'Anticipate Challenges, Dead Ends, and Reinventions': Professor Tim Kane Offers Rules of Life

Dr. Tim Kane is a Professor of Economics at UATX and a founder of the Polaris Project. He is the author of The Immigrant Superpower (Oxford University Press, 2022), Balance: The Economics of Great Powers (Simon and Schuster, 2013), with Glenn Hubbard, and Bleeding Talent (Palgrave, 2012). Kane earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego, and a Bachelor's degree from the U.S. Air Force Academy. His writing has been featured in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Defining Ideas, and Commentary Magazine.

Here, Professor Kane offers his thoughts on building a culture of leadership, bridging the worlds of think tanks and academia, and the life lessons he hopes UATX students will learn.

UATX: In addition to teaching economics at UATX, you will help lead the Polaris Project component of the curriculum, in which all students will build, create, or discover something serving the human good. What lessons do you hope students will learn through the program?

Dr. Tim Kane: The first speech I gave was an impromptu address to fifth graders when I visited my favorite elementary school teacher after basic training at the Air Force Academy. I told the students there are three rules of life you should follow if you want to succeed. Rule #1: Work hard. It’s that simple. Rule #2: Don’t do drugs. That’s directly and indirectly essential as a metaphor for short-term satisfaction. Rule #3, which is the most important, is to have more than one big dream. Successful innovators learn Rule #3 early, and that’s a key lesson for students undertaking their Polaris projects.

Here are some other lessons I hope UATX students will learn: Anticipate that you will fail a lot, at big things and small things. So to achieve success, anticipate challenges, dead ends, and reinventions. Fail fast. Learn to let go of one dream so that you can use your limited time on this Earth to achieve others. You will be amazed at how many dreams you can fulfill when you are not obsessed with one, or destroyed when the first dream fails. 

You served as a captain in the United States Air Force and wrote a book about leadership in the U.S. military. What are the core attributes of a leader? What is missing in how we raise and educate leaders today?

The military has an outstanding culture of raising and educating leaders. However, veterans know from experience that the military management bureaucracy is stifling these young people, as I described in my book Bleeding Talent: How the US Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It's Time for a Revolution.

I’m proud to be part of a movement to reform what one Secretary of Defense called the “institutional concrete.” The administrative state is a malignancy that has emerged naturally over centuries and threatens simple principles of liberty and self-government. 

We are all in a lifelong battle to weed out the overreach of bureaucracy and the tyranny of (too many) laws that is a natural part of the human condition. 

The University of Austin prepares students for the struggle by grounding them in the ancient wisdom that power corrupts and eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

You have a Substack called WhyAmerica, focused on American exceptionalism. Could you describe very briefly why the American economy is exceptional?

The United States is blessed with excellent institutions that foster productivity and growth, which we call economic freedoms: property rights, contracts, free internal trade, immigration between the states, and national security. Most importantly, we have complementary cultures of “free labor,” in the words of Abraham Lincoln, and entrepreneurial innovation. 

Most countries wouldn’t have allowed radically new companies like Microsoft, Google, and Cisco to emerge, let alone Palantir, Tesla, Nvidia, and a million “little tech” unicorns. 

You come to UATX from the world of think tanks and foundations. How has the work you’ve done there prepared you to help build a new university?

While I’ve enjoyed working on public policy issues at think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, their key “product” is education – whether that’s on a cable news debate, marketing a book, briefing Congressional staffers, or testifying before the Senate. 

We live in an era when information is a roaring sea. Our job is to help students find the signal in the noise. That's where education comes in.

What attracted you to UATX, and what will be distinctive about a University of Austin education?

The university culture in the United States is deeply unhealthy. UATX offers its founding faculty and students an opportunity to set a new standard that puts excellence and merit back where they belong, as the guiding stars. 

As the father of an ethnically diverse family, I’ve watched with distress how divisive identity politics has undercut the educational mission, perhaps irreparably, at other universities. In contrast, UATX stands for meritocracy, high standards, and nurturing talent.

Subscribe to our newsletter for more faculty interviews.