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December 17, 2024

Industrial Policy and Deficits: Dark Clouds for Democratic Capitalism

Democratic capitalism is a system that marries liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. This union creates tensions, and requires balancing competing aims. But this tension is healthy, not destructive — provided…

December 5, 2024

More High-Skill Immigration Is Popular. Let’s Act on That

…last summer, whose authors include numerous academics and think tankers, including AEI economist Michael Strain: One obvious policy solution is to stop sending away foreign-born graduates of American colleges and…

December 5, 2024

Inflation Reduction Act Offers a General Lesson against Industrial Policy

With President Trump’s stunning return to power, Congress has the opportunity in 2025 to enact additional business tax cuts. One of their specific goals should be to make “full expensing”…

November 21, 2024

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work

Summary Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) promise to improve productivity significantly, but there are many questions about how AI could affect jobs and workers. Recent technical innovations have driven the…

November 19, 2024

A Trump Boom?

Donald Trump’s stunning and decisive return to power makes it official: We live in the Age of Trump. The 2008 global financial crisis was a turning point in history, and…

October 21, 2024

US Tariffs Will Not Bring Back Jobs from China

Although protectionism has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in America, the public debate about it gets some basic facts wrong. Yes, trade is disruptive, but the US has…

October 17, 2024

Harris’ Tax Plans Would Reduce Long-Term Prosperity. Trump’s Proposals Might Be Even Worse.

AEI Scholar and Director of Economic Policy Studies Michael R. Strain contributed to the Dispatch’s Symposium titled Economic Policy Experts: Doom, Thy Name Is Populism, as a group of experts outlined…

October 15, 2024

Why Should the US Wish to Be More Like China?

…https://twitter.com/MichaelRStrain/status/1846187710563623000 But why should the U.S. wish our economic policy to be more like China’s? From my AESG paper: China’s central planning will not be remembered as a long-term success. It…

October 9, 2024

Learning the Right Lessons from the “China Shock”

https://twitter.com/MichaelRStrain/status/1844047782505808245 An influential 2013 paper by economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson finds an average reduction in manufacturing employment of 90,000 jobs per year from 1990 to 2007 because of…

October 3, 2024

Protectionism is Failing and Wrongheaded: An Evaluation of the Post-2017 Shift toward Trade Wars and Industrial Policy

Abstract The Trump–Pence and Biden–Harris administrations enthusiastically embraced protectionism. Each administration explicitly argued for a break from the bipartisan consensus of recent decades that has been generally supportive of free…