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On this episode of Critics Corner, Oren Cass is joined by AEI’s Angela Rachidi to discuss family affordability.

The basic quandary for economists in this debate is that they stake their claims to expertise and deference on their field’s purported rigor, but they can uphold their own standards only under artificial conditions inapplicable to policymaking. As a result, their work’s defensibility bears an inverse relationship to its relevance.

Oren Cass is right to note that modern economists largely misunderstand Adam Smith. But the misunderstanding runs deeper and traces even further back than editorializing in 20th-century textbooks. For more than two centuries, scholars have ignored the relationship between Smith’s political philosophy and economic analysis.

Oren Cass’s essay demonstrates how the advantages of industrial policy, apparent to some of the founders of economics and foundational to the success of the United States, were carefully airbrushed out by advocates of free trade in the 20th century.

American Compass research director Wells King reviews two books on the de-growth movement.

As neoclassical economics steeped with market fundamentalist ideology started to gain ascendency in the 1970s, the federal government gradually abandoned efforts to help lagging regions.

While it is true that Sweden adopted some neoliberal reforms after an economic crisis in the early 1990s, Sweden is not, and never has been, a free-market welfare state.

American inequality is higher now than at any time since WWII. The gap is wide and getting wider. Read what the data show and why it matters.

Some right-of-center analysts have absolute conviction that basic statistics describing some of America’s challenges are obviously wrong

The United States is not producing 24,881% more computers than it was in 1980, and is likely producing significantly fewer because of offshoring.