A merican Compass’s new compendium of essays, The New Conservatives, is aimed at providing readers “an anthology documenting how we have revitalized conservative thinking” and “a primer on what that new thinking is.” Certainly, American Compass, the think tank founded in 2020, has had a huge influence in a short period of time: Its focus on pushing back on a market-centric approach to economic prosperity, and doing so from a decidedly conservative viewpoint, has clearly been seen in the actions of the new presidential Administration.

In evaluating their policy agenda, I think it is useful to walk through three questions. First, what does it mean to listen to voters? Second, what is success in economic policy? And finally, how do policymakers choose what concern to focus on? Thinking through the answers to those questions helps reveal how the authors of a policy agenda see their role: Are they there to justify ideas that already sound good to voters? Or are they trying to deal with the hard questions that may not have a perfect answer?

The New Conservatives compiles a range of essays from authors who have been associated with American Compass, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute, former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, and of course Oren Cass, the think tank’s founder. (A plurality of the essays are authored by Cass, which speaks to his singular role in developing and driving this policy agenda.) The essays are divided into three sections: “Principles,” about the thinking that underlies this work; “Production,” about trade and the “deindustrialization of the American economy”; and “People,” about how to make sure that policy works for the citizens themselves.

It all sounds plausible enough. However, reading this book causes repeated whiplash. An absolutely reasonable sentence or paragraph is followed by a statement that is not backed up by economic data, or by a policy suggestion that would exacerbate the problem that it is supposed to solve. So let’s walk through those three questions to see how American Compass approaches the development of economic policy.

First, what does it mean to listen to voters? If voters say they want lower prices, but in order to get there they want a policy that will raise prices, how should politicians respond? In other words, are politicians and policymakers there to implement the ends…or the means?

Founder and chief economist Oren Cass has a clear take on this: “No set of facts or statistical analyses, to which an expert might have superior access, overrides what people actually value and what trade-offs they would choose to make. Leaders might seek to shape public opinion and alter preferences—indeed, that is part of leading—but they must yield to the outcome. Their obligation is to pursue the community’s priorities, not their own.”

How policymakers see their own role isn’t just a philosophical question. When inflation took off in 2021, many voters were very clear on the solution: lower interest rates. Of course, whenever anyone presented this polling to economists, we all groaned because it is widely agreed among economists that the way to fight inflation is to instead raise interest rates. But voters think of interest rates as a cost: If rates go up, costs go up, which they associate with inflation. So what should policymakers do? Lower interest rates because that’s how voters want to fight inflation? Or raise them because what voters ultimately want is to bring inflation down?

Cass seems very certain that voters are opposed to “the neoliberal political consensus and policy agenda that has characterized recent decades, with its globalization, deregulation, and financialization of the economy; atomization of the society; and reliance on redistribution to those left behind.” Certainly voters are upset about the direction of the country and seem particularly frustrated about their economic lives. And certainly Cass’s solutions—tariffs and restricting immigration in particular—seem to have been popular enough for President Trump to win election running on those ideas in 2024.

I absolutely believe that many voters want tariffs and immigration restrictions. But do they want the consequences of those policies? Cass seems convinced that people will pay the higher prices that will result. He does gesture at the idea that an increase in food costs brought on by immigration restrictions could be painful for many families, but he appears very confident that an increase in wages for low-income workers will help offset it. That ignores how immigration can help grow the pie for everyone—and the fact that people really, really dislike price increases (as seen in the recent bout of pandemic inflation). Similarly, Cass feels very certain that tariffs are worth it. But voters don’t seem actually willing to pay Made in America prices when Made in Vietnam is right there in front of them. Why would they suddenly become comfortable with higher prices once tariffs left them with no cheaper option?

Second—how should we measure success in economic policy? Cass repeatedly states that he feels that government policy in recent decades has been aimed at maximizing consumption rather than welfare and that such an approach leads to bad outcomes: “People are workers as well as consumers, and their own health, the health of their families and communities, and ultimately the security and the prosperity of the nation depend as much on what they contribute through their production as on what they enjoy in consumption.” Leaving aside whether his preferred policies create jobs or destroy jobs (and I would argue that the balance of evidence is that immigration restrictions and tariffs hurt job growth and economic prosperity), how do you measure overall economic success apart from consumption? One can argue about unemployment rates, wage growth, or economic growth more broadly, but it is consumption that allows us to see how other measures are translating into living standards on the ground. It is certainly not a perfect measure, but it is not one that should be simply dismissed out of hand.

And it’s hard to come up with another measure. I know this to be the case because in 2023 Cass did come up with a measure that, when applied, suggested people are doing worse now than they were in the past. American Compass’s “cost-of-thriving index” is aimed at measuring “the number of weeks a typical worker would need to work in a given year to earn enough income to cover the major costs for a family of four in the American middle class.” (In other words…a consumption measure.) I will not spend time in this review debunking his preferred measure: Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute and Jeremy Horpedahl of the University of Central Arkansas have already done so quite well. Their concerns are multifaceted and I would encourage people to read their full piece, which walks through both the empirical and theoretical issues with the index. But the difficulty of coming up with another useful measure speaks to the fact that what we are trying to do in economic policy is create the conditions under which people can lead happy, prosperous lives—and happiness is hard to measure. In the absence of that, measuring prosperity is about as good as we can do.

And correct measurement is important. Otherwise, one can just state that one’s preferred policy will make people “better off” and not have to determine whether that is actually true. We all have policy preferences; we all have biases. But it is important to use data analysis as a reinforcing tool. (I should note that it is difficult to read, much less review, a book from a group that has documented issues with their data work; see the mention of Winship and Horpedahl’s work on this issue above. I do not have time to go through and fact-check every data claim they make, nor would most lay readers.)

Third, when developing a new policy agenda, amongst all your priorities—what do you focus on? If you have read this far, you may assume that there is nothing in this book of essays that I agree with. That is untrue. There is plenty I disagree with, plenty I vehemently disagree with, and plenty I find frustrating. There are, however, points that I do agree with. I nodded along, for instance, when Cass critiques employers who don’t want to pay higher wages to get people to accept jobs—and emphasizes that employers can raise wages to attract workers.

This book also is scornful of deficit-financed tax cuts, and in particular narratives about how much growth will result from them. As Cass writes in one essay, “The case for a supply-side tax cut is contingent. To what extent are tax rates discouraging economic activity? How much would the proposed cut alter the incentives? What response would such an alteration generate? Temporarily reducing already much lower rates by a few percentage points, as in the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts or the 2017 tax cuts, may accomplish little, even as it costs quite a lot.” And yes, the book is correct on this front: Yale’s Budget Lab, where I am the executive director, has released modeling that shows that the deficit-financed tax cuts in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill will actually be more expensive than conventional scores show because they slow down growth and raise interest costs. The Congressional Budget Office also found that the bill would be more expensive when scored to account for its broader impact on the economy.

One essay touches on the importance of hot labor markets for workers. Another mentions that in order to get to the best economic outcome you may need government intervention (e.g., taxing people to fund scientific research). The book emphasizes that making supply-side investments (e.g., investments that focus on boosting supply not just on boosting demand—see the recent debate around increasing energy supply in this country) is important, but that thinking this can be done entirely through tax cuts is a fool’s errand. All good points.

But how much energy has American Compass put into fighting against deficit-financed tax cuts or for basic scientific research, as opposed to calling for tariffs and immigration restrictions? At some point, even if not everything you say is disproved by the economic literature, the fact that you are choosing to focus on the areas with the weakest justification is telling.

So what can we learn from this book of essays? I was repeatedly struck by how clear American Compass’s diagnosis of the “problem” is: It’s runaway immigration and free trade enabled by globalization and elites who aren’t using the power of government to help American citizens. That is a message that has clearly resonated with many voters (although views may be changing somewhat as President Trump implements that policy agenda).

I disagree with that account. But I also don’t have a clear diagnosis of what the problem is. And let’s be clear—there is a problem. People are obviously unhappy with the status quo. Real wages aren’t the culprit: They are no lower than they were decades ago, and in fact have been rising. So is it inequality? Is it social media? Is it the rising cost of specific services? Frankly, I don’t know. But when I closed this book, I was left wanting a different version. One that stepped away from the tendency to bend data to fit one’s preferred policy agenda and instead went back to basics to try to figure out exactly what is driving the frustration in our country and what we know from rigorous economic work about how to fix it.

When someone writes that book, please call me.