March 2, 2023
The Lost World of Ecumenical Republicanism
As improbable as it may sound, one of the more interesting books on the market right now is a policy memoir largely about the rise and fall of Richard Nixon’s welfare policy. For a few wonks, scribblers, and geeks, that policy history is quite valuable as a reminder of how it’s all been said before…
February 28, 2023
Workforce Futures Initiative: How Well Does the American Workforce System Work?
Event Summary On February 28, AEI’s Brent Orrell hosted an event commemorating the launch of the Workforce Futures Initiative (WFI) website. WFI has been an ongoing research effort among the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Harvard Kennedy School Malcom Weiner Center for Social Policy. The panelists of this event were the steering…
February 23, 2023
Heeding the Warning from the Future
It’s fun to laugh at flat earth theory and similar conspiracist nonsense. It’s less fun to consider the implications of the movement’s resurgence. In case you weren’t aware, America is in the midst of a dramatic, internet-driven resurgence of the fanatical belief that our beautiful, oblate spheroid is in reality a flat plane whose edges…
February 14, 2023
Brave New Technology
In the early 1990s, I had the very good fortune to work on Capitol Hill for then-US Senator Sam Nunn (D-Georgia). As an elected official and a boss, Senator Nunn was widely known for seeking balanced perspectives on policy problems. This wasn’t a tic or the narcissism of small policy differences. He recognized that many…
February 14, 2023
Microsoft Is Getting Ready to Eat Google’s Lunch
The new Bing Chat appears to be an existential threat to Google’s search dominance. You’ve heard, endlessly, about ChatGPT, but you may not have had a chance to look at its “child” Bing Chat, a Microsoft product in its testing phase that I got access to around midnight the night before last. Think of ChatGPT as…
February 13, 2023
The Eerie Familiarity of California’s Boom-Bust Cycle
Those trying to ride a corporate unicorn to a major IPO should consider the lessons of their nineteenth-century forebears. On January 24, 1848, James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter from New Jersey who had taken up residence near Sutter’s Fort in northeast California, was attempting to establish a timber mill to feed burgeoning construction in nearby…
February 8, 2023
Where the Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Hardest
Companies are cutting programmers, human resources, and DEI staffers. The hiring burst of 517,000 new jobs in January ran contrary to the conventional economic wisdom, namely that the Federal Reserve’s war on inflation is slowing interest-rate sensitive sectors like finance and technology and presaging a broader slowdown. Tech and finance did, indeed, show some losses—just not enough to…
January 24, 2023
“Gig,” Contract, and Nontraditional Workers
A recurring theme of the Workforce Futures Initiative has been how little we know about the evolving needs of workers and businesses or even how the nation’s spatially and numerically vast labor market actually operates. This is especially true when we consider the “gig” or contract worker economy, which has grown dramatically in the past…
January 19, 2023
Labor Unions and the “Double-Helix” of America’s Workforce Development Future
The role of labor unions in the future of American workforce development depends largely on how we conceive of the needs and demands facing workers and the economy. Traditionally, we’ve thought of workforce development in terms of formal, technical skill development and the so-called “skills gap,” the difference between the credentials and skills our training…
January 3, 2023
Systemic Disadvantage
The term “systemic racism” freezes social, political, and policy conversation. As soon as the words are uttered, contending parties retreat to their respective corners to engage in a mutual misunderstanding guaranteed to produce anguish and anger on both sides. In a way, the resulting stasis serves the interests of both sides: Progressives are relieved of…