August 21, 2023
Four Shocking Truths about the American Economy! (Well, Shocking to Some.)
I recently wrote a brief essay, “Generative AI and Economic Growth,” for Exponential View, the great newsletter by Azeem Azhar. And I knew one particular passage would be sure to raise eyebrows: A lengthy and fundamentally solid expansion would allow the economic progress of the pre-pandemic period — falling inequality, rising real wages across the income…
August 10, 2023
The Real Reason People Leave Religion
More than a decade ago, the Pew Research Center released a path-breaking study on people without religion: “Nones” on the Rise. At the time, I was in graduate school studying political science and working full-time as a pollster. Partly inspired by this work, I wrote my dissertation exploring why people leave religion: “And Then There Were Nones:…
August 3, 2023
Expanding Economic Opportunities Through Evidence-Based Sector Training
Read the PDF. Introduction The Workforce Futures Initiative is a research collaboration among the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Project on Workforce at Harvard Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. The initiative aims to develop concise and actionable reviews of existing research for federal, state, and local policymakers. Since August…
August 2, 2023
Measuring Social Capital: Can We Tell If Some Places Are Richer in Social Capital Than Others?
The concept of social capital has been inconsistently defined and described.[1]That should not be surprising, given that social capital is intangible and not easily measured. (The same is true of human capital, though researchers have defaulted to measures of educational attainment and test scores, only recently expanding the set of indicators to encompass noncognitive skills.)…
July 18, 2023
The Great Recession, COVID-19, Interest Hikes Left a 15-Year Mark on Housing
How have the Great Recession in 2007, the COVID-19 pandemic that hit in 2020, and the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes that started in 2022 affected mortgages in the region? Here’s the short answer: Each year, researchers at George Washington University use the State of the Capital Region report to do a deep dive on a policy…
July 18, 2023
Yet More Absurdities in Biden’s Housing Policy
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, my colleague Ed Pinto and I recently raised alarms about how the Biden administration is doubling down on the same failed policies that preceded the housing crash of 2008. Unfortunately, policymakers keep dreaming up new and equally absurd housing policies. The latest move comes from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the…
June 30, 2023
The U.S. Could Learn a Lot from This School in the U.K.
Last month, I took advantage of a trip to the U.K. to spend a day observing at London’s legendary Michaela School, which serves about 800 students ages eleven to 18, a short distance from Wembley Stadium. Katharine Birbalsingh, who has gained fame in her country (some say infamy) as “Britain’s strictest headmistress,” invited me for an entire day…
June 30, 2023
It’s Time to End Legacy Admissions
The Supreme Court’s decision in the UNC and Harvard cases was received, as most news is these days, in two quite different ways on the two sides of our political aisle. But one theme seemed to resonate with both supporters and opponents of affirmative action: that in the spirit of ending unfair admissions practices, elite…