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May 7, 2025
Did ‘China Shock’ Throw Millions of Americans Out of Work?
…uses a measure of total employment from Scott Winship, “America Is Still Working,” updated to 2024. (See end note 5 from that paper.) For 1939-2024, the manufacturing employment measure is from…
February 20, 2025
The American Dream Is Not a Coin Flip, and Wages Have Not Stagnated
…Hell, Robert Manduca, Jimmy Narang, “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940.” Replication files available at https://opportunityinsights.org/data/?geographic_level=0&topic=0&paper_id=546#resource-listing. MACPI is from Scott Winship, “Introducing the More Accurate Consumer…
January 22, 2025
How the Trump Administration Can Hit Its Growth Target
By setting an ambitious 3% growth target, US Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent has provided the Trump administration a North Star to follow in devising its economic policies. The task…
January 16, 2025
Should We Believe the Economic Data or Americans’ “Lyin’” Eyes? The Answer Is Yes.
…living standards have changed over the long run. Scott Winship is a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute…
December 20, 2024
Fixing Inflation, Right-Sizing the Federal Government
Thirty years ago next month, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan testified before a joint session of the House and Senate Budget Committees with talk of deficit reduction in the…
May 30, 2024
The Truth about Trends in Worker Pay
Time was, only progressives made outlandish claims such as that hourly wages have been stagnant for more than half a century. But with the rise of populism on the right, “doomerism”…
September 15, 2023
What Does a Good Economy Look Like?
…2024. Let’s start with a chart from Scott Winship at the American Enterprise Institute (where I am a nonresident fellow), who is a longtime skeptic of the more dire populist diagnoses of…
June 21, 2023
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…
June 14, 2023
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…
January 3, 2022
Dynamism as a Public Philosophy
…dawn of the Industrial Era, that the notions of potentiality and fulfillment took on an especially commercial hue. The Scottish philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith argued that it was…