Economics

My latest column is now online at Governing magazine. It’s a further discussion of Howard Husock’s book The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It. For those of you who weren’t able to check out the recording of our AEI book event, this piece discusses some of the key points.

Below is an excerpt from the column:  read more »

To some in the Biden Administration, the supply chain crisis can be dismissed as a loss of East Asian-made consumer trinkets that, as Vox tells us, we could all be better off without—or as White House spokesperson Jen Psaki suggested, amounts to little more than “the tragedy of the delayed treadmill.” Yet, in reality, a broken supply chain is hardly  read more »

Since 1932, Congress has passed dozens of laws aimed at making rental housing and homeownership more affordable. Many of these laws created new programs while few of the older programs were abolished.  read more »

The world, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are proposing banishment of fossil fuels and are focused on reducing emissions from fossil fuels at any costs, but a safety net of having a viable replacement should be in place before we jump off that cliff.

Banning oil imports, fracking, and ceasing oil production to focus on the symbolic renewable energy as the fossil fuels replacement is fooling ourselves as that “clean energy” is only electricity generated from breezes and sunshine.  read more »

In Netflix’s must-see new series, Maid, Alex (Margaret Qualley) flees a violent boyfriend with her two-year-old in tow, only to discover the gordian knot of being an impoverished, unhoused, single mom. Affordable child care is at the knot’s center. Alex must have a pay stub to qualify for subsidized housing, but first she must have child care to earn that paycheck. While she scrubs wealthy people’s floors, Alex depends on babysitting from her mentally unstable mother (played by Qualley’s real-life mom, Andie McDowell).  read more »

When Matt Crisp rang the bell a couple of weeks ago opening trading on the New York Stock Exchange because his St. Louis-based company, Benson Hill, had just completed an initial public offering, it ranked as a happy but unfortunately uncommon occurrence.  read more »

I spend entirely too much time listening to experts in business, government, and academia explain the economy in general and the property market in particular. Looking back, very few people who are purported to know how the economy works, based on empirical evidence, have successfully predicted the wild spikes and crashes over the years.  read more »

There is an expectation in some quarters that densification of existing urban areas will lead to improved housing affordability. This argument is used to justify densification policies around the world.  read more »

Cambria and Taziki’s Mediterranean Cafes are among smaller companies in Flyover Country that have joined some of our largest corporate citizens, including Walmart and Target, in recognizing a truth that is becoming increasingly important to our economy: The more that legal immigrants can be assimilated by learning English, the more valuable they will be as employees – and the more fulfilled as Americans.  read more »

For a generation, the Long Beach and Los Angeles harbors in California handled more than 40 percent of all container cargo headed into the US and epitomized the power of a globalizing economy.  read more »