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January 12, 2024
When It Comes to the State of the American Economy, Let’s Keep It Real
Here we go again. An oft-repeated economic claim on social media is that most Americans lack the means to cover a $400 emergency expense. More evidence that most of us…
January 2, 2024
Billionaire-Built Cities Would Be Better Than Nothing
…the high-water mark of racial segregation, a private developer named James Rouse planned an integrated city in nearby Columbia, Md. Columbia is not perfect, but it remains racially diverse, and according to data…
November 30, 2023
A Valuable New Perspective on America’s War on Poverty
…an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure” by Richard V. Burkhauser (Cornell University), Kevin Corinth (University of Chicago), James Elwell (Joint Committee on Taxation), and Jeff Larrimore (Federal Reserve Board). They try…
November 30, 2023
Evaluating the Success of the War on Poverty since 1963 Using an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure
Abstract We evaluate progress in the War on Poverty as President Lyndon B. Johnson defined it, which established a 20% baseline poverty rate and adopted an absolute standard. While the…
October 31, 2023
It Takes Two
…matter. Furthermore, somewhat undermining her case, Kearney notes that research by Nobel laureate James Heckman has found that Denmark’s more expansive welfare state does not appear to translate into higher…
October 27, 2023
What Happened to the American Dream?
…from medicine to nuclear power. The recent book by the Reaganite economic writer Jim Pethokoukis, “The Conservative Futurist,” makes an extended version of this argument, tracing our era of stagnation…
September 12, 2023
Please, Gen Z Aren’t “Doomed to be the First Generation of Americans Who Will Grow Up with a Lower Standard of Living Than Their Parents”
One could easily fill all the waking hours in the day—and non-waking hours, too!—with pointed responses to all the bad economic opinions expressed on social media. That said, I like…
August 22, 2023
Is Paid Leave a Pro-Growth Policy?
Some pro-growth public policies seem super obvious, like attracting more high-skill immigrants or reducing the federal paperwork needed to build clean energy facilities and infrastructure. Paid leave, whether mandated by…
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…