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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…
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…
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…
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…
September 10, 2024
Event: New Census Data on American Families’ Economic Well-Being
Event Summary On September 10, AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility gathered leading experts to analyze the new poverty and economic numbers from the US Census Bureau for 2023. AEI’s Kevin Corinth began by summarizing the data’s main findings. Median household income rose, and the official poverty measure (OPM) showed that poverty declined while…
July 26, 2024
Two Cheers for Shrinking Black-White Opportunity Gaps
The latest in a series of important reports on social mobility by the research group Opportunity Insights is out, and it’s another conversation-changer. Across a variety of outcomes in adulthood and adolescence, the gap between black Americans who grew up with low-income parents and their white counterparts has narrowed over time. This news is certainly…
May 30, 2024
The Truth about Trends in Worker Pay
Time was, only progressives made outlandish claims such as that hourly wages have been stagnant for more than half a century. But with the rise of populism on the right, “doomerism” now transcends ideology. It’s the national-conservative group American Compass that is now saying that the typical worker makes only 1 percent more today than he…
May 14, 2024
Understanding Trends in Worker Pay over the Past 50 years
Key Points Executive Summary Doomers on the political left and right agree that economic growth has failed to translate into higher wages for American workers, with some claiming that pay has barely risen in 50 years. Such sentiments have been buttressed by flawed analyses that, comparing apples to oranges in a variety of ways, have…