Keywords: Tourism, Optimal Tourism, Natural Resource Curse, Hawaii

Keywords: Education, Welfare, Welfare Dependency, Social Mobility

Published in the Brown Journal of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

Keywords: Panama, Development Accounting, Foreign Direct Investment, Tertiary Education, Research and Development, Policy Implications

Published in the Boston University Import Export

Keywords: Immigration, Undocumented, Wages, Labor, Xenophobia, Racism

An excerpt of this piece is listed below:

We’re going to have to let you go. I am going to encourage you to start looking for employment opportunities elsewhere. You’re fired. All words nearly ten million Americans heard at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. With unemployment rates topping out at 14.8% in April of 2020, millions of Americans flocked to the welfare system and applied for unemployment benefits, food stamps, and countless other federal welfare programs. All of this attention thrust the current welfare system, and all its flaws, into the limelight.

The welfare system, as we know it today, is ineffective at raising individuals above the poverty line. Ann Stevens of the University of California Davis reports that over 36% of individuals return to poverty less than four years after breaking through the poverty line. This accompanied by the fact that exit probabilities decrease as the length of a probability spell increases make welfare a chronic issue within the United States. After an individual's first year below the poverty line, their probability of exit is over 56%, but this number quickly plummets as only 13% of individuals escape poverty after maintaining this status for seven years. Over a third of the citizens who are able to escape are plunged into an intrepid cycle and find themselves in the same, if not worse, situation back below the poverty line only four years later. The nation as a whole needs to shift its perspective on welfare and poverty, and create a system that not only raises individuals out of poverty, but keeps them out of poverty.