National Affairs

10/25/2025

Lorraine Smith Pangle on why Benjamin Franklin is the founder with the keenest advice to offer our troubled time: Keeping our republic, he insisted, depends not so much on finding policy agreement as on sustaining our people's virtuous character.

Benjamin Franklin is the founder with the keenest advice to offer our troubled time. He understood that extreme partisanship, populism, and creeping authoritarianism don't just happen to a people; they grow out of, and in turn deepen, a nation's mora...

10/23/2025

Daniel DiSalvo joined our latest podcast to discuss the importance of civic education, and why democracy needs a little soul craft: https://nationalaffairs.com/blog/detail/media/civic-education-a-path-to-unity

10/08/2025

Litigation embodies a self-reinforcing approach to authority that Americans find politically attractive. Overcoming it will require more than reducing procedural hurdles, write Thomas F. Burke & Jeb Barnes:

"Abundance liberalism" is suddenly all the rage. But its potential is sharply constrained by litigation's centrality in American public life. Litigation is not simply a policy mechanism we can turn on or off; it embodies a self-reinforcing approach t...

10/06/2025

Abby M. McCloskey on why addressing our crisis of fertility must go beyond policy, nourishing a new culture of family and fertility from the bottom up:

It has become fashionable to worry about declining birth rates, and rightly so. But our debates rarely reach beyond the simplest kinds of economic factors. To better address the problem, we need to consider the lack of social support for childbearing...

10/03/2025

Michael F. Cannon argues in our Fall issue that if the health-care industry in the United States operated under free-market principles, it would deliver care to far more Americans than it does now:

Many critiques of American health care begin from the assumption that the American system is a model of free-market economics. But this is far from true. In fact, the government plays a massive role in providing coverage, setting prices, and imposing...

10/02/2025

Mark J. Warshawsky on why we need new tools to better protect Americans from major natural disasters:

Insurance exists to protect against risk, but its traditional tools are not well suited to the worst kinds of catastrophes. When it comes to major natural disasters, we need new tools — including public-private partnerships and better risk pool...

10/01/2025

Continuing our symposium on AI in our Fall issue, Eli Lehrer asks: Is this the beginning of a new arc of change, or merely an extension of an existing trajectory?

The dawn of artificial intelligence has unleashed equal measures of optimism and fear regarding its potential to fundamentally transform society. As AI becomes increasingly widespread, a crucial question presents itself: Is this the beginning of a ne...

09/29/2025

To understand what AI means in this moment, we need to grasp how its development fits into the history of computing. Arnold Kling in our Fall issue:

The rise of artificial intelligence has generated drastically different predictions about its effects on our economy and society, but they tend to agree that AI marks a sharp break with the history of computing technology. That may prove true in time...

09/26/2025

Americans have forgotten how to disagree constructively. Daniel DiSalvo & Carlo Invernizzi Accetti write that, by committing themselves anew to civic education, universities can encourage pluralism rather than entrench division:

Higher education has a civic mission. The public knows that, but faculty and administrators seem to have lost sight of it. Instead of transmitting shared civic principles, universities often frame civics through polarized partisan lenses. Restoring c...

09/25/2025

University of Texas at Austin provost William Inboden discusses how universities can restore the academic social contract with the American public: https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/restoring-academic-social-contract

09/23/2025

Leading off our new Fall issue, Howard Husock & Bruce D. Meyer consider how government housing programs could be reformed to better promote upward mobility:

Government housing programs have grown far larger than programs involving cash welfare, yet unlike the latter, they impose no time limits or work requirements on beneficiaries. They thus ignore the lessons learned from cash-welfare reform in recent d...

09/22/2025

Our Fall 2025 issue is now online! Featuring:

-Howard Husock & Bruce D. Meyer on reforming subsidized housing to promote upward mobility
-William Inboden on restoring the academic social contract between universities and the public
-Arnold Kling on the AI era in computing
-Abby M. McCloskey on our broken fertility culture
-Lorraine Smith Pangle on Benjamin Franklin and keeping our republic
-And much more! Happy reading: https://nationalaffairs.com/