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June 24, 2023
Family Affordability in America: A Story of Decline or Achievement?
…Some scholars conclude that income has generally kept pace with costs, suggesting that having a family has not become less affordable over time. Meanwhile, others conclude that costs have outpaced…
June 24, 2023
City Can No Longer Afford Life-Long Subsidies for Lucky NYCHA Tenants
…traditional public housing, including lifetime tenure for tenants. What’s more, it keeps prime property off the tax rolls at a time when New York City desperately needs revenue. The logic…
June 23, 2023
SNAP Can Improve Nutrition, Help Farmers, and Support the Environment
…not even consider the costs of new obesity drugs, which have proven effective but expensive, nor the indirect costs associated with obesity and diet-related disease such as lost work time and…
June 22, 2023
In An Age Of Low Social Trust, Stopping By Your Neighbor’s House Is Weird And Creepy
It was presaged during the pandemic: “Masks have also become so much more than mere barrier between germs and lungs,” the New York Times reported in April 2021. “They can keep that too-chatty neighbor…
June 22, 2023
Thanks to the Baby Bust, America Is Getting Older
…Times. “Fewer kids are being born.” This is true. Almost every year since 2007, fewer and fewer children have been born in the United States, down from 4.3 million in…
June 22, 2023
The Cost of Thriving Has Fallen: Correcting and Rejecting the American Compass Cost-of-Thriving Index
…was in 1985. When we include younger full-time workers excluded by Cass and full-time female workers, COTI falls by nearly one week before accounting for taxes and by 7.5 weeks…
June 21, 2023
The Bad Math Behind Economic Doomerism
…full-time male workers. We first improve on Cass’ cost estimates by correcting conceptual and measurement errors and using better source data. For instance, while Cass uses the average sticker price…
June 20, 2023
College isn’t just about career or credentials — it’s also about friends, formation, and, if you’re lucky, marriage
A few weeks ago, my college friends and I all got together for the weekend. We are seven guys in our mid-40s who have been friends for about 25 years. We drank beer…
June 20, 2023
Down Through the Ages
…happiness between higher-income and lower-income white Americans in the 1970s, but by the 2010s, “five times as many whites in the lowest fifth for income were unhappy compared to those…
June 16, 2023
The Missing Context Behind “Cuts” in Fast-Growing Welfare Programs
…its baseline projections for the number of current and expected future benefit recipients—show that both food stamp and Medicaid caseloads have recently grown many times faster than those would-be reductions. Before the…