A well-functioning market in which businesses fulfill their obligations to workers, families, communities, and the nation depends upon legal, economic, and social constraints that have fallen away in recent decades.

Good jobs benefit workers and boost corporate performance, so why aren’t there more of them?

On the most recent episode of Jonah Goldberg’s podcast, The Remnant, AEI director of economic policy studies Michael Strain delivers a harsh assessment of projects like American Compass. According to Michael, “the arguments that they put forward just aren’t well developed,” “they aren’t supported by evidence, they aren’t convincing,” and “the work they’re doing just […]

NEWSWEEK—American Compass’s Oren Cass debates University of Chicago professor Todd Henderson over the question, “Does the private equity industry create substantial social value?”

REAL CLEAR POLITICS—RCP talks with American Compass’s Oren Cass about a new White House initiative to connect Americans with education and training programs that can be accessed immediately without requiring the time or money of a bachelor’s degree.

Redistribution is a vital topic for conservatives as we question stale orthodoxies and reexamine how first principles can help to address modern challenges. In this respect I agree entirely with recent comments by Sam Hammond, both here on The Commons and at The American Conservative, insisting that the right-of-center must get beyond “hostility to anything […]

The Wall Street Journal’s defense of private equity (“Populists Don’t Know Much About Private Equity”) is an impressionist masterpiece of market fundamentalism, relying on the unexamined assumption that fees paid to private-equity partners represent “social value.” One can simply step back and gawk in amazement, but true appreciation requires poring over each brushstroke.

The opinion pages of both the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal have featured calls for industrial policy in the past week, an encouraging trend toward realism about the necessary role for government in a free-market economy. In the Times, yesterday’s editorial warned against “the absence of a proactive industrial policy” and argued that “quick […]

THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE—American Compass’s Oren Cass describes the parameters of the fight on the right and makes the case for a Post-Trump conservatism.

I was jolted by the familiar echo, reading Chris Arnade’s “Cops and Teachers,” of an argument I’ve made a thousand times. It was an obviously conservative point, turned suddenly into a refutation of a popular conservative stance. Speaking in the context of safety-net policy, I often try to distinguish between policies that maintain households in poverty […]

A Response to Samuel Hammond

Professor Dan Drezner is again illustrating how we ended up with a misbegotten consensus on globalization built upon inadequate assumptions and shallow analysis. A couple of weeks ago, we encountered him badly mischaracterizing a study about the supposed value of trade liberalization. Breezing past that issue, he is back now with a more outlandish claim, […]