For-profits may have incentives to cut corners in pursuit of profits, but this trait is the flip side of valuable characteristics: the inclination to grow rapidly, readily tap capital and talent, maximize cost effectiveness, and accommodate customer needs. Alongside nonprofit and public providers, for-profits have a crucial role to play in meeting America’s 21st century educational challenges.

Education leaders often act lazily, blaming union contracts and federal regulation rather than confronting the problems they have the capacity to solve.

Reid Hoffman’s talk this week at Stanford (podcast and video available here) touched on several themes that collectively seem to comprise the Silicon Valley innovator ethos; most are relevant to healthcare and biopharma, and I agree with all his assertions except one.

(Hoffman, for...

If education philanthropists want to influence policy, then they must open themselves to more public debate about their  plans and goals.

AEI Scholar Roger Scruton and Tyler Cowen will debate whether social media are enhancing or damaging human relationships.

Improved patient-focused measurement, while not perfect, could be profoundly enabling in the short term as well as beyond– but capturing this potential will require thoughtful science, involved patients, and inquisitive physicians, as well as the shared commitment to iterate and optimize around the common goal of improved health for real people.

At the next American Enterprise Debate, held on Capitol Hill, Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation, will argue that America's demography is shifting in a direction that permanently benefits the Democratic Party. AEI resident fellow Michael Barone will counter that neither party has a natural majority in an age of open-field politics.

How can more accurate and actionable information about physicians improve the affordability and quality of U.S. health care?