Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) — A panel of fellows at the Hoover Institution has selected four winners of its third annual Distinguished Undergraduate Essay Competition. The winning papers feature topics including a guide on how the United States can win a second cold war and the positive impact of access to clean water on women in rural Malawi.
The award winners, Stanford undergraduate students pursuing majors across a wide variety of departments, distinguished themselves through the strength of their writings on topics concerning the values and institutions of liberty, and how public policies impact human freedom. Essays were expected to address a diverse set of policy disciplines.
This year, a panel made up of fellows Russell A. Berman, Norman Naimark, and Caroline Hoxby selected four winning papers.
“A free society depends on citizens who can speak and write well in order to convince others through clarity and reason,” Berman, the director of the contest, said of the contest. “With the essay award, Hoover honors students who have excelled in academic writing and who are surely on their way to distinguished careers.”
All four winning entrants will receive a cash award and be celebrated at a future ceremony at Hoover to be held in the fall quarter of 2024.
The winning papers are as follows:
Distinguished Essay Award (best essay written by a first-year student):
Haibib Kerim (Major: Electrical Engineering, Class of 2027)
Essay Title: “How to Win the Second Cold War”
Haibib Kerim examines China’s attempt to expand its sphere of influence through modern economic neocolonialism, assessing the detrimental effects on the developing nations who are signatories of programs such as the Belt and Road Initiative. He also connects such developments to a broader “second cold war” with an ideological conflict between democracy and authoritarianism, drawing parallels to the ideological battle between capitalism and communism in the Cold War.
Distinguished Essay Award
Divya Ganesan (Major: Political Science, minor in Computer Science, Class of 2025)
Essay Title: “Pressing Power: Bismarck’s Mobilization of the Masses”
Divya Ganesan’s essay examines Otto von Bismarck’s strategic use of the press in nineteenth-century Germany, contrasting his approach with those of other European nations that were integrating the liberty of public opinion into their political systems as part of democratic reforms.
Distinguished Essay Award
Andrew Gerges (Major: Economics, Class of 2025)
Essay Title: “Analyzing the Effects of Clean Water Access on Women’s Educational Attainment in Malawi”
Andrew Gerges quantifies the impact of water access projects on women’s schooling and its economic effects in Malawi. After reviewing the literature related to the topic, Gerges establishes the outsize effects of education on women’s economic well-being and national economic growth as well as the disproportionate effects of a lack of clean water access on women’s educational attainment.
Distinguished Essay Award
Pedro Carvalho (Major: Economics, Class of 2024)
Essay Title: Beyond Numbers: Keynes, Friedman, and the Mathematization of Economics
Pedro Carvalho’s essay examines the shared skepticism of John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman toward the increasing reliance on mathematical modeling in economics. It argues that both economists believed this trend overlooked the discipline’s complexity. These economists instead emphasized the importance of creativity, psychology, and logic alongside numerical analysis.
There were also three submissions lauded as honorable mentions, including “Cyprus’s Dependence on the Greek Motherland: Failed Perceptions of National Identity among the Youth,” by Marinos Eliades (Mechanical Engineering, Class of 2027); “Revolutionary Ukraine: Why Democratization Is Still ‘in Progress,’” by Anna Pikarska (History, Class of 2026); and “Alliance Institutions and the Great-Power Competition in the Asia-Pacific: Leadership Preference in South Korea’s US-China Alignment,” by JB Lim (International Relations and Mathematical and Computational Science, Class of 2024).
To learn more about the competition and read about prior years’ winners, click here.
