Cato Event Podcast

For four years, the Obama administration has been engaging in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations with 11 Pacific Rim nations, and last year initiated similar talks called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union. These negotiations offer the promise of significantly reduced barriers to international trade and investment, which would be an important source...

Our children are in constant danger from — to quote Lenore Skenazy's list — "kidnapping, germs, grades, flashers, frustration, failure, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men, sleepovers and/or the perils of a non-organic grape." Or so a small army of experts and government policymakers keep insisting. School authorities punish kids for hugging a friend, pointing a finger as a pretend gun,...

Intellectual property has been a focus of U.S. trade policy for many decades, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations include an especially ambitious effort by the United States to strengthen international intellectual property laws. At the same time, however, there is serious debate within the United States over the proper scope and level of intellectual property protection. Is it in the i...

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, the IRS quietly proposed major changes to the rules governing nonprofit social welfare groups, or 501(c)(4)s. For years, pundits and politicians have attacked (c)(4)s as so-called “dark money” groups that are illegitimately trying to influence elections. Last year, Congress heard testimony that the IRS had targeted conservative (c)(4)s with demands to answer onero...

The Federal Reserve Act was signed into law on December 23, 1913. It was designed to provide an elastic currency and prevent banking panics. The Great Depression, the Great Inflation, and the Panic of 2008, however, seriously mar the Fed’s record. In particular, the Fed’s failure to detect and prevent the 2008 financial crisis needs close public scrutiny. Moreover, the Fed’s vast expansion of its...

There has been an explosion of partnerships, exchanges, and programs between U.S. institutions of higher education and those in China. While made in the spirit of intellectual and scholarly collaboration, these relationships have proceeded without serious consideration of the practical and moral/ethical issues posed by dealing with authoritarian regimes. This presentation focuses on the case of We...

Purchase book Nobody likes to fail, yet failure is a ubiquitous element of our lives. According to Megan McArdle, failing often — and well — is an important source of learning for individuals, organizations, and governments. Although failure is critical in coping with complex environments, our cognitive biases often keep us from drawing the correct lessons and adjusting our behavior. O...

In this sequel to Gold: the Once and Future Money , Nathan Lewis describes the theoretical basis of gold-standard monetary systems. Lewis argues that the pre-1913 world gold standard system was perhaps the most successful monetary system the world has ever seen, enabling high levels of economic growth. Descriptions of both Britain’s economic rise under the gold standard and the United States’ rise...

More than three years after the departure of U.S. combat troops from Iraq, a determined insurgency rages against the government led by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Violence has claimed thousands of lives. Some question whether the Iraqi government can maintain control of several major cities, including Fallujah, the scene of some of the toughest fighting during the eight-year-long U.S. war...

A once-in-a-generation supply shock is transforming global energy markets, lowering crude oil and natural gas prices, and quickly making the United States the world's largest producer of oil and gas. But energy politics threatens to short-circuit this American economic boom. Of immediate concern are federal regulations — in particular, discretionary export-licensing systems for natural gas a...

Purchase Book Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China's Future addresses the challenges China will face during the coming decades and why it is unlikely to overtake the United States this century. The book provides an in-depth analysis of the threats to China's continuing rise, offers bold policy prescriptions addressing those challenges, and explains why — without substantial reform — C...

In his latest Cato book, Tim Sandefur addresses one of the most neglected topics in modern American constitutional law, the philosophical foundations of the Constitution. He argues that for that we should look to the “conscience” of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, as Abraham Lincoln did. And if we do, we discover that the Constitution was written not to empower democratic majori...

Glamour promises to carry us out of quotidian life into a world more beautiful and fulfilling. But what is glamour? A mere daydream distracting us from our true duties and long-term well-being? An illusion created to stimulate commerce in a capitalist economy? How does glamour relate to envy, to art, to self-improvement, to personal charisma? In her new book, Virginia Postrel builds on h...

Are we harming public health in the name of environmental protection? Is the theoretical model that drives the regulation of carcinogens and radiation not only flawed, but fundamentally wrong? For over a half-century, this regulation has been based largely on a linear response to pollutants, often with a threshold of a single molecule or a single photon. Voluminous research now shows this paradigm...

In his new book, Tim Harford attempts to demystify macroeconomics in the same way his earlier bestseller,  The Undercover Economist , demystified microeconomics. Using his characteristic conversational style, Harford will discuss abstract macroeconomic ideas, explaining the most common models of recessions and the difficulty of discriminating between them on empirical grounds. For example, wa...

In his first book of all new, previously unpublished material since 2007, best-selling humorist P. J. O’Rourke turns his lens on his fellow post-war babies. In The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way … And It Wasn’t My Fault … And I’ll Never Do It Again , O’Rourke draws on his own experiences and leads readers on a candid, laugh-out-loud journey through the circumstances and events that shaped a genera...

In recent years, controversy has arisen over perceived conflicts between intellectual property protection and public health, and also over the role of international investment rules that allow corporations to sue governments before international tribunals. A new case combines both issues. Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly has filed a claim before a NAFTA tribunal, alleging that Canadian court decis...

On Monday, January 13, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in an important separation-of-powers case concerning the president’s recess appointments power. Under the Constitution the president may “fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate” without going through the normal requirements of obtaining the “advice and consent” of the Senate. On January 4, 2012, when th...

With American education seemingly stuck in neutral no matter what elementary and secondary reforms we try, policymakers are looking to younger children to improve achievement. Indeed, touting the benefits of “high-quality” programs, President Obama has proposed spending $75 billion to expand preschool to all four-year olds. But on what research basis does the argument for greatly expanding early c...

In his latest book, a wide-ranging tome covering vast areas of our law, Richard Epstein mounts a principled attack on modern Supreme Court jurisprudence and much of the legal scholarship that has grown up around it. The major disarray that infects every area of modern American life, he argues, from deficits and debt to health care, financial services, declining standards of living and more, could...

In 2001, Argentina defaulted on $81 billion of debt — the largest sovereign default in history. While years later most of its creditors settled to swap their old bonds with heavily discounted new bonds, a group of holdout creditors challenged Argentina in the courts. In October 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with plaintiffs to rule that Argentina must treat all its cr...

Americans have been stunned by revelations that the National Security Agency is collecting vast troves of information about ordinary citizens. But the NSA is only part of the surveillance story. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, state and local police have formed data “fusion centers” across the country and partnered with the federal intelligence community to share a wide array of personal...

George Gilder is the living author who was most quoted in President Reagan’s speeches. His books  Wealth and Poverty  (1981),  Microcosm  (1989), and  Telecosm  (2000) had a big impact on the way people looked at economics and technology. Now he’s back with a new analysis of capitalism that just might do the same thing. In  Knowledge and Power , Gilder breaks away from the supply-side...

Purchase Book In a process that began some 250 years ago, most of humanity has managed a great escape from grinding poverty and early death that characterized its existence for thousands of years. Professor Angus Deaton will describe the dramatic scope and speed of that progress, why we are living longer, healthier lives, and how progress has created inequalities that can have positive or negative...

The United States maintains nearly 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons and a triad of systems — bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) — to deliver them. Current plans call for modernizing all three legs of the nuclear triad, which could cost taxpayers over $100 billion. A just-released Cato paper explains why a triad is no lo...