March 15, 2023
Can Businesses Boost Upward Mobility?
Event Summary On March 15, AEI and the Brookings Institution convened a panel of labor economists and experts to discuss the role businesses play in advancing upward mobility for workers. AEI’s Brent Orrell moderated the discussion among the panelists. Harry Holzer of Georgetown University spoke first about the economics of good and bad jobs and…
March 6, 2023
The Federal AI Shambles
The future is fast arriving—as the last year’s developments in artificial intelligence make clear—but the national government is nowhere near ready. Over the last year, we’ve seen the explosion into the public consciousness of major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence in the form of new tools that were immediately widely available. First came the release of…
March 2, 2023
The Lost World of Ecumenical Republicanism
As improbable as it may sound, one of the more interesting books on the market right now is a policy memoir largely about the rise and fall of Richard Nixon’s welfare policy. For a few wonks, scribblers, and geeks, that policy history is quite valuable as a reminder of how it’s all been said before…
February 28, 2023
Workforce Futures Initiative: How Well Does the American Workforce System Work?
Event Summary On February 28, AEI’s Brent Orrell hosted an event commemorating the launch of the Workforce Futures Initiative (WFI) website. WFI has been an ongoing research effort among the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Harvard Kennedy School Malcom Weiner Center for Social Policy. The panelists of this event were the steering…
February 27, 2023
China’s Revolution in Family Structure: A Huge Demographic Blind Spot with Surprises Ahead
Read the PDF.
February 23, 2023
Distance to 100: An Alternative to Racial Achievement Gaps
Policymakers and practitioners can do only so much to solve any problem without a clear, unbiased view of the underlying causes. Educators today have failed to improve student achievement largely because we use an inadequate conceptual framework to understand poor academic performance. The prevailing national lens for interpreting student progress or lack of it is…
February 23, 2023
Heeding the Warning from the Future
It’s fun to laugh at flat earth theory and similar conspiracist nonsense. It’s less fun to consider the implications of the movement’s resurgence. In case you weren’t aware, America is in the midst of a dramatic, internet-driven resurgence of the fanatical belief that our beautiful, oblate spheroid is in reality a flat plane whose edges…
February 22, 2023
Unlocking the Future
Editor’s Note: The following chapters are AEI scholars’ contributions to a report from Opportunity America’s working group on K-12 education. The toll of the pandemic years is becoming clearer every day: devastating learning loss among the nation’s K-12 students. Parents are angry, voting for change and telling pollsters they want more control over their children’s…
February 22, 2023
Unlocking the Future
Editor’s Note: The following chapters are AEI scholars’ contributions to a report from Opportunity America’s working group on K-12 education. The toll of the pandemic years is becoming clearer every day: devastating learning loss among the nation’s K-12 students. Parents are angry, voting for change and telling pollsters they want more control over their children’s…
February 14, 2023
Brave New Technology
In the early 1990s, I had the very good fortune to work on Capitol Hill for then-US Senator Sam Nunn (D-Georgia). As an elected official and a boss, Senator Nunn was widely known for seeking balanced perspectives on policy problems. This wasn’t a tic or the narcissism of small policy differences. He recognized that many…