Skip to main content

Research Archive

Welcome to Our Research Archive

Search and filter by content type, issue area, author, and keyword

May 8, 2024

USDA Report Highlights Subjectivity of Food Insecurity Measure

Every year, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) releases a report detailing the share of US households who are “food insecure”—defined as those that have “limited or uncertain access to adequate food” due to insufficient resources. Last month, the USDA released a report combining six years of data (2016-2021) to show how food insecurity rates…

May 7, 2024

How Zoning Policies Affect the Housing Supply: City of Denver Case Study

Summary:The City of Denver switched to a new zoning code in June 2010. Most areas were upzoned, but some were downzoned. Overall, the policy encouraged housing construction in Denver. Slide deck 

May 6, 2024

How States and Communities Can Strengthen Marriages 

Family is the greatest source of social capital, providing the setting in which people grow, develop, and anchor their lives. Stable and healthy marriages are at the foundation of strong families. Marriage is associated with myriad positive outcomes, including greater happiness and satisfaction with life, less loneliness, and better health.[1] Children raised in intact families…

May 6, 2024

Comments on the One Seattle Plan (Comp Plan)

Summary:1) Seattle has been underbuilding for the last decade (and likely even longer) and it needs to build more housing than the targets set in the comp plan.2) Seattle can legalize the building of more housing by embracing the lessons of its past and expanding on them. During the 1990s, Seattle upzoned parts of the…

May 2, 2024

A New Lost Generation: Disengaged, Aimless, and Adrift

More than a quarter of America’s school-aged children were absent from school 10 percent or more of the time last year. There’s no shortage of explanations on offer for this surge in “chronic absenteeism,” mostly blaming the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath: lockdowns; lowered expectation; health and hardship; bullying and school safety issues. Remote learning…

May 2, 2024

Q&A: A Conservative Vision for Education

We just published a new book, Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College. As the title makes clear, we unabashedly make the case for a conservative approach to education. But we think it’s important to clarify the kind of “conservatism” we have in mind. We’re not talking about politics. We’re not politicos…

May 2, 2024

Lives Cut Short: A Project to Document Child Maltreatment Fatalities

Every year, at least 2,000 children die of maltreatment. Many of the adults responsible for their deaths were known to child welfare services or law enforcement before the fatal incident occurred. Unfortunately, state governments fail to count many of these deaths or release information that would help determine their causes. Why is this? How can…

May 1, 2024

Getting Higher Education Right

Higher education has a vital role to play when it comes to safeguarding the store of human knowledge, promoting scientific inquiry, and teaching wisdom to the next generation of civic and community leaders. But rising costs, bureaucratic bloat, double standards, and campus sloth have come to plague America’s colleges and erode Americans’ faith in them….

May 1, 2024

The closing of the American heart

In the late 1990s, I began my study of marriage and family as a graduate student at Princeton University “for the sake of the children.” Then, I was concerned that our nation’s retreat from this core institution since the 1960s was harming children. And at that point, the share of children residing with their married,…

April 30, 2024

Understanding Trends in Worker Pay over the Past 50 years

Introduction “Bernie Sanders is right about capitalism.” That’s the headline from a recent op-ed by CNN senior political analyst Kirsten Powers. “Late-stage capitalism” is “untethered to morality or decency,” and “it’s not working, except for the super-rich.” Such declensionist views are not unique to Bernie Sanders and the political left. A policy handbook published by…