January 3, 2023
Systemic Disadvantage
The term “systemic racism” freezes social, political, and policy conversation. As soon as the words are uttered, contending parties retreat to their respective corners to engage in a mutual misunderstanding guaranteed to produce anguish and anger on both sides. In a way, the resulting stasis serves the interests of both sides: Progressives are relieved of…
January 3, 2023
Perspective: Women Are More Likely to Make Friends at Work Than Men. Here’s Why That Matters
Despite efforts to close the gender wage gap, the difference between men’s and women’s wages remains a stubborn fixture of modern society. Women still make 83 cents for every dollar men make. Commonly offered explanations include gender discrimination and occupational segregation. One study identified a “care penalty” that disproportionately affects women “when workers in jobs that require higher levels…
January 1, 2023
Perspective: Is your boss on your DOS? How remote work monitoring can work
The challenge is to develop and use tools that reinforce trust rather than weaken it As COVID-19 recedes, American workers are filtering, slowly and fitfully, back to the office. In the past few years, remote work has gone from rarity to commonplace to an ongoing, contentious renegotiation between workers and employers. One front in this…
December 15, 2022
The Myth of Income Stagnation
According to the conventional wisdom, income stagnation and inequality are large and growing threats to broad-based prosperity in the United States. Many economists, journalists, business leaders, and elected leaders (from both parties) believe that for a large share of households, real (inflation-adjusted) income has not increased for decades, and that income inequality – the gap between higher- and lower-income households –…
December 14, 2022
Bringing Home the Bacon: Have Trends in Men’s Pay Weakened the Traditional Family?
Key Points
December 9, 2022
“Automatic Stimulus”: How It Would Have Increased the Record Unemployment Benefits Paid During the Great Recession and Pandemic
Key Points Read the PDF. Executive Summary The COVID-19 pandemic saw unemployment claims reach a high of over 33 million in June 2020—over two and a half times the prior record set during the Great Recession. From March 2020 until temporary federal programs expired in September 2021, nearly 1.6 billion weeks of benefit checks were…
December 6, 2022
Fixing Our Child Welfare System to Help America’s Most Vulnerable Kids
Every day, more and more children in America lack a safe, permanent, and loving home. Evidence increasingly shows that child welfare agencies and family courts aremuch more concerned with adults’ needs and sensibilities than with children’s safety.While reform must come from many different corners of this field, Congress should committo creating a stronger and smarter…
December 1, 2022
Was Rising Inequality Behind Falling Absolute Mobility? Reassessing Chetty et al. (2017)
In 2017, a widely publicized paper by a research team led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty found that while the vast majority of American kids born in 1940 ended up better off at age 30 than their parents fared at the same age, that was only true of half of kids born in 1980. Moreover,…
November 28, 2022
Public School Instructional Offerings and Enrollment Changes: Evidence from Two Years After the Pandemic
Key Points Read the PDF. Executive Summary We examine how COVID-related reopening policies during the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years affected enrollment in public school districts. We use difference-in-differences and event study designs to estimate plausibly causal effects of different reopening policies on public school enrollment. Consistent with prior research, we find that public school…
November 17, 2022
American Renewal: Launching a New Conservative Policy Book with Paul Ryan and Angela Rachidi
Event Summary On November 17, AEI’s Paul Ryan and Angela Rachidi launched their new volume, American Renewal: A Conservative Plan to Strengthen the Social Contract and Save the Country’s Finances (AEI, 2022). In his opening remarks, Speaker Ryan noted our unique social and political moment, contending that many Americans are suffering at the hands of…