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June 24, 2023

Family Affordability in America: A Story of Decline or Achievement?

On June 22, AEI’s Scott Winship and Angela Rachidi were joined by Oren Cass of American Compass and Idrees Kahloon of the Economist to review the evidence on family affordability…

June 22, 2023

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…

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…

May 4, 2023

The Social Breakdown: The Poverty of Family, Community, and Religious Life in America

…panels covering topics ranging from renewing trust in our shared institutions to reinvigorating religious life in America. The event concluded with remarks from Scott Winship, the director of COSM, who…

May 3, 2023

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,…

April 28, 2023

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…

April 18, 2023

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…

December 14, 2022

Bringing Home the Bacon: Have Trends in Men’s Pay Weakened the Traditional Family?

Key Points Both the populist right and left claim that raising a family on one income has become harder and that men’s declining economic prospects are behind rising single parenthood….

December 1, 2022

Was Rising Inequality Behind Falling Absolute Mobility? Reassessing Chetty et al. (2017)

In 2017, a widely publicized paper by a research team led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty found that while the vast majority of American kids born in 1940 ended up…