December 4, 2024
Back to Basics: America’s Founding, Civics, and Self-Government in K-12 Curricula
AEI Senior Fellow Ian Rowe testifies before the US House Education and Workforce Committee on December 4, 2024, alongside Dr. Jed Atkins, Director and Dean, School of Civic Life and Leadership, University of North Carolina; Brian V. Kennedy, International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers; and Michael Weiser, Chair of the Board of Directors, Jack…
December 4, 2024
Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through A.I.
Abstract We analyze changes in pedestrian behavior over a 30-year period in four urban public spaces located in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Building on William Whyte’s observational work from 1980, where he manually recorded pedestrian behaviors, we employ computer vision and deep learning techniques to examine video footage from 1979-80 and 2008-10. Our analysis…
December 3, 2024
Avoiding an Unemployment Loan Bailout
Taxpayers in most states may have dodged a billion-dollar bullet on election day. That is, if the outcome had been different, liberal lawmakers would have been uniquely positioned to bail out California and New York unemployment benefit debts, and in the process shift large costs onto taxpayers in other states. All states levy payroll taxes…
December 2, 2024
Reforming State Authorization of Colleges to Boost Competition and Lower Tuition
Key Points Executive Summary Higher education suffers from barriers to entry. Though the ranks of students at traditional colleges have grown by 29 percent over the past three decades, the number of active institutions has declined. Four in five students today attend an institution that was founded before 1970, and virtually none attend a school…
December 2, 2024
Why Has Construction Productivity Stagnated? The Role of Land-Use Regulation
Abstract We document a Kuznets curve for construction productivity in 20th-century America. Homes built per construction worker remained stagnant between 1900 and 1940, boomed after World War II, and then plummeted after 1970. The productivity boom from 1940 to 1970 shows that nothing makes technological progress inherently impossible in construction. What stopped it? We present…
November 27, 2024
Finally, a Win for Working Men
Since the 1970s, working men, particularly those without college degrees, have experienced lower employment rates, increased social isolation and growing health risks. Today, we are starting to see early signs that this problem may be abating. But lately, men have started going back to work. During most recessions, the male employment rate falls and never returns…
November 25, 2024
Don’t Write Off Workforce Pell Grants
Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon, a former administrator of the Small Business Administration, is a proponent of expanding Pell Grants to short-term workforce education programs. In a September op-ed, McMahon boosted the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, which would allow students to use Pell Grants for high-quality workforce education programs as short as eight weeks in duration (the…
November 21, 2024
A Local Option for Natural Gas Fracking
The 2024 election was a referendum on a wide range of issues, but there’s no doubt that increasing domestic fossil-fuel production—“energy dominance,” as Donald Trump now calls it—was on the ballot and won. Kamala Harris backed away from her past calls to ban fracking but nonetheless lost Pennsylvania, where voters seemed to doubt her sudden…
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 rapid development of generative AI systems, which produce text, images, or other content based on user requests – advances which have the potential to complement…
November 21, 2024
A Consensus on Common-Sense Education Reform
Is common ground possible in an age of extreme polarization? Perhaps! “Toward a Potential Grand Bargain for the Nation” is a new report by a group of experts from think tanks and academia meant to share consensus “policies in each of these areas: economic growth and mobility; education; environment; health; taxes; and the federal budget.”…