Behind the Scenes with Oren Cass, Policy-Based Evidence Maker

A Revealing Email Exchange

I sat on this for a bit, but Oren Cass’s latest “victory” lap one year after Liberation Day convinced me to post. In case you missed it, Cass had a good, smug laugh at economists who predicted the tariffs announced on Liberation Day would be hugely damaging to the economy. Boy, were they wrong! Left unmentioned was the fact that Trump quickly walked back those initial tariff rates, lowering them substantially.

This example of Cass withholding information from his readers in order to make a rhetorical point resonated with me because I had just experienced another example of it—the attribution to me by Cass of a finding I do not stand behind. Not only did I tell him multiple times that he was using out-of-date results of mine, I pointed him to updated results, created additional ones, and even provided him with the data for the new numbers. Here’s the story, complete with the email exchange that closed it out.

Our saga begins with a chart in a paper I wrote and ends with a sentence in a new American Compass report citing me. In late 2022, I wrote Bringing Home the Bacon, which examined whether the evolution of young men’s earnings could explain the sharp decline in sole-breadwinner families or the dramatic increase in single motherhood. Many populists argue that a deterioration in men’s economic standing has led to these changes. My report showed that real median annual compensation among young men was essentially the same in 2019 as in 1969 and that by various “marriageability” thresholds, young men were “at, near, or above historic highs.” That ruled out declining male earnings an explanation for the striking changes in the family that occurred over this period.

In my paper, I made a number of conservative methodological choices because I wanted to show that male marriageability had not declined even using methods that worked against that result. Nevertheless, in public events, podcasts, and even the inaugural post for his “Understanding America” Substack, Cass highlighted that young men’s earnings were lower or no higher than “50 years ago.” He did so again during our 2024 debate on the state of the economy.

After the latter, I took to X to share some updated results that I didn’t get a chance to mention in the debate. I indicated that, using an improved price index that I had developed earlier that month, young men’s real median post-tax compensation rose 20 percent from 1973 to 2019, or $7,200, and rose 24 percent ($8,500) from 1989 to 2019. Optimistically, I wrote, regarding whether young men’s earnings have stagnated over 50 years, “I’ll trust my chart doesn’t get cited anymore in support of that claim!” I also stated unambiguously that, “In case it’s not clear, the chart [showing stagnant earnings] was what I considered the best evidence then, but it is not the best evidence now. You [Cass] can still cite it, obviously, but you should either say why you think it is still the best evidence or clarify that you don’t care.”

No response was forthcoming, but Cass returned to the question one year later, asking whether I’d updated Bringing Home the Bacon yet. I replied it was “on my list,” but noted that in the meantime, I had produced updated estimates of the median pre-tax earnings trend for men ages 25-29 and that they indicated an increase of 21 percent from 1973 to 2023. The increase from 1989 to 2023 was 25 percent. I provided a link to that 2025 paper, Don’t Choose Your Own Adventure, which was published at Civitas Outlook, on my Substack, and on AEI’s site.

Despite the new published results, on Monday, February 23 of this year, Cass reached out to AEI’s communications team to request permission to reproduce for a forthcoming American Compass report the chart from Bringing Home the Bacon showing earnings stagnation. Because I no longer believe that that chart provides the most accurate available depiction of young men’s earnings trends, I indicated to our comms team that while I would not grant permission, I would publish a new version of the chart, using the improved methods from Don’t Choose Your Own Adventure, and he could use that one. My understanding was that he needed a chart by the end of the week.

My new chart differed from the earlier one in three ways. I extended the earnings trends from 2020 to 2024. I refined the inflation adjustment using the “More Accurate Consumer Price Index,” or MACPI, which I developed in 2024. And I switched from including all young men (workers and nonworkers alike) to only year-round workers, based on extensive analyses in Don’t Choose Your Own Adventure. (The latter choice isn’t that consequential relative to other defensible ways of dealing with nonworkers and part-year workers.)

I wrote a piece describing my updated estimates and including a new chart developed for Cass’s use. Notably, the piece also provided results that simply extended the same analyses from the old paper to 2024, finding that while median earnings were little different in 2024 than in 1973, they rose by 15-22 percent from 1989 to 2024 (or $6,800-$9,100). Any decline had ended 30 years ago. At the very least, then, Cass could have cited these estimates, perhaps explaining why he objected to my preferred ones. But even these estimates aren’t fairly described as “stagnation” without noting that a period of decline has been followed by three decades of non-negligible gains. (Of course, that pattern is inconsistent with the China Shock having harmed American workers, a central part of many American Compass narratives.)

My piece went into a fair amount of detail on my improvements to the original Bringing Home the Bacon estimates, citing the 17,500-word 2024 report I wrote justifying my new price index and the 4,400-word Don’t Choose Your Own Adventure. (The latter’s appendix added another 3,100 words.) I concluded that the median earnings of young men had risen 24-40 percent between 1973 and 2024 and 42-46 percent between 1989 and 2024. This does not constitute stagnation.

AEI published my new piece early the afternoon of Thursday, February 26. I also published it to my Substack. At some point later that day, my comms person emailed Cass, sending him a link to the AEI version of the piece. We also gave him an image file of the new chart and an Excel file with the chart and the numbers behind it.

Alas, before the weekend arrived, Cass indicated to my comms person that he would just refer to the numbers in the 2022 report without reproducing any chart or using any of the updated estimates.

After sitting on it for the weekend, I sent the following email to Cass on Monday evening, March 2. It’s a long one, because I wanted to make sure I was clear about my position on the earnings trend. Anything in brackets below has been added here and was not part of the original email.

Hi Oren,

I was happy to hear last week of your interest in reproducing a chart of mine. Unfortunately, I understand that you’ve chosen not to reproduce the chart I’ve just published that improves on the one in which you were interested (Figure 5 from my 2022 report). Could I ask why? It was my understanding that you needed a chart by the end of last week, which led me to accelerate my work updating the 2022 report and publish something publicly by your deadline.

As I say in the new piece, posted in two different places on the AEI website, I view the new chart as a clear improvement on the one in the 2022 report, which I am in the process of updating. I spent weeks (months, actually) researching price indexes, producing the 2024 paper to which I refer and link in the new piece. I went so far as to try to validate the MACPI last year by comparing various estimates of absolute mobility using different price indexes against subjective data on absolute mobility from public opinion surveys (also mentioned in the new piece). [That piece is available here.] Both the evidence on price measurement and the validation exercise point toward the superiority of the MACPI. The MACPI paper is filled with references to academic and government economists who have argued that the CPI family of indexes and the PCEPI are biased in the direction of indicating too much inflation. [“CPI” is the Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers, and “PCEPI” is the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index.]

I also spent weeks researching the question of how to deal with non-earners—I dare say that I’ve gone into more depth on this question than anyone ever has. I refer and link to that research in the piece too.

To be clear, when I am done updating the 2022 numbers and writing them up, AEI will publish a new version of the paper that will constitute an improvement on the 2022 one. I anticipate taking down the old paper and having the old URL redirect to the new version, and the new version will clearly indicate what has changed and why. It will also include a link to the archived 2022 paper for those who want to see the old, inferior numbers. I would be surprised if you want to link to the old version and have the reader who follows the link see estimates that conflict with your claims about what I find. I’d also be surprised if you instead prefer to link to an archived version of the old report if its author is telling everyone that it’s an inferior version of analyses that the author once viewed as the best evidence at the time but has since improved.

To be clear, the figure you have repeatedly cited to date always was presented as a conservative trend. I wrote that, “The trend in men’s lifetime earnings would likely show that men have done somewhat better over time.” I noted that the trends for older men get around some of the issues involved and showed that the trends of older men indicated rising earnings. I also wrote, “There are other reasons to think that the ideal pre-tax earnings measures would show a somewhat better trend than in Figure 5, as discussed in Appendix A.”

In Appendix A, I specifically mention the issue of how to deal with non-earners, saying, “There are good reasons for excluding at least some of these categories of non-earning men. However, the issues that would result from doing so are either unclear or would make earnings trends appear better than shown in the report. To be conservative, I leave them in the data.”

I also link to an earlier piece I wrote at the Manhattan Institute to justify using the PCE deflator to adjust for inflation. That older report notes, “Using the PCE looks like a very conservative choice for a cost-of-living adjustment.” [That piece is available here. See Appendix 2.]

In both instances, I went with conservative choices because I wanted to show that even making such choices, male marriageability has not declined. Having subsequently done more research into these questions (and seen my conservative choices be misconstrued by analysts), I have improved the methods. (Indeed, I think it is the case that the MACPI is a conservative choice in some regards, as my 2024 paper on the index indicates.)

Regardless, it’s surprising to me that having been given permission to use a more accurate version of the chart you wanted to reproduce--a chart published on AEI’s website with a clear explanation for its superiority over the older chart--and having been provided the actual estimates behind the new chart and a graphic file of the chart, you would choose not only NOT to use the more accurate chart but to cite the old numbers that the author has told you and the world are less accurate than the updated ones.

It’s all the more surprising to me that you have a preference for the numbers I have said are inferior because your cost-of-thriving research seems to reject price indexes all together as a way of accounting for the rising cost of living. I would have thought that you’d either reject ALL of my estimates as illegitimate or emphasize that while you disagree with conventional price indexes as a way to adjust for the cost of living, a believer in price indexes finds that there’s a substantial rise in men’s earnings. It seems inconsistent with your past work to say instead that YOU prefer one set of results over the one the author prefers, even though you reject the whole exercise of inflation adjustment.

It’s certainly your prerogative to choose as you’ve done, but it feels like an intellectually dishonest decision. I guess that’s just not what I would expect of the founder of a think tank seeking to help working Americans by aligning policies with the evidence. As ever, thanks for your interest in my work. Happy to answer any questions you have about these estimates. Best, Scott

Cass’s reply, midday on Tuesday, March 3, was brief:

Hi Scott,

I have never rejected the whole exercise of inflation adjustment and of course I regularly publish and cite inflation-adjusted data. My concern here, and the reason I will not use your newly published Substack chart, is that you are substituting your own personal inflation index for those provided by public statistics agencies. I consider that improper as a methodological matter and unwise as a political one. Not that you asked for my advice, but for whatever it’s worth, I genuinely believe it will be a mistake for you and for AEI to publish a revised version of your analysis that materially changes the answer by making an adjustment that you invented yourself.

I’ll note again that even if Cass insisted on citing numbers I deem inferior, he could have cited estimates from either Don’t Choose Your Own Adventure or my latest paper that included more recent years but otherwise used the same methods as the old numbers. I’ll also note Cass’s interjection of political considerations in a conversation about empirical methods, a revealing aside.

I sent a final reply, that afternoon, to which Cass did not respond.:

I mean, I don’t know what “Substack chart” means. I posted the piece to Substack after it was posted to AEI’s website. The links you were sent were to AEI’s website. Anway [sic], I’m not sure why you’d denigrate Substack publications given how, ahem, “Commonplace” it is to publish to that source. [This was a reference to the American Compass newsletter that is published on Substack.]

Your objection to my developing an alternative to official government price indexes would ring truer if you used them consistently and used the ones that government agencies advocated consistently (rather than the CPI-U for long-term trends). If you’re unaware of what those agencies have advocated, my MACPI piece goes into detail about what BLS, CBO, the Census Bureau, and the Federal Reserve Board have said about them. Is there other evidence that you’re going on when selecting which price indexes to use or reject? [“BLS” is the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and “CBO” is the Congressional Budget Office.]

It’s also frustrating as someone who wrote tens of thousands of words critiquing YOUR attempt at an alternative to government price indexes to just have you dismiss my effort without any substantive critique. [This was referring to my paper, with Jeremy Horpedahl, on Cass’s flawed Cost of Thriving Index.] What did I get wrong in the MACPI paper? Did I misrepresent the research of economists who study the topic? Is my validation exercise fatally flawed in some way? Rather than address the evidence, you seem all too willing to just go with the estimates that make the case you want to make—to engage in policy-based evidence making.

A more confident and honest researcher would accurately convey the conclusions of other researchers he cites rather than withhold those conclusions. Or, if he insisted on citing less accurate evidence that the original researcher has updated, he at least would indicate that the original researcher disputes the claim being made and say why.

I used to get more upset about this stuff, but we have each chosen our intended audiences, be they more or less interested in evidence. I doubt I can influence your core audience, and I think mine understands the nature of your project. Do as you will! Best, Scott

I’m saddened to report that American Compass’s new paper, on workforce development, was released on Thursday, March 5, and the foreword, coauthored by Cass, cited my old report:

For young men, especially, the situation has become dire. Their outcomes are worse at every stage of the conventional pipeline, and their earnings have now stagnated for half a century. Research published by the American Enterprise Institute’s Scott Winship in 2022 found that men between the ages of 25 and 29 earned lower compensation in 2020 than in 1970, both pre- and post-tax.

This paragraph didn’t so much as include a citation, let alone any caveat about my own updated views on this question. It included no reference to my just-released updated figures, nor to the updated figures in Don’t Choose Your Own Adventure. Cass simply cited a researcher’s no-longer-operative finding without including any of the original nuance the researcher offered, ignoring two updates to the results in question, and shrugging off the researcher’s privately and publicly stated view that the earlier estimates no longer reflect the best evidence.

Cass calls himself an economist, but he was trained as a lawyer. Economists (and other social scientists) are interested in the best evidence. Cass, like a skilled litigator, is interested in the best evidence that strengthens the case he has already decided to argue. Cass uses evidence not because he is interested in getting closer to the truth, as a strategy for finding effective policy solutions; he uses it to advance his perspective, unmoored though it may be to the best evidence and unhelpful though it may be to the people for whom he claims to advocate.