Cato Quarterly
Events
Reimagining Social Security: Global Lessons for Retirement Policy Changes
Cato Institute scholars and leading retirement policy experts gathered for the launch of Reimagining Social Security: Global Lessons for Retirement Policy Changes, a new book by Romina Boccia (top right), Cato’s director of budget and entitlement policy, and Ivane Nachkebia (top left), a research consultant at Cato with a primary focus on Social Security. Panelists discussed public opinion, structural reforms, and lessons drawn from Canada, Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, and other countries. Other Cato scholars included Adam Michel (bottom right), director of tax policy studies; Hunter Johnson (bottom left), a research associate for Cato’s Project on Public Opinion; and Krit Chanwong (middle), a quantitative research associate.
How China’s Economic Growth Is Influencing US Foreign Policy
Justin Logan (right), director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, moderated a wide-ranging discussion about China’s economic growth and how it influences US strategy, security, and global power. Stephen G. Brooks (left), professor of government at Dartmouth College, challenged conventional wisdom about China’s economic strength, arguing that the US and its allies retain significant but underappreciated economic leverage over Beijing, particularly in high-tech production and global supply chains. Gerard DiPippo (middle), associate director of the RAND China Research Center, argued that the US still needs to grapple with China’s manufacturing capacity and leadership in key industries such as biotech and AI.
Fifty-Five Years of the Bank Secrecy Act
Over the last five decades, the Bank Secrecy Act has created a vast surveillance apparatus that monitors virtually every financial transaction Americans make. Norbert J. Michel (left), vice president and director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives (CMFA), and Nicholas Anthony (right), a policy analyst at CMFA, were joined by Ludlow Institute president Naomi Brockwell (middle) for a discussion about the law on its 55th anniversary, including how it shaped our modern financial system, implications for the Fourth Amendment, and the reforms that are much needed.
Film Screening for When Cops Become Robbers
The Cato Institute held a screening of When Cops Become Robbers, a powerful new documentary about how civil forfeiture laws allow police to seize cash and property from Americans who are never charged, much less convicted, of a crime. After the screening, Clark Neily (right), Cato’s senior vice president for legal studies, held a panel discussion with Institute for Justice senior attorney Dan Alban (left) about the film and potential reforms to civil asset forfeiture.
Cato Hosts Florida Shark-Diving Guides Who Received Presidential Pardons
Mike Fox (far right), a legal fellow at Cato’s Project on Criminal Justice, hosted Florida shark-diving guides Tanner Mansell (middle left) and John Moore Jr. (middle right) at the Institute in January. Jodi Mansell (far left), Tanner’s mom, also joined the panel. Moore and Mansell were charged with felony theft for an honest mistake then convicted at trial by a seemingly hesitant jury in 2022. Fox and Clark Neily, Cato’s senior vice president for legal studies, filed an amicus brief during Mansell and Moore’s appeal, arguing that jurors were not properly informed about their power to acquit against the evidence. Neily featured the case in the spring 2025 issue of Free Society, while Fox testified before Congress last May about the men’s ordeal. Just weeks after that, President Trump pardoned both Mansell and Moore.
Publications
Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement
The school choice movement is often seen as a modern, partisan undermining of a cherished institution: public education. Fighting for the Freedom to Learn sets the record straight, revealing that the struggle for educational freedom is as old as America itself and rooted in a deep and enduring tradition of parents and communities shaping how children learn. Neal P. McCluskey, director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, and James V. Shuls, head of the educational liberty branch at the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University, assembled contributions from 12 leading education scholars in this sweeping history of school choice in the United States.
You Don’t Own Me: Individualism and the Culture of Liberty
The idea of individual liberty has had a well-documented and enormous influence in politics, economics, and religion, but its influence on the arts has also been immense. From pop music to films—from the poetry of John Milton to Star Trek and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston—individualism has made a cultural impact both pervasive and profound. In You Don’t Own Me, Timothy Sandefur, an adjunct scholar at Cato and vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, examines how people in America and Europe have addressed the unique experience of personal freedom in movies, songs, literature, and even architecture.
Featured Cato Studies
Human Freedom Index 2025
The Human Freedom Index 2025 paints a stark picture of a world drifting away from liberty. Using 87 indicators of personal and economic freedom, the annual index found that human freedom dropped sharply during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, then increased somewhat in 2022 but remained flat in 2023, the most recent year for which comprehensive data are available. The authors— Cato’s Ian Vásquez, the Fraser Institute’s Matthew D. Mitchell, Southern Methodist University’s Ryan Murphy, and data scientist Guillermina Sutter Schneider—profiled 165 countries and found that freedom has declined for 90 percent of the world’s population since 2019. The index, copublished by Cato and Fraser, also shows that freedom is strongly related to per capita income and other measures of human well-being such as tolerance and life expectancy
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.