In an August 2023 Wall Street Journal poll, less than one-quarter of registered voters answered that the economy was headed in the right direction. This dissatisfaction persists despite low unemployment, steady economic growth, recovered pandemic-era losses, and waning inflation.  

In a new report, Ben Harris and Aaron Sojourner explore potential explanations for the disconnect between the economic data and public opinion. Their model “adds to evidence that biased sources of information play a role, and suggests that economic news has become systemically more negative beginning in 2018, with the negative bias growing over the past three years.”

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More research and commentary

Can Ukraine sustain its fight? “Demographic trends aren’t in Ukraine’s favor and wavering Western support casts a huge cloud. Yet, despite these challenges, Ukraine is not facing an acute and immediate manpower crisis and is not at short-to-medium-term risk of losing the war due to a hollowed-out army,” write Michael E. O’Hanlon and Alejandra Rocha in The Cipher Brief.

Safeguards for AI amid rapid progress. By establishing safety standards, improving visibility into frontier artificial intelligence (AI) developments, and instituting compliance mechanisms, society can harness the tremendous potential of AI while safeguarding the public interest, argue Markus Anderljung and Anton Korinek in Lawfare.