July 17, 2023
The Latest Extraordinary Findings on Pandemic Improper Payments
A recently released US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report benignly titled “A Framework for Managing Improper Payments in Emergency Assistance Programs” serves as a forward-looking guide for policymakers responding to future emergencies. It also includes a number of extraordinary facts about how badly government programs were abused during the pandemic. The following highlights what GAO found: 1….
July 17, 2023
What the Rise in Dog Attacks Signals About the State of America’s Social Capital
If you have ever had the unfortunate experience of being attacked or bitten by a dog, you’re not alone. The one time it happened to me was while walking at night in a park near my apartment. It was dark and difficult to see; I was not paying much attention and was probably staring at…
July 14, 2023
Do We Need a Reboot? Challenging Prevailing Narratives on AI
It is hard at times to tell which is likely to be more disruptive: artificial intelligence (AI) or the multiplying efforts to regulate this powerful, potentially transformational, and highly beneficial technology. With multiple calls for pauses and increasing calls for new regulation, we are clearly at a critical moment in a debate that could either…
July 13, 2023
This School Year, Recovery from COVID Learning Loss Went the Wrong Direction
Beleaguered with one report after another about how bad COVID learning loss has been, many Americans think they have a pretty clear picture of the basics of where student learning has been and where it is headed. We know student learning took a huge hit during the pandemic, leaving most students well behind compared to their pre-pandemic peers. Most…
July 13, 2023
Republicans Step Up to Lead on Higher Education Reform
For decades, the political debate on higher education reform could largely be understood in simple terms. Democrats wanted to spend more money on higher education, and Republicans wanted to spend less—mostly within the nation’s preexisting policy infrastructure. In recent years, however, this familiar paradigm has been upended. As Democrats lurch leftward, Republican leaders in both…
July 12, 2023
Employment in SNAP: Setting the Record Straight
Skeptics of work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) often argue that most families receiving SNAP benefits are already working. A recent NBCNews article, for example, claimed that four out of five SNAP households have at least one working person in the household, and that 10 percent had three or more workers in 2021,…
July 12, 2023
Rethinking the Impact of the Lockdowns
We are only beginning to make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic and the implications of the lockdowns that forced people to stay home. It is an endeavor that will take years to flesh out. Eszter Hargittai’s Connected in Isolation is one of the first large-scale attempts to do just that and looks at how the United States…
July 12, 2023
Local News and Social Capital
Joseph Schumpeter famously observed that capitalism unleashed “creative destruction.”[i] If that is so for American journalism, just such a wave has, without doubt, been destroying local newspapers. What’s not yet clear is whether such destruction will be complemented by creation. The result matters not just as it affects a select group of business enterprises. Arguably, local…
July 7, 2023
The 21st Century Decline of Economic Freedom
From 1850 to 2020, industrialized economies went from roughly $3,000 per capita to $40,000 per capita, inflation adjusted. This was also a period of expanding economic freedom, as documented in the new analysis, “Economic freedom, 1850–2020: New evidence” by economic historian Leandro Prados de la Escosura. There are two important things to note about that…
July 6, 2023
The End of Affirmative Action Calls for a Renewed Conservatism of Opportunity
Only about 40 percent of adults in their late 20s have a bachelor’s degree, and that’s true of only 25 to 30 percent of blacks and Latinos in that age range. Just 20 to 25 percent of black and Latino men ages 25 to 29 have a bachelor’s degree. Most college graduates attend schools that are minimally selective. All…