Cato Event Podcast

Part three of this year’s Summer with Sphere series is all about preparing for the upcoming school year. As you think about how you will set your students up for success from their classroom environment to their curriculum for the year, consider the benefits of implementing strategies that foster civil discourse into your approach. In this webinar, we will equip you with tools and resources that will help you effectively embed healthy habits of conversation into your classroom experience for students through class norm setting, learning environment, and fostering a strong home‐​to‐​school connection at the start of the year. You will hear from Sphere’s content development team about new engaging interdisciplinary classroom content, including our new Civil Discourse Toolkit for Middle School Teachers and Election Hub to supplement your curriculum, and our Sphere on the Road team about professional opportunities available to you and your school.

There’s a quietly brewing rift on the right between those who want to rein in administrative power and those who hope to wield it for conservative ends. Former presidential candidate and business entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy favors the former path and has delivered detailed plans for a radical rollback of regulatory power and shutting down several federal agencies. With the Supreme Court’s recent blows to Chevron deference and its embrace of the major questions doctrine, he sees a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to rein in the permanent bureaucracy. Ramaswamy argues that it is not controversial to hold that the people we elect to run the government should actually run the government.Is the United States consigned to rule by an army of unelected and unaccountable federal bureaucrats? Are there any realistic paths to diminish the power of federal government bureaucracies?Join Ramaswamy and Cato’s Gene Healy for a discussion about the prospects for transforming how the federal government rules its citizens and businesses.

The COVID-19 pandemic was the most severe global public health emergency in over 100 years. Deadlier than the influenza virus, COVID-19 claimed more than 1.1 million lives in the United States by 2023. Had it not been for the rapid development and deployment of vaccines, many more would have died. To further combat the pandemic, US and international public health agencies enacted unprecedented school closures, lockdowns, and border closures that inflicted collateral damage on children, other vulnerable populations, and the rest of the public. These preventative measures exacerbated substance abuse and mental health problems that persist today. Public health and media organizations suppressed and often censored scientific experts with dissenting opinions and recommendations that might have mitigated much of the collateral damage.Award-winning Canadian filmmaker Vanessa Dylyn (Matter of Fact Media) produced and directed the documentary COVID Collateral: Where Do We Go for Truth?, which examines the global pandemic response, the suppression of scientific discourse, and lessons for approaching the next pandemic. www​.covid​col​lat​er​al​.com.Please join us for a film screening in the Cato Institute Hayek Auditorium, followed by a roundtable discussion of the film and its lessons featuring our distinguished panel.

From July 9 through July 11, NATO will celebrate its 75th birthday at a summit in Washington, DC. US officials foreshadowed three themes of this summit: celebrating 75 years of the alliance’s existence, emphasizing progress on defense burden-sharing, and aiding Ukraine in its defense against Russia.Despite modest increases in European defense spending, the United States still carries a disproportionate share of the continent’s defense burden. At a time when there is increased pressure on US resources from debt, deficits, and other regions overseas, the transatlantic alliance needs rebalancing.On the first day of the Washington summit, join us for a half-day conference examining how the alliance arrived at its current condition, as well as proposals for burden-shifting and an updated view of US interests in Europe.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) has been accused of playing a disproportionate role in facilitating illicit finance, from funding terrorism to evading sanctions. Not only do these allegations misrepresent the evidence, but they also have been leveraged to justify policy proposals and enforcement actions that infringe on Americans’ financial freedom and threaten technological progress. How do we overcome the application of faulty narratives and outmoded anti-money laundering frameworks to DeFi? Can practical policy solutions preserve the rights to transact, develop software, and maintain financial privacy? And can DeFi technology itself provide remedies to long-standing policy challenges related to illicit finance? Please join us for an expert panel that will help to answer these questions and separate the signal from the noise.

Joining Sphere Education Initiatives for this conversation will be James Redelsheimer, introductory and Advanced Placement (AP) economics educator at Robbinsdale Armstrong High School in Plymouth, Minnestota. In addition to authoring our new economics lessons, he is the author of Barron’s AP economics, a BestPrep Minnesota board member, master teacher with the Minnesota Council on Economic Education and a Next Generation Personal Finance Teacher Fellow.

Generations of people have been taught that population growth makes resources scarcer. In 2021, for example, one widely publicized report argued, “The world’s rapidly growing population is consuming the planet’s natural resources at an alarming rate … the world currently needs 1.6 Earths to satisfy the demand for natural resources … [a figure that] could rise to 2 planets by 2030.” But is that true?After analyzing the prices of hundreds of commodities, goods, and services spanning two centuries, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley found that resources became more abundant as the population grew. That was especially true when they looked at “time prices,” which represent the length of time that people must work to buy something.To their surprise, the authors also found that resource abundance increased faster than the population―a relationship that they call “superabundance.” On average, every additional human being created more value than he or she consumed. This relationship between population growth and abundance is deeply counterintuitive, yet it is true.Why? More people produce more ideas, which lead to more inventions. People then test those inventions in the marketplace to separate the useful from the useless. At the end of that process of discovery, people are left with innovations that overcome shortages, spur economic growth, and raise standards of living.But large populations are not enough to sustain superabundance―just think of the poverty in China and India before their respective economic reforms. To innovate, people must be allowed to think, speak, publish, associate, and disagree. They must be allowed to save, invest, trade, and profit. In a word, they must be free.