Michael R. Strain is Director of Economic Policy Studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He has conducted research in a wide range of areas, including labor economics, public finance, and social policy, and his papers have been published in academic and policy journals. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It),” the editor of “The US Labor Market: Questions and Challenges for Public Policy,” and the coeditor of “Economic Freedom and Human Flourishing: Perspectives from Political Philosophy.” He is a research fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn and was a member of the AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity.
Strain writes frequently for popular audiences, and his essays and op-eds have been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and National Review, among others. He is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
A frequent guest on radio and television, Strain is regularly interviewed by broadcast news networks, including CNBC, MSNBC, and NPR. He has testified before Congress and speaks often to a variety of audiences. Before joining AEI, he worked in the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau and in the macroeconomics research group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell, and lives in Washington.
