Fangyuan Cao

A competition judged by faculty from Yale, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. The essay argues that state regulation of disinformation fails on its own terms: Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act pushed platforms to over-block rather than adjudicate, and cut disinformation very little; AI takedowns produce enormous numbers of false positives and have almost no multilingual training data; and compliance-driven moderation moves slower than the misinformation it chases. Independent fact-checking and media literacy are the more durable alternative, because they do not require the state to decide what is true.

Meritocracy is a myth — not in the sense that it disguises structural inequality, but in the stricter sense that it cannot satisfy its own justificatory conditions. The essay takes on desert-based meritocracy, the claim that allocations are intrinsically justified because people deserve outcomes according to their merits, and argues it is incompatible with the liberal societies that are the only place desert is intelligible as a fairness criterion in the first place. Set out the conditions that would justify it, and the conditions turn out to be ones liberalism cannot meet.

The annual contest of the Cambridge University Economics Society. The essay applies the Solow growth model to project output contraction under sustained below-replacement fertility, then tests the standard policy response — pro-natalist cash transfers — against the Easterlin hypothesis, and argues that perceived economic stability is a far more durable lever on fertility than transfers are.

A research website arguing that pirate crews of the Golden Age were the most democratic and egalitarian institutions of the pre-Enlightenment world. Working from articles of agreement and other primary sources, it shows crews practising elected leadership, written constitutions, and compensation schemes that the Royal Navy and the merchant service — the supposedly lawful alternatives — did not.

A capstone arguing that over-broad patents suppress follow-on innovation by raising entry costs for the firms best placed to improve on an existing invention, and proposing an expansion of post-grant review under the America Invents Act. Written during a two-month fellowship with roughly a 6–8% acceptance rate; I also co-authored four nonpartisan economic policy briefs and was a paid co-author on a depolarization white paper published with Business for America.