The Hill Op-Ed: Emerging from the COVID-19 crisis as a better and more resilient society
Our nation is facing a once-in-a-generation challenge in the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic crisis. These events will define us for decades to come, and we can only hope that we will be defined by the wisdom and courage of our response rather than by the failures that led us to this tragic place. It ...
The Widening Economic and Social Gaps Between Young Men and Women
Recent social and economic data has revealed a troubling trend: young men in the US are increasingly falling behind their female peers, a long-widening gap that has accelerated in the wake of COVID-19. Many young men have struggled to navigate the disruptions associated with the pandemic, resulting in stagnating labor force participation rates, declining college ...
Three Takeaways from the Census Bureau’s New Population Estimates
Last week, the US Census Bureau released new estimates of the US population over the past five years. Overall, the US population rose by 0.5 percent (by 1.8 million) from mid-2024 to mid-2025, a sharp slowdown from the prior 12 months, when the population grew at double that rate at 1.0 percent. Below, I highlight ...
Manufacturing Resilience: The US Drive to Reorder Global Supply Chains
Global supply chains—the network through which products and services move from initial producers to final consumers—have become increasingly complex over the past several decades. Recent disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the threat of further interruptions from rising geopolitical risks, have exposed the fragility of today’s supply chains. To build more resilient networks, ...
IN BRIEF: Pandemic-Era Student Learning Loss and the Policy Response
BRIEFLY The COVID-19 pandemic created not only a public health emergency but a youth education crisis as well. Decades of progress in math and reading among America’s students were wiped away in two years. The federal government passed three rounds of funding to help school districts mitigate the disruptions of the pandemic, but that aid ...
Overcoming Pandemic-Induced Learning Loss
The global COVID-19 pandemic created not only a once-a-century public health crisis but also a once-a-century public education crisis. Unfortunately, the United States federal government’s financial assistance to schools to overcome pandemic-induced learning loss is about to expire – despite the fact that the country has made almost no progress remediating this learning loss. In ...
TIME Magazine Op-Ed: Too Many High School Seniors Are Turning Away from College Altogether
For many high school seniors and their families, May 1st is “National College Decision Day,” when millions of students make a personal decision about their academic future. It is also a decision with financial implications that will shape much of their lives. While headlines often cite the ultra-competitive landscape for highly selective schools, recent years have ...
Why Crime Matters, and What to Do About It
In this paper, Jennifer Doleac describes what is known about crime trends in the US and outlines the best evidence to date on the effectiveness of various approaches to reducing crime through prevention, deterrence, and rehabilitation. Crime in the US rose during the 1980s and early 1990s before declining steadily until 2020. During the COVID-19 ...
In Brief: The Recent Rise in US Labor Productivity
BRIEFLY US labor productivity has enjoyed a period of renewed growth over the past year, interrupting a nearly twenty-year decline: the 2.7 percent productivity growth in 2023 outpaces the 1.5 percent annual average since 2004, and it nearly matches the 2.9 percent pace seen during the country’s last productivity surge in the 1990s. While the ...