Human Dignity Project

When people are no longer able to earn their success — when they feel they are no longer needed — their dignity takes a direct hit. We need to talk more about the dignity deficit in America today; human dignity must become central to our current policy debates.

How can we rebuild an economy and a culture where everyone is necessary — to their families, their communities, and their employers?

AEI Housing Center

We are not satisfied with just producing the usual think-tank products — policy papers, op-eds, testimonies — in the hope that policymakers will take up the mantle. Instead, we develop unique databases that allow us to track market conditions, and we leverage those datasets to measure the impact of policy changes. Beyond engaging the data to ask and answer policy-relevant questions in real time, we have also developed three flagship products for the US housing market.

American Boondoggle

Agricultural policy is in disarray in the United States. Subsidies disproportionately flow to wealthy farm business owners through a multitude of programs, which are often duplicative or wasteful. The 2018 Farm Bill will be a chance to reign in government waste and implement common-sense reforms.

This is the focus of “Agricultural Policy in Disarray,” a series of papers written by leading agricultural economists evaluating how farm programs affect farm incomes, US food security, rural communities and poverty, the environment, and US trade relations.

Critical Threats

America faces an extremely dangerous world. The international security environment is deteriorating rapidly. America cannot protect its way of life against continuous physical, economic, cyber, and other attacks and threats by standing on the defensive along our coasts and borders.

The American Enterprise Institute created the Critical Threats Project in 2009 with this danger in mind. Critical Threats’ objective is to inform and educate policymakers, the intelligence and military communities, and all interested citizens who need to understand the nuance and scale of threats to America’s security.

Open Source Policy Center

Hosted at the American Enterprise Institute, the Open Source Policy Center is built on the principal that better public policy analysis leads to better public policy. Since 2013, OSPC has incubated open source projects, including models and webapps, for predicting the outcomes of public policy. We identify tools that have the potential to fundamentally improve policymaking, and we help tool builders create open source projects that are professional, user oriented, and welcoming to outside technical contributors.