About Lakebridge Institute

What we do

Lakebridge Institute studies public policy questions where reliable numbers are hard to find. We take a question that is often argued in general terms, such as what a health system would cost or who would pay for it, and work it through with real data, state by state and line by line.

How we work

Our studies start from primary sources: official statistics from government agencies, cited down to the table. Where a result depends on a judgment call, we say so, test the alternatives and report a range rather than a single number. Each study comes with a short explainer for general readers and a full technical report for anyone who wants to check the work. Data and code are available upon request.

Independence

We do not endorse candidates or parties. When our data backs a specific piece of legislation, we may support it, but supporting a policy is never an endorsement of the person or party who proposed it. Our job is to get the numbers right, wherever they lead.

How we use AI

We use AI tools as a force multiplier. They let a small institute take on work that would otherwise need a much larger staff: compiling and processing source data, writing and running analysis code, and drafting and editing text, tables and charts.

AI serves as an assistant in our research, not as the researcher. People decide which questions to ask, which methods to use and what the results mean, and the author of each study reviews the work and takes full responsibility for it. AI will likely always be part of how we work, so we would rather be open about it. Every study includes a statement describing how AI was used to produce it.

The name

The name Lakebridge reflects the geography and infrastructure of Michigan, the institute's home state. Michigan is the Great Lakes State. It touches four of the five Great Lakes, and the lakes have shaped where its people live, how its cities and industries grew, and how it sees itself.

Michigan is just as defined by what it has built to connect itself, above all the Mackinac Bridge, which joins the state's Upper and Lower Peninsulas across the Straits of Mackinac. The lake and the bridge in our emblem stand for that same identity: a state shaped by its waters, and by the work of connecting what they divide.