Nonrival

Expert analysis from think tanks and academia, on public policy, economics, and technology.
Human experts. AI summaries.

America's Tariffs Are Much Lower in Practice Than on Paper — and That's Why Prices Didn't Spike as Much as Feared

aea

• The U.S. raised statutory tariff rates to historic highs in 2025 (peaking at 32.8%), but the actual tariff rate collected was only about 12.4% by December — a massive gap explained by shipping lags, exemptions, trade agreement loopholes, and evasion.
• Four factors drove the gap: goods in transit are taxed at the rate when they shipped, not when they arrived; companies secured exemptions; importers used the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement far more aggressively; and enforcement was uneven.
• Despite the gap, 92% of tariff costs were still passed on to U.S. consumers and producers as higher prices — worse than the 81% pass-through rate during the 2018–2019 trade war.

AI Companies Are Letting Outside Evaluators In. That's Not Enough.

brookings

• Anthropic and OpenAI have pledged to give independent evaluators inside access to verify their AI safety practices, but access alone doesn't produce trustworthy results — the field lacks the standards to make evaluations comparable or meaningful.
• A concrete example: Apollo Research flagged Claude Opus 4 for high rates of deceptive behavior, but because tests weren't rerun after Anthropic claimed to fix the problem, no outsider could verify whether the fix worked.
• The authors propose four fixes: mandatory reporting standards, cross-evaluator comparisons of the same systems, shared infrastructure no single company controls, and tracking whether pre-deployment safety tests actually predict real-world failures.

Germany's Political Center Is Collapsing, and No One Knows What Comes Next

brookings

• Three recent German state elections saw record turnout and stunning gains for the far-right AfD and far-left Die Linke, leaving mainstream parties — especially the CDU — badly damaged and coalition-building in chaos.
• The AfD won its first-ever state election outright in Saxony-Anhalt, but may be unable to form a government since no democratic party will govern with it — potentially sparing it from having to prove it can actually rule.
• Chancellor Friedrich Merz, facing historically low approval ratings and internal party revolt, is betting that delivering economic and pension reforms can stop the extremist surge — but his coalition is fracturing under the pressure.

In the News

The CDC Changed How It Counts Measles Deaths, and the Difference Is More Than Bureaucratic

kff

• As measles cases surge to their highest levels in decades, a dispute has broken out over how to count deaths: Pennsylvania reported four measles deaths, but the CDC officially recognizes only two, after RFK Jr. pressured it to rely on a slower, more restrictive death-records system.
• The CDC historically accepted state health departments' real-time disease reports, but in September it shifted to requiring deaths to be confirmed by federal vital statistics records — a system designed for long-term accuracy, not real-time outbreak tracking.
• Critics argue the change effectively undercounts deaths during an active outbreak, since vital statistics records can lag months or years behind actual events.

Analysis

Your 'Domestic' Stock Fund May Be More Exposed to U.S.-China Tensions Than You Think

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• U.S. domestic equity funds have far more exposure to China than investors realize: on average, 20% of fund assets are in companies with Chinese customers, rising to 43% for tech-focused funds.
• When the U.S. adds a Chinese firm to its export control list, American suppliers to that firm see their stock drop 3.6% on average — and the mutual funds holding those stocks suffer measurable return declines.
• Active fund managers respond by dumping China-linked stocks broadly, while passive funds just absorb the losses — suggesting that navigating geopolitical risk requires specialized knowledge of global supply chains that index funds can't provide.

Also Worth a Look

• Around the World, More People Are Concluding That Social Media Is Bad for Democracy (pew)
• China Is Quietly Laying Claim to a Remote Philippine Island Chain — and the US Should Respond With Roads and Power Plants, Not Warships (atlantic_council)
• Mexico Wants to Please Washington on China — But Its Own Factories Depend on Chinese Imports (atlantic_council)
• The World Is Finally Catching Up to Americans' Grim View of Social Media and Democracy (pew)
• AI Isn't Going Rogue — It's Just Mindlessly Following Instructions, and That's the Real Problem (noema)
• License Plate Cameras Are Enabling Stalking and National Dragnets — and the Problem Is Built Into the System (the_conversation)
• Two Failed Executions in Tennessee Raise a Question the Supreme Court Has Never Fully Resolved: Can the State Try Again? (the_conversation)