Reports and Issue Briefs
Religion Supports Well-Being during Crisis
Although most American religious denominations have temporarily stopped gathering in person, many religious communities are adapting to provide continued opportunities for participation, and meet the spiritual and physical needs of their communities.
Volunteers Provide Support for American Seniors with Few Social Ties
The elderly are typically counted among society’s most vulnerable members due to health and physical challenges that accompany aging. Unfortunately, seniors are even more vulnerable during the current crisis and constitute one of the CDC’s high-risk populations for COVID-19.
America Tests Positive for Social Capital Decline
Much has been said about coronavirus’s costs to public health and the economy, but it’s also worth considering how the virus may affect the health of American civil society. Non-profits constitute at least one significant element of civil society and they are currently being put to the test.
The State of Marriage in a Time of Crisis
The family’s vital role is more apparent than ever during a crisis, and in recent weeks Americans have depended on the comfort and support of family more than usual. Unfortunately, new research suggests that the foundation of the family continues to erode.
Update: Deaths Of Despair Declined In 2018
From 2017 to 2018, the age-adjusted mortality rate from deaths of despair ticked down from 45.8 to 45.3 per 100,000.
The Space Between: Renewing the American Tradition of Civil Society
Even in our twenty-first-century American society, associational life ought to be at the center of thinking about our social order and public policy. This report discusses rebuilding civil society. It lays out the nature of our diminished civil society, documents trends in its decline, and charts a ...
Multiple Choice: Increasing Pluralism in the American Education System
The American education system makes it difficult for parents to individually tailor their children’s educational experience. Most families are defaulted into a one-size-fits-all model, designed in the age of assembly lines, and no longer fit for era of technological disruption.
Zoned Out: How School and Residential Zoning Limit Educational Opportunity
Since housing is the traditional gateway to public education, this paper suggests policymakers consider improving access to educational opportunity by minimizing residential zoning while expanding public school choice policies. Reforming residential zoning supports public school choice efforts by pe...
Reforming the Charitable Deduction
Rebuilding civil society will require capitalizing on the strengths of America’s associational life to address its weaknesses. One way of doing so is to reform policy so that less of the charitable giving of Americans is subject to taxation. Doing so would be more consistent with the principle that ...
Measuring Income Concentration – A Guide for the Confused
The work of Piketty, Saez, and Zucman suggests sharply rising income and wealth inequality, falling tax progressivity, and stagnant income growth for the bottom half of Americans. But other researchers have reported modestly rising income inequality, growth in wealth inequality that is less sharp, r...
