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Spring 2017 / Volume I, Number 1
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Why a New Policy Journal?

Our Mission Statement

The conventional party platforms no longer address or even comprehend the most pressing challenges facing American institutions. Economic mobility is down and inequality is up, while growth, productivity, and wages are nearly stagnant. Trust in government is at historic lows…

The Anxieties of Conservatism

The conservative movement is understandably in a state of anxiety. Donald Trump was not their candidate. The key issues of his campaign were not those in which the Right’s leading thinkers had invested their efforts. The major organs of conservative opinion distanced themselves from his candidacy, only allying with him tactically, and in many cases…

Foreign Policy

The Digital Age Produces Binary Outcomes

Defense R&D and Innovation

The digital age produces binary outcomes. Winners tend to win overwhelmingly—in war as well as in business. The Soviet Union crumbled in the late 1980s when American technology bested Soviet military spending, then estimated at a quarter of GDP. The enormous Russian bet on military power lost and Communism fell. America emerged from the Cold…

America and the Liberal International Order

In a year of upset political apple carts, none were rattled harder, or lost more fruit, than traditional notions of American foreign policy. Donald Trump shocked a lot of people over a lot of issues. But no anti-Trump Republican economists orchestrated elaborate letters, with hundreds of signatories, to swear they would never serve in a Trump administration. No dissident Republican trade negotiators ostentatiously switched parties and vowed to support Trump’s…

Political Thought

James Burnham’s Managerial Elite

Conservative polemicists have long presented a caricature of a decadent liberal elite, and liberals have offered a competing caricature of a conservative plutocracy. But few have attempted to understand how these ostensible opponents function as elements of the same elite, or how they have participated in maintaining the broader intellectual, political, and economic status quo.…

Putting Work in Its Place

Lessons from Hegel

That working-class anger and resentment helped propel Donald Trump to the presidency is well known. This discontent points to important questions omitted in current political debates, beyond discussions about job loss to foreign competitors and technology: What is the place of work in a good life? And how should a…

Economic Theory and Policy

The New Shape of Globalization

It was a telling moment when China’s President Xi Jinping rose on January 16, 2017, to proclaim himself the new champion of free trade in the great conference hall of Davos, Switzerland, the citadel of globalization. This proclamation came just four days before the inauguration of the newly elected U.S. president, who has traditionally served as the leader of the globalization movement. The symbolism was rich. As a result of comments by President Donald Trump that his new administration might take a tougher line on trade policy than all U.S. administrations since World War II, the Davos crowd was uneasy. The elite gathering of global billionaires, celebrities, scholars, bankers, heavyweight…

Dismiss Macroeconomic Myths and Restore Accountability

Statements from past and present Federal Reserve chairmen inspire little confidence that their models provide any understanding of what is going on within the United States, never mind the rest of the world. Yet the Fed continues to rely on the same analyses as it did before the financial crisis of 2008, and it is still led…

A Return to Political Economy

Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, it was widely taken for granted that the U.S. economy was exceptional, at least in the developed world: it was the only one of the major developed economies that could grow. The Japanese economy had stagnated in the 1990s. Europe was on the road to similar stagnation on account of its pensioner-heavy demographic profile and an overregulated business sector…

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