Bonjour! Here’s your PolicySphere morning briefing! If you were forwarded this, here’s more about who we are and what we’re doing and, of course, don’t forget to sign up and tell your friends.
First, an apology. Yesterday was the first day since we launched that we failed to send out our PolicySphere Morning Briefing. The reason for this is simple: due to an error by X Corp, our X.com account (which you should follow, of course) was suspended. The reason this affected our ability to send the Briefing is that–to give you a peek behind the curtain–much of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating the Briefing, which as you know includes curated news, is based on Lists on X.com we have built over months of the most important and relevant accounts. This curation work doesn’t sound like much but it is very time-consuming and important. Thankfully our account has been restored and we can resume normal business, but we do sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. As always, we welcome your feedback.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry; Publisher, PolicySphere
#ThinkTanks – A little inside baseball, but…Well, that’s why you subscribe, don’t you? American Compass, the think tank founded by Oren Cass to chart a course for post-Reagan-consensus conservative economics, has announced a reorganization. Cass is shifting from executive director to chief economist and writing a weekly newsletter, called Understanding America, which we look forward to subscribing to. Regardless of how you feel about American Compass’s policy orientation, Cass is certainly right to celebrate how influential his think tank has become on a small $2 million budget. The right in general needs more policy entrepreneurship, more policy debate, and American Compass certainly is a shining example of all of that, and we wish them very well indeed.
#EVs – American Compass is creating a lot of news this week! They have also just published a very interesting report, “The Electric Slide.” Superficially, it is about Tesla. In actuality, it is about the fight between China and America in the EV market, and more generally about industrial policy in the 21st century, and more. “EVs sit squarely at the center of a dizzying array of policy issues: trade with China, Europe’s geopolitical orientation, labor organizing and disputes, subsidies for domestic investment, the Inflation Reduction Act’s efforts at a ‘green transition,’ regulation of natural resources,” the report states. Quite so, and it is one of the best overviews we have seen of this nexus of issues.
#GreatStagnation – Genomics institute Arc Institute has just published two new papers in Nature. The bottomline seems to be this: they have created a technology that allows “copy-and-paste” genetic editing. More here from Patrick Collison. This is potentially world-changing technology; it also has dizzying potential ethical implications. Watch this space.
#Savings – Savings equal investment, and therefore promoting savings ought to be a goal of public policy. Cato’s Adam N. Michel has recently testified on universal savings accounts, and it is an important testimony.
#Investment – Speaking of investment, a new NBER paper by Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Matthew Smith, Owen M. Zidar, and Eric Zwick finds that the corporate tax provisions of the TCJA increased investment in the US. From the abstract: “Domestic investment of firms with the mean tax change increases 20% versus a no-change baseline. Due to novel foreign incentives, foreign capital of U.S. multinationals rises substantially. These incentives also boost domestic investment, indicating complementarity between domestic and foreign capital.” Very interesting.
#Race #Opportunity #DEI – Also important from Paul G. Vallas at Manhattan Institute: “Data on legal immigrants from Latin America and Africa reveal that many outperform native-born Americans from their demographic group, and other figures reveal non-white groups’ increasing economic success.” In other words, the success of (in particular) black immigrants in the US shows that lack of opportunity is not due to “racism” as the far-left would have us believe. More.
#BigTech – R Street’s Shoshana Weissmann analyses some striking breaking news: “Identity-verifier used by Big Tech amid mandates has made personal data easily accessible to hackers.”
#FamilyPolicy – There is lots of discussion on the impact of smartphones on kids. Fair enough, says Institute for Family Studies’ Justin Coulson, but don’t forget: parents are also addicted to smartphones, and that’s bad as well.
#Homelessness – Anyone familiar with the (non-fraudulent) research on this topic could have predicted this, as well as any normal person, but still, social science marches on: a randomized controlled trial finds very poor results of offering an unconditional $1,000/month UBI to homeless people. The effect on homelessness, relative to the control group, was statistically insignificant.
Chart of the Day
Meme of the Day
