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June 27, 2023

House Republican Plan Penalizes Marriage

If there was something liberals used to hate most about welfare reform, it was policies that promoted more work and smaller welfare caseloads. For example, during debate about 1996 reforms, Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-IL) asked what would happen to families if they didn’t meet proposed work requirements: “Do we put them on trains and send them out West?” Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) said those reforms “can only encourage a…

By Matt Weidinger

June 26, 2023

Why There Are So Few Black Kids at Stuyvesant: Private Schools and Charter Schools Pull Top Students Out of the System

Once more there is hand-wringing as only a handful of Black students are in the 2023 entering Stuyvesant class; and very limited numbers at Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech: the three flagship New York City high schools. These numbers are virtually the same as the previous year. As usual, most liberals again demand that the…

By Robert Cherry

June 24, 2023

Family Affordability in America: A Story of Decline or Achievement?

On June 22, AEI’s Scott Winship and Angela Rachidi were joined by Oren Cass of American Compass and Idrees Kahloon of the Economist to review the evidence on family affordability in America. Event Summary The event began with presentations from the three panelists, each presenting original research on changes in the ability of the average…

By Angela Rachidi | Scott Winship

June 24, 2023

City Can No Longer Afford Life-Long Subsidies for Lucky NYCHA Tenants

If the definition of insanity involves doing the same thing repeatedly and hoping for a different result, maybe the long-troubled New York City Housing Authority, the nation’s largest, isn’t entirely insane after all.  Rather than pouring yet more money into repairs of the crumbling Fulton and Elliot-Chelsea Houses, among the nation’s oldest public-housing projects, NYCHA…

By Howard Husock

June 23, 2023

SNAP Can Improve Nutrition, Help Farmers, and Support the Environment

A headline in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year read, “America Is Binging on Snacks, and Food Companies Are Eating It Up.” The article explains how American diets that were already heavily reliant on snacks and packaged foods, have only gotten more so since the pandemic – to the tune of $181 billion in household snack purchases…

By Angela Rachidi

June 22, 2023

In An Age Of Low Social Trust, Stopping By Your Neighbor’s House Is Weird And Creepy

It was presaged during the pandemic: “Masks have also become so much more than mere barrier between germs and lungs,” the New York Times reported in April 2021. “They can keep that too-chatty neighbor at bay or help the introvert hide in plain sight.” Everyone had shouted at us in spring 2020 to stay at home. They told us that…

By Timothy P. Carney

June 22, 2023

Thanks to the Baby Bust, America Is Getting Older

When I was born in 1978, the median American was 30 years old. These days, the median American is 38.9, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Thursday. That’s a rapid aging of the American population. Some portion of that increase is good news: Older people are living longer than they were 40 years ago. In 1980, the average American life expectancy at…

By Timothy P. Carney

June 22, 2023

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

Event Summary On June 22, AEI’s Brent Orrell and Shane Tews were joined by Rob Reich of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and Jeremy M. Weinstein of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies to discuss System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot (Harper Academic, 2021), a book…

By Brent Orrell | Shane Tews

June 22, 2023

The Cost of Thriving Has Fallen: Correcting and Rejecting the American Compass Cost-of-Thriving Index

AbstractThe Cost-of-Thriving Index (COTI), developed by American Compass Executive Director Oren Cass, asks whether families can afford a middle-class lifestyle. It compares the costs of five goods and services to the income of a typical full-time male earner. Cass concludes that the cost of thriving has increased dramatically, from 40 weeks of work in 1985…

By Scott Winship | Jeremy Horpedahl

June 21, 2023

The Bad Math Behind Economic Doomerism

It’s a big week for American Compass, a think tank founded in 2020 that fancies itself as the “pre-eminent alternative to the Old Right’s market fundamentalism.” On the heels of its new policy book, Rebuilding American Capitalism, it hosts an event on Capitol Hill today with multiple Republican senators. It’s the latest sign of the intellectual confusion afflicting…

By Scott Winship | Kevin Corinth