February 24, 2025
A Glut of MBAs?
It’s all about the skills, not the credentials. You know the labor market times are changing when Harvard MBAs start showing up in the unemployment stories. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, 23 percent of recent Harvard Business School grads were still looking for work three months after graduation. In 2022, that figure was only 10 percent….
February 22, 2025
Why Long Island Is Hoping Former Cops Will Become Child Protective Services Workers
“It’s incumbent upon us to make sure these children are safe,” Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman said at a press conference recently. “That’s job No. 1.” Blakeman launched a program in 2023 to hire more workers for child protective services in order to reduce caseloads at the Department of Social Services. But Blakeman’s January decision to bring on former…
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…
February 18, 2025
Why So Blue: Liberal Women Are Less Happy, More Lonely. But Why?
Young liberal women are especially prone nowadays to reporting poor mental health. This was the discovery that Zach Goldberg made almost five years ago pouring over Pew data in the spring of 2020. Further research in 2022 found that depression had surged among liberal high school girls in the last decade-and-a-half, and much more so for them than other high schoolers,…
February 16, 2025
More Girls Than Boys Are Using Fentanyl. What Is Going on in the Lives of These Girls?
In the latest sign that something is seriously amiss in the lives of adolescent girls, we now have figures on drug use in 2023 from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. And girls seem to be outdoing their male peers — not in a good way. When asked if they have used cannabis,…
February 15, 2025
One Man’s Quest to Keep Kids Away from Drugs
he audience of 35 teenagers shuffling into a classroom at Twin Oaks High school on a Thursday morning does not look friendly. Heads down and dark sweatshirt hoods up, there is barely any chatter. But Rocky Herron is not deterred. Herron, a towering former Drug Enforcement Administration agent and a recently minted grandfather, begins a…
February 14, 2025
Poverty During the Pandemic and the Role of Government Transfers
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted unprecedented policy interventions in the US that provided nearly $3 trillion to support struggling families. This column examines the short-term effects of these interventions on child poverty and finds quite different trends for income poverty and consumption poverty. While disposable income poverty declined dramatically in 2021, consumption poverty fell more gradually,…
February 11, 2025
AI and the Future of Work Looks Bright
One of the hottest guessing games in workforce development is figuring out how generative artificial intelligence will affect jobs and how to prepare students and workers for an AI-infused economy. The future of work looks bright, but the full potential of AI to increase productivity and raise wages and incomes will only be realized if…
February 7, 2025
Follow Elon Musk’s USAID Model to Free Tenants from Public-Housing Hell
The willingness of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to take on sacred cows is stunning Washington, as tenets long unquestioned suddenly fall like idols destroyed by Abraham. The same creative destruction should be focused on a bad idea that has harmed cities and fostered dependency for nearly a century: public housing. Instead of tinkering…
February 7, 2025
Low-Performing Students Fall Farther Behind the Pack
On January 29, the National Assessment of Education Progress, NAEP, released results from its 2024 assessment. This latest installment of the self-styled “Nation’s Report Card” makes depressing reading. Indeed, if it weren’t for bad news, there would be hardly any news at all. The previous 2022 NAEP results were bad—but they could be blamed on…