All Research
Commentary
Putting This Year’s Poverty Numbers in Context
On Tuesday, the Census Bureau released its latest income and poverty estimates covering calendar year 2022, including two assessments of poverty in America. One, called the Official Poverty Measure (OPM),…
Commentary
Working from Home Has Increased More Modestly Than Many Believe
…pre-pandemic surveys to which it links its estimates are not comparable to the SWAA. As one of us (Winship) explained in a report on food hardship with Angela Rachidi, linking…
Blog Post
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…
Blog Post
It Really Is More Expensive to Give Everyone $1 Than to Give Some People $1
In a piece from last year, Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project argues (in the title of the piece) “Universal Benefits Cost Less Than Means-Tested Benefits.” He lays out his central…
Op-Ed
Reforming the EITC to Reduce Single Parenthood and Ease Work-Family Balance
Sixty years ago, in 1963, 94% of American children were born to married mothers. Today, the figure is only 60 percent. This decline signals a fundamental disruption in the long-standing stability of…
Blog Post
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…
Report
The Cost of Thriving Has Fallen: Correcting and Rejecting the American Compass Cost-of-Thriving Index
Abstract The Cost-of-Thriving Index (COTI), developed by American Compass Executive Director Oren Cass, asks whether families can afford a middle-class lifestyle. It compares the costs of five goods and services…
Op-Ed
The Bad Math Behind Economic Doomerism
It’s a big week for American Compass, a think tank founded in 2020 that fancies itself as the “pre-eminent alternative to the Old Right’s market fundamentalism.” On the heels of its new…
Report
Better Data Means Better Policy
“Did you adjust for inflation?” An occupational inconvenience of doing economic research is that you are routinely asked by disbelieving non-researchers whether your numbers have taken into account the rising…
Report
The Mainline Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Social Capitalism
Download the Dataset When Alexis de Tocqueville penned his seminal Democracy in America lauding the strength of American communities, institutions, and associations, he noted the unique status of religion. Religion,…
Blog Post
Social Capital: What Is It?
Words and phrases, as they say, can do a lot of work. Sometimes, evocative terms can be useful even if they paper over imprecise concepts or obscure definitional disagreement. But…
Blog Post
Introduction to The Social Breakdown
“Social capital” is an esoteric and often loosely defined concept, yet it captures a deep-seated intuition and shared sensibility among virtually all Americans: Our relationships have value, and what we…