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Today's top 3: Recent data highlight the best and worst cities for first-time homebuyers, gender dynamics in the workplace, and AI’s geopolitical impact.

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1. Buying Your First Home: Best & Worst Cities

Topline: Persistently high prices make homeownership challenging, especially for first-time homebuyers (FTBs). Analyzing FTB sales for the nation’s 60 largest metro areas, AEI’s Edward Pinto and Tobias Peter ranked the cities from most to least affordable. They found the most affordable cities in the Midwest and South.

How bad? Pinto and Peter report that these metro areas’ median FTB affordability ratio rose from 3.0 in 2013 to 3.6 in 2023—meaning first-time homebuyers spent 3.6 times their household income on a home.

Trouble in Texas: While cities in Texas and Florida are relatively affordable, factors such as high rates of relocation to those states have raised the price of homes, making them less affordable. Dallas saw the most significant change, with prices for first-time homebuyers increasing by 136% since 2013.

2. Your Boss Is Likely the Same Gender as You

Topline: Most Americans work for people of their gender, according to a new report by AEI’s Brent Orrell and Daniel Cox. They find that 66% of men have male bosses, and 55% of women have female bosses.

Women with Male Bosses: Though the study suggests workers’ satisfaction with their boss does not correlate with their boss’s gender, women with male bosses stand out in two ways.

First, 67% of early-career female workers with male bosses report having frequent conversations about their career—compared to 53% of female workers with female bosses.

Second, 53% of women with male bosses report having flexibility to handle personal matters during work—compared to 40% of female workers with female bosses.

3. Does AI Favor Autocracy or Democracy?

Topline: As AI’s geopolitical implications emerge, AEI’s Hal Brands suggests that AI won’t upend the world order. In Bloomberg, he evaluates six potential impacts on world affairs—including warfare technology, global coalitions, and the Sino-American rivalry.

“Sure, there are reasons to fear that AI will make warfare uncontrollable, upend the balance of power, fracture US alliances or fundamentally favor autocracies over democracies. But there are also good reasons to suspect that it won’t.”

—Hal Brands

Last but Not Least . . .

Russian Officials Tour Africa

The Energy Policy Act of 2026

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