In the early 2000s, a small group of economists at Princeton University (including Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke) provided insightful analysis for how to make monetary policy more effective when interest rates are near zero. In “The Princeton School and the Zero Lower Bound,” Scott Sumner shows how this school of thought began to influence Federal Reserve policy and how its key ideas relate to other recent policy models advocated by market monetarists and NeoFisherians.

President Biden’s nominee to run the Federal Railroad Administration, Amit Bose, is the subject of a confirmation hearing this week in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Bose recently spoke to the committee about the direction he has in mind for the FRA. One question related to train crew sizes. This years-long debate, while seemingly only applicable to the railroad industry, encapsulates a question that will probably come up repeatedly in the Biden administration: Will the president press regulators to implement smart, 21st century regulatory approaches, or will it be business as usual in Washington?

This article is a slightly edited Q&A between Adam Thierer, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and Jonathan Pelson, a telecommunications expert and author of “Wireless Wars: China’s Dangerous Domination of 5G and How We’re Fighting Back.”

For most of my lifetime—except perhaps for a brief period after the end of the Cold War—Americans have been convinced that we are living in an era of crisis. But the current era can claim at least one bona fide crisis distinct to itself: the resurgence of authoritarianism and the widely acknowledged weakness of “liberal democracy,” particularly compared with the triumphal confidence of liberal democracy in that post-Cold War era. So, what went wrong?