Demography is neither self-defining nor pre-political. A society's demography is simply the ensemble of variables that demographers choose (or are instructed by their superiors) to select, define, identify, classify, measure, and publish. The choice of these variables - and the ways in which...

In my new book, One Nation Undecided: Clear Thinking About Five Hard Issues That Divide Us (Princeton UP, 2017), I first analyze the factors that make "hard" issues hard, explore the quality of public debate about them, and explain what the title means by "clear thinking." Chapters 2 through 6...

"Let's be honest, we've all expressed opinions about difficult hot-button issues without always thinking them through. With so much media spin, political polarization, and mistrust of institutions, it's hard to know how to think about these tough challenges, much less what to do about them. One...

This report addresses a deceptively simple question: How can the productivity of American health care be substantially improved? Productivity, in lay terms, is the ratio of output to inputs. A more colloquial rendition of the question might be: how can we get a lot more bang for our health care...

This article, written for a Vanderbilt conference on affirmative action, considers the state of race-based affirmative action by public universities after the Supreme Court's decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (2013). It criticizes many aspects of the Court's jurisprudence in...

The United States economy is struggling to recover from its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. After several huge doses of conventional macroeconomic stimulus - deficit-spending and monetary stimulus - policymakers are understandably eager to find innovative no-cost ways of...

This chapter of an edited book reviews a 1997 article in the Yale Journal of International Law in which I proposed a system for distributing refugee protection burdens on a regional basis through a system of tradable refugee protection quotas. The chapter describes how this proposal was received...

Highly skilled immigrants to the United States (“HSIs”) have helped catalyze American economic growth and advances in human welfare by generating knowledge and innovations that have spawned new products, services, systems, jobs, and wealth. A number of studies document that HSIs are...