Hoover Daily Report | July 24, 2025

Today, Charles I. Plosser and Mickey D. Levy argue that a return to the fundamentals can bring the Federal Reserve out from underneath White House pressure. Steven J. Davis and coauthors demonstrate the power of remote work to increase productivity and broaden workforce recruitment. And the GoodFellows speak with Rick Caruso, former candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, about the future of big American cities and how to right the ship in areas that have recently seen significant decline.

Hoover Daily Report | July 24, 2025

Episode Transcript

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Welcome to the "Hoover Daily Report". Ideas Advancing Freedom. It's Thursday, July 24th, 2025.

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Today, Charles Eye Plosser and Mickey D. Levy argue that a return to the fundamentals can bring the Federal Reserve out from underneath White House pressure. Steven J. Davis and coauthors demonstrate the power of remote work to increase productivity and broaden workforce recruitment. And the GoodFellows speak with Rick Caruso, former candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, about the future of big American cities and how to right the ship in areas that have recently seen significant decline.
What the Federal Reserve Can Do to Help Itself Opening their piece with the statement that President Donald Trump’s efforts to replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell with someone who will cut interest rates is “misguided,” visiting fellows Charles Eye Plosser and Mickey D. Levy argue that the Fed can help itself by focusing on its core mandate. Citing the burden of mounting government debt, they say the Fed needs to refocus on simply keeping inflation low and achieving maximum employment, nothing else. Quote “The Fed must continue to pursue its dual mandate of low inflation and maximum employment without outside hindrance,” they write. “Its best response to Mr. Trump should be to re-establish its objectives and incorporate them into its upcoming strategic plan.” Furthermore, they argue, the Fed should utilize more rules into its decision making, such as the Taylor rule, in a bid to show the market it acknowledges its judgment during the pandemic period wasn’t always correct.
Shift to Remote Work Boosted Productivity and Broadened Recruitment In a new submission to VoxDev, Senior Fellow Steven J. Davis and coauthors from across Europe demonstrate how a medium-sized call center in Turkey was able to improve its productivity and broaden the profile of its workforce by switching to remote work. In March 2020, the Tempo BPO firm sent all thirty-five hundred of its employees home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using personnel and performance data from 2019 to 2023, the authors find that agents taking calls from home significantly improved the rate at which they resolved them, and the firm was able to hire more experienced employees, more working women with children, and candidates with higher educational attainment. Also, the firm was able to reduce attrition after scaling up in-person training with new hires.

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The Rise and Fall of US-China Engagement with David Shambaugh On the latest episode of China Considered, Senior Fellow and host Elizabeth Economy speaks with professor David Shambaugh about his new book: Breaking the Engagement: How China Won & Lost America. Shambaugh says that from 1979, when normalization of relations between the two countries began, until about 2010, China and the US were moving toward one another, especially during the “reform” period of the early 2000s. But after key US constituencies started to encounter obstacles in China, he argues “the engagement coalition” started to fall apart. Where does the relationship between the two nations go from here? Shambaugh walks through what he describes as five separate schools of thought dominating the current debate about the future of US-China relations.
Lawyer Erroneously Cites Case in Hearing About Other Erroneous Citations At The Volokh Conspiracy, Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh continues his chronicling of lawyers allegedly misusing AI with a whopper of an oopsie from New York. In a hearing concerning whether to discipline an attorney for his apparent previous uses of AI to generate and cite improper and sometimes completely fabricated precedents, the same attorney apparently used AI to generate new reasons why he shouldn’t be sanctioned for his prior improper uses of AI. The judge caught the deception. Quote “Of course, it turned out that Mr. Feldman used AI technology to generate this brief without sufficiently verifying it, which perhaps explains why the brief was not as focused on arbitration as he would have liked it to be,” Judge Katherine Polk Faylah wrote. The matter will continue next month.
California Dreaming with Rick Caruso Joining the GoodFellows crew for this episode is real estate developer and 2022 candidate for mayor of Los Angeles Rick Caruso. He tells the group how big-city electorates are responding to the high cost of living in US cities, sometimes by entertaining a giant shift to the left. In his own home of Los Angeles, Caruso says, the January 2025 wildfires were a big wake-up call that may make a centrist municipal electoral victory possible. Asked what LA needs, Caruso says only a clean and safe downtown will bring commercial vacancies down. He said the city needs a leader who is a “moderate with common sense,” and not radicalism. Senior fellows Neil Ferguson, John H. Cochrane, and H.R. McMaster then discuss the continued Russian invasion of Ukraine, Hunter Biden’s return to public discourse, the future of Harvard, and the Epstein file scandal.
This Month in Hoover History Hoover Institution Welcomes Supporters to 2024 Summer Board Meeting The Hoover Institution welcomed its board members and major supporters to Stanford University on July ninth to eleventh, 2024, for its annual summer Board of Overseers Meeting. Throughout the event, scholars spoke on a variety of emerging challenges facing America as it approached a contentious presidential election campaign period.
That’s your "Hoover Daily Report" for Thursday, July 24th, 2025. Each weekday, we bring you research, analysis, and commentary focused on public policy, national security, and the ideas shaping American society and government. The Hoover Institution at Stanford University is grounded in constitutional principles with a commitment to sustaining the safeguards of the American way of life. Thank you for listening . . For links to all the articles and interviews mentioned today, visit hoover.org slash hdr .