May 7, 2025
Did ‘China Shock’ Throw Millions of Americans Out of Work?
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that “3.7 million Americans lost their jobs” due to the “China Shock”—the increased import competition occurring after China was granted membership in the World Trade Organization. He cites research by David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, linking to two of their papers. But it appears…
April 28, 2025
You Autor Know
Along with many other controversial issues in 2025, Americans are at odds over the merits of tariffs. Underlying this debate is a more specific one—the impact of increased trade with China over the past 25 years on American manufacturing employment. Advocates of tariffs hope they will bring back blue-collar jobs, to which they ascribe special…
April 15, 2025
Is There Really Pent-Up Demand for Ten Times the Manufacturing Jobs We Have?
Data analysis is hard. Admittedly, the consequences of getting it wrong are less severe than a botched surgery. But you still want to be very careful. It’s all too easy for a misinterpretation of the facts to harm important policy debates. For an example, look no further than the debate over the past couple of…
March 27, 2025
The Looming Debt Crisis, the Trump Tax Cuts, and Medicaid
Let’s start with a chart to understand the dire fiscal situation we are in as a nation. Figure 1. Federal Debt Held by the Public as a Share of Gross Domestic Product, 1940-2054 You’re looking at how sizeable federal debt has been and will be relative to gross domestic product (GDP). From 1960 to 2008, the federal debt held by…
February 20, 2025
The American Dream Is Not a Coin Flip, and Wages Have Not Stagnated
In my last column, I showed that Americans’ assessments of the economy have tracked the official unemployment rate well over the long run. That is important because it suggests that both public opinion and objective measures indicate that the labor market is historically strong (though accelerating inflation during and after the COVID-19 pandemic has caused these…
February 18, 2025
Family-Friendly Policies for the 119th Congress
Key Points Read the PDF. Introduction America is in a baby bust, with birth rates hitting record lows and still falling. Young Americans are getting married later and less. Meanwhile, parents face rising stress, and children suffer an epidemic of anxiety. The family is the fundamental building block of a society, as the cell is…
January 16, 2025
Should We Believe the Economic Data or Americans’ “Lyin’” Eyes? The Answer Is Yes.
Many Americans are convinced the economy is ailing and that life is financially tougher today than a decade—or a generation—ago. Social media posts wax nostalgic for a long-lost era when all single breadwinners allegedly could afford a home and two cars for a family of four. Everyone seemingly knows someone who did everything they were…
January 7, 2025
Tax Policy Should Prioritize Shoring Up the Family
During the Biden years, tax policy related to the family revolved around the child tax credit (CTC). Attempts to expand the credit to make it easier for two-parent families to have kids and rely on a sole breadwinner were thwarted by objections that a child allowance would also promote single-parent families in which no one…
December 20, 2024
Fixing Inflation, Right-Sizing the Federal Government
Thirty years ago next month, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan testified before a joint session of the House and Senate Budget Committees with talk of deficit reduction in the air. In January 1995, Republicans had just won control of both houses for the first time in 42 years. The federal debt had reached 48…
November 7, 2024
Introducing the “More Accurate Consumer Price Index”
Abstract Particularly since the 1990s, federal statistical agencies have worked to improve the ability ofvarious price indexes to measure changes in the cost of living. However, in recent years, somehave sent mixed signals to researchers about the relative merits of different measures. As aresult, academic and policy researchers routinely use theoretically and empirically inferior priceindexes…