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1 week ago | 
aei.org | Scott Winship |Bryan Riley
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that “3.7 million Americans lost their jobs” due to the “China Shock”—the increased import competition occurring after China was granted membership in the World Trade Organization. He cites research by David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, linking to two of their papers. But it appears that Secretary Bessent’s numbers use a calculation not in those papers.
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2 weeks ago | 
scottwinship.substack.com | Scott Winship
Along with many other controversial issues in 2025, Americans are at odds over the merits of tariffs. Underlying this debate is a more specific one—the impact of increased trade with China over the past 25 years on American manufacturing employment. Advocates of tariffs hope they will bring back blue-collar jobs, to which they ascribe special status in improving the individual, family, and community lives of Americans.
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2 weeks ago | 
aei.org | Scott Winship
Along with many other controversial issues in 2025, Americans are at odds over the merits of tariffs. Underlying this debate is a more specific one—the impact of increased trade with China over the past 25 years on American manufacturing employment. Advocates of tariffs hope they will bring back blue-collar jobs, to which they ascribe special status in improving the individual, family, and community lives of Americans.
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1 month ago | 
aei.org | Scott Winship
Sign up for AEI on Poverty A newsletter highlighting work on poverty–and efforts to reduce it–from AEI’s Poverty Studies team Thank you for your submission.
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1 month ago | 
cosm.aei.org | Scott Winship
Data analysis is hard. Admittedly, the consequences of getting it wrong are less severe than a botched surgery. But you still want to be very careful. It’s all too easy for a misinterpretation of the facts to harm important policy debates. For an example, look no further than the debate over the past couple of days as to how many Americans wish they could be employed in manufacturing.
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1 month ago | 
aei.org | Scott Winship
Let’s start with a chart to understand the dire fiscal situation we are in as a nation. Figure 1. Federal Debt Held by the Public as a Share of Gross Domestic Product, 1940-2054You’re looking at how sizeable federal debt has been and will be relative to gross domestic product (GDP). From 1960 to 2008, the federal debt held by the public averaged thirty-five percent of GDP. Today, we have reached 100 percent.
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1 month ago | 
aei.org | With Nat Malkus |Nat Malkus |Todd Harrison |Scott Winship
In June 2023, an Oklahoma charter school board approved the nation’s first religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. In spring 2025, the US Supreme Court will consider whether a religious charter school violates the separation of church and state, or if denying a charter application because the school is Catholic constitute illegal religious discrimination. The case raises a host of education policy questions.
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2 months ago | 
aei.org | Scott Winship
In my last column, I showed that Americans’ assessments of the economy have tracked the official unemployment rate well over the long run. That is important because it suggests that both public opinion and objective measures indicate that the labor market is historically strong (though accelerating inflation during and after the COVID-19 pandemic has caused these trends to diverge). Is public opinion also consistent with long-run trends in living standards and opportunity?
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Feb 5, 2025 | 
aei.org | Michael Strain |Frederick M. Hess |Scott Winship
What is the state of the nation? This is a fundamental question. Increasingly, we see evidence, from polling data to our own dinner tables, that the answer is “not very strong.” Many feel that things are not going well in the United States. A gnawing sense of angst seems to have descended upon us. We seem polarized and distrustful, worried and pessimistic. Where exactly are we going wrong? Just as importantly, what might we be overlooking—what is actually going right?
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
aei.org | Scott Winship
This week we cover the Los Angeles wildfires, reforms to high-skilled immigration, new leadership at the Department of Energy, legal peril for ESG investing, and a new agenda for the 119th Congress. Our interview this week is with Scott Winship, director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute. We talk about blue-collar wages, social welfare spending, tax credits, and whether the U.S. should be more like Denmark and Sweden.
