Scroll
Featured
Articles, Reports, and Media Appearances
Columbia professor Edmund Phelps, 2006 Nobel laureate in economics, died last week. Ned Phelps won the Nobel in part for disabusing the supposed permanent tradeoff between inflation and the rate of unemployment. Real people would catch on, Phelps explained, and adjust expectations accordingly. Formulas did not account for the short and long-term reactions by real people. Over time, unemployment graduates to its “natural rate”—a concept Phelps first described and a term coined by Milton Friedman a year later.
For the past several decades, Phelps developed a theory of how workers as well as entrepreneurs flourish within an open framework of dynamic capitalism that gives people ample room to overcome authentic challenges in their own ways. This individual resourcefulness can’t thrive under stifling bureaucratic and corporatist structures.
In this podcast discussion with the Niskanen Center’s Geoff Kabaservice, Philip Howard offers qualified approval of the Abundance movement that he in some ways anticipated by decades. But he insists that the pruning of excessive rules and procedures must also be accompanied by restoring a role for human judgement: “It’s not simply having less to comply with. It’s actually re-empowering everybody — the teacher in the classroom, the principal, the head of the school, whoever it happens to be — empowering them to do what’s right.”
By the same token, he criticizes Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative for focusing on cutting the things government does but squandering the opportunity to change how the government does things: “There was not even a pretense that they had an idea about how things would work better the day after DOGE.”
Social trust is a barometer for the health of society. A trusting society is more energetic, more collaborative, and more hopeful. America, unfortunately, is going in the wrong direction.
Social distrust is a kind of cancer, causing gears to grind ever more slowly. David Brooks, in his farewell New York Times column, connects Americans’ “loss of faith” in each other with their loss of hope for the future—over two-thirds of Americans say they no longer believe in the American dream.
How does America pull out of this downward spiral of distrust? Accepted wisdom is that America is just too diverse. But America has thrived with diversity since the latter half of the nineteenth century, and surveys suggest that Americans of diverse backgrounds still share basic values such as truthfulness, reciprocity (“Do unto others …”), and respect for the common good.
In Saving Can-Do, Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard unlocks the quandary of populist resentment and also of broken government.
America is flailing in legal quicksand. The solution is a new governing framework that allows Americans to roll up their sleeves and take responsibility. We must scrap the red tape state. What’s required is a multi-year effort to replace these massive failed bureaucracies with simpler codes that are activated by people using their judgment. As America approaches the 250th anniversary of the revolution, it’s time to reclaim the magic of America’s unique can-do culture.
Saving Can-Do was published by Rodin Books on September 23, 2025.