Matt Grossmann

2 weeks ago | niskanencenter.org | Matt Grossmann

Donald Trump has now unilaterally imposed huge global tariffs, upending the world economy. But we did get a preview of Trump’s trade approach in his first term, allowing researchers to analyze the political consequences. Thiemo Fetzer finds that China, the EU, Canada, and Mexico reacted to the first term tariffs strategically, trying to hurt Trump’s constituents.

4 weeks ago | niskanencenter.org | Matt Grossmann

The 2nd Trump administration has begun tearing down the administrative state, firing thousands, cancelling contracts, and shuttering agencies. But they have also used the power of the state to ramp up summary deportations, crack down on universities, and threaten prosecutions of their political opponents. So is this the culmination of Republican efforts to scale back government or a sign that they just want to redirect its goals?

1 month ago | niskanencenter.org | Matt Grossmann

We have the parties that we said we wanted: they compete over extensive policy programs, with voters making decisions among clear issue position alternatives. But how did they get here and have they now gone too far? Katherine Krimmel finds that the American parties became extensively programmatic as they lost vestiges of clientelism and became national parties after federal growth and civil rights. But Trump may be changing the nature of the party system.

1 month ago | niskanencenter.org | Matt Grossmann

Five years after the COVID lockdowns, the performance of government and policy experts is not looking great in retrospect. Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee find that policymakers dispensed with years of pre-pandemic planning that suggested the tools used to fight COVID would not work. Experts did not sufficiently consider the costs of their preferred approaches and spoke publicly of consensus while privately admitting limited evidence.

1 month ago | lawliberty.org | Matt Grossmann |David Hopkins |George Hawley |Asheesh Agarwal

The modern conservative movement’s antipathy toward academia was present at the moment of its birth. William F. Buckley became a national figure thanks to his 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, which attacked his alma mater for abandoning its Christian heritage and embracing left-wing economics. In the late 1980s, Allan Bloom became an important public intellectual because of The Closing of the American Mind, which argued that universities had abandoned the quest for truth.