AEI welcomes Andrew G. Biggs as a resident fellow. He will research Social Security and pension issues. Biggs was previously the deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, where he headed the agency's representation to the Social Security Trustees Working Group and acted as secretary of the board of trustees.

In an essay in the Wall Street Journal last fall, Christopher DeMuth wrote that "think tanks serve as storehouses of ideas, patiently developed and nurtured, waiting for the crisis when practical men are desperately seeking a new approach, or for the inspired leader who sees the possibilities of action before the crisis arrives." In this manner, AEI scholars' ideas have been taken up by presidential candidates. In a January 30 debate, Mitt Romney said that he had been briefed by Frederick W. Kagan on the size of the military and the surge in Iraq: "As you know, many consider him one of the authors of the surge idea." Kagan's report on the surge has been accessed more than fifty thousand times on AEI.org. During the same debate, John McCain called for a one-page mortgage form along the lines of the one proposed by Alex J. Pollock early in 2007. "A mortgage should be one page," McCain said, "and there should be big letters at the bottom that say, 'I understand this document.'"

Resident Fellow Alex J. Pollock

Alex J. Pollock's proposal to create a modern analogue to the New Deal-era Home Owners' Loan Corporation, first floated in his December Financial Services Outlook, picked up steam in late January when it was brought up by Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) during a Senate Banking Committee hearing and covered extensively in the national media.

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote about Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the February 8 issue of The New Republic, praising her work on the treatment of women in Muslim countries and urging the European Union to guarantee the rights of all people to live without fear of death threats from extremists. Hirsi Ali received the Prix Simone de Beauvoir in Paris on February 11.

In February, David Frum offered a history lesson in the pages of the Times of London. Just as the Republican Party transformed itself in the late nineteenth century and stopped resting on its Civil War-era laurels, so, he argues, today's Republicans should leave behind nostalgia for the Reagan years and begin the hard work of crafting policies for today's challenges.

Resident Scholar  Vincent R. Reinhart

Vincent R. Reinhart was recently interviewed by Research magazine about monetary policy during his two decades at the Federal Reserve Board. Commenting on how the central bank has handled the recent economic straits, he said: "Bankers like to live in a linear world. They dread non-linear events, such as when banks suddenly stop lending or when nominal interest rates go to zero and therefore can't be reduced in a crisis."

Richard Vedder hosted a conference on February 1 on the growth and role of university endowments. Several prominent figures in higher education debated the tax eligibility of endowment giving, whether or not colleges should have to pay out a minimum percentage of their endowments each year, and to what extent endowments can offset the fast-rising cost of college. In the Washington Post, Vedder wrote that the hoarding of endowments is only one of many problems with higher education today. Kevin A. Hassett wrote his monthly National Review column on the same subject.

Resident Scholar Sally Satel

AEI mourns David L. Kaserman of Auburn University, who died in January from illness resulting from his longtime status as a kidney transplant recipient. Partly because of his personal experience as a dialysis and kidney transplant patient (like AEI's Sally Satel), Kaserman devoted his work to explaining and resolving the shortage of organs for transplant. He coauthored The U.S. Organ Procurement System: A Prescription for Reform (AEI Press, 2002), which argues that a market system of organ procurement would create supplies that over time would meet demand and save thousands of lives at relatively low cost. Satel reflected on her own transplant experience and discussed ways to reverse the organ shortage in The New York Times Magazine in December 2007.