October 9, 2024
Learning the Right Lessons from the “China Shock”
An influential 2013 paper by economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson finds an average reduction in manufacturing employment of 90,000 jobs per year from 1990 to 2007 because of U.S. competition with imports from China. Those economists published another important paper, along with economists Daron Acemoglu and Brendan Price, that found import growth from China led to…
October 3, 2024
Protectionism is Failing and Wrongheaded: An Evaluation of the Post-2017 Shift toward Trade Wars and Industrial Policy
Abstract The Trump–Pence and Biden–Harris administrations enthusiastically embraced protectionism. Each administration explicitly argued for a break from the bipartisan consensus of recent decades that has been generally supportive of free trade and of allowing markets to shape US industrial and employment composition. But the protectionism of the Trump and Biden administrations has not succeeded and…
September 23, 2024
Toward a Potential Grand Bargain for the Nation
The views expressed in this report are those of the individual authors who collectively constitute the Grand Bargain Committee, co-chaired by Michael R. Strain and Isabel V. Sawhill. This report was sponsored by the Center for Collaborative Democracy and was prepared independent of influence from the center and from any other outside party or institution. It…
September 10, 2024
Event: New Census Data on American Families’ Economic Well-Being
Event Summary On September 10, AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility gathered leading experts to analyze the new poverty and economic numbers from the US Census Bureau for 2023. AEI’s Kevin Corinth began by summarizing the data’s main findings. Median household income rose, and the official poverty measure (OPM) showed that poverty declined while…
September 5, 2024
Hurt Pennsylvania’s Workers to Win Pennsylvania’s Votes?
Have populist politics gotten so out of control that politicians believe they need to hurt Pennsylvania’s workers in order to win Pennsylvania’s electoral votes? Yesterday, the Washington Post reported: President Joe Biden is preparing to announce that he will formally block Nippon Steel’s proposed $14.9 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel, according to three people with knowledge of the…
June 26, 2024
American Workers Are Doing Great. They Could Be Doing Even Better.
Editor’s note: This is one of a pair of essays responding to the Economic Innovation Group’s report, “The American Worker: Toward a New Consensus”, by Adam Ozimek, John Lettieri, and Benjamin Glasner. The other is by Paul Krugman of the New York Times. To the Economic Innovation Group’s attempt to articulate a “new consensus” about the American…
June 10, 2024
Employment and Labor Supply Responses to the Child Tax Credit Expansion: Theory and Evidence
AbstractThe 2021 Child Tax Credit (CTC) expansion increased government benefits to families, andespecially to families with the lowest incomes. Economic theory predicts that this policyintervention would have led to a reduction in labor supply among adults in those families. Ourreview of available research suggests that employment within broadly defined demographicgroups was not reduced by the…
June 10, 2024
The Economic World We’ve Lost
Populism has infected both major parties in the United States, leading to policies that previous generations of economic policymakers would immediately recognized as foolhardy and counter-productive. But whether the country can escape its self-destructive pessimism is anyone’s guess. WASHINGTON, DC – The past decade has brought a sea change in US economic policy, and not…
June 4, 2024
What Comes After Neoliberalism?
The steep tariff increases on Chinese goods that US President Joe Biden’s administration recently announced are just the latest in a long string of interventionist economic policies that fly in the face of decades of neoliberal orthodoxy. And the Biden administration is hardly alone: a growing number of governments, economists, and institutions are rethinking the…
May 13, 2024
The American Dream Is Alive and Well (and the Problem of US Inequality Greatly Exaggerated)
Don’t listen to the populist naysayers: The U.S. economy continues to deliver jobs, higher wages and upward mobility for those who need it most. What do former President Trump and Bernie Sanders have in common? Or Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Nobel Prize-winning Clinton administration economist Joseph Stiglitz and billionaire investor Ray Dalio? Among many other prominent elected officials, commentators, public…