Megan Brown
Staff Writer
Louise Sheiner and Michael R. Strain will continue this week’s discussion by addressing the economy and economic policy at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater.
With their varying attitudes surrounding the economy, Sheiner and Strain will elucidate on Chautauqua Lecture Series’ Week Four theme “The Future of the American Experiment — A Week in Partnership with American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution.
Sheiner currently serves the Robert S. Kerr Senior Fellow for Economic Studies at Brookings and as a policy director for the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy.
Sheiner’s recent research at Brookings has focused on federal debt, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and health spending.
In an interview with The Harvard Gazette, the newspaper of Harvard University, Sheiner’s alma mater, Sheiner discussed the state of social security and Medicare in 2023. She noted that while projections try to be balanced, a lot of uncertainty surrounds these issues.
Sheiner finds herself somewhere in between not cutting benefits and preparing for the worst scenario.
“I would like to protect benefits, especially for lower-income people,” she said. “I think there’s a lot we can do on the tax side. And figuring out a way to make the health system more efficient would have huge benefits all around. It would help people; it would help the budget; it’s a big deal. That should be a high priority.”
Strain is the Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy and director of Economic Policy Studies at AEI. He has published numerous articles in academic and policy journals and authored the book The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It) in 2020. In a recent article Strain co-authored with Clifford S. Asness, hedge fund manager and co-founder of AQR Capital Management, he and Asness address how both the far left and far right share “doomsday” messaging surrounding the economy. That article was titled “Have You Heard the Good News?” published by The Free Press. Asness and Strain don’t think everything is as bad as media outlets portray it to be.
“Yes, we have real problems,” they wrote. “But widen the aperture, and you’ll see that there has never been a better time to be alive than the present day.”
They support their claim with economic data, from high wages to record-high personal consumption.
“Again, you can always claim it should have been even better. I mean, we’d claim that, as we have our own preferred policies and political philosophy that we think would have worked better,” Asness and Strain wrote. “But you cannot claim things are much worse now than in some mythical past.”
