Oren M. Cass (born 1983) is an American public policy commentator and political advisor.[1] Since 2024 he has served as the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank. He previously worked on the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012, being described as a "general policy impresario of the emerging conservative consensus on fighting poverty".[2] Between 2015 and 2019, Cass was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and he was the author of The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America.[3] In February 2020, Cass established American Compass, an organization aimed at the question of "what the post-Trump right-of-center is going to be.”[4]
Education and early career
Cass received a Bachelor of Arts in political economy from Williams College,[5] and was then hired as an associate consultant at Bain & Company.[1] After working at Bain for several years in the firm's offices in Boston and New Delhi,[5] Cass "took a six-month leave to work on Mitt Romney's 2008 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination".[1] Cass then enrolled in Harvard Law School "to deepen his understanding of public policy", stating of the experience that "law school is a lot of fun if you’re not there to be a lawyer".[1] Cass "caught the attention of Romney's staff while still in law school and was tapped as domestic policy adviser for the candidate's presidential campaign in 2011":[2][1][5]
He worked for the next Romney operation in 2011 between his second and third years at Harvard, and ended up with so much in his portfolio that at the end of the summer "they sort of said, well, you have to stay". He became domestic-policy director while still in law school.[1]
Following the 2012 election, Cass returned to Bain, where he became a manager, but also "started writing on environmental and labor policy for National Review.[1] Senator Marco Rubio credited Cass for the poverty-fighting plan Rubio released in 2014.[2][6] From this work, he was brought on as a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute in 2015. Also in 2015, Politico named Cass number 35 on its list of the top 50 "thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2015".[2]
The Once and Future Worker
In 2018, Cass published The Once and Future Worker, a broad re-evaluation of American society, economics, and public policy that earned widespread coverage and praise across the political spectrum.[1][2] The book introduces what Cass calls "the Working Hypothesis: that a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long-term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy". He argues that the obsessive focus of policymakers and economists on "consumer welfare" has been misguided because it is as workers and productive contributors that people flourish and build strong families and communities. This is asserted to lead to innovative proposals for reform across a wide range of policy areas.
National Affairs editor Yuval Levin deemed it "the essential policy book for our time".[2]National Review concluded that "[t]his book and its policy proposals mark Oren Cass as one of the nation's most original and forceful policy thinkers".[7]Jason Furman, the chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, described it as "a thoughtful, provocative, carefully argued book that made me change my mind on some issues that I thought I'd thought about quite a lot".[8] The book has also been featured in publications including The New Yorker,[9]The Economist,[10] and Foreign Affairs.[11]
Donald J. Boudreaux, for the American Institute for Economic Research, disputed some positions taken by Cass, asserting that Cass focuses too heavily on the importance of production over consumption, to the point of extolling measures such as tariffs that coerce society into purchasing goods that would not be the first choice of uncoerced consumers.[12]
Dedicated to reforming conservatism, American Compass is endeavoring to shift the economic consensus towards a high view "of family, community, and industry."[13] With the group, Cass has argued for several changes to conservative thought:
Free markets
Under Cass, the group has strongly questioned the belief that free markets should be given primacy when setting public policy. Cass has described this "free market fundamentalism" as "pathetically simplistic."[13] Cass and the grouping hold that it is not only absolutely proper for society to intervene in the market but also necessary for it to do so.[13]
Industry and trade
Cass has advocated for unionization that enables workers to collectively bargain for sector-wide pay standards and working conditions.[17] He argues that local industry should be protected by a cross-the-board 10% tariff on imported goods, which would increase by 5% until trade deficits are brought to zero, while investment in local industry would be funded by a national development bank.[17]
Environment
Cass wrote an essay in 2017 framing rejection of strong measures to combat climate change as a form of moderation, by criticizing both those on the political right who question the validity of climate science and those on the political left whom he characterizes as suffering from depression and misusing data to paint a picture of imminent catastrophe.[18]
^Lepore, Jill (March 4, 2019). "Are Robots Competing for Your Job?". The New Yorker. The economist Oren Cass, the author of "The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America" (Encounter), much of which originally appeared in National Review, is fed up with the robot hysteria. "Technological innovation and automation have always been integral to our economic progress, and in a well-functioning labor market, they should produce gains for all types of workers," he insists.
^"Donald Trump is the main barrier to the revision of conservatism". The Economist. February 7, 2019. Progress on the rethinking of Reaganite shibboleths that his campaign promised has been scattered and rare. The hoopla generated by a recent book on labour markets by Oren Cass of the Manhattan Institute, which made a conservative case for wage subsidies and other interventions to promote the dignity of work among strugglers, was both justified and indicative of this.
