Jerusalem Demsas | The Atlantic

The Myth of the Poverty Trap

2025-05-13T06:00:00-04:00

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We used to be trapped. And by “we,” I really do mean all of us. A few hundred years ago, the majority of the world lived in extreme poverty, and even in recent decades, people lucky enough to clear the $2.15-per-day threshold were living lives that others in the developed world would find unrecognizable.

Death is inevitable. Living in poverty is not.

From 1981 to 2019, the share of the global population living in extreme poverty fell from 44 percent to just 9 percent—an astronomical achievement.

On this episode of Good on Paper, we’re going to talk about how this all happened. Today’s guest is Paul Niehaus, an economist and co-founder of the NGO GiveDirectly. His new paper details what actually happened in the lives of people who escaped extreme poverty since the early 1980s. As he and his co-authors write, by “how” they mean: “Did they plant a new cash crop on their farm? Find work in a factory? Start their own business? Move to a city?” And further, what happened across the life of one person, versus what happened between cohorts or generations?

The answers provide insight into what a real “success sequence” looks like, and challenge some foundational ideas within development.

“There’s no one story,” Niehaus tells me. “As an author, it would’ve been nice if there was a very simple story to tell, which is, Well, the key thing is everybody’s gotta move to the city or whatever it is. But you see people getting out of poverty while moving to the city. You see a lot of people getting out of poverty while staying where they are. You see a lot of people getting out of poverty while not switching from agriculture into nonagriculture. And also, the stories are different in different countries.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: For centuries, mass poverty seemed inevitable. Starvation, disease, death. As late as the 1700s, roughly half of children globally would die before reaching adulthood. This was the natural order of things.

And then everything began to change. Looking at a graph of development measures over the past two hundred years is to witness the miracle of human development: On any measure you can think of—child mortality, nutrition, poverty—more and more people are able to live significantly better lives than their ancestors could even dream of.

Just 35 years ago, 2 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Today, that number is just under 700 million. That’s still a lot of people, but this staggering improvement proves that mass poverty isn’t preordained.

[Music]

Demsas: My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

Why did extreme poverty fall so fast, and can we finish the job? Loads of research and debate has gone into the question of why extreme poverty fell, but today we’re going to talk about how.

Paul Niehaus is an economist at UC San Diego and the co-founder of GiveDirectly, an NGO focused on getting cash into the hands of the global poor. Few have thought harder—academically and practically—about these questions. Today we’re going to talk about his work with GiveDirectly and a new paper he co-authored, titled “How Poverty Fell,” that details what happened between 1981 and 2019 in the lives of those living in extreme poverty.

Before we jump into this conversation, one last note from me: This will be my final episode with you all. I have loved my time here hosting Good on Paper and feel so lucky to have been able to explore all of my curiosities with you and the brilliant guests who lent us their time. And I want to thank all of you—those of you who listened, emailed, left a review, and engaged with this show in any way. It has been amazing to realize how many fellow wonks there are out there, excited to dig deep into how and why we know things. And don’t worry. The show isn’t going away—just taking a break.

Let’s dive in. Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Niehaus: Thank you, Jerusalem. Great to be here.

Demsas: I think because people remain rightly concerned about continuing deprivations, we often don’t take a step back to take in just how remarkable the global decline in poverty—in extreme poverty—has been. Can you give me a sense of how much things have changed?

Niehaus: Exactly. And so we’ll talk about the paper I think that you wanted to talk about, which is “How Poverty Fell.” But in some sense, I sort of feel like for maybe most people listening, the key thing that they need to take away is actually just the premise that it fell. And so we start the paper with that observation, that over the course of the last four decades or so, from around 1980 to around 2020, the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty—so people living on less than (currently we measure that as) $2.15 per person per day—that fell from about 40 percent to under 10 percent around the start of the pandemic. And that is, in my mind, just one of the most remarkable episodes in human history, and just an achievement to celebrate and to try to understand, which is what the paper’s about.

Demsas: And extreme poverty. I mean, $2.15 a day—I mean, if folks remember, it used to be $1.90 a day until that 2022 update for inflation. It’s not the threshold that people are living what we would consider good lives, right? People will starve at this level. They probably lack access to electricity and other important goods. Why is it important to track this number, versus other metrics of poverty?

Niehaus: It’s not the only one, and we’ll do this in the paper, look at other lines as well. And any line has fundamental issues with it, which people have rightly pointed out. Some people are going to have a greater ability to translate $2.15 a day into the sorts of things that really matter in life—health and relationships and things—than others. So it’s just one indicator.

But what I think it has done very effectively is to sort of galvanize attention around the world through the process—the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals and the World Bank’s advocacy for that number—to a sort of simple metric that we can track and say, Are we making progress or not? And that matters, right? Because it lets us quantify whether we’re seeing the kind of progress that we’d like to see.

Demsas: So “How Poverty Fell” is a very straightforward title, which I appreciate. And I want to start by asking you to explain that question. What does it mean to investigate how poverty fell? Like, what are you looking at? What are you trying to describe?

Niehaus: Yeah. Great. The first thing I’d just say is poverty fell, right? As I said, that premise itself is very important. So literally just that fact, that premise, I think is an important takeaway.

The next bit is the how, with just a lot of emphasis on how as opposed to why. And so a lot of the movement in development economics over the last couple of decades, which has been tremendous, has been towards trying to understand causality: the why. So why did poverty fall? And of course, many of the great debates that we have about the global development process are about the why. Was it because India liberalized in the early 1990s? How much did that contribute?

But this is a paper about how. Descriptively, if we look at all these people who moved out of extreme poverty, what happened in their lives, right? Is it that kids were able to start out life much better than their parents did, because they had access to better schooling or other early-childhood investments? Is it that people moved out of agriculture; they moved to the city and were able to get a manufacturing job as they moved off the farm? These are all sorts of things that we know happened, but how important, quantitatively, were they for all these people that made that step over the poverty line?

Demsas: I’d love for you to walk us through how you did this paper, because a big part of why I wanted to talk to you about this is because it’s a pretty ambitious attempt to collect data over time from so many different people and families across several countries. So you focus on five countries. What are those countries, and then what did you do to get this information?

Niehaus: We’re looking here at, as you say, five countries: India, China, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico. And actually, most of the work—you mentioned all the hard work, so enormous amount of hard work—but actually, most of it was done by people other than ourselves, the people who went out and collected these original survey data sets that let us do this. And so our filter for the project, when we decided which countries to look at, are the countries that have some of the highest-quality household-survey data sets available. That let us really drill into, What are people’s standards of living? and also, Where are they getting their income from? so that we can understand how that’s changing.

And that’s a really hard task. And so one piece of context I want to set is that if you’re used to thinking about, say, poverty in the United States, we can measure that pretty reliably—you know, issues and so forth—but looking at sort of data that people report to the government automatically through tax reporting and so forth. And we want to supplement that with surveys and so forth, but there’s third-party reporting. There’s all this machinery that exists.

And so in the countries we’re studying, that’s not the case. And the data that we’re looking at are going to come from people that are going out into remote corners of the country because we sampled a village there—and going to that village and trying to track down some people that we sampled that we want to interview, and then asking them if they’d be willing to sit for a multi-hour interview, and asking them really detailed questions like, How much rice did you and your family eat last week? And how much money did you make from your vegetable farm? And how much money did you make from doing some casual labor for other people in the village? And it’s an incredibly painstaking and laborious effort. What we’re trying to do is capitalize on all of that hard work that other people have done and say, If we now put it all together—because for a bunch of these countries, we have data that are really sort of the best, that adhere to the highest standards of data collection in fieldwork in development—what can we learn from that?

Demsas: And, I mean, I think a lay person hearing those five countries would think there’s something important missing. I mean, India, China, South Africa, Mexico, Indonesia: It really doesn’t include some of the countries where most people think about extreme poverty being the biggest issue. Like, it doesn’t include much of sub-Saharan Africa, where we do see the most deprivation. Are you worried about that in terms of—I know you said you picked these countries based on what the best data allowed you to study—but are you concerned that it’s not going to extrapolate to the places that are of most concern today?

Niehaus: Yeah, there are two parts to that. One is: It is backwards looking, and so these are actually the countries that contributed the most to extreme-poverty reduction during the period that we’re looking at, especially India, China, Indonesia. So South Africa, Mexico—relatively small. And we may get into this, but there they’re different economically in a bunch of other ways as well.

So actually, during the time period that we’re looking at, these countries are pretty attractive and may be the ones that you’d want to prioritize. For today, I think you’re totally right: If you wanted to sort of look at what’s happening in the last five years or think about what might happen in the next 10, you’d probably want to be looking elsewhere in the world.

That said, there are also examples of smaller-scale studies—a few regions in Uganda or in Tanzania, for example—that track migrants. And so one of the things we try to do in the paper is to also tip our cap to those and point out some similarities in terms of the findings from those as well. But yeah, those are places where we do face this very deep constraint that the same kinds of data, and especially panel data—meaning, data where we follow the same people over long periods of time—are much scarcer.

Demsas: Yeah. It’s a hard problem because the very places that are most deprived are the ones that are most difficult to study.

Niehaus: Yes.

Demsas: So how did poverty fall, Paul? What did you find?

Niehaus: I distill three things. So the first is: We look at this intergenerational aspect of it. And probably you’ve heard language like breaking the cycle of poverty or [breaking] the intergenerational cycle of poverty. So really sort of interested in: To what extent, as poverty fell, was it because one generation was sort of stuck at where they were, because they never had the chance to get a good education or whatever it is, but then they’re able to make the sacrifices so that the next generation can have a better life?

And so what was really interesting to me—I think I would’ve expected a lot of that. Actually, what it looks much more like is: When we see a new generation entering into the workforce, they’re starting out about as poor as their parents’ generation—so much less poor than their parents’ generation was when their parents’ generation entered the workforce 25 years earlier, let’s say. But their parents have made a lot of progress in the meantime. So overall, what seems to be happening is people are making a lot of progress during their lifetimes in parallel to the improvements that they’re then able to pass along to their kids.

And so we take away from that that it’s important to understand what is happening during people’s lives, because it’s certainly true that, you know, what you get at the start in terms of nutritional investments your parents are able to make, looking after your health, vaccination, schooling—all that stuff’s important, but it’s not like that’s the end of the story, right? We see that there’s much more after that, and a lot of people are making progress during their lifetimes as well. So that’s sort of fact No. 1.

Fact No. 2, we’re now going to turn to these panel data sets I mentioned that let us track the same people over time. And so those are even more scarce. You can imagine the difficulties involved, especially when we want to track people as they—you know, maybe they’re moving to a different part of the country for better opportunities and so forth. But we have data for these five countries, and what you really see in all of those is an enormous amount of churn, of movement in both directions.

So if the first thing I wanted you to know about this paper is that a lot of people got out of poverty, the second might be that even more people got out of poverty in gross, but then on net, poverty rates fell less fast than they might have, because a lot of those people fell back into poverty. And that’s a really important fact. We may come to it in terms of how we frame the way we think about poverty and poverty reduction. You hear a lot of conversation talk about poverty traps, people being stuck in poverty. I think that contributes to this mindset that’s like, Unless we come in and intervene in some way, unless we kind of find the magic key to unlock this situation, people are going to stay stuck where they are.

And what the data actually looked like is much more that, like, people are getting out of poverty all the time at a very fast rate. The biggest problem is they’re facing a lot of headwinds, things that knock them back. And we can get into what some of those things are. It might be illness, droughts, agricultural shocks, things like this, but it’s that getting knocked back that I think is really important.

There’s some caveats to that finding. There’s going to be some measurement error in our data, right? And that’s going to generate more of this. It’s going to look like somebody got out of poverty, when actually they didn’t. So it’s a little tricky, to be completely frank, to say just how much of this is churn versus measurement error. But it’s so strong, it’s so pronounced in the data, and it lines up with a lot of other research. I just think that’s a very important reality to kind of get your head around.

Demsas: And you mean measurement error that you’re losing people as they move, or you just can’t find them again?

Niehaus: More just that, like, when I come in and I try to do these surveys and figure out your living standards, it’s hard, right? And we don’t always get the answer exactly right. And so that’s just going to create some noise in the data, and it will look like somebody fell back into poverty when maybe they didn’t. So a little bit of it’s going to be that.

Demsas: And then you had a third stylistic fact for us.

Niehaus: So the third is—now we look at these people as they’re moving out of poverty and get to some of these questions I posed earlier about what’s happening in their lives. And I’d really say there’s no one story. As an author, it would’ve been nice if there was a very simple story to tell, which is, Well, the key thing is everybody’s gotta move to the city, or whatever it is. But—

Demsas: Yeah.

Niehaus: —you see people getting out of poverty while moving to the city. You see a lot of people getting out of poverty while staying where they are. You see a lot of people getting out of poverty while not switching from agriculture into nonagriculture. And also, the stories are different in different countries in interesting ways.

So maybe a good sort of broad way to think about it is: It’s good to not be looking for, sort of, the solution and saying, What is the path that people need to walk? and more thinking about, like, What are the right paths for a given person in a given context, and how can we accelerate that and help them along that? As opposed to coming in expecting there to be one thing that’ll work well for everybody.

Demsas: So now I have to talk about my priors here, because you pushed against them in ways that made me uncomfortable. So economists, urbanists, immigrants—we tend to see migration as a huge part of the story for modernization, poverty reduction, increasing the quality of life.

I mean, I’m obviously going to be biased, also, because of my own life. My family immigrated here from Addis Ababa when I was very young, and my dad moved from Asmara to Addis Ababa in order to get an education. And it’s just, like, this is ingrained in not just personal experiences but also, the economic literature really pushes that moving towards cities—higher-productivity cities—is the key way to improve both economic growth and productivity, but also giving people access to the good life, like access to higher standards of living and other things that they care about.

It’s not that your paper invalidates this entirely, but it does push back against this dominant view, in some ways. That classic story of rural peasants moving towards cities and towards factories, it’s only a part of the picture, and it’s not even the dominant one. In some ways, I would think it’s not really the movers that are the stars of your stories; it’s the stayers, both in terms of geography but also in terms of staying within specific sectors. Is that an accurate kind of read of a takeaway, and did that surprise you?

Niehaus: Yeah, that’s about how I read it. A few things there. One is: International migration, which you brought up, we’re not going to see here. And it’s probably not relevant for getting people over $2.15. I’m guessing that your family, when they moved, had access to much better opportunities but that you’re moving from a much higher starting point than that poverty line. And so we are really kind of zooming in here on the left tail of the income distribution and trying to understand that.

Point two is—and this is where the economics comes in—that when a few people move to the city, let’s say, that’s going to change wages and labor-market outcomes and other things for the people who stay behind. And so one of the things that economists need to really unpack, and this is something that’s been important in other papers that I’ve worked on, is that bit of not just the direct effect on the person who leaves but also the indirect effects and how that changes things for everybody else.

And so that’s not something we can see very easily in these kinds of data, but that’s one of the questions that we should be asking of them, is how much of that was playing a role. But, you know, all that having been said, yeah, I think it’s very clear that a lot of people have been able to make significant progress while staying in place.

And, you know, to me, one of the most interesting cases was Indonesia, because we have really good migrant tracking in Indonesia, and there were a lot of people who got out of poverty while moving, but while moving from one rural area to another rural area. So that, again, as you say, it’s a little bit different from the standard story. It’s an interesting twist. I think that’s a good thing to drill into.

Demsas: Yeah. I mean, regional economic convergence is something that has been studied at a different level—not really that I haven’t seen in the extreme-poverty space. But one of the editors at The Atlantic, Yoni Appelbaum, has written about this, and it starts with Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag’s really great paper about declining regional convergence, which just kind of shows, you know, exactly what you were saying, that when people leave lower-productivity, lower-wage areas towards cities that are higher wage, higher productivity, the places they leave are net better off because there are fewer people there or because the average poverty level declines because the people who remain are often those who are in the good jobs.

But I want to tease apart something that you pointed out in response to my question, which is: We’re talking about people escaping extreme poverty, not people like my family and others who were not at, like, $2.15 a day or below that level.

Do you think that these answers that you’re finding—these facts that you’re finding—are really just about extreme poverty, and that questions about how to move people into the middle class, into higher levels, are going to be quite different? That industrialization will play a much larger role, urbanization will play a much larger role? How do you think about that?

Niehaus: Yeah, possibly. And I think most of the answer to that is: That’s something that I think we’ll keep doing as we continue with the project and look more at that, so probably better to just look at the data than to speculate too much.

Demsas: The second part of this is that it’s not just about geographical moving; it’s also about within sectors. So you talked a little about this with agriculture, but what is happening within agriculture that is allowing people to get themselves out of extreme poverty? The traditional story, as you said, is that they have to leave that sector to make money.

Niehaus: Well, one of the things we can look at with the data is whether you’re self-employed or not. And so the sector you choose to work in is a big one, as you say. We tell a lot of stories in economic development about the role of self-employment as opposed to wage employment. And so one of the things that I thought was very interesting here, and one of the ways in which, as I said earlier, some of these countries look very different from each other, is that in the lower-income countries—the countries that started out poorer at the beginning of this period, which are India, China, Indonesia—you see that people who switch into self-employment are making a lot of progress. That accounts for a fair share of the poverty decline, and sort of the rates at which people who make that change exit poverty are relatively high. And then in Mexico and in South Africa, it’s the exact opposite, which is that the people who seem to be doing best are people who get a job.

And I think that also maybe relates a little bit to your question about the ladder and sort of what the later stages in the ladder look like as well. Because Mexico, South Africa are more developed countries—they’re more industrialized countries—agriculture plays a smaller role to begin with.

And so that is a place where people who “become entrepreneurs” look to me a lot like these sort of entrepreneurs of necessity. They’re sort of doing it because they couldn’t get a wage job, which is what they really wanted. And the best thing they can do is to be a small vendor, sell something at the roadside, try to scrape by until they can get back into wage employment—as opposed to these other countries where I think it is actually: For many people to own their own land or to start their own non-ag business, that would actually be a really high return and exciting thing to do if you could get the capital to do it.

Demsas: You hinted at this, but I think the nonlinearity of the stories underlying this research kind of speaks to a lot of people’s personal experiences. It’s the slippery slope where people are making their way out of poverty to a slightly better position than falling back. Can you just describe what’s going on there and maybe give us some of those facts within countries? I think Indonesia, for instance, was a place where you looked into this.

Niehaus: Yeah, what we do in our paper is, you know, we’re trying to give you the kind of broad-stroke facts here. I think for this question, I would go to other sources. I really like, for example, Anirudh Krishna’s book One Illness Away, which sounds like it’s a book about health, but it’s really a book about poverty dynamics and this dynamic of getting knocked back into poverty.

And he called it One Illness Away because for many people, that is the thing that does it. It’s like: A primary breadwinner gets sick. You have to spend a lot of money on their health care. Hopefully that works, but maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you spend all that money and then they still pass away. In the meantime, they’re not earning. And that’s just a huge shock, right? And during that period, maybe you’re selling off assets and so forth to try to cover their medical bills and to make ends meet. And so I think it’s things like that we should have in mind when you think about these people who get knocked back.

Demsas: And the numbers were really shocking to me. I mean, in Indonesia, you guys find that 37 percent of households who were poor at the start remained poor at the end of a 15-year panel. But only 16 percent were poor in every survey round, meaning that loads of people are falling in and out. Similarly, in South Africa, you find that only roughly, like, a quarter of initially poor households stayed consistently poor throughout the panel. I think that level of churn is something that we’re familiar with, even in higher levels of poverty in developed nations.

In the housing context, people are finding a place to stay, and they feel safe, and then divorce happens or an illness happens or a job loss happens, and then they fall back into homelessness. I mean, that kind of churn is really well documented. But, you know, it’s interesting because it doesn’t feel like that’s how people talk about the poverty trap, right? They talk about it as if you’re stuck there and waiting for an intervention, and until that intervention happens, there’s really nothing to be done. You’re just, like, waiting there, and it really stagnates. Why do you think that idea persists?

Niehaus: I’ll be honest: I think that the somewhat skeptical part of my nature thinks that it’s attractive to us. It sort of depicts a scenario in which a hero is needed. And look—I got into development economics hoping to be a hero of some sorts, I guess, and so I should be very honest and self-critical about this.

But I think that story sells, right? And it’s effective at getting people to donate money. And so you sort of say to people, Yeah, like, people are stuck in this trap, and if we come in, we can get them out. And so I think that’s very compelling, maybe a little bit easier to pitch to people than the story that, like, people are making enormous amounts of progress on their own, largely without help. Our role is to come in and think about how we can accelerate that, how we can make it faster, and also how we can provide them with some degree of a safety net so that when they get hit by these shocks, they don’t get knocked too far back. It’s a bit more nuanced. But I think that’s true to the data.

Demsas: After the break: Who should receive cash transfers, and who gets to decide?

[Break]

Demsas: I want to move a little bit into takeaways for policy makers, for NGOs, for individuals who care about reductions in poverty and want to make a difference. So you are at GiveDirectly, which is an organization that sends cash transfers directly to people living in extreme poverty. Can you broadly describe how you decide where to direct those transfers into which people?

Niehaus: Yeah. So first I should say I am at UC San Diego. I’m there today, and they’re the ones who pay my paycheck. But I’m also a co-founder and a board member at GiveDirectly. And so: super happy to talk about the work that we do there. GiveDirectly is, I think, the largest global nonprofit focused on direct transfers to people living in extreme poverty. We’re currently in around a dozen countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, to your point earlier.

And you asked specifically about how we choose who to direct the transfers to. Pretty simple: We’re generally looking for people living, you know—the poorest people that we can find, the poorest communities that we can find. We’ve tended to err on the side of simplicity. When we get into a village, let’s say we’re going to enroll most of the people living in that village. We might try to exclude a few wealthy landowners or people that are sort of absentee landowner, landlords, people like that. But generally, the goal of it is to try to find the poorest people we can and then get large amounts of money into their hands, no strings attached. Let them decide what they want to do with it.

But for everybody listening, I think there’s a bit of context that’s very important, which is that this show is called Good on Paper. I would say that, like, most of global-development work was, like, up until around 2000, good on paper—in the sense that we had a lot of theories of what ought to work, a lot of intuitions and things like that. There wasn’t all that much rigorous testing of anything, let alone the very specific questions about the right way or the best ways to do cash transfers and so forth, which are very good.

And so it was only in the last 20 years or so, I’d say, not just because of experimental testing—[randomized controlled trials] (RCTs) and the RCT movement—but especially because of that, I’d say we started to get a lot of really good causal evidence on what works. So that’s why we’re in a world where (A) I can tell you a lot already about what happens when we give money to people living in extreme poverty, which has generally been very good, and (B) we can get into some of those more nuanced questions that you’re asking. But I just want people to have that context.

Demsas: And how much research do you do towards things like anticipatory cash transfers or seasonal cash transfers or targeting specifically at women or different groups? How do you think about those aspects?

Niehaus: I just wrote a review paper on some of these questions with Tavneet Suri, and the gender one I think is very interesting. We have a few studies that compare what happens if you give money to a husband versus to a wife, let’s say. We have fewer of those than you might think. It’s obviously a very important question, and the reason is that the overwhelming view has been that you should give it to the wife, and so almost all cash transfers are run that way. GiveDirectly, by the way, it tends to be around 70–80 percent of the time in a typical program that we’ll give money to a wife, but we actually let the household decide how they want to do that, and so there’s been some variation there.

I’d say that if you look at the studies that have varied this, there isn’t an obvious winner. It’s not like women are good and men are bad, or vice versa. There are differences. There are cases where there are significant differences. There are cases where you see more investment in kids when you give transfers to the mom, maybe more investment in a business when you give transfers to men. That’s a pattern that I think fits people’s priors. But by the way, there are also cases where there’s bigger impacts on kids’ nutrition when you give transfers to the men. And there’s, I think, good evidence that many women have enterprises that they could, in principle, invest in, but it’s harder for them to keep the money safe and keep other people from getting their hands on it, sort of pressuring them for it. So I think it’s just a very nuanced story. I don’t think there’s a clear This is the right person, in terms of the impacts.

For me, this one is much more just about, like, on a priori grounds, we look at everything we know about empowerment, about who has the sort of rights to decide how household resources are used. It’s very inequitable, right? Women generally have much less say in a lot of things. So to me, this is one where I don’t think that the right way to go about it is to go do a bunch of these things and try to show in the data somehow that you get a bigger treatment effect on some particular outcome. It’s more like, I think equity really matters, and so I think it’s good to give resources to people who have less control over them to begin with.

Demsas: How do you think about the balance there? Because a big thing that you laid out for us is that the global NGO community was not sufficiently concerned with outcomes, and it required sort of the randomized controlled trial (RCT) revolution and work by you and organizations like GiveWell that focused on effectiveness and, really, ranking and charity navigators that really tried to force NGOs and force global aid communities to think more deeply about the impact there. How do you balance just focusing on sort of the raw benefits that you can measure and quantify in the spreadsheet versus values that are more difficult to show up in development statistics?

Niehaus: Great question. And first I would say, I think you mentioned the NGOs. Certainly true, I think, that many NGOs are much more evidence focused these days than they were in the past, and that’s been a good thing.

But hey, I mean, let’s remember: NGOs are going to follow the money. I think that the process—and I’m a big fan of the whole evidence revolution and of outcome measurement and all of that—but it is still a very top-down, technocratic process where somebody in a position of power who has the money says, Here’s the outcome that I want to achieve. And then people go out and try to figure out the best way of doing it, and then they come back and say, Here are the results. And then they get to decide which thing seems most attractive, given the impacts, as opposed to a process where the people that we are ultimately trying to benefit have a meaningful say in what gets done.

Cash transfers are obviously an example of that. That’s, like, an extreme case where we’re going to say, We’re going to give all the money directly to these people and let them say what they want to get done, what they want to prioritize. But there are other less-extreme ways that it happens or that you could imagine doing it where people have not just some sort of participatory process—in the sense that we’ll talk to people, but then, at the end of the day, we’re going to retain power and decide what to do—but people are given real control over how resources get used.

So that, to me, is a very important gut check on everything else, because if I come in and say, I really care about health—I’m a health guy, let’s say—that’s great. Obviously, people living in poverty also care a lot about health and about the health of their family members, but it’s not the only thing. And so there has to be some sort of gut check or process check that says, Am I really still kind of pursuing things in a way that’s consistent with their values and their priorities?

Demsas: Returning a little bit to your paper: Your paper doesn’t directly say what one should do in order to reduce extreme poverty. It’s a descriptive paper. It’s not one that’s looking at causation directly, but it does indicate that large reductions in extreme poverty are not really about transfers. Is that because they were insufficient over the time period you’re studying, or is it because these are just dwarfed by things like economic growth and other sorts of changes in people’s lives?

Niehaus: Yeah. Transfers in our data were small, for the most part. If you look in almost all the countries at the people who got out of poverty, after getting out of poverty, transfers are a pretty negligible share of their income, of a couple of percentage points. And so what that means is just that we weren’t sort of trying to get people out of poverty with a program—a very ambitious, large-scale program—of transfers at that time.

What we were doing in most of those countries is trying to use it to offset some of these shocks that we talked about, to kind of make the slope a little bit less slippery. And so you see that the people who are getting a larger share of their income from transfers are the people that were making negative progress, the people that were falling back into poverty.

There’s one exception to that fact, which is interesting, which is South Africa, which has historically had extremely generous social transfers—pensions and others, child-support grants, and so forth. And so you’ll see in South Africa much larger shares of people’s earnings coming from these public transfers. But even there, the people who got out of poverty are going to see that share decline by a lot. They’re not getting out of poverty because the government is ramping up transfers. They’re getting out of poverty in other ways.

Demsas: Does that indicate to you that transfers don’t play a large role in reducing extreme poverty?

Niehaus: Well, I mean, transfers are going to reduce extreme poverty very mechanically, right? If you give somebody $1 a day, they’re going to have $1 more a day. So no. I think what it indicates is that kind of the way we’ve thought about the role of transfers has been social protection. And that’s exactly the language that’s used for most cash-transfer programs, which I think is a very good thing.

I think that now just in the last five, 10 years, we’re starting to think about transfers in a more ambitious way. Which is, (A): Could they be graduative? Could we give people enough money to really push them over the line? And then (B) the question that I’m excited about and would love for us to talk about a little bit is: If we wanted to design a program that would end extreme poverty using transfers, how much would that cost? Because I think we’re actually quite close to it. That’s not a question that we’ve asked before, but I think we can now.

Demsas: I want to get to that, but the thing I’m trying to press on here is: If you’re an individual looking at this paper—and I know you mentioned it’s one paper; we don’t want to just say this is the end all, be all of descriptive statistics on extreme poverty—but it indicates that the most important thing to focus on is economic growth, right?

I think the thing that most people think about when they see the logic of economic growth being so vast in comparison to other interventions is: Is it just that we don’t actually know as individuals and NGOs and governments how to actually spur that sort of change? And so we’re doing the second-best thing, which is, Alright, let’s just send people money and do charity and do other kinds of forms of aid. Or is it that you think it’s possible to get these massive reductions, like what you described at the beginning of this episode, roughly 40 percent of people living in extreme poverty to 10 percent. Is it really possible to get those kinds of levels of changes through programs like GiveDirectly?

Niehaus: For sure. The way I would think about the role of the paper is: It’s certainly not telling us what the high-return things are to do—certainly not. And that’s what most of development economics over the last decade or more has been about. And so, obviously, no one paper is going to achieve that for all of these different things. I think what it can do is give us some clues as to where to look. And as economists, we really want to be thinking about what the investments are that people might like to be able to make that they can’t, because they don’t have the resources, or they face some other constraint.

Because that’s what’s going to drive—you talk about economic growth. We really care about, sort of, growth. But within this small subset—the subset of people who are, kind of, in the left tail of the income distribution—so, you know, economic growth for them might mean paying the cost to migrate or taking the risks to migrate. Or it might mean investing the capital required to start your own business, which we saw was a driver of poverty reduction for a lot of people.

So the way we can use results in a paper like this is to ask ourselves where to look and what sorts of things seem like they might be high-return pathways for people that not many of them are able to take, because they can’t get the money to do it in the first place.

Demsas: And you mentioned that you think it’s possible. I mean, this has been a UN development goal for a while: to end extreme poverty by, I think, 2030, which people are now projecting, due to the pandemic’s effect on increasing the number of people in extreme poverty, is likely not going to happen. Do you think that 2030 deadline is unlikely to happen? And how would you design a program to actually end extreme poverty?

Niehaus: I think it’s unlikely to happen under the status quo, just looking at the world as it is and at what’s happening. I think it’s very doable. And what I would do—in terms of recommendations, what we could do: I’d sort of split it into two parts. I think there are extraordinarily high-return ways of helping people in extreme poverty, which we should do and which we can do for a limited number of people.

So you mentioned, like, GiveWell, for example. They’ll recommend things like bed nets for people who live in areas with a lot of malaria, with a high prevalence of malaria. Or they’ll recommend deworming for kids who live in areas with a high worm load. And so those are going to be extremely high-return things that we can do to help that set of people who face that one particular issue.

If we want to do something really ambitious, like end extreme poverty by 2030, we’re going to need maybe a portfolio of strategies or maybe something that works everywhere and for everybody. And so part of what I find very compelling about direct transfers is that they do that, right? Cash is relevant, whatever your issue is, wherever you live, whatever your problem is, right? Money’s the most flexible thing that we can give people to help them. And also, the numbers on cash transfers and poverty, I think, are very compelling. Like, the global extreme-poverty gap—the total amount by which people who are poor in the world today are below that poverty line—estimates range between maybe $100–$150 billion a year.

Demsas: That’s not that much.

Niehaus: And you put that in global context—that’s like 0.1 percent or 0.15 percent of global GDP. So if we could find everybody and give them the exact amount of money they need to get over the line, to finance that, you and I, everybody, we’d all need to give up 0.1 percent or 0.15 percent of our income, which I think is a bargain. I think most of us would be willing to make that. You take, like, the average American sort of making $50,000 a year. What does that mean? That means 75 bucks. So if I ask, Would you be willing to give up 75 bucks, and that would be your part for ending extreme poverty? I think the answer is, in my experience, absolutely. And so I don’t think people realize how close we are.

The problem is we don’t know exactly how to go out and find everybody and give them exactly the amount of money they need to get over the line. And so I’m actually actively working on that right now, and we’ll get you an answer, which is: Maybe it’s, like, 0.2 percent or 0.3 percent because there’s going to be some buffer, because we don’t know exactly how much money different people need. But I think that, undoubtedly, the answer from this is going to be that there is a feasible, shovel-ready way of ending extreme poverty that would cost much less than you think and is something you’d feel really good about ethically—that, like, I did my part to end this thing.

Demsas: Yeah. So you brought up GiveWell, and there was something really interesting that happened within the GiveWell world. It’s an organization that directs charitable contributions, and importantly for this conversation, they evaluate charities on their effectiveness. And GiveWell and others have often used cash-transfer programs and, in their case, particularly GiveDirectly’s cash-transfer program as the benchmark with which to evaluate other charities. That is, like: How much better is your program than just giving that money directly to people in need? Like, you need to prove that it’d be better for us to pay to set up this whole organization to do anything—vaccinate people, whatever it is—that would be better for people’s outcomes than just giving them cash to do whatever they need to do, including getting vaccinations.

So in 2022, they updated their most effective charities to exclude GiveDirectly, pointing instead to a couple of malaria-prevention programs, a vitamin-A supplementation program, and a vaccine-incentive program in northern Nigeria. At the end of last year, they actually also evaluated the impact of unconditional cash transfers again and found that GiveDirectly was three to four times as cost-effective than they previously estimated, but they still think that those other four charities are significantly more cost-effective than GiveDirectly. Did this evaluation change or affect how you think about GD’s work?

Niehaus: That’s exactly what we wanted to do. I think when we set out to start GiveDirectly, we said cash transfers surely are not the only thing that we should be spending global-development money on, but what’s missing when you look at the sector is a little bit of this gut check of, like, Okay, I think I have a good idea. I think I have evidence. I have all this stuff. Am I confident that I’m better at spending this money than the person who’s actually there, living it, dealing with it, and knows what they need, perhaps better than I do?

And so I just really appreciate that GiveWell have sort of baked that into the way they now evaluate other organizations and sort of the way they think about the world. And I think it’s really good and really important to have an organization like GiveWell that’s out there saying, What can we do that’s actually better than what people living in extreme poverty could do for themselves? Because they can do a lot of really good things for themselves. And the update that you mentioned—the three to four times more effective—I think reflects some of that, as well as taking into account some of the aggregate impacts of the transfers, like the macroeconomic impacts of the transfers.

So in any given year, I think we might make the cut in terms of being on their very top list, or we might not. But I think that way of thinking about the world, which is, like, Yeah, there is some stuff where you need some coordination right there, externalities and public goods and problems like this we need to solve. But, like, our default should always be transfers. I think that’s exactly the right way to think about it.

Demsas: Do you think that more money in the global aid community should be going towards these kinds of public-health programs that GiveWell is doing over cash transfers? Do you agree with their ranking?

Niehaus: It’s a question of: If I were to think about where to give $1—sort of a given finite amount of money—then there’s a strong case for it. I think that the part that they don’t price that we’ve always felt at GiveDirectly is that—I think it’s true that GiveDirectly has contributed, to some extent, to helping to really shift perceptions in the sector more broadly. Cash transfers have now become a big part of how a lot of global-development work is done. And I think there are a lot of other people that now ask this question of, like, Well, we could come in and design a program, try to move outcomes, all this stuff. But are we sure that’s better than just giving money?

So I think if there’s, like, an unpriced part of GiveDirectly’s work that I think isn’t reflected in the GiveWell score, it’s that. And that’s hard to price, and I think we’d all agree with that. So I’m okay with it. But, you know, I don’t think it’s either-or. We should be doing both of these things, and we are.

Demsas: I feel like I’ve cited this, like, five times on the show already, so apologies, listeners who know this already. But it just reminds me a lot of Amartya Sen’s arguments about development as freedom, and that it’s obviously very important to center the literal metrics. Like, are people better off, and can you measure that? And also to realize that there are specific things about—the reason we care about development to begin with is because it gives people access to freedoms. Like, are you free to choose how you want to live your life? Are you free to make decisions for your children, for your family, and be free from discrimination and free from abuse? And that it can’t always be measured, those democratic freedoms. Like, do you feel free to speak your mind about things? It’s hard to show that on a spreadsheet, but that’s important.

And I asked you this earlier because I struggle with this, too, because a lot of the things that I care about, whether it’s gender egalitarianism or the rights of various marginalized groups worldwide, you can see how sometimes a focus on that can move people away from being rigorous about whether their work is actually helping people, because it’s hard to measure those things. Like, you can do surveys, but even those sorts of things are often really riddled with error, whether it’s just, like, people’s perceptions shift or whatever it is. Like, how do you measure whether people are happy on gender-egalitarian grounds? It’s just open questions. And I wonder, like, how do you wrestle with that problem and make sure that you’re able to balance both of those things?

Niehaus: I love what you said. It reminds me of some of the encounters we had in the very earliest days starting GiveDirectly. I remember, in particular, we had a great conversation with Duncan Green, who was at Oxfam at the time, talking about some of the cash-transfer programming they’ve done and talking about some of the things people did with the money that would not show up in any of the metrics.

But that really sort of provoked deep thought about: What is the point of global development? And Amartya Sen, right? Am I really bought into that? Am I okay with that? They found, for example, in one of these programs that a lot of people—there’s a program in Vietnam, and a lot of people use transfers to purchase coffins because for them, culturally, religiously, it was very important to be buried in a coffin and not in an open grave. And that’s not something that I think anybody ever measures in our surveys, right? But what if that’s very important to you? Am I okay with that?

And in my own experiences with GiveDirectly fieldwork, I remember: We interviewed a guy who was part of the basic-income project that we were doing and had worked as a security guard in a town to earn money and send money back to his family, and then who lived in the village. And then when he started getting transfers, he quit that job and moved back, going to live in the village, earn less money but see his kids more often.

Again, that’s going to look like an income reduction in the data that we typically collect. It’s because we aren’t great at measuring things like the quality of your relationships with your kids, which are what I think actually matters in life. So I just think that it’s super, super important to take all of the measurements, the outcome stuff, with a grain of salt and with that humility, and sort of trying to remember that people’s own views on what they want out of their lives are very important if we really take that Senian perspective.

Demsas: It’s funny because there’s a subset of people where I’m like, Okay, yeah, you should take this more seriously. But broadly, I find that when I’m talking to people in the charitable-giving space, it’s like, maybe they’re not taking the effectiveness seriously enough. And it’s like, which message does any individual need to receive?

And kind of on that, we briefly touched on the UN’s goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030. When you look at the global aid and the work that different governments are doing, is the international community largely focused on doing the right thing? What would you change—maybe setting aside what’s going on in the US for a moment—what would you change about how countries, intergovernmental organizations, etcetera are doing to try to actually attack this problem?

Niehaus: Well, it’s a really interesting moment, and I think that actually taking the institutions as given might be a mistake. We might want to actually sort of reimagine the institutions themselves to some extent.

Demsas: You mean, like, the UN?

Niehaus: The whole architecture for aid. So if you take, for example, the UN architecture for humanitarian response, it’s built around these silos that say we’re going to have some organizations that are focused on shelter, some organizations that are focused on food, some organizations that are focused on education, and so forth. And so in a world where service provision is done by NGOs, then you need that specialization, right? Because you need to kind of pick something and be good at it.

In a world where we’re going to give money to individual people and let them decide what they want to do with it, and more of the provision—the service provision—is going to be done through markets, maybe we don’t need that same institutional structure. And in fact, seeing the way that’s played out within the United Nations system as it’s become, in humanitarian work especially, much more receptive to it, I think people now agree that cash transfer should be a much bigger part of humanitarian response. It doesn’t sort of fit very neatly right within that system.

So I think it would be—and John McArthur and Homi Kharas at Brookings sort of suggested this, as well, that it might be a good time for a new multilateral that’s focused on direct transfers. And that would let us think a bit differently, as opposed to trying to fit new wine into old wineskins, so to speak.

But in terms of the things that we would be doing, look—we have 20 years now of really rigorous evidence on cost-effectiveness and impactfulness. And so there are a bunch of things that are fantastic. If you’re wondering, like, Do we know good things to do with money? Yes. We know great things to do in education that are really effective at improving learning outcomes. We know great things to do in public health that reduce disease burdens and improve people’s lives for long periods after that.

And we have cash transfers, which are just a great way of helping people do whatever it is they want to do, and have an enormous evidence base people are using money responsibly. They’re generally not wasting it. They’re generally not using it in self-harm ways, like drinking it away or smoking it away. And in many cases, they’re making investments that have long-lasting impacts on their lives.

So the point is, like, we have so much good stuff to do. And we, up until now, have been doing a lot of stuff that’s really based on old thinking, right? This sort of good-on-paper-type reasoning, “Teach a man to fish” type thinking. And seeing USAID essentially evaporate overnight, obviously it’s sort of a gut-check moment, but I think it’s also an opportunity to rethink how we do the whole thing.

Demsas: Well, I think that’s a great time for our last and final question. Paul, what is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up being just good on paper?

Niehaus: So I would say—and I sort of said this earlier, but—I think that idea of teaching a man to fish is something that when I first heard it made a lot of sense and seemed good on paper. But, like, as we started to test impact over the last 20 years and say, like, What impact do our fishing lessons actually have? I don’t think it works very well; the data don’t support it.

Demsas: We’re bad at teaching people how to fish.

Niehaus: Unpack that a little bit, right? I mean, if you take it a little bit too literally than it’s meant to be, it presumes that the guy doesn’t know how to fish in the first place. Maybe, actually, he did know, and what he needed was a fishing rod. It presumes that the lake isn’t getting overfished, right? Maybe there are tons of people out there fishing, and the big issue is sort of overextraction of natural resources, and we definitely should not be teaching more people to fish, right? It presumes, as you said, right, that we’re good at teaching people how to fish. Maybe we’re not. Maybe it’s hard, and it’s not something that we know how to do well. So there are all these sorts of assumptions baked into it, and that’s why it’s important to test. And you go out and test it, it actually doesn’t.

The other thing that I think is really interesting—I’ll just riff on this a little bit about teaching a man to fish—is the origins of it. So today you hear it, and the way we interpret it is it’s saying, like, Don’t just give people money, because they’re not going to use it in ways that have a lasting benefit. It’s important to kind of help them in these other ways, which I think is just empirically untrue.

But actually, if you trace it back, the first place that I’ve been able to find it, it shows up in this Victorian novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and she has this ironic character in one of her novels saying that the reason that we don’t do these things is because affluent people really don’t want it. They said you could really help somebody make progress, but affluent people would feel uncomfortable with that—it would upend the social order. So it’s funny that the origins of the term are actually this critique of inequality and of people’s unwillingness to—

Demsas: Wow. I’ve never heard that.

Niehaus: But somehow, over time, it’s completely changed. And now the interpretation is: You can’t trust people to make financial choices for themselves. That’s not what it originally meant.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Niehaus: Pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes, edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Jerusalem Demsas.

Thanks again for listening. And keep an ear on this space for when to expect new episodes from Good on Paper.

The Collapse of Feminism

2025-05-06T06:00:00-04:00

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Reports of feminism’s obsolescence have been greatly exaggerated.

As female achievement and visibility increased in higher education, the media, politics, and more, some people grew tired of being lectured by feminists and began to wonder: Do we even need them anymore?

This attitude made up a dominant strain of popular thinking and discussion in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And as the defiant, gritty rage of third-wave feminism scrabbled for purchase, a new era of “girl power” was rising up. As the Atlantic writer Sophie Gilbert tells it in her new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, young women of this time “came to believe that sex was our currency, our objectification was empowering, and we were a joke.”

Gilbert’s book skewers porn, reality TV, and celebrities for their complicity in relegating women to the role of sex object and for warping feminism into a debate over individual choices instead of collective action.

In our conversation on today’s episode of Good on Paper, Gilbert and I discuss postfeminism, explore a defense of the girlboss, and examine the false promise of sexual power.

“What I remember from my own life during this period from the 2000s was that there was only one kind of power that women were being allowed, and that was sexual power,” Gilbert recounts. “And sexual power was everywhere. It was the idea that sex would empower women and that sexual presentation would empower women was in every form of media, and it was impossible to avoid.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: In 1998, Time magazine plastered a jarring provocation across its cover: “Is Feminism Dead?” By century’s end, the term postfeminism had been thoroughly bandied about in academic circles and in the media. Had feminism finished the job? Or maybe people were just tired of feminists. Either way, something had shifted.

Gone were the days of suffragettes and feminist punk rockers. In the dawn of the new millennium, many American women were embracing the empty slogans of “empowerment” and “Girl Power.”

[Music]

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. In all the conversations we’re having around broken dating markets, the rights of trans people, and the growing chasm between young men and women’s political views, I’ve felt a bit lost as to how we got here. The feminism of the ’90s feels so far removed from today. What changed?

My colleague Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert has a new book out called Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. In it, she argues that the shift from ’90s Riot Grrrl grit to Spice Girls’ empty promises of “Girl Power” was turbocharged by online porn, reality-TV aesthetics, and an algorithmic spotlight that rewarded hypersexualized images over everything else.

It’s a really interesting book that I’m so excited to dive into. Sophie, welcome to the show.

Sophie Gilbert: Thank you so much for having me. This is really exciting to be here talking with you.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, congratulations on the book. I feel like it’s a big moment to be writing about feminism. I feel like everyone’s writing about the rise of misogyny and, of course, what’s going on in right-wing governments across the world. But you’re taking us back to my childhood, to the late ’90s, early ’00s. And I was feeling really nostalgic for those days before I read your book and, I mean, I guess that’s just what happens when you get older. You start kind of memory-holing everything that you disliked about your childhood. But you’ve reminded and also recast much of my memory of those times in your new book.

How would you describe the state of feminism in the late ’90s and early ’00s? What made this period of time that you chose to focus on in your book so interesting to you?

Gilbert: Well, originally when I was thinking about the book, I wanted to focus on the 2000s because that was a decade that seemed like where misogyny was really at its sort of febrile peak, should we say. But then I ended up: In my research, so much seemed to lead back to the ’90s. And so I think the ’90s are really fascinating because there was so much that was going on. And especially within feminism, there were all these sorts of debates and shifts happening. There was the evolution of third-wave feminism, which started out, I think, really potent and was very much, like, the Year of the Woman and Anita Hill’s Senate testimony and Riot Grrrl music. And it was sort of ferocious and activist, and it had this real agenda for change.

And then over the course of the ’90s, it kind of made this shift toward postfeminism, and postfeminism was so different. It was so sort of celebratory, and the ethos of it was really like, We’ve accomplished everything that we ever will, women. Don’t worry. Like, you’re free now you have jobs. Go spend money. Like, wear anything you want. Feminism’s boring. Be cool. Wear miniskirts. I’m being glib, but it was sort of very, like, Sex and the City, Ally McBeal energy.

And I sort of have been trying so much to figure out what happened to get from the Riot Grrrls to Britney Spears in her school uniform. And what I landed on was sort of the Spice Girls as the transitional act in the middle, because you had this slogan that was being used by the riot-grrrl movement—the punk musicians in the Pacific Northwest and Washington, D.C.—who were really sort of advocating for safety for women and girls at punk shows, but also, at college, safety from sexual assault. And they had this slogan that was “Girl Power,” which was fascinating because they were trying to put together words that no one would sort of free-associate: girl and power.

And then this slogan, which was very sort of charged, got co-opted by the Spice Girls, and the way that they used it was really fun—and I love the Spice Girls—but it didn’t really stand for anything anymore. It was just kind of, like, this kind of mantra that people said, and it wasn’t sort of advocating for change or anything specific. And the Spice Girls were such good branding mechanisms. They had something like $500 million worth of branding deals in the first year and a half as a band. And when people saw how much money you could make with very fun, beautiful women in pop, that was sort of the beginning of the end for feisty women in music.

Demsas: I have this trouble with cultural criticism, because it’s not what I do. This is mostly a policy show. And I’m always like, Okay, well, how do I know something? Like, is there a study? Is there something I can point to that feels concrete? Can I draw inferences from data? And the thing about cultural criticism is that it takes just absorbing a lot of qualitative material, that it’s very difficult to categorize in some objective way, and then to make arguments based on that, that are often very contested. But it’s not a computer. Like, a computer will not be able to just resolve these things for us in the way that hopefully we’ll be able to resolve some scientific questions in other fields.

And so I wanted to ask you, like, when you’re thinking through these sorts of questions—like, How did feminism change?—what are these inflection points in feminism? How do I describe what’s going differently in the early ’90s versus the late ’90s and the mid-’00s? How do you determine that things are actually trends versus something that you’re just noticing, maybe because it’s your media diet? How do you think through that problem?

Gilbert: It’s such a good question, because I think so much of what was appealing to me about this sort of period of research and study with the book was reading between the lines a bit and, like, trying to detect patterns and things that maybe weren’t so studied or weren’t so obvious or hadn’t been talked about so much. That was the thing that was really thrilling.

This period has also been studied a lot by different kinds of academic researchers. And so there were some really helpful books and some really thoughtful analysis of the period that was helpful to me. But also, I think, for myself—I don’t want to be like, So much depends on vibes, but you can tell that there is a vibe shift from the riot-grrrl movement to the Spice Girl movement. Like, it’s different. It’s sort of anodyne compared with what came before it.

Demsas: Yeah. So as you mentioned, you framed the book as reckoning with postfeminism, this idea that feminism’s work was done; women could just enjoy the spoils. But I wonder, postfeminism is a very deeply contested term. Could you help refine that down for us a bit?

Gilbert: Yeah, I mean, it’s tricky, right? Because postfeminism was sort of something that people kind of interpreted from the outside. There was no figurehead waving the flag. In many ways, postfeminism, I think now, seemed to be a mechanism to sell things, more than anything else. But there was very much this idea that was sort of spread in the media in different forms of media that people were tired of feminism; people were tired of the sort of scolding, boring, serious, blue-stocking era of second-wave feminism. And they wanted something sort of fresher and newer for the new millennium.

What was really interesting to me, in researching my book, was the influence of the AIDS crisis, because I hadn’t been anticipating that, but it was obviously this moment of profound anxiety and fear, especially regarding sex. And that impact was felt in culture in very different ways. And one of the ways was this sort of movement of what we now call sex positivity, where artists like Madonna felt like in this moment of fear, it was really important for people to be able to still celebrate sex—like, celebrate what it meant to people, what a source of joy it could be, what a source of meaning in people’s lives. So there were shows—like, HBO’s Real Sex was sort of born out of this impulse to defend sex as a pastime, not that sex has ever really needed defending, but to sort of be able to find space in media to portray it in a way that was not so fearful and so afraid.

But what that meant was: Suddenly, the ’90s were just this, like, very sexually —explicit is not the right word, but this era that was sort of defined by sex in different ways. Like, Bill Clinton—I mean, we’d never thought about a president in a sexual context before, or maybe people had, but they kept it to themselves.

Demsas: (Laughs.) Yeah.

Gilbert: But there was sort of the era of the tabloids, of Hugh Grant being arrested for soliciting in Los Angeles and all these scandals that were, like, John Wayne Bobbitt—all these scandals that were very sexual in nature. And I remember asking my parents about them and being, like, in the awkward silences at the breakfast table when they tried to figure out how much they could actually explain. But the ’90s were this decade more than ever before that was really consumed by sex. And how that fed through, I think, to feminism was: It just became so much easier, I think, with this real glut of sexual imagery in media—it just became so much easier to persuade women that was their source of power, especially heading into a new millennium, heading into this new era.

I start the book in 1999, when I was 16 years old, which was the year when you had “Baby One More Time” coming out. You had American Beauty, which was this movie about a middle-aged man with a mad crush on his teenage daughter’s best friend. And that won five Oscars, so it’s hardly fringe product. And you also had that year that Abercrombie & Fitch catalog came out, which was targeting, I think, 18-year-olds, and it had an interview with Jenna Jameson. It was just like everything in that moment was highly eroticized. And I think what was happening was: This sort of movement to celebrate sex had become commercialized in a way that I think in the 2000s made it much easier to exploit people, especially women.

Demsas: So you are describing this sort of cultural shift, and I wonder how much of it you attribute to technological changes. In the book, you talk about how these gossip blogs and social media really contribute to this culture of exploitation and objectification of women. You’re talking about this as kind of a reaction to what’s happening with people’s fatigue with second-wave feminism and fatigue with being scolded and frustration with the difficulties around celebrating sex in the AIDS crisis.

But would all of this just have happened, regardless, once you have easily accessible digital cameras and you have the internet and you have information technology so people can transmit these little news items really quickly. Is it technology that is really driving all of this?

Gilbert: This is where we need the study, you see, because we’ll never know. I mean, there were so many elements at play, but what was fascinating to me—and I sort of never had really thought about this before, because I’m not a historian of porn—was just how much porn as a cultural medium really exploded from the late ’80s onward.

I mean, there’s a statistic in the book, I think—especially if you think about VHS, like, even before the internet. I remember naively, like, going to Blockbuster and renting VHS tapes, and you probably maybe do too. It was like this technology that just felt very normal, but I think when VHS was first launched, 75 percent of the tapes at launch were pornographic. Like, it was basically just a mechanism for people to watch sex in their own homes. And from 1985 to 1996, porn rentals per year on VHS went from 70 million to something like 700 million. It was just this huge increase in the number of people watching porn. And then the internet happened. And it was, obviously—it’s hard to quantify. But imagine—

Demsas: The internet was for porn. (Laughs.)

Demsas: Yeah, I know. (Laughs.) The earliest issue of Wired in the mid-’90s, I think, was acknowledging how the internet already was just, like, this home for smut. And so I think you had this sort of shadow cultural product that was really America’s, like, No. 1 pastime at that point, but no one was really talking about it. There were jokes about it, and obviously its influence was very much being felt in culture as time went by. But it’s just so interesting to me that you could have something be so influential and so popular, but no one’s really analyzing it or kind of getting into the weeds of what it’s doing to people.

Demsas: Yeah. I mean, you wrote in the book that you just kept coming back to porn. Do you think that porn is inherently anti-feminist?

Gilbert: No. No, I don’t. And I especially know that there are filmmakers now who are making their best efforts to make feminist porn. And there are certainly really interesting things happening in the romance fiction market, which I know is not porn. But it’s sort of similarly aligned.

Demsas: Some of these things, they’re close. They’re quite close. (Laughs.)

Gilbert: But it’s interesting, right, because it’s so different. Romantic fiction has always been made for women. Whereas porn, I would argue, has always historically, with a very few exceptions, been made for men. And so if you compare the two, you can see how the people that they’re being made for influences the product itself.

And I think what was interesting to me about porn, without condemning it, is just tracing how extreme it became, especially over the course of the late ’90s and the 21st century—because mainstream media was becoming so heavily sexualized that porn had to become more transgressive to persuade people to pay for it. Otherwise, why watch porn when you can see the same thing on HBO, you know what I mean? So that was really driving this trend towards much more extreme and much more, in some ways, cruel and more violent content that I deal with in one chapter of the book.

Demsas: There are thinkers like the controversial Camille Paglia who might say something like, Sexual imagery is liberating, and women are strong enough to handle them, and the real problem is seeing prudery and women as passive victims. And she’s criticized anti-porn feminists as being anti-sex. How do you respond to those who argue that porn, strip clubs can be venues of women’s empowerment? And of course, like, as you’ve said, it’s not that you don’t think that theoretically they can’t be. But in the instantiation that they have, in reality at this time period you’re studying, it seems like a lot of people might push back and say like, Yes, there’s degradation, but empowerment is much more a theme that they’re witnessing. They’re also saying, like, Women do have the choice to opt out of these situations. So how do you respond to those kinds of critiques?

Gilbert: Well, the word empowerment is really interesting to me because whenever I encountered it in my research, it was being used to defend something that was absolutely not about giving women power, like Wonderbras. I think when they first launched, everyone was like, Wonderbras are empowering. Like, I’m sure people have defended corsets and lip gloss as being empowering.

I mean, there was a torture porn movie that came out in the 2000s starring Elisha Cuthbert, and there was a very sort of controversial ad campaign for it that depicted her being bound and tortured, and even in some of the images, like, her body, her dead body. There was this massive reaction to the campaign, and one of the producers of the film was like, Well, she fights back in the movie. This movie’s actually about female empowerment.

And so I’ve sort of become very suspicious now whenever I find this word, because it seems to be such a tell in so many ways. And what I would say is: Of course, women have the right to present themselves any way they want and to feel empowered and act any way they want and behave anywhere. That’s the point of feminism. It’s not to judge other women or to condemn them or to restrict their choices. It’s to offer people more choice and more freedom.

But I would just say that what I remember from my own life during this period from the 2000s was that there was only one kind of power that women were being allowed, and that was sexual power. And sexual power was everywhere. It was the idea that sex would empower women and that sexual presentation would empower women was in every form of media, and it was impossible to avoid. And we absorbed it. Of course we did, inherently. And the issue I have with that is not that sexual power isn’t real and can’t make someone feel powerful, but it’s the absence of all other kinds of power, like the distraction of what sexual power promises. And what I’ve come to think of much more as I enter my midlife period now, in my 40s, I’m much more interested in other kinds of power.

Demsas: Well, to push on this a little bit more, because you brought up romance novels as something that’s being made for women. I’m hoping you can help tease out how you distinguish things that are actually venues for women to express themselves sexually and have access to their sexual identity, and ones that you view as primarily exploitative. Because a lot of these romance novels are extremely violent. They’re indulging in fantasies where, if they were depicted on a screen and the director was a man, I could imagine it being criticized in your book. So how do you distinguish between these two types of things?

Gilbert: I think I must be reading different kinds of romance novels, because—

Demsas: Well, look at, like, Fifty Shades of Gray or things like that, where it’s kind of dominating.

Gilbert: Oh God—

Demsas: I mean, those are very, very popular.

Gilbert: Yeah. I mean, the difference, I would say, between romantic fiction and porn is that romantic fiction—and I’ve written about it for The Atlantic in the past, defending it, because it’s always been condemned as trash, as fodder for maids to read, scullery maids—but the difference is that romantic fiction sees women as full-bodied human beings with consciousnesses and who are deserving of dignity and kindness and respect. And that doesn’t mean in scenes of a sexual nature that those things always adhered to. But porn, I would say, does not. And that’s the difference.

There was actually a really interesting argument from the sociologist Alice Evans that I found about a year ago, and she found that one of the best predictors of how a society—and a society in a different country or a different era—how it treats women and what kind of status women enjoy in that society is the importance that society places on romantic love. And so cultures that are more inclined to celebrate romance are more inclined to see women as human beings and to think of them as worthy of respect and dignity and kindness. So once you see that, it’s very hard to unsee.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: in defense of the girlboss.

[Break]

Demsas: I know that your book is not about what should be done about this, but what do you think should be done about porn? I mean, is this something where you view the need for governmental action and intervention here? Because there’s always this tension between How much coercion do we want in these spaces? and Is the free marketplace actually ending up coercing us anyway without that government intervention? Not that you need to lay out a specific policy agenda, but do you think that the government should step in and regulate what types of porn is allowed? Like, do you view that as possible in a place where the government struggles to really hem in the internet?

Gilbert: It’s so funny because I was just listening to your episode on this, and it really did make it sound like, Oh, there’s not really a lot to be done here. I mean, the things that are so crucial, I think, are the things that are maybe the hardest to implement—and I don’t think that means people shouldn’t try, because if you don’t try, nothing will ever change.

And I think that means better education, better media education for teenagers. I know there’s a significant movement now among my fellow parents to not give children phones until they turn 14 and to keep them off social media as long as possible. And I have two 4-year-olds, and the idea of them being on the internet is the most scary thing in the entire world. So I’ll check in 10 years and let you know how that’s going.

But, I mean, so much of it relies on people being willing to think critically about what they consume, and that’s not always possible. But also, at this point, it just feels like the genie’s out of the bottle with so much content. I do think there are filmmakers like Erika Lust who are really doing their best to make feminist porn that treats performers ethically and is much more curious about female desire and treating women not just as objects. But as far as the legislative aspect of it, I mean, I know in my home country, in the U.K., they’re making great efforts now to try and make porn and all kinds of content less available to children. So it’ll be interesting to see how that pans out.

Demsas: One thing I find interesting in your book is: I was trying to identify the villains. I was trying to go through and be like, Okay, who does Sophie think are all the bad people? And there’s some obvious ones, like Harvey Weinstein, etcetera and other misogynists who have committed crimes against women. But one thing that I see is that you don’t let women off the hook, right? Was it bell hooks who said, “Patriarchy has no gender”? Meaning that women can uphold sexist culture and do uphold sexist culture just as much as men. And of course, the title of your book, Girl on Girl, and the subtitle, which specifically points to how we’ve turned against ourselves. How do you think about the question of female agency?

Because sometimes I hear from people who push back on this argument, saying, Okay, it’s like feminists want to have it both ways. Like, both you are put upon by society, and also, We’re victimizing you by not giving you the voice in describing how power is actually distributed in society. Do you have pushback on women’s complicity here? Like, are we just doing this to ourselves? And the question is just: When will we stop?

Gilbert: No, we are not. I mean, I think people complicate arguments so much. I’ve heard from so many women who are like, I’m not a feminist, because I like men. And I’m like, No, I like men too. I have a husband. I have a son. My boss is pretty great. Like, there’s all kinds of men who—that makes it sound like I’m saying, Some of my best friends are men. (Laughs.)

Demsas: (Laughs.) Not all men.

Gilbert: But the point is not to be anti-men or that it’s a zero-sum game. The point is just: Do we think that women are equal human beings, and do we want women to have equal opportunities? And the answer to both of those, for me, obviously, is yes. And I don’t know—everything else just feels like muddling up people’s thinking.

The complicity of women is an interesting idea because women are not a monolith, and we never will be. And we’ll always have different motivations and different backgrounds, and we’ll always want different things, and we’ll always, in some ways, be in conflict. But I don’t know—I just think there was this real shift in feminism in the 21st century towards a more individualist outlook, and it has not made anything better. And I think if we are going to try to change things in the years to come, we have to start thinking more collectively and to think about what we can do that will benefit not just ourselves and not just our circle, but all women—like, what we can do that will really make a tangible difference in women’s lives.

Demsas: It’s funny. I was reading your book, and I was nodding along to so much stuff and then I got to—you critique individualism and girlboss feminism. And I’ve begun recently feeling a bit defensive of girlboss, individual feminism. And I’m not saying that it’s, like, a holistic solution or anything, but I feel like there is this trend now where, in order to recognize structural critiques, we’re, in essence, reducing our own individual agency. I mean, the research has shown repeatedly a positive relationship between having an internal locus of control and better mental health.

So like, do you believe that outcomes and misfortune are largely driven by your own actions and choices and abilities, or external ones, like powerful people or chance? And internal locus of control is much better for mental health. And it may not be true, right? It may just be, like, a lie that we tell ourselves.

But at the same time, I really remember coming into contact with a bunch of arguments when I was in late high school, early college in particular, around reframing interactions that I had, that I’m now understanding like, Oh, this was tinged with misogyny. I’m re-understanding and contextualizing all of these dynamics that I’ve noticed and have stuck with me. And it didn’t make me feel better. Like, it didn’t make me more capable of fighting back. I actually felt a lot worse for a serious period of time. And it may have been true, right?

But anyway, I say all that to say, like, I do wonder if there’s some compatibility here. Like, yes, of course, collective action is needed, but having this sort of “lean in” energy, girl-boss energy may actually help individual women navigate their own lives.

Gilbert: Yeah, I guess I don’t think it’s an either/or situation. I think they’re very compatible. I mean, if I had really believed in collective effort to the extent of everything, I probably would not have written a book. Obviously, I can’t stand here and say that I don’t have my own career ambitions and my own—

Demsas: You’re girlbossing right now.

Gilbert: I am. We are both girlbossing. We should change the name of this podcast and write a new book, #girlbosses. But, like, the thinking strategically needs to be more inclusive. And that doesn’t mean that we can’t and we shouldn’t all have our own dreams and our own goals and our own ability to sort of feel empowered—there’s that word; oh my God—our ability to feel in control of our own lives and to feel like we’re able to make differences.

But in terms of feminism’s ambitions more broadly, it’s so powerful to me whenever you can sense that. And I’m going to use an absurd example here, but I remember I was so depressed after Roe v. Wade was overturned, and I remember going to see the Barbie movie in my little pink jacket. And it just felt so lonely. I felt so isolated. I felt so feeble in so many ways, and there was just something about seeing all the other women in their little pink jackets that made me feel like, Oh, maybe I’m not alone. Maybe there’s some way that we can harness this, like, group energy. And I know that protests are really good for that, too—which obviously, we are not allowed to do, because we’re journalists. But protests, I think—just that sense of feeling connected with other people for a shared goal can be so powerful and so inspirational.

Demsas: So what we need to do is get everyone on board to a Lean In book club, and then we’ll have it. (Laughs.)

So amid a lot of the doom, you do point to Taylor Swift as a hero, which I was a little bit surprised about. I’m a big Taylor Swift fan. I went to see her concert. But I think often she’s at the receiving end of a lot of criticism around feminism. Can you elaborate what makes her kind of an emblem of progress?

Gilbert: Well, she was really interesting to me because she emerged as an artist in this, like, wasteland of music in 2005, 2006, 2007—where, to go back and watch some of the videos now, as I did for research, is a really interesting experiment, because it’s like Fergie, “Buttons,” Pussycat Dolls. It’s a lot of, like, kind of dull rap music about strip clubs, and it’s, like, all the songs are like, Smack that, tap that, hit that, laffy taffy. It was just a lot of very objectifying, which—and those songs slap.

But put collectively, shall we say—I mean, my point with this book is never to indict anything individually. It’s more to point out patterns and themes that are maybe interesting when you look at them. And Taylor Swift came into this very sort of gloomy environment, and she just asserted her interiority, and it was this real force of feeling and emotion, and she’s never shied away from writing about—I mean, obviously, she’s not the first person to do it. It’s a grand tradition in music.

But she’s always—even the way that she tells stories about her own life and the way she sort of incorporates things, it sort of aligned with this movement of first-person confession in writing for women in the 2010s that, to me, was really fascinating. Because the 2000s was such a period of tearing women apart, raking them over the coals, criticizing them, dehumanizing them. And then suddenly, you had this movement of artists and writers coming along who felt the need to kind of just express themselves and really, like, unburden themselves on the page and in songs, and to kind of defend themselves as thinking, feeling human beings.

Demsas: I mean, this kind of leads to sort of a more meta question about cultural commentary in general. And obviously, you’re not saying in your book that all anyone needs to do is do cultural criticism and make better art. But your book leans heavily into focusing on media, music, and fashion. And what is the value of investigating those sorts of things—in looking at Taylor Swift lyrics, in interpreting feminism? Like, why not focus just on what’s going on in labor rights? Like, you talked about Roe v. Wade—like, why did you not become inspired to just write about abortion rights and the ways in which that’s shifting in society? So why do you view this as a valuable way to do feminist critique?

Gilbert: Because it’s where most women are. And the culture that especially women consume has always been derided as trash. Especially if you look at something like reality television, no one cared to really—I mean, there are academics who have—but its influence has never really been given the study that it deserves, I would say, because people don’t want to think about it seriously. They think it’s a kind of absurd thing, like silly little shows that women watch on Sunday nights. But they’re massively influential. And the ideas about beauty, about bodies, about friendships, about relationships, about power, about money, about careers—like, they atomize out all these different ideas into the mainstream, and we, the consumers, absorb them even if we don’t watch those shows.

Like, everyone knows who Kim Kardashian is. And I remember writing about her in 2014, back in The Atlantic, and I would get these furious emails from people like, This is the magazine of Emerson and Twain; like, how dare you lower yourself to write about this trashy woman? But she, I would argue, now is one of the most powerful women in the world and certainly one of the most influential. And so if you want to look at what’s happening to women, there are certain people who really can embody it, who can embody those shifts, and who can sort of show you not just what’s happened but also what might be coming.

Demsas: So your book and much of this conversation has just really been focused on this time period, the early ’00s, in particular. But I want to ask what you think about more modern shifts, particularly in the post-#MeToo era. So there’s this idea that Simone de Beauvoir had about this master myth around an unattainable ideal that women are supposed to reach. And this ideal-woman myth, in her telling, was: You had to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother, a muse. In the early ’00s, you kind of have this sense of the perfect muse is this extremely waifish, beautiful, sexy girl who bears herself out to the world, never ages above, like, 17 years old. What does that ideal woman look like now?

Gilbert: Oh God. I mean, I think I write about Fleabag in the book as being this, like, satire of a woman who just cannot get to grips with what women are supposed to be. Because she doesn’t feel powerful. She doesn’t feel like a girlboss. She can’t identify as a career woman or as a sexy lingerie-wearing dominatrix. Like, she just cannot feel at home with mass portrayals of womanhood.

And I think, to use some recent examples, there is so much in recent media that is so much better than things used to be. And I think about movies as an example— like, the 2000s were just this decade where there really weren’t many movies about women for women. Every movie seemed to fail the Bechdel Test. I mean, women, if they appeared at all, they were sex objects or they were scolds, or they were boring girlfriends who were getting in the way of the fun trip to Vegas or whatever. It was just this complete lack of curiosity and interest in women’s lives.

Whereas now, like, I think about the Golden Globes and the Oscars this year: Like, you had these women in their 40s, 50s, 60s doing the most interesting performances of their careers and exploring subjects like beauty culture and aging and motherhood and all these, like, really rich stories being made for and by women. And they’re complicated. They’re hard to parse. But they were so much more compelling than a lot of what’s come before.

But I would say the thing that sometimes gives me pause is that even though there are so many women now who are allowed to be visible in their 40s and 50s and 60s, they’re only allowed to be visible under certain terms, right? Like, they’re all gorgeous, they’re all immaculately well-preserved, they don’t seem to age, and sometimes the sort of uncannyness of that, it’s always the tension that I’m always stuck on. Like, it is incredible to have more visibility for women in midlife and even late in life. But if the bargain is that we have to present ourselves always in the same kind of girlish way, what does it mean?

Demsas: How do you kind of put together this view of women’s power being so focused on their physical appearance and that’s kind of the only realm of power, as you said, that women are allowed to have. How does that fit in with existing narratives around women’s educational attainment now exceeding that of men’s?

Of course, women’s purchasing power is really high. As you talk about in your book, a lot of postfeminism, a lot of this era of American feminism—or Western feminism, that is—is focused on things that you can buy, which I think reflects the purchasing power that women have gained in recent decades. So it does feel like there’s a lot more gains that have been made in material realms but that those material changes have actually perpetuated the misogyny rather than freeing women from it?

Gilbert: It’s interesting because one of the things I think that really changed portrayals of women in media from sort of the late ’90s onwards was the discovery by corporations that teenage girls had lots of pocket money. They had babysitting money, and they didn’t have mortgages, so they could go to the mall at the weekends and they could buy things, and they would buy things because they had extra cash, and they were this very powerful demographic. And of course, that changed culture because you needed different kinds of people to sell them products and different kinds of imagery to make them want to buy products. And so that’s a lot of where the Britneys and the Christinas came from.

I think what I come to at the end of the book—I interviewed Tom Perrotta at The Atlantic Festival a few years ago, and he, of course, wrote Election, the book that was made into a movie with Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick. And Tracy Flick has forever been our kind of icon of female political ambition. And Tom said that he was sort of surprised by that, but then somebody—it occurred to him at some point that there just weren’t other cultural portrayals of women seeking out political power or women politicians even in general. And that’s why I think when we have this stereotype of the sort of grasping ambitious political blonde, it’s Tracy, it’s Leslie Knope, it’s Hillary Clinton even. Because there’s just this real void of cultural considerations of women who want power and use power and have power.

So I think one of the things that I’m really interested in, people sort of say, Oh, why don’t you have more solutions in the book? And I think, at the end, I actually do. I think one of the solutions I would suggest is just different kinds of storytelling about women, and especially about women in power that sort of try to make the ideas less divergent—and I guess it does come back to “Girl Power” in the end and, like, the idea that these are two words that shouldn’t go together—but more really thoughtful, really intellectual. And that doesn’t mean that women would be necessarily so much more gracious with power than men. And I think some of the most interesting writers and thinkers out there don’t take that for granted at all. But just more understanding, more sort of creative thinking about what it might mean for women to have power and to wield it.

Demsas: I think that’s a great time for our last and final question: Sophie, what is something you once thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Gilbert: I don’t know if this will be controversial or completely noncontroversial, because to me, I think: social media.

Demsas: Yeah, yeah.

Gilbert: Maybe people have said this before.

Demsas: No, but it’s a good one. What happened?

Gilbert: I don’t know. I just feel like we’ve lost the ability to relate to each other and to connect with each other. And I think about so many—especially, like, living in London now—so many of my friendships, so many of my work relationships, so many of my, like, really critical friendships, they’re all sort of online. Like, I don’t really call my friends on the phone anymore, because I’m that elder millennial who would rather die than leave a voicemail. And I feel like I’m in touch with people, because I see these pictures of them and their kids online, but it’s not real.

And I think one of the things—especially after COVID, it was just so much harder to have conversations with people in real life. And you, obviously, will have the studies to show the sort of very tangible effects that social media has had on people’s lives and what it does to us in so many ways. But thinking just purely about human beings relating to human beings, I’m not so sure that it’s a force for good.

Demsas: I’m so cross-pressured on social media, and I think partially it’s because, like, once everyone starts saying something, I’m just like, I don’t know. Like, maybe everyone’s wrong. But like, I also just think back, and there’s so many people who I genuinely would not have interacted with or known about or, like, heard their ideas or arguments if there was not some vector for them to speak louder than they had the ability or power or time to do. And it’s just—I don’t know. Like, obviously, the things that are bad, I think it’s, like, fried my brain, you know what I mean? So that’s not good.

But I just really feel like we’re—maybe not you in particular, but as a culture, I worry that we’re overshooting the harms here sometimes. And I just remember there was a big moment during the Arab Spring when everyone was like, This is going to be—it’s possible now for people to organize protests and shifts with social media, and that obviously did not turn out well.

Gilbert: It’s really interesting. I’ve been reading Careless People, the Facebook memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, and she sort of charts the evolution of Facebook from that really hopeful period, where she was like, Facebook is going to change the world, to what actually happened and the sort of real atrocities that she writes about Facebook being involved in one way or another.

And I don’t know. I’m like you. I mean, it has elevated so many different kinds of voices that have been so beneficial to my life and to my work. It’s just, it’s not as real as the communities that I have now, like around my children’s school and my children’s friends. And I think being a part now of a very real three-dimensional, tangible community of people who are actually there to pick up your kids if you are stuck or to help you if you have a doctor’s appointment or, like—I don’t know. There’s a guy who saves a loaf of bread for me in the morning. Like, stuff like that. It sounds so medieval. It sounds so, like, Gilmore Girls.

Demsas: It’s like an American’s version of, like, what we expect is going on in the U.K.

Gilbert: Yeah, seriously. My bread man. But you actually feel this is a real community, and that’s not to devalue online communities. Like, it can be profoundly powerful and helpful, but I’d find the real iteration of it so much more important to my life.

[Music]

Demsas: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Sophie.

Gilbert: Thank you. It was so nice to talk to you. I’m so sad that we still haven’t met because I’m so far away. But I hope we will very soon.

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

The New Divide in American Marriage

2025-04-29T06:00:00-04:00

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Marriage isn’t dying, but it is stratifying.

Dating and marriage markets have transformed as more women have gone to college and the share of college graduates has skewed more female. Some observers have concluded that this imbalance has left highly educated women unable to find men to marry.

Not so. In a new paper cleverly titled “Bachelors without Bachelor’s,” the economists Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelmann find that “the share of marriages where the wife has a four-year degree but the husband does not has quadrupled.” Contrary to popular narratives, marriage rates for educated women have remained remarkably stable.

So who isn’t getting married? Well, a growing share of non-college-educated women. On today’s episode of Good on Paper, Goldman, an assistant professor of economics and public policy at Cornell University, joins me to discuss what his findings reveal about the state of American marriage.

One clue as to why marriage rates for non-college-educated women declined so steeply over the 20th century is revealed when you look at a map of marriage rates. In areas where men have the lowest rate of bad outcomes such as incarceration or unemployment, the marriage gap between college-educated and non-college-educated women is 50 percent smaller.

But what—if anything—is to be done? Although some commentators urge people to “just get married,” Goldman remains skeptical (as do I): Say we had some technology to put the marriage rate from 60 percent to 70 percent. “Would that be ‘good’? Goldman wondered. “People still say they really want to be married and it’s an important thing they want to achieve in life. But when they’re not doing it, I think there’s serious questions we have to ask about why, and are folks able to find the right match?”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: Women are so picky. We’re gold diggers who want to marry up and would never deign to marry someone less educated than us.

If you’re on the internet or just a human being alive today, you’ve heard something along the lines of this narrative: College-educated women refuse to date “down,” and it’s creating a crisis of marriagelessness.

There’s just one problem with this narrative: It’s not true.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

Joining me today is Benny Goldman. He’s a professor of economics at Cornell and the co-author of a fascinating paper chock-full of narrative violations about the dating and marriage markets. Benny shows that rates of marriage for college-educated women, as they’ve faced difficulties finding a partner at the same education level, have remained relatively stable. How? Because they’re marrying men without college degrees.

But what’s happening to women with the least education? If you look at the 25th percentile of the education distribution, roughly three-quarters of women born in 1930 were married. Zoom forward to women born in 1980, and just over half of them are married now. That’s a big drop.

What’s causing declining marriage rates among non-college-educated women? Well, a big part of the answer seems to be the difficulty in finding a suitable partner. Benny’s research shows that in places where men have the lowest rates of joblessness and incarceration, the marriage gap between college and non-college-educated women shrinks. In these places, that marriage gap is 50 percent smaller.

Let’s dive in. Benny, welcome to the show!

Benny Goldman: Thank you so much for having me, Jerusalem. I appreciate you taking the time.

Demsas: Yeah, I’m excited to talk about your paper. I mean, not only does it have a great name, which we’ll get into, but I think this is just like a hot topic in general. So let’s start extremely broad and in a place where I’m sure you can give us definitive answers: What do people look for in a partner? Let’s put aside the spark or whatever. When you look at marriage markets from an economist’s lens, what variables explain which people end up together?

Goldman: Great. So the first thing I’d say here is definitely don’t turn to economists for dating advice. I think the economics view on marriage and couples, it’s nothing you need a fancy degree to understand. I think in many ways it will be intuitive to most folks, right?

So you can think about gains from scale. So just something like rent or housing—it’s certainly not twice as expensive to get a home for two people as it is for one person. You don’t need twice the size. You can think about housework. You can think about cooking and preparing meals. So I think there’s gains to scale from being in a couple.

There’s also, I think, an important insurance element. So, you know, if someone falls on hard times, if your partner or spouse loses work or has a decline in their income, the other partner can help them kind of shelter or smooth over that period. And finally, as I think many folks, including Melissa Kearney and others, have documented, there’s benefits to raising a child in a two-parent household where you can split up some of the work. Of course, historically, much of that has fallen on women and remains a big issue for gender equality in the labor market. But it certainly seems much, much easier to raise a kid with two people rather than one.

Demsas: So I think that’s why a lot of people want to get married. But I think one thing that I find interesting is just how deterministic it feels, who you end up with. I mean, this is something you find in your paper, too, but there are certain characteristics that make you more likely to end up with someone, right?

Goldman: Absolutely. So in econ parlance, this is what, going back to [Gary] Becker, one would call “assortative mating.” And at first, it was a puzzle. So you can think about this along many dimensions. You can think about income. You could think about education. You could even think about race. And it is, in some sense, a theoretical puzzle.

For instance, would we expect folks to partner with individuals at the same level of income? It’s not, ex ante, so obvious, right? Because you might think that for folks who have higher income, they might want to partner with someone who has less to gain from being in the labor market and might be able to spend more time with children or, you know, working—

Demsas: Or might just care less.

Goldman: Might just care less. It might be a less important part of their life and how they view themselves. But I think in practice, time and time again, when one goes to the data, you really see what we would call “positive assortative matching,” which is people tend to match with likes. You know, so educated folks tend to be married to other educated folks. Higher-earning folks tend to be married to other higher-earning folks.

And I think in addition to just marriage rates overall, this notion of who matches with whom is an important feature for the landscape of inequality in the U.S., both within and across generations, right? If all the haves, if you will, are matching up with each other from the perspective of kids, you’re in a situation where either you have two parents who are both high income, and so you’re growing up in a really well-resourced environment, or you end up with two lower-income parents or even one parent. And so you can see how these matches could end up propagating inequality across generations in this way.

Demsas: Yeah, there was a paper I read several months ago—I’m blanking on who wrote it, but we’ll put it in the show notes—that showed that the collective influence of partner selection on household-income inequality led to a three-point increase in the Gini coefficient, which is a pretty significant impact on inequality. Because if you see increased numbers of rich people marrying rich people, and you don’t see rich people marrying middle-income people or marrying poor people, then you don’t see that kind of income inequality declining over time. You don’t see that wealth spreading around. I had no idea that it had such a big impact, though.

Goldman: Of course, and I think, you know—who knows. Three percent, that might be hard to get some intuition on, but another way to come at that same problem is to ask, Well, how has inequality changed in the U.S. you know, in the past 40 or 50 years in terms of the Gini coefficient? And I think when you take that frame, there’s a lot of folks working on this question of what percentage of the rise in overall inequality in the U.S. can be attributed to the fact that people tend to match with likes or people are increasingly matching with likes over time.

Demsas: And do you happen to know how that’s changed?

Goldman: I think the estimates vary a lot. So one challenge conceptually in this space is the fact that often, you know, if you have a very high-income spouse, especially as is more common for women, you’ll drop out or retreat from the labor force after the birth of a child. That makes it difficult to measure total household potential income, if you will, because you might see a lower level of income that reflects choices, in a sense. And it’s important to think about that in computing the overall accounting, in terms of how much of this type of matching contributes to inequality.

Demsas: Yeah. So I’ve held a pretty unpopular opinion for a while that dating apps are net positive, and part of why I believe that is, theoretically, they expand the dating pool significantly, and it means that you’re more likely to run into more people. It’s not just, you know, Do you go to the same church or synagogue as me, or your dad and my dad or friends? And a few pieces of evidence bolstered my opinion that dating apps were increasing partnerships across unexpected lines. So in 1967, roughly 3 percent of newlyweds were in interracial marriages. That’s 17 percent in 2015. The census says that in 2022, 19 percent of married opposite-sex couples were interracial.

Similarly, you have another story with interfaith marriages. Eighty-one percent of couples married before 1960 were to someone of the same religion. And in 2010 to 2014, that was down to 61 percent. And to me, these trends kind of felt like a proxy for people being willing to date those who were different than them—whether that meant considering someone of different race or national origin or religion.

But it seems like this was, like, missing something important about how dating apps—and, also, just how dating is changing, in general—were facilitating matching on other metrics more easily. Can you tell us about that? Why do you think there’s this divergence between what you measure, which is mostly kind of class markers, versus these other markers?

Goldman: Yeah, absolutely. I think one caveat to have in mind when thinking about trends in those interracial-marriage statistics is how the population of mixed-race individuals is evolving over time. So the U.S. is becoming more diverse. In some sense, you would expect an increase in interracial marriage just because there’s now more people. It’s harder, in some sense—if you take it from the perspective of white Americans, it’s more difficult to marry someone who’s exclusively white these days, because it’s just a smaller share of the overall population. And so I think there’s some nuance there in terms of how much of that is kind of a true change in people’s attitudes versus just a constraint in terms of who’s around. And in many ways, I think it varies by the particular pairing you’re looking at.

So for instance, there’s been substantial increases in white–Black interracial marriage in the U.S., but the overall rate remains persistently pretty low. So I think at something like age 35, it would be about only 3 percent of Black Americans are married to a white spouse, which is still pretty low relative to the size of the Black and white populations in the U.S.

In terms of dating apps themselves, I think the jury is still out. As you mentioned, a lot of these trends in interracial pairings are long-running trends. And to the extent they sharply increased around the time that dating apps got introduced, I think, is still an open question. One reason I might be a little skeptical of the fact that dating apps have generated a substantial increase in marrying across types, if you will, is that geography actually plays a really important role in who you see on the app. And we just have a ton of segregation geographically.

So one anecdotal story about this I like to tell is: I recently was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is just about a mile and a half away from Boston, which is right across the Charles River. And many of my friends would say, Oh, I don’t go on dates in Boston. It’s simply not worth it. The marginal date is just not good enough to justify it. So in practice, if you’re dating only amongst the pool of Cambridge residents, where Harvard and MIT are located, you’re going to draw from an extremely educated pool of folks who are likely to be similar to you in many dimensions. So I’m deeply interested in that question of what the dynamics introduced by dating apps have done to some of these matching patterns. But I’m not sure we have the answer quite yet.

Demsas: Well, I could have this whole conversation with you just about dating apps, but I want to get to your paper. And before we get into the details, I want to pull out a statistic that you cite: Among women born in 1930, roughly 78 to 79 percent were married by age 45, regardless of education. Can you trace us through the past hundred years or so? What has changed over that time period with respect to marriage rates?

Goldman: Absolutely. So I should say the reason we’re doing this at age 45 here is because part of what’s gone on in the past a hundred years is increasing age at marriage, especially for folks with more education. And so when we look at the data over that period, what we see is that the entire decline in marriage rates in the U.S.—and I should be clear that this is a well-documented fact that doesn’t just come from our paper—is concentrated among Americans without a four-year college degree.

So in particular, if we were to focus on women and ask what has happened to marriage rates for college-educated women at age 45, they’ve declined slightly, from about 78 percent to about 71 percent. But for non-college women, there’s been this huge and steep decline from about 79 percent to now just about 52 percent. And so when one asks what has happened to family and marriage in the U.S., it’s really important to kind of have this class lens, since the decline itself is really focused on Americans without college degrees.

Demsas: And one of my initial questions when I first read your paper was: Is this just being made up for in cohabitation without getting married? And you look into that. So what do you find?

Goldman: Yeah, that’s a great question. Some have this intuition that instead of being married, folks are now more likely to be in these kind of committed, long-term but unmarried partnerships. I think that’s actually true in other places, especially in Europe, but less true in the U.S.

So if we were to include the folks who are in these cohabiting arrangements in these statistics, you would effectively find the same pattern, where things have been very stable for college-educated women in the U.S. and declining for women without four-year degrees.

Demsas: So I think a lot of people have been hearing this discourse, not just from your paper but also books like Brad Wilcox’s Get Married, Melissa Kearney’s research, which you referenced earlier. And a lot of people just ask: Why do you care? Why are economists so obsessed with this topic? Why does it matter that a lot of men and women aren’t marrying? What are the tangible consequences for individuals, children, or communities when marriage rates drop? And why do we think that’s causal?

Goldman: Absolutely. So why do we care? I think bucketing the causal element of this for now, one can just come back to this discussion about the role that marriage and matching plays in overall levels of inequality in the U.S. And so regardless of any causal effect of marriage on kids or anything like that, just plain inequality—what fraction of income, or household income, is concentrated in the top 10 or 20 percent of the income distribution—statistics like this are strongly impacted by the extent to which (1) people marry and (2) whom they end up matching and marry to.

And so then you can kind of take the next step and say, Well, if marriage and who one marries matters for overall levels of inequality, it ought to matter in a dynamic sense for the next generation, right? If kids born to, say, lower-income or less-educated mothers are less likely to grow up in married two-parent households, they’re also less likely to grow up in households with enough income to get by, and so on. And so I think that’s the sense in which these patterns can have kind of a first-order impact on both overall levels of economic inequality, but also differences in outcomes between kids who grow up in high- or low-income households.

Demsas: I think some people might say—and, you know, I don’t have to put it in someone else’s mouth. I could just say to that, though, the question is then: How do we get kids into households that have access to earnings? Like, why the focus on marriage?

Goldman: I think that’s absolutely right. I think there’s much we still have to learn about how important the second person and marriage itself as an institution are— versus, you rightly point out, these overall levels of resources. But I do think, just from first principles, there’s good reason to think that having a second person around who has a direct interest in the child’s well-being is likely to be important just from a time perspective, from a mental-sanity perspective, of course.

But you’re right to point out, Jerusalem, that identifying causal effects here is a real challenge, because what one needs to do that is some change that shocks, in some random or exogenous way, marriage rates—while both holding fertility levels effectively where they are and not impacting kids’ outcomes through some other channel. So there’s been prior research, for instance, on something like the “China shock,” where, when certain areas of the U.S. were exposed to international trade, there was a large decline in employment rates and, in turn, a decline in marriage rates.

The issue with that type of shock for studying impacts of kids is, of course, this trade exposure can impact kids’ outcomes in many other ways. And so I do think a kind of frontier in this space is thinking about ways we can learn about the effects on kids of growing up in different types of household arrangements, isolating that resource channel from the kind of married, two-parent channel. But I don’t think we know enough yet. But the descriptive data are super compelling. There’s just huge differences in outcomes between kids growing up in single-parent households and married households.

Demsas: I guess the IRB isn’t going to let you randomly assign children to have their parents divorce. (Laughs.)

Goldman: Certainly not to date.

Demsas: So I have teased the fun name of your paper. It’s called “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s.” And for people who are not able to hear the difference from what I’m saying, it’s bachelors, as in single men, without bachelor’s degrees. Did you come up with that title? Who did that?

Goldman: I did that. I came up with the title.

Demsas: Wow.

Goldman: But I should say, anything intelligent in this paper, I attribute to my excellent co-authors, Clara Chambers, who’s at Yale, and Joe Winkelmann at Harvard, who are both two rising stars in this area—but the title was certainly my big contribution.

Demsas: They’ll have to learn about marketing because that’s what got me, honestly.

So your study shows that marriage rates have stayed pretty high for college grads but plunged for non-college folks, as we’ve already talked about. Can we talk more granularly about, you know—let’s say you’re a 45-year-old man without a high-school diploma versus one with a college degree? What are the rates of marriage that we’re expecting for that cohort?

Goldman: Yeah, so it used to be for Americans born around 1930, there was hardly any difference. In some sense, one way to describe the data is that marriage was not a kind of high- or low-status thing to do 50 or 60 years ago. It was just simply something everyone did. So for members of that cohort born around 1930, something like 80 percent of them would end up married at age 45, regardless of education. Whereas when we go out today, you’re seeing rates closer to 50 percent for Americans without a four-year degree, even lower for folks who don’t have a high-school diploma, and then substantially higher rates still closer to around 71 percent for Americans who do have a four-year degree.

Demsas: Another thing I was thinking about is, like, the common critique of papers like yours or theses like yours is about composition, right? So it’s difficult to compare non-college as an umbrella across decades. There are huge compositional changes going on under the hood there. As more and more people have gone to college, the umbrella non-college has gone from basically everyone, as you said, including high-earning professionals, to meaning you are likely to be working a low-wage job in the service sector. So the 1930s non-college is not the same as 1980 non-college. But you work to address this in your paper. Can you explain how?

Goldman: Absolutely. So perhaps a different way to state that hypothesis, Jerusalem, is: What we see is that for Americans born in 1930, about 10 percent of women went on to attend a four-year college. Today, that’s closer to 45 or 50 percent. And so one can say, Well, maybe marriage rates are declining for non-college Americans simply because the pool of folks who are no longer going to college are the types of people who never would’ve kind of gotten married in the first place.

But what you can do is, rather than think about college and non-college, which have these labels and these compositional effects, you could simply rank Americans by their education status and, say, focus on marriage outcomes for the person who’s at the 25th percentile. So in the 1930 cohort, that would’ve really been someone with just a high-school degree or even without a degree. Whereas today, that’s someone with a high-school degree or even some college.

And so when you take that view and ask, Well, how have marriage rates evolved for the relatively most-educated versus relatively least-educated Americans, you see exactly this divergence, where it’s for the relatively high-educated Americans where the rates have stayed stable, and for the relatively least-educated Americans—whether we call that, you know, no high-school degree in 1930 or some college today—it’s for those folks marriage rates have declined.

And I think the simplest way to get intuition on this process is just the fact that, you know, for Americans born in 1930, there was just no difference in marriage rates across these education groups. So then it’s difficult to argue that the subsequent decline in marriage rates for non-college Americans comes from the fact that now there’s more of these folks who used to just be high-school-degree holders in the college group. The reality is that those folks who used to just go on to high school were very likely to end up married in any case.

Demsas: Yeah, in your paper, there’s a really great figure where you can see the percentiles. The 25th-percentile woman in 1930 was really likely to get married, but now, even though the 25th-percentile woman is different—like, the characteristics she has, her educational background, etcetera—she’s much less likely to get married. I think that visual was really helpful.

So I’m actually getting married this year, and it’s very funny I’m telling you this story.

Goldman: Congratulations.

Demsas: Thank you. I was telling this male relative of mine that I was getting married. And I guess he was kind of joking, and, you know, it’s across translation—he’s Eritrean. But he was like, Oh, it’s funny. I didn’t think educated women would get married. I thought they just weren’t getting married anymore. And he was kind of joking with me. But it was like, there’s something that you hear on the internet all the time, right? Like, Oh, like, college-educated women, they’re so picky. They won’t get married. Why do you think that is such a prevailing narrative despite what you’re finding here?

Goldman: Yeah, so that, to be frank, Jerusalem, is really how we started on this project, which is we—not only from, I think, what one reads online or in the media, but even being in these kind of social circles where folks have very high levels of education, you get this kind of quote-unquote “vibe,” if you will, that it’s really difficult, that something’s kind of going wrong in the dating market for highly educated folks right now.

And I think the flavor of these stories in the media tend to focus on two sets of facts to make this point. The first is that there’s now these huge gender gaps in college enrollment. And then also there’s this growing political divergence between the two genders. So the story goes: For left-leaning, educated women, it’s really difficult to find a partner, simply because there are not enough educated, left-leaning men around.

And, you know, when we were seeing this story, you know, talking to folks about these trends, it gave us a substantial amount of pause because we know this fact that it’s precisely the most educated Americans for whom marriage rates have remained stable over this period.

Demsas: Yeah, and I want to repeat what you said earlier—that your paper and your research only goes up to people born in 1985. Did you look at anything for younger cohorts? I know that you can’t have the age married at 45; they’re not old enough yet. But were you able to see if these trends persist or are likely to persist, or if things are maybe even getting worse and accelerating?

Goldman: Absolutely. So one thing we’re able to do there is effectively forecast marriage rates at age 45 using data on relationship status earlier in life. So whether someone has a long-term cohabiting partner at age 30, whether they’re already married at 30, is, of course, quite predictive of whether they’re also likely to be married at 45.

And doing that, one can effectively carry these results out through Americans born in 1995. And what you’d see is that these gaps are expected to continue widening, so things continue to look very stable for Americans, for women with more education. And you see a continued decline in marriage rates for Americans without a four-year college degree, such that by the time we get out to the 1995 birth cohort, fewer than one in two non-college women in that cohort are expected to be married at age 45. And that will be the first time in this time series where marriage rates for that group have dropped below 50 percent.

Demsas: Wow. You mentioned the finding that there are way more women on college campuses than men on campuses. But you are also saying that the rate of marriage for college-educated women is pretty stable. So who are those women marrying?

Goldman: Absolutely. And so just to give a sense of the magnitudes here: For Americans born in 1930, there was 1.8—you know, almost two—men on four-year-college campuses per woman. And by the time we get out to the 1980 cohort, this has dipped below one. And so in many ways, this kind of vibe we were talking about earlier—why is it difficult for highly educated women to date?—there’s really some truth there. If you go to a four-year college as a woman and you’re intent on finding a partner who also has a four-year degree, it has indeed gotten much more difficult over this period. There’s now way fewer men relative to women to choose from.

So I think that sets up this question, Jerusalem: Well, if that’s true, how have marriage rates for college women remain stable, given they tend to marry college-educated men? And what we see in the data is that they’ve effectively begun to substitute, to marry non-college men, but really not any non-college guy. They tend to marry the relatively well-off non-college men.

And so one way to see that is if you look, over time, at the earnings of the non-college men married to college-educated women, they’ve been doing pretty well. So now today they have, on average, earnings of around $65,000. Whereas if you look at all the other non-college men, in some sense, the ones left in the dating pool, there’s just been a huge collapse in outcomes for those folks.

Demsas: And does this mean that college-educated men are basically getting married at, like, 99 percent likelihood or what?

Goldman: Yeah. So in some sense, this would lead one to believe college-educated men have it very good, right? Because they’re in really high demand. I think their marriage rates are not quite at 100 percent. It’s hard to ever get up that high, just because you have divorce and other factors here, but they are indeed really high. So we’re talking about rates upwards of 70 percent still, so very similar to how it looked for Americans born in the 1930 cohort.

Demsas: Why is it so stable for them if they’re in such high demand? Is there just a stable number of men who either don’t want to get married or are “unmarriageable” for various other reasons?

Goldman: I think there’s some natural kind of attrition in and out of marriage due to divorce. There might be some men who, you know, are waiting an especially long time to settle down.

But what I’ll say is: When you look at these data, the key thing that kind of comes out is just this fact that on the female side of the market, they have kind of remained marrying college men at similar rates to what they used to, which wasn’t 100 percent. It’s not like every college person marries a college person. It’s really that the college–college matches have been relatively stable. But what’s happened is that in response to the growing shortage of college men, these kinds of marginal matches are between college-educated women and non-college men.

And one way to see that is just to ask: For Americans born in 1930, what are the odds you end up in a marriage where the wife has a four-year degree and the husband does not? This used to be a type of couple that effectively did not exist. So for Americans born in 1930, that was just 2 percent of folks. By the time we get out to the 1980 birth cohort, closer to 10 percent of Americans are going to end up in marriages where the woman has a four-year degree and the husband does not. If one were just to extrapolate those trends to around kids born today, we’re going to expect something like a third of all marriages in the U.S. to be this kind of new type of couple that didn’t used to exist.

Demsas: After the break: one economist’s point of view on what makes men marriageable.

[Break]

Demsas: There’s an implication when you say the kind of difference between a college-educated woman and a non-college-educated man—that matchup—that the woman is maybe earning more money or is in a different class bracket than a non-college-educated man. But one thing that a lot of researchers have pointed out is that there are employment industries that are predominantly made up of men that lead to higher-income opportunities then for women which are highly professionalized.

So for instance, if you have a teacher who’s married to, you know, let’s say a tradesman, and who are maybe making similar salaries—or maybe, you know, the tradesman is actually making more than his teacher spouse. Are those really indicating class difference, or is it just that there are a lot of feminized industries and workplaces that require college degrees at rates higher than for men?

Goldman: So that could certainly be true, Jerusalem. What I’ll say, though, is that it is still true in the 1930 cohort that 10 percent of women got a four-year degree. And it was pretty rare at that time—the number of marriages between college women and non-college men was quite low, in part because there were just not as many college women to go around. But I think you’re right: This notion of class is relatively loose, and it doesn’t seem so foreign to think of a marriage, say, between a nurse and someone who might own, you know, a local landscaping business.

What I will say is, if that feels familiar, why do we think these trends are important? I think it’s useful to think about the implication of this for the marriage prospects of non-college women. And so one way to come at this is with a very crude kind of economist definition of marriageable. So don’t try this at home.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Goldman: But one can ask, for the non-college men—let’s say you have to meet two criteria to be quote-unquote “marriageable.” One is that your earnings need to be above the national median. So for much of this period, this would mean something like earning above $30,000 per year—so nothing crazy, but a relatively stable, well-paying job. And of course, you can’t already be married to a college-educated woman.

And if one takes that view, if you go back to the 1930 birth cohort, roughly 70 percent of non-college men in that cohort were quote-unquote “marriageable,” according to this view. Whereas when we go out to the 1980 cohort, this has dropped remarkably. It’s now much closer to 35 percent of non-college men that fit the bill today.

Demsas: Wow.

Goldman: And that’s both because earnings have declined for this group of men, but, also, college women are now marrying the kind of HVAC technician, the person who owns the local electrician business, and so on. And that’s kind of eaten into the pool of relatively well-earning non-college men. And so this trend has had really, I think, important implications for the marriage prospects of Americans without college degrees.

Demsas: So let’s talk about the men who are left out. Your paper documents that many men without college degrees, especially those with lower incomes, are ending up unmarried, as we’ve discussed. What are the main factors holding these men back from marriage? Is it just a question of relative status? Is it their earnings, cultural attitudes? Or is there something else that’s going on here?

Goldman: I think that’s the right question to ask, because I think the way in which we’re having this discussion can give the impression where it’s kind of the non-college women making the decision and choosing not to be married to the non-college men anymore. But in practice, of course, it’s a joint decision. And these broad trends don’t tell you, really, which side of the market is driving the decline in marriage rates between non-college Americans. And so I think it is important, exactly as you say, Jerusalem, to think about what is going on with this pool of men.

What I’ll say is that we’re really using earnings here as an aggregate or summary to describe what’s happened to these folks. So at age 45, if you look at the pool of non-college men who are not married to college women, they used to earn in the 1930 cohort about $56,000 per year, on average. Now they earn about $46,000 per year, on average, for the 1980 cohort. This is remarkable, the fact that earnings have declined over this 50-year period at a time when the U.S. economy has grown substantially. So the fact that you’re able to find any group that’s had a decline in real earnings is remarkable and, I think, a signal of what is going on with this group, but I don’t want to give the impression that it’s all about earnings.

So I think Richard Reeves and other folks in this space have done a good job to document some of the trouble with working-class men in recent years and decades. And you see, you know, for instance, overdose deaths tend to be concentrated on non-college men. When we think about things like addictions to sports-gambling technologies, again, it tends to be concentrated in this group. We have factors like incarceration and so on. And so, certainly, I don’t mean to give the impression this is all about economics—rather that there’s something going on with this pool of folks that we ought to understand better because it has important implications for women, and especially non-college women.

Demsas: Are you finding that predominant—I mean, one thing that you do is you look at employment-to-population ratio and incarceration rates in various areas to see how much is being driven by those factors. And you do find that in areas where there’s more employment and less incarceration, non-college men are significantly more likely to be married than not. So what proportion of the lack of marriage at this part of the dating market is because of something other than, Do you have a job? and, Have you been to jail?

Goldman: Yeah, absolutely. So I think thus far we’ve focused on these patterns over time. And what you see in the data is that in a period where (1) men are going to college at lower rates than women and (2) non-college men have been struggling economically, that’s been characterized by a period in which marriage rates have been relatively stable for college women and decline sharply for non-college women.

But one can ask that same question in present data, but instead of looking over time, look across areas in the U.S. And what you see when you do that is exactly the fact you mentioned, Jerusalem, where if we zoom in on the areas where non-college men have the lowest employment ratios, you see those are precisely the parts of the U.S. that have just these massive gaps in marriage rates between college and non-college women.

And instead, when we go to the areas where almost all of the non-college men are working, you see those gaps are substantially smaller. In some sense, those areas, which often are concentrated, for instance, in the upper [Great] Plains states—suburban Minneapolis is one example—kind of look like marriage outcomes looked in the U.S. 40 years ago, in a sense, where there was not a ton of education polarization in marriage.

You asked about, you know, is this about employment or incarceration? I think it’s really hard to tease these different measures apart, because they tend to move together. The areas where non-college men are not working are also the areas where many of them fail to graduate from high school. A higher share of them might end up incarcerated. There might be issues around even early-life mortality. And so it’s difficult to diagnose: Is it about earnings? Is it about incarceration? And so on.

It’s more of this broad pattern, which is: Where in the U.S. are the areas where these education gaps in marriage for women are the largest? And they are really concentrated in the subset of places where men who didn’t go to college are struggling.

Demsas: Yeah, and I was just struck by the finding that “marriage rates between college and non-college women are 50 percent smaller in commuting zones where men have the lowest incidence of [what economists refer to as] ‘left-tail’ outcomes,” whether it’s joblessness and incarceration or something else.

And I think that’s a huge, important finding for policy makers who care about this issue and want to make it increase the life outcomes for these men, and also for women who are searching for a partner, unable to find one who meets their needs. You know, there is actually a lot of policy-making that goes into whether the employment-to-population ratio is high and whether incarceration is high, and attacking those things is actually really within policy makers’ control. This isn’t just a question of, Do you think that we should regress to the 1950s cultural norms or not? if you care about this issue.

Goldman: Absolutely.

Demsas: I wanted to ask you about race in your paper, because we started this conversation talking about interracial marriage, and we know, of course, that race correlates with class and education. What do you find when you look at racial outcomes here?

Goldman: Yeah. So in terms of these geographic differences, you see a very similar pattern within each racial group. So what you see is for white Americans, for white women, for instance, these education disparities in marriage are concentrated in the areas where non-college white men have the lowest employment rates. And that relationship between employment-to-population ratio of non-college men and marriage rates for college and non-college women is actually very similar for white Americans, for Black Americans, for Hispanic Americans.

Demsas: This feels like it really mirrors a lot of what’s going on in our political discourse, where you see increasing racial depolarization and increasing class and education polarization. It’s just remarkable to see that across so many different planes. It’s not just marriage markets. It’s also happening in labor markets and education markets and in political ideology. So it’s not just in this one place. Do you see all these as connected?

Goldman: Yeah, absolutely. I think I have other work looking at recent trends in intergenerational mobility in the U.S., and you see exactly this racial depolarization you’re mentioning, Jerusalem, but it tends to be perniciously coupled with a growing importance of class. And obviously, that’s been very salient politically recently in the U.S. But we’re starting to see the same thing happen to inequality and intergenerational mobility.

So in particular, what I mean by that is gaps in outcomes between lower-income Black and white Americans who are born to lower-income parents have shrunk by about 30 percent in the past 15 or 20 years. Yet the gaps in outcomes between white children born to high- versus low-income parents are growing over time. And so that’s the sense in which class is becoming a bit more salient than race. We know it’s happening politically in the U.S. but, as you rightly point out, it’s happening in these other domains, too, and marriage is certainly not exempt.

Demsas: So there’s an implicit assumption latent in a lot of the “just get married” discourse—particularly, I think, coming out of Brad Wilcox’s book, but in other places as well—that if unmarried men and women would just pull the trigger, outcomes across a variety of variables would be better off.

And this is kind of getting back to the question I asked you earlier about causality.

And I think this is kind of, like, a weird prior for people to have. I mean, I think that many people want to be married, and they understand the financial benefits of marriage. And if they were able to find a partner that fit their needs on a bunch of metrics, some of which you can measure and some of which you can’t, they would do that. And what we’re seeing is actually that the people who are not getting married are, I think, likely, on average, making a rational choice about what would make life better for them and their families.

And I wonder how you think about this, because there is a ton of research descriptively that you’ve walked us through that talks about the benefits of marriage to children, to communities. But I think that’s always going to be skewed towards marriage among people with college degrees, good jobs, given all we’ve talked about. So how do you think about this?

Goldman: This is the key puzzle in this space. You’ve completely hit the nail on the head here, which is: Marriage rates, albeit what they are in present-day U.S.—so at age 45, you know, something like 60 percent of Americans are married—the key question is, well, say we had some technology to put that from 60 percent to 70 percent. Would that be “good”? And I really agree with your intuition that marriage is an awfully important decision folks make in their life.

And so it’s a bit strange to come at it from this view of, Well, folks are making a mistake. They would actually be better off, you know, if they tried harder to be married or if they ended up tying the knot with someone who they have major reservations about. And I think we should be cautious when bringing that view to the data. And I think, in some sense, part of what’s driving that is when you do look at survey data of folks, people still say they really want to be married and it’s an important thing they want to achieve in life. But when they’re not doing it, I think there’s serious questions we have to ask about why, and are folks able to find the right match in person?

One important feature of this conversation is, I think, a discussion of people’s expectations. It’s kind of a new phenomenon that they expect their partner to be this all-encompassing best friend, thought partner, physically attractive, and so on. And maybe some of this is related to social media. I’m, of course, speculating now. This is not for my own research. But I think these things matter, but it might be helpful to split this into two parts.

One is, like, why are adults not getting into these marginal marriages? Who are these people? If we did boost marriages from 60 to 70 percent, who are those people kind of on the edge of tying the knot, and would it be good for them personally to make that decision? And I think that’s where you get into these tougher questions of, you know, does it make sense to question people’s own intuition about this important decision in their life? But there’s a separate question, which is: If folks are going to have kids anyway, what is the impact on their kids of the two parents who are marginal to being married, whether or not they tie the knot?

And there, I think, we just need more evidence. So there’s some early work looking at the introduction of unilateral divorce in the U.S. by Jon Gruber that suggests there might be benefits to some of these marginal marriages staying together. But there’s much more we need to understand. And, of course, no one wants to be in the position of recommending someone stay in a relationship with someone who might be abusive, physically or emotionally, just for the benefit of the kid. I think we need to understand why people are not getting married and then, you know, if there are ways we can help along that margin that might be supportive both to adults and to children.

Demsas: Benny, this has been a great conversation. I think it’s time for our last and final question, which is: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Goldman: Well, Jerusalem, you’ll have to let me know if this is too on the nose. We’ve already talked about this a bit, but I’m going to go with dating apps here.

Demsas: Really? Okay.

Goldman: And this is going to be, in part, hypocritical because I met my girlfriend of two years on a dating app.

Demsas: Okay. We won’t have her listen to this.

Goldman: (Laughs.) Yeah, exactly. The sense in which I mean it’s good on paper but not in reality is: I do think it could make a lot of sense from an individual level to join a dating app, especially when many other folks are doing that. But I think, in many ways, this kind of algorithmic approach to dating has had odd effects on equilibrium behavior, whether or not folks are accountable when they go on these dates, the dynamics and inequality it’s introduced, especially for men.

So we know a small number of men are getting almost all the matches, and that might impact their incentive to settle down. And, you know, it might impact just literally how people are interacting with each other on these dates themselves. So I think that’s something that we need to think more about as a society.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned before, I have very uncommon views on dating apps. I also met my fiancé on a dating app, and I think it’s hard for me to believe that it is worse to date now than it was when your only options were, like, the people that your parents or friends introduced you to.

I believe that there are some serious problems that would need to be addressed. I think you’ve mentioned a lot of them already. But just, like, in term of relative benefits, like, I would never have met my partner. You know what I mean? So I don’t know. You’re right—like, it’s probably worse for some people; it’s better for other people. And it’s hard for me to fully disaggregate what’s going on here. But it would be hard to prove to me that things have gotten worse, on average.

Goldman: I think I share your intuition, but I think there are psychological effects of having all this choice, as well as how quickly folks give up on each other. And, you know, of course, if anyone from Hinge or Match Group is listening and wants to give Benny and team access to the data so we can answer these questions once and for all, I know me and many other very competent researchers would be excited about that opportunity.

Demsas: Okay. Hinge, Match, if you do this, we will have Benny on the show again because I’m very curious.

Goldman: Bring it on. We’re ready for the data.

Demsas: Thanks, Benny. Thanks for coming on.

Goldman: Thank you guys so much for having me. Great conversation.

Demsas: Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Who Really Runs America?

2025-04-22T06:00:00-04:00

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Something has gone wrong in American democracy. Though our diagnoses differ, the entire political spectrum chafes at the widespread dysfunction. Our traditional modes for understanding democratic decline—tyranny of the majority, corruption, erosion of trust, polarization—all of these shed some light onto our current circumstances, but they fail to explain how policies with broad public support don’t materialize.

While reporting on the democratic terrain in state and local government, I’ve become preoccupied with how easily minority interests are able to hijack broadly beneficial policy goals—often through mechanisms we view as democratically legitimate. Tools developed to push against a potential “tyranny of the majority” have allowed majorities to be subjugated to the will of minority interests time and again. Whether it’s by professional associations, police unions, homeowner associations, or wealthy individuals, majority rule has repeatedly been hijacked.

Steve Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has a similar diagnosis. In a new essay titled “Minoritarianism Is Everywhere,” he argues that America’s democratic deficits require a serious rethinking of liberal governance and values.

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, we discuss the causes and consequences of minoritarianism and debate potential solutions.

“Faced with the fact that actually lots of people don’t want things that liberals want, the way that liberals have responded is finding sneaky, complicated, roundabout ways to get around” that fact, Teles argues. “And instead of trying to find other ways to persuade them or compensate them or other things, we’ve tried to find these complicated, expert-delegation kinds of ways around that. And sometimes that works. But one thing I think it does is it also raises questions about the legitimacy of the larger system.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: We’re used to thinking about the tyranny of the majority. We don’t have to imagine what happens when majority voices vote to trample on individual rights.

That fear so animated the Founding Fathers that they designed a system to restrain it: a bicameral legislature with one chamber—the Senate—insulated from electoral pressure by staggered six-year terms, and lifetime appointments for judges to shield them from the shifting tides of public opinion.

They spent far less time thinking about the opposite problem: tyranny of the minority.

[Music]

Demsas: Yet today, much of my own work is thinking through the ways that well-organized interest groups and strategically placed individuals have managed to take hold of the systems of power throughout government and enact their minoritarian preferences.

From land use, permitting, and zoning abuses by homeowners associations to police unions, gun-lobbying groups, and environmental groups fighting against popular opinion in favor of a niche ideological perspective—once you start looking for undue power wielded by a minority, it’s all you can see.

This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is Steve Teles, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. He has a new article out called “Minoritarianism Is Everywhere” that I think is the single most important piece you can read about this trend in American democracy.

Steve, welcome to the show

Steven Teles: Thanks for having me.

Demsas: In the early days of the United States of America, thinkers like Madison and Tocqueville were primarily afraid of tyranny of the majority. Why was that the dominant mode through which they feared democratic collapse?

Teles: So the Founders had a lot of experience from their own experience of the colonial period and going back to their reading of the Greeks and Romans about how republics fell apart, and they thought that republics fell apart, in part, because they had too much of an expectation of homogeneity. And so one of the most important things to understand about the Founders is they actually did believe that diversity, as the yard signs say, is our strength and that the way to actually make a republic work was not to actually try and get homogeneity but actually to get conflict, to get diversity so that no part of the community would be able to actually tyrannize the rest.

We know the famous line from Madison that when you extend the sphere, you take a greater variety of interests. And so part of their theory was to create a republic that was big enough that no single interest could dominate and, within that, to break apart whatever level of government in order to ensure that there would be deliberation. I think deliberation was really the underestimated part of the Founders’ constitutional idea. It was not just that they wanted to ensure that a majority couldn’t tyrannize over a minority, but that people would actually have to argue—they would have to provide reasons—and that was the one of the motivations for having separation of powers, as well as having what they call the “extended sphere.”

Demsas: What’s the extended sphere?

Teles: So the extended sphere was the idea that you would have a large republic. Every other republic in history had been small. They’d been city-states. The anti-Federalists, who were the opponents of the Federalists, had some of that same idea—

Demsas: Including Madison.

Teles: —that the only way republics could work is if they didn’t have disagreement, because otherwise, one group would tyrannize over the other.

And the experiment of the Founders was to have an extended sphere, to have one over, originally, 13 colonies but eventually a kind of continental republic. And a continental republic is something that nobody had ever attempted. People only thought you could have that level in an empire. And so that was really the experiment that the Founders were trying—was to have something large that had only been imperial in the past, but make it a republic.

Demsas: So you’ve recently written an essay warning us about the tyranny of the minority. Do you think that the Founders were wrong about their assessment, or do you think that something has changed?

Teles: So there’s kind of two stories you can tell about this. One is: The government just does a lot more than it used to. A lot of our system was designed to keep government from doing very much. It was designed to slow the government on the way up.

And one thing I often tell my conservative friends is that separation of powers has, and a lot of the other devices that the framers created, a kind of perverse effect on the way down. Once you’ve already built a large government up, all of those systems are also a brake on trying to reverse it. So it may be that having separation of powers means you have to have a much larger majority in order to create new government programs. But all those same separation-of-power systems also are an obstacle to cutting them later on, which is one of the reasons, for example, that DOGE is having to do all these things that are of, I’ll say, marginal constitutionality—

Demsas: Questionable legality? Yeah.

Teles: —because they can’t actually pass things through the separation-of-power system that the Founders created. So they’re trying to do it through a sort of soft authoritarianism. So that’s one thing, right? One thing is that the Founders didn’t anticipate that we’d have a government as big and as sort of into everybody’s business as we have now.

And the other thing, and this was something that Mancur Olson, the economist from the University of Maryland (go Terps), said a few decades ago, which is that one of the things that Founders didn’t really count on was concentrated interest—that one of the basic problems of democracy is that, in many cases, you actually can dominate government if you have a very concentrated interest, which gives you disproportionate attention, and that democracy is really not a system that lets the majority govern. It’s the system that allows the attentive majority to govern. And the attentive majority is a lot smaller than the actual majority.

And that also is important if what you mostly want to do is to keep things from happening, right? So when we talk about—a lot of the things that you write about in your own work are about people stopping things, obstructing things. And so when you combine the fact that in our system it’s easier to obstruct than it is to create—and again, you go back to all the systems of separation of powers, and we can talk about all the other forms of participation that got layered on top of that—all of those are wired up for obstruction. And when you combine obstruction plus concentrated participation and concentrated attention, you have a formula for allowing often very small minorities to dominate government.

Demsas: I think for a lot of listeners, this is going to feel like an odd conversation to have right now, because a lot of the blocking points, a lot of the veto points, a lot of the obstructionist things that we’re witnessing right now are actually preventing a lot of harm or at least are the only things that are standing in the way of even greater harm done by, whether it’s DOGE or whether it’s other types of soft authoritarianism. So isn’t this kind of a misplaced concern in this moment?

Teles: So that’s funny. I actually thought at the very last minute of pulling this essay. Literally a couple days before I was supposed to send it to Yuval Levin, who’s the editor of National Affairs, I sent him an email that was more or less along the lines of, I don’t know, man. Should I actually be publishing this?

And then I thought, I don’t know. I mean, when are you going to publish? There’s never a good time to do stuff like this. And part of my argument is that people who think government should be doing a lot of stuff, which is, more or less, me, need to be thinking about what it is, the state that we want to build on the rubble of whatever we may, inshallah, inherit in a few years.

And I think that’s a thing that we’re not going to have a lot of time to figure out. And if you go and look at the essay, one thing I argue is that the problem with this majoritarianism discourse or minoritarianism discourse that you see out there that’s been part of the democracy-trademarked discourse that’s been going on for quite some time is it sort of assumes something about what the status quo ante in the United States was before Trump, before authoritarianism.

It also assumes something about lots of European countries because this discourse is supposed to be transnational. It assumes that all of those systems were more or less okay, and then something twisted happened in conservatism, and it morphed into populist authoritarianism, and that was what was wrong. And I think that story has a lot to answer for. In the European context, it has a lot to answer for the fact that huge amounts of European governance, especially EU-level governance, is not majoritarian at all. It’s bureaucratic; it’s professional.

That’s exactly what the EU, and especially European Commission, was designed to do. It was designed to create a highly insulated, elite form of governance. And it’s not a surprise that lots of political forces grew up to counter that. And I think that’s a sort of hidden or overlooked problem. Also in the United States, a lot of the targets of populist authoritarianism are not about liberalism’s majoritarian manifestations. They’re about its most elitist and professional manifestations.

Demsas: Well, I want to push on this, because I think there’s a tension between two things that you care about. At the Niskanen Center, where you work, you guys have a state-capacity program where you’re trying to increase the ability of the state to do what it says it wants to do. That means having really high-quality staff. It means caring about expertise. It means updating your IT systems and your data systems, and ensuring that you have really high-quality people and products that you’re able to create for Americans.

And many of the minoritarian structures that you criticize—administrative agencies, and you just talked about this in the EU, licensing boards, etcetera—they’re created to add expertise and consistency to policy. If we sideline this sort of professionalized governance that you’re talking about in favor of more direct democratic control—I mean, walk me through how that works. Are we saying that Congress is writing extremely detailed laws delegating how agencies should work? But also, it feels like you get less information, like you get more short-termism in government. So how do you think about that?

Teles: Yeah, so this, in a way, gets us to the delegation question, which is raised in a lot of constitutional administrative law. And I actually think that often conflates two things. So the one question is, do we actually have rule of law? Right? Has whatever it is that the bureaucracy is doing, has it actually been authorized by the legislative branch? And that’s the question if you think about things like Title IX, where Congress has passed extremely vague laws and then passed that authority over to bureaucracies, which then passed the authority over to other organizations and divisions inside of universities and firms. I think that’s a legitimate problem of democratic governance.

And that’s separate from the question of whether government can actually manage the things that it has been legitimately democratically authorized to do—so the kind of things you were mentioning, the Niskanen Center, and I’m going to say that name as many times as I want because that’s my second job, along with Johns Hopkins. And Jen Pahlka helped set up a state-capacity program at—

Demsas: She’s been on the show.

Teles: And the things that they’re talking about are things like, as you were talking about before, setting up IT systems. So we’ve authorized the government to do a bunch of things—to send people Social Security checks, to send people unemployment insurance, to do all of these things. And that, I think, basically authorizes them to create whatever systems are necessary to do those things that the legislature has completely unambiguously, normatively decided that government should be doing.

And I think there, there’s a very wide breadth of legitimate expert authority to figure out how to actually act on those things. When, on the other hand, we transfer ambiguous regulatory authority over private entities or other governments, I think that raises a very different question, and it raises a question about whether or not experts actually do have the authority to answer deeply, morally, normatively complicated issues. So I actually think those are two different questions.

Demsas: I want to get into the “Democracy™️” discourse, because I think that situating this conversation is important. So the traditional arguments that most people, I think most listeners, will have heard about minoritarianism are focused on institutions like the electoral college and the filibuster that benefit the Republican Party by amplifying the voices of rural states, where fewer people live than coastal states.

In their book, Tyranny of the Minority, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky argue that, and I’m quoting here from a review by Kurt Weyland, “The U.S. institutional framework has an exceptional set of counter-majoritarian features, designed to forestall the unfettered domination of the current majority and to give political minorities institutional mechanisms for defending their basic interests and rights. The Electoral College in presidential elections, the Senate with its disproportionate representation of small states and its filibuster, and the Supreme Court with its judicial review and its lifetime judges all fulfill this function. Yet in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s view, the effort to prevent a ’tyranny of the majority’ through this globally unique institutional set-up has gone too far: It has allowed the nationally ever less competitive GOP to establish its tyranny of the minority—while also enabling its continued focus on racially resentful whites and its refusal to adjust to multiracial diversity.”

So this argument, I think, is kind of weird in this moment because Donald Trump just won with a multiracial coalition, a multi-class coalition, for sure, and won with the popular vote. And there was movement to the right across this country, even in the most progressive jurisdictions. And we now see a trifecta in the federal government. And so while this argument kind of, I think, really struck true in 2016, when Trump won while losing the popular vote, it feels kind of weird now. So how much of your argument is in line with what Levitsky and Ziblatt are talking about? How much are you kind of actually critiquing this view?

Teles: So I do think there’s something to the Levitsky and Ziblatt—and they’re great political scientists. I’d say they’re probably better political scientists than I am, although that’s not much of an accomplishment. But the thing I would say about them is—and my critique is more about what they’re not talking about than what they are talking about. So I do think that they’re—and again, I’m probably more sympathetic to our basic constitutional arrangement than they are. I think there’s a reason why some degree of separation of powers, especially for a country as diverse as we are, makes a degree of sense. My critique is more all the nonmajoritarian things that we layered on top of the framers’ system, right?

So I would say that the degree of minority influence that we have in the original constitutional system was fine, and we should have stopped with that. But in the article, I argue that we’ve added a lot of other minoritarianism systems on top of the original constitutional system, which I think makes a lot of sense and is just the degree of nonmajoritarianism that actually works for a large, complicated government. So if we got rid of the filibuster, even with the malrepresentation in the Senate, we would have a lot more majoritarian way of making decisions. And also, we would not have the weird bias we have about doing lots of things through spending bills that we should really be doing through regulation or other kinds of things. But again, when you think about minoritarianism, there are a lot of things that Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t talk about.

They don’t talk about the weird ways that we make decisions about housing that are extremely—and you’ve, obviously, written a whole book on this, as well as a million essays that people have written—about the numerous ways that minoritarianism warps how we make land use decisions. But lots of other forms of minoritarianism had sort of crept into our system on top of the sedimentary layer of our original constitutional system. And those that were really created mostly by liberals, or at least by defenders of activist government, are mostly not part of the “Democracy™️” discourse.

Demsas: Is then your argument just, Yes, this is true that there are a bunch of benefits that the current system gives to the Republican Party in our federal system, but that’s an incomplete view of the ways in which minoritarianism has also upheld progressive ideas in the states?

Teles: Well, I actually think when you look at some of the bias—I don’t want to go too far back again into litigating the stuff that’s actually in the Levitsky and Ziblatt, and the other sort of people who are questioning our inherited Constitution, too much—but I think that some of that slant has actually declined in recent years.

If Democrats were more competitive in Texas, a lot of this discourse would look very different. And it’s not that far, although everyone always says that a Democratic Texas is the future and always will be. But I think one way to think about this is: There are parts of our governance system that are minoritarianism and are biased in favor of Republicans. There’s no question about that. And some of them, I think, are worth the benefits we get from those, and some of them are not.

But there’s lots of other parts of our governing system, especially things that were created in the 1960s and ’70s—forms of participation, forms of professionalism, forms of expert governance—that systematically, at least politically in the past, have favored Democrats and liberals. And that is not part of our democracy discourse. And if we really do think majoritarianism is the key normative guide that we should use for thinking about constitutionalism—and I’m not entirely sure that it is, but if it is—then we really need to think about the full sweep of minoritarianism and the parts that actually favor interests that we usually associate with Democrats and liberals.

Demsas: Well, that was a little milquetoast, Steve. You’re not going to defend majoritarianism?

Teles: No. I mean, I think majoritarianism in some cases is a perfectly legitimate argument, that it’s better than just straight-up minoritarianism.

Demsas: I mean, it’s quite literally democracy, right?

Teles: Right. Well, but again, democracy is legitimate to the degree to which we think that certain decisions should be made by government at all. There’s lots of things that we don’t think should be, either because we think they implicate rights or because we think that it’s just inefficient to have decisions made by majorities. So I don’t necessarily think that housing—

Demsas: But as a principle for what the government does do, you want to defend majoritarianism?

Teles: Again, it’s better than the alternative, right?

Demsas: Such a political scientist’s answer.

Teles: I mean, I don’t want to sound milquetoasty, but I want to be precise.

Demsas: That’s fair.

Teles: If we have to have a decision and a decision has to get made, I think a lot of people in the democracy discourse tend to import a lot of stuff into the idea of democracy, beyond the idea that at some point we should make a decision, and it’s better to have a majority make that. Now, the problem there with majoritarianism is: Which majority?

So again, this goes back to work you’ve done. We have to make a decision about the unit that we should actually have making majoritarian decisions. So it may be that we need to have regulation of what kind of things people build and where. But should that be made by Irvine? Or should it be made in Sacramento? And that is a decision that you can’t make on democratic standards. That’s a decision you have to make on some other standards. Should it be national?

Demsas: It’s also practical considerations.

Teles: It’s also about whether or not you can overload the agenda of one level of government. So even if you might think that, serially, having the national government do something would be better, having lots and lots of decisions would overwhelm the capacity of a central government to actually manage them simultaneously.

Demsas: After the break: why local politics are a breeding ground for minoritarianism.

[Break]

Demsas: One reason I wanted to bring you on is that Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, has taken over all policy discourse. And we had them on the show, and you should go listen to that episode if you haven’t. I asked them on the show when they came on about why there isn’t more conversation about localism in their book. Like, why don’t they talk more about the fact that a lot of the problems they’re identifying are actually a function of our localist and decentralist tendencies in government? That it’s not really a problem that some people don’t like housing. I don’t like a lot of things. Like, I don’t like certain colors. I don’t like certain architectural styles. I don’t like them.

The problem is that we have a structure of government that takes that preference and allows it to be a veto on larger public interests. Like, well, we do need homeless shelters. We do actually need a place to house people who are lower income. We actually do need a place to house everyone. We need a place to put people. And that is not cared about. And again, this is touching on exactly what you talk about in your piece around this majoritarian desire kind of being trounced by these minority interests.

And after reading your essay, though, part of what I kept thinking about was that maybe the problem isn’t minoritarianism itself, that there are these checks that allow for vetoes. The problem is that local government cannot—and state and local government cannot—mediate between a bunch of different minority interests and balance those against majority preferences. Meaning, I feel like this is not as much of a problem at the national level as it is at the state and local level. There are a lot of things you’ve identified that come into play at the national level, but I think in local government, what we see is: The reason why these special interests are able to exert so much influence is that voters have basically disappeared from the playing ground.

So this is Sarah Anzia’s great work. She’s a Berkeley professor who wrote this great book called Local Interests. And what she argues is, essentially, in the vacuum that’s been created by voters at the local level—and I mean, just to put some numbers on it, just 23 percent of eligible active voters in New York City cast a ballot for mayor in 2021. And that’s a city that has a ton of local media. People are highly educated. There’s a ton of activity there happening to create civic institutions to push people out to vote. Like, 23 percent of eligible, active voters—that’s a small percentage of the broader adults who exist there.

Teles: And that’s high for lots of local governments.

Demsas: That’s high for local governments. Yeah, in North Carolina, 463 municipalities held elections in November 2021. All told, about 15 percent of registered voters turned out. But when you look at what happened in 2020, the year before that, five times as many people turned out for the general and statewide elections. And the reason I say all of this is that part of the problem is not that there are interest groups coming and making their case to the government, whether it’s teachers’ unions or environmental groups or police unions or it’s homeowners’ associations. It’s that when they show up, there’s no voter majoritarian voice really there. So I wonder: How much of the problem do you think is attacking minoritarianism writ large, versus how do you make more of the decisions pushed up to levels of government where majority voices are actually heard?

Teles: There were a bunch of things in your peroration there that I want to pull apart. One is, especially in housing, the basic problem with localism is where you have governments that are making decisions about their jurisdiction, but the influenced parties are in some other jurisdiction, right? So again, in lots of these cases, the thing that’s a problem is the people who would benefit from new housing are not only in the jurisdiction, but not participating, right? They’re somewhere else. They’re in Ohio. They’re in Indiana. They would benefit from actually being there. And so that’s a particular problem of putting decisions that have enormous national or even or statewide implications in the hands of local governments.

As you were saying, we do have this basic, really corrosive problem of incredibly low participation in local elections. And especially when you get to pretty small jurisdictions, the other problem is: We don’t have functional party competition in most of those places. So not only do we have very small turnout, but we have almost no political competition to help people actually organize their decisions. So especially in lots of blue jurisdictions, there ought to be parties. And they wouldn’t be Republican and Democratic Parties—they would be a Jerusalem Demsas party versus a left NIMBY coalition that would want no one to ever build or even walk around or do anything. They’d just all stay in their houses.

Demsas: That was a really generous take on left NIMBYs. (Laughs.)

Teles: Yeah. So again, we have all these sort of reinforcing problems in local government. And in the paper, one thing I say is that that’s bad for what you might think of as a more general interest, but it’s very good for the people who do show up. And the people who do show up are organized. So you think about local governments where you only have 15 percent of people showing up. All the election is in the primary, as opposed to the general election. Well, who wants that? So one way political scientists talk about that is that the institution is endogenous, in the sense that it’s related to the interest of the people who help shape the institution, right?

Demsas: Yeah, so why do we have off-year elections at all?

Teles: Right. We have off-year elections, in part, because the people who benefit from them, which are often the government’s own workforce, want them that way. So teachers’ unions, for example, love off-cycle elections where decisions are made in primaries, because they know what’s going on, they know what the decisions are being made, and they can actually participate and get their interest magnified.

Demsas: And they have organizing capacity to turn people out to primaries.

Teles: Right. They can show up at every level of government. That’s one of the advantages of having teachers’ unions that are organized in a federated way, which is that when nobody else is organized at a local level, they’re organized, and they can draw on this rich basis of information they get from being part of a national organization. The same thing is true of police unions. The same thing is true of other government unions. And those public-employee unions had the further advantage that lots of the decisions that matter to them are made in collective bargaining rather than through normal lawmaking, which is even less public and accessible to ordinary voters. And again, that’s where their informational and organizational advantages are particularly consequential.

Demsas: Yeah, you make this point in your piece. But the thing I want to ask you about, which I think needles at me a lot, is: Is there a majoritarian preference for minoritarianism? And by that I mean, it’s hard to know that the majority preferences aren’t being followed. Someone once told me the reason there’s so much low voting in local elections is because everyone’s happy with what’s going on. If they were really upset, they would show up and say something about it and do something about it.

And I think that’s a bit flippant and ignores a lot of things, the cost that it might require to show up in elections. But there’s something there, right? There’s something there about this system in many ways. Every one of us, every member of the electorate, is both part of the majority and part of a minority at every given moment in their lives. Maybe you’re a part of the majority because you’re a part of a racial majority, but you’re part of a religious minority. Maybe you’re part of a minority of people who like a certain economic policy, but you’re a majority in terms of abortion policy. All the time, you are part of both majorities and minorities. And it may just be the express preference that, given that you know that, we actually do kind of have a preference for a system where minority voices can obstruct, because everyone is more afraid of bad things happening to them than they are of the good things they want not happening.

Teles: Yeah. So this is where I think some of these questions are related to the particular time that we’re in. When a lot of the laws that we’re talking about were passed in the late ’60s and early ’70s—

Demsas: What kinds of laws?

Teles: When you think about a lot of the environmental laws that were passed in that era, or laws about public participation—when court decisions were changed, they gave people more access and more ability to use things like the Administrative Procedure Act to get influence. That was a period in which Americans were, for a variety of reasons, particularly sensitive to the risks of things happening, of various things happening. Their kids getting a terrible toy that killed them or having environmental damage or having—

Demsas Rivers on fire—

Teles: Yeah. I mean, there’s all kinds of things that you can think about. I think we’re in a different era, and a lot of the conversation we’re having around abundance comes from a general sense that that government just doesn’t work, and it’s not delivering things, and that there’s something really temporally urgent about the need to actually do things. And so the decision of whether the government should have a bias toward allowing majorities to work their will or allowing minorities to obstruct, to keep things from happening is partially a function of the times that we’re in.

I also think when you add in geopolitical competition—the fact that Americans are worried that we might not have the economic wherewithal to actually compete with a militarizing China. When you actually think of European countries are now really having to face this, the fact that they don’t have the economic base to actually have a military that can do anything, I think that’s actually making all of those things seem really urgent and is making the need to actually ensure that nobody is ever harmed by anything seem less consequential. And so that’s what I think a lot of the abundance discourse that you were referring to earlier is responding to, that sense, and also responding to the sense that it’s generating populism.

If you look at the ads that the Reform Party put out in Britain, one of the most striking of them started out with the person saying, “You know, nothing works anymore.” And that sense that nothing works anymore is one of the most important and most sort of lost factors in driving populism—is the idea that all this supposedly expert liberal governance doesn’t seem to be making anything better.

Demsas: I want to return to the solutions that you presented at the beginning when we talked, and you had two. One was liberal populism, or plural professionalism. These are the two ways forward you see for someone trying to combat pernicious minoritarianism in our democratic system. I’m first hoping you can define both of those for us.

Teles: So by liberal populism, I mean the idea that we could have an activist government without necessarily a high degree of delegation to expert authority. And if you go back to the original populists, back in the day, in the late 19th century, the thing that was interesting about them is they really liked legislatures, and they really disliked courts and executive agencies, and they thought, We’re going to go get the people en masse to go and vote for us, and then we’re going to pass very specific laws in Congress that don’t give executive-branch agencies or courts a lot of authority.

And I think there are ways that we could do that now. I mentioned earlier, if you think about a carbon tax, or you could, actually, just literally take away the authority of local governments to make decisions about housing at all. You could just say, Look—everything’s by right. Now, again, there’d be a lot of problems with that. There’d be difficulties. But compared to the status quo, the point about liberal populism is not that everything they do is going to be perfectly calibrated but that it would be relatively simple. It would be easy. It would be easy for the public to actually know what was happening and whether it was succeeding.

And so doing things straight up through taxing and spending is another way of doing things through what I would call liberal populism. So just making things illegal, or making them legal, or spending or taxing, right—doing that, as opposed to doing things through complicated, multistep expert delegation of the kind that liberals have gotten used to. That’s what I mean by liberal populism.

Demsas: Let’s stop right there then, because I want to ask you about this. What happens when you can’t pass something that is simple to address an important problem, like carbon tax—most environmentalists would love to see a carbon tax. They would love to see a price on carbon. We’re seeing now in Canada and the new prime minister, Mark Carney, who’s taken over from Justin Trudeau for the Liberal government, as part of his appeal to voters as he’s facing a real threat from the Conservative Party, is that he is repealing their carbon tax. And we see this in the United States. There was a real attempt to do a cap-and-trade system to try to get a carbon tax passed. It just was not politically viable in this country. People do not want to see their energy costs go up. It’s just not something that they’re going to accept.

Given that is often true for a lot of the first, best policies that people want to get passed, you inevitably have to go, like, Okay, what can you get done in this system then? And a part of why we see such a kind of kludgy outcome from many of these other policies is that there are smart people working on this problem, realizing that they cannot get their first, best policies. And so is your answer that you should just not do things if you can’t get that first, best policy? Or how much of a kludge are you willing to accept to get us marginally closer to these goals?

Teles: Yeah, so I’ve always found this a very weird argument. What I would say on this is: The most simple point of democracy is you have to persuade people to do things. And if they regularly and repeatedly say they don’t want something, then you don’t do it. Experts can come up with lots of ideas about what should be done, but at some point, there has to be a check on that from legislators, from the public, and if you actually can’t persuade them, you just don’t get to do it.

Demsas: I think this is unfair, though. Because I think that often what’s happening is the public is giving competing signals. The public is saying, I don’t want to see my energy costs go up. They’re also saying, I would like hurricanes not to be as intense all the time. They’re also saying, I care about environmental protection in some ways. And these are things that the democracy has to mediate, because if every single country was like, We’re not going to tax carbon. We’re just going to let this happen, people would be really upset with the eventual outcome.

Teles: Okay. Just to be clear, I want to tax carbon, and I think climate change is a big problem. I don’t want to have anybody come at me and send emails saying, Steve Teles didn’t think climate change is a big problem.

But I do think that one of the things you are describing is what I’ve sometimes called “structural sneakiness.” Which is: Faced with the fact that actually lots of people don’t want things that liberals want, the way that liberals have responded is finding sneaky, complicated, roundabout ways to get around the fact that people just don’t want to do what people who want an activist government want to do. And instead of trying to find other ways to persuade them or compensate them or other things, we’ve tried to find these complicated, expert-delegation kinds of ways around that. And sometimes that works. But one thing I think it does is it also raises questions about the legitimacy of the larger system.

If you keep producing governing outcomes that people don’t like—they don’t like the consequences of them—and you don’t actually just directly try and convince them and find other ways to convince them, find ways to pair it with other stuff, overall that this creates sort of alienation from the larger regime of activist government. So I think every time you try and do these end arounds that you’re talking about, there is a kind of external effect. It’s not necessarily in that domain, but it’s on the general system of activist government.

Demsas: So people lose trust, and they feel betrayed by government.

Teles: Yeah. And again, I think that this is a problem that has happened to liberals, in general. It’s just that instinct of having to actually take people’s problems and take their objections seriously. And directly trying to argue with them, as opposed to finding end arounds, as you were just describing, is a real fundamental problem with liberalism.

Demsas: So I want you then to explain your second solution, which is plural professionalism.

Teles: Right. So what I say is, liberal populism is a partial answer to certain kinds of problems, but there’s going to be a lot of stuff that government’s still going to have to do through experts. There’s a lot of things in which some degree of delegation is inevitable, given the complexity of what government needs to be doing. And when that’s true, the argument I make in the piece—and it draws in another piece I wrote with Jal Mehta on plural professionalism and education—what I say is, it’s a problem that our expert class has gotten more and more ideologically homogenous.

And that is not, I think, an inevitable feature. There’s lots of smart conservatives out there. We might disagree about how many there are. But I think there—I meet a lot of them. They could be in government, but in many cases, they’ve decided that lots of these expert fields are simply sort of ideologically coded. So you think about the example of nursing, right? It wasn’t that long ago that everybody just thought that nursing was, by definition, a female field. And so men who might’ve liked to be nurses, who might’ve been good nurses, just didn’t go in, because they thought it was definitionally incompatible for men to do that. I think many of these expert fields are increasingly ideologically coded in the way that nursing was gender coded.

And that has lots of consequences. I actually think it has some consequences for explaining what DOGE is doing right now. If there was a larger cadre of conservatives who actually knew what they were doing and actually knew how government works and actually knew what the actual programs of HHS were, they would be able to govern by sort of taking the reins of these things and taking away the parts that they don’t like, the parts that they think are excessively woke or in infested with DEI. But they don’t actually really know how lots of these government agencies are working, so they’re trying to make it up with having a bunch of 20-something technologists operating with AI telling them where to cut.

And I think if we actually had a cadre of people in the regular civil service who were more diverse, we would actually have, again, more deliberation. We would actually have more arguments, not so much about the facts or about technique but about the relative weighting of normative preferences. I think that’s one answer, is to actually diversify that expert class. That takes you back to universities. It takes you back to professional schools. And it also, I think, should also make conservatives have to look in the mirror and ask themselves why there aren’t as many people going into these expert fields in public policy and social work and other kinds of areas.

Demsas: We had Sahil Chinoy on the show recently, and he has a paper called “Political Sorting in the U.S. Labor Market.” And his finding is that a Democrat or Republican’s co-worker is 10 percent more likely to share their party than expected based on local partisan shares. So if you’re comparing the partisanship of Silicon Valley to the partisanship of Google—these are just hypotheticals—you might expect that there would be a certain level of partisanship just by who lives in that area, but it’s even more partisan than that. And the thing that I found really interesting about his research is that he’s tracing it throughout the entire system of how someone decides what company they end up working at. It begins with what college you go to, and then what major you choose within that college, and all these other things that end up with you choosing a more partisan workplace for whatever reason.

And the thing that—I mean, I agree with a lot of what you said, but the thing I really want to push on, though, is this idea that there are a lot of experts across the ideological domain who could provide these functions. So because there’s all this sorting going on, if you are a completely ideologically neutral person hiring at the PPO in the White House, and you’re looking for the best people in certain spheres, they’re going to be people who are predominantly one ideology over the other. And more than likely, they’re going to be liberals because liberals end up working in areas that are adjacent to public policy. And conservatives end up working more in private-sector areas. And so part of the problem we’re identifying here, though, is that even if someone wanted to have this sort of plural professionalism, it would mean you got worse people who were conservatives.

Teles: Well, so if you think the answer to this is just ideological affirmative action and preferential treatment, then in equilibrium, you’re going to get worse. And again, now, that’s a function of other things that were happening earlier in the labor market.

And this is where, again, I think it’s worth thinking about this as a structural problem. Just as we have ideas about structural racism, I think it’s also worth thinking about sort of structural ideological bias. And most of the bias in many of these fields really is structural, in the sense that it’s self-reproducing; it’s chronic. Again, once a field gets defined ideologically in the way that I talked about before, then nobody has to do any discriminating. The perception of what the field is about does all of that work.

So my friend Harold Pollack at University of Chicago has talked about this in the field he’s in, in social work. And social work is now so definitionally marked as being a left-of-center thing that people would just think it was inappropriate for a person like them to do that if they were more conservative, even though there’s lots actually really important work that people who come from a more conservative point of view could be doing in social work—and, in fact, are doing but they’re doing without, necessarily, that kind of technical training.

So I think of this as a long-term project. So one of the things I’m involved with is a new school of government at Johns Hopkins, and we have a very deep sort of institutionalized commitment to ideological diversity in the faculty we hire and the students that we’re going to bring on. And part of that’s an effort to try to get some capture on the problem that we’re just describing.

But to go back, there’s a reason why the labor-market phenomenon you’re talking about exists, which is: Homophily is a very powerful force in human affairs—the fact that birds of a feather flock together. It’s because at any one time, that reduces conflict. People like being around other people who share their values, and managing diverse workforces, whether they’re managing for race or ideology, is hard. It takes extra work to do that.

Now, again, I think there’s a reason to think that it produces, over time, better outcomes, because it surfaces conflict in ways that are actually necessary, as opposed to simply having everybody assume they know what everybody thinks and, also, not checking each other’s work when it agrees with their ideological priors. One of the advantages of having some degree of diversity, for example, in academia, is you really want people rerunning people’s models or checking their footnotes. They’re going to do that more if they have an ideological motivation to do so. And they’re going to do it less if it feels like, well, that’s just going to make you feel like a jerk because you’re that guy who is checking the model of the thing that everybody wants to believe is true.

Demsas: Well, Steve, I think this is a great point for our last and final question. What is something that you thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Teles: So I know you want me to say that, like, my choice of toothpaste or something was the thing I thought was good on paper, but I’ll give the more prosaic one, that I thought the Iraq War was a great idea.

Demsas: Really?

Teles: And I wasn’t, like, out there writing stuff in Foreign Affairs at the time. But for lots of reasons, at the time, I remember very strongly thinking that—now, part of this was that I thought we had sort of run out of other options, that the old line that lots of ways you get in trouble is that you say: This is unsustainable. Something must be done. This is something, ergo we should do this something.

And the thing, and in retrospect, that was so disturbing to me when I actually saw what happened in the Iraq War is: I was ignoring lots of things that professionally I should have known about. A lot of what I actually teach people about is the problem of joint coordinated action, the difficulty of actually doing big, complicated things. And for some reason, I just didn’t apply any of that knowledge when it was about something that, for normative or other reasons, I thought was a really good idea.

And so my penance for that is I started teaching a class called Policy Disasters that always ended with the Iraq War. So that was the last case I would do, but it was my effort to sort of ritually abuse myself for having made that big mistake and to try and teach other people how to apply what we know about why big, complicated things go wrong, even the things that they care a lot and feel normatively invested in.

[Music]

Demsas: I was too young to have a considered opinion on the Iraq War at the time, but I do find it interesting that there’s—like, polling had like large majorities in favor of the Iraq War, yet I never find anyone admitting that they were one of the 60-something percent of people who were ready to go to war there. So I appreciate you admitting that to us on this podcast.

Teles: Thank you for having me here.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Would You Give PornHub Your ID?

2025-04-15T06:00:00-04:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Cultural attitudes toward porn may be liberalizing, but the belief that minors shouldn’t have unfettered access to it remains broadly shared. Parents are the natural guardians of their children’s internet habits, but many report feeling powerless against the innumerable work-arounds and relentless societal pull toward unrestricted internet use.

So what can be done to prevent kids from accessing harmful content? Make porn websites check ID? That’s exactly what several states have tried—with mixed results.

A new study by researchers at Stanford, NYU, the University of Georgia, and Georgia State followed the implementation of a law in Louisiana that required any website publishing a substantial amount of pornographic content to take reasonable steps to verify the age of users before giving them access. The researchers found that while search traffic to Pornhub—which complied with the law—dropped by 51 percent, traffic to its noncompliant rival, XVideos, rose by 48.1 percent. This is a classic tale of tech regulation: lots of friction while the primary aim remains unfulfilled.

But one of the researchers, Zeve Sanderson, the executive director of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, isn’t resigned to defeat. On today’s episode of Good on Paper, we discuss what governments can even do to regulate the internet on behalf of minors and what doing so might cost the rest of us. Also, he explains, Louisiana’s legislation shows that writing a law can be the beginning, not the end, of a policy process.

“A noncompliant firm that platforms content that we would be more concerned about has risen,” Sanderson laments. “And it’s not clear to me that any laws are gonna change as a result.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: Thirty years ago, one of the only legal ways to access porn was to walk into a store, show some ID, and purchase a magazine or video. Today, the concept is almost laughable. I don’t even think most minors even realize they’re doing something illegal when they search for porn online. When something is trivially easy—like jaywalking or setting off fireworks or finding porn on the internet—it feels legal.

But over the past three years, legislators in nearly half of U.S. states have passed laws to try to end the porn free-for-all. The goal, they say, is to stop kids from viewing adult content, by forcing porn sites to verify the ages of their users. This episode is about how policy can backfire, and raises questions about how governments can even begin regulating what kids do on the internet.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

My guest today is Zeve Sanderson. He’s the executive director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics, and a research associate at the school’s Center on Technology Policy. In a new study, Zeve and his co-authors find that the effect of these laws are not as policy makers intended. While there was a 51 percent reduction in searches for Pornhub, which complied, there was a nearly commensurate increase in searches for the dominant noncompliant platform, XVideos.

We wanted to give XVideos an opportunity to respond to this story and the claims that they are not complying with U.S. state laws. We requested a comment from the company but have yet to hear back from them.

Let’s dive in. Zeve, welcome to the show.

Zeve Sanderson: Thanks so much for having me.

Demsas: So we’re going to start with a noncontroversial question. Do you think porn is bad for kids?

Sanderson: So it’s a good question. One of the challenges with answering this question and answering many of the questions right now around, sort of, “insert a particular type of digital media,” including social media, and that effect on kids, is that it’s really hard to run, sort of, causal studies on kids.

Demsas: You’re not going to randomly assign kids to watch porn.

Sanderson: Exactly. And which is actually sort of a big issue when it comes to, like, Is porn bad for kids?

Demsas: Yeah.

Sanderson: And so there’s a fair amount of correlational work. I want to flag that my focus is on political communications and on tech policy. So I obviously have a broad understanding of the literature, but I myself am not a psychologist.

As I understand the literature, studies have shown that adolescent exposure to online pornography is associated with things that we would consider to be normatively bad—things like body-image concerns, lower self-esteem, and increased acceptance of sort of aggressive sexual scripts, which may normalize sexual aggression more broadly in intimate contexts.

However, again, these are purely correlative, and so drawing that sort of causal connection is hard, in general, but especially hard, like you said, when we’re not going to run, like, an RCT where we expose kids to pornography.

Demsas: Hey, kids. Do you want to join this fun study? (Laughs.)

Sanderson: Yeah. I can’t imagine any university ethics board that would go along with that.

Demsas: Yeah, that’s like a 1960s-type study. And if they didn’t do it then, we’re not going to get it now.

Sanderson: Right.

Demsas: Okay, but what do you think? Like, you’ve spent a lot of time in this space, right? I get that it’s correlational, but the problem with this kind of research is that we have to make policy even though we don’t have RCTs. So do you think it’s more plausible that porn is making kids less happy, have body-image issues, express more anxiety, have negative interactions or things that we would consider bad social scripts regarding gender relations?

Or do you think it’s mostly, if not all, selection—that the kids who already kind of have those traits are the ones more likely to be using porn or admit to using porn in surveys?

Sanderson: So I think that it broadly depends on contextual factors, right? So kids with access to comprehensive sex education and strong parental communication sort of demonstrate in research a greater ability to critically evaluate pornographic content.

That said, I think one of the interesting things about this policy space is that there’s actually pretty broad acceptance that, like, trying to block access of kids watching porn is a good thing that everyone wants to move towards. Even Pornhub and the Free Speech Coalition, which is the sort of professional lobbying group of the adult-entertainment industry, are all sort of directionally on board with “kids shouldn’t have access to adult content.”

As I’m sure we’ll discuss on this show, though, the challenge becomes: How do you move from there to, like, a set of policy interventions that actually work?

Demsas: Set the stage for us a bit here about porn usage among kids. And to the best of our knowledge, how much usage do we see? How much do we see it differ by gender? What’s the age of first exposure, as best as we can tell?

Sanderson: Yeah. So in terms of what we know, a lot of it, like we discussed, starts from survey-based studies because we’re not going to be treating kids with certain types of adult content. And so surveys suggest that first exposure typically occurs between ages of 11 and 13.

And so I think one of the interesting pieces is that we have always attempted to restrict kids’ access to porn. And before the internet, that largely was done via needing to show an ID at a convenience store or an adult shop in order to get access to the products that they were selling. The internet really complicated things, and policy makers in the ’90s largely tried to solve this and failed.

The main laws that were passed were struck down on First Amendment grounds. And so as a result, what we’ve sort of gotten in this shift from primarily offline access to primarily online access has largely been self-regulation. So if you access an adult website, they have a pop-up that asks you to verify if you’re over 18. In sort of more nascent examples, there was an adult video game called Leisure Suit Larry in the ’80s that would ask trivia questions as an age-verification system.

Demsas: Wait. Like what?

Sanderson: Like “Who is Spiro Agnew?” Nixon’s former VP.

Demsas: (Laughs.) That maybe also shuts out a bunch of adults too, right?

Sanderson: Totally. Yeah, it would be a weird cross section of, like, very precocious kids and adults who have access to it. Another funny one is that one of the questions was, “O. J. Simpson is ______,” and it was a multiple choice, and it was 1987, and one of the wrong answers was “under indictment.” And so there would also be a time feature to who had access to this.

Demsas: That’s so funny. I don’t know if this is an apocryphal story or a real one, but there’s the park ranger trying to design a trash can. And he’s, like, the overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest human is quite large, so designing trash cans in national parks is difficult.

Sanderson: Exactly.

Demsas: Cool. Okay. I think that sets a stage for us a bit here because we’ve seen in recent years kind of more attention towards how regulators can really engage in this space. The internet’s kind of like the Wild West, and it’s a place where you don’t see a ton of regulation, not because I think there’s not a desire to do so, but people kind of feel like it’s futile, which is maybe a theme of this podcast today.

But my colleague Marc Novicoff wrote a great article in The Atlantic that goes over some kind of personal history here in Louisiana. So Louisiana passes a law to force pornography websites or websites containing, quote, “substantial adult content” to verify their users’ ages.

And Marc writes that it happened, in part, because the Louisiana Republican state representative Laurie Schlegel decided to act. Schlegel is a sex-and-porn-addiction counselor and had heard Billie Eilish describe how porn had affected her as a child. “I started watching porn when I was, like, 11,” Eilish said on The Howard Stern Show. “I think it really destroyed my brain, and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”

Obviously, Billie Eilish is not solely responsible for this trend, but I think that those kinds of accounts have become more common as the internet generation has grown up and are now adults and reflecting back on their own experiences, and you have some people kind of having the same experiences as Billie. So can you walk us through Louisiana’s law? What did Act 440 do?

Sanderson: Yeah, so essentially what Act 440 did: It was implemented on January 1, 2023. And there were a few key features of what it was doing. So the first is that it sets specific technical requirements for verification providers. So these are the providers that essentially sit between a website that hosts adult content and a user, in order to verify the user’s age. The second is that it clearly defined covered content and websites. And it also introduced substantial penalties for noncompliance.

Demsas: And what were those penalties?

Sanderson: So the penalties were not to exceed $5,000 for each day of violation and not to exceed $10,000 for failure to perform reasonable age verification. One of the challenges in actually implementing this, though, is that people in Louisiana, like everywhere in the world, have access to websites all over the world.

And so if there is a website that sits—you know, the servers are in another country, and let’s say it’s owned by a company in another country, and they have no sort of U.S. legal presence. Being able to actually levy those penalties against companies is pretty much impossible. And thus companies don’t have to comply.

Demsas: In the paper, your goal is to see how this law and other laws in other states—21 states have passed similar laws. Are they all kind of in the same form as Act 440, or is there a lot of variation?

Sanderson: So 21 states have passed age verification. In 18 states, the laws are in effect, and in three, they’re going into effect this summer. Interestingly, 17 other states and D.C. are also considering age-verification bills. So the question then is: How similar are they? In short, they’re relatively similar. They’re all based off of sort of a similar model for the policy.

Where they really differ, though, is the technical requirements or the mechanism for age verification. And as a result, you actually see Louisiana be a little bit of an outlier relative to the other 17 states where the laws are in effect, because Louisiana has a digital-ID program called LA Wallet, and part of the sort of age-verification mechanism in Louisiana specifically is able to leverage LA Wallet in order to give users access to adult content in a privacy-preserving way. Whereas in other states, they had different age-verification mechanisms, including uploading a copy of a government-issued ID, like a driver’s license, relying on a third-party vendor to verify a user’s age using various data. And all of these were relatively privacy invasive. And so as a result of these other laws, Pornhub, which is the most popular adult website in the U.S., pulled out of all of those states. The only state where it’s still active in which an age-verification law has passed is Louisiana.

Demsas: Wow. And the reason for that is because it was concerned about privacy?

Sanderson: It’s concerned about a bunch of different things, all of which are extremely valid. So one is privacy. Does the user have to turn over any personally identifiable information to a service, and in particular to the website that’s doing the verifying, like Pornhub, that at some point could be used to reidentify that user? That’s one of the main concerns. And the reidentification could obviously happen in certain ways. It could be everything from a hack, and so a ton of users’ history of actually watching particular adult content is made visible.

But also, there are other legal mechanisms by which somebody could access it, like potentially a subpoena. And so there’s this big question, which was how was age verification being done? Who was doing it? And whether users’ privacy was protected. And at least Pornhub’s perspective was that Louisiana was the only state where they felt comfortable complying with the law versus just pulling out entirely.

Demsas: Part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you is because you had a preanalysis plan and preregistration of your study. For folks who don’t know what that is, can you explain why that’s important?

Sanderson: Essentially, what a preanalysis plan is, is it specifies the way that we are going to analyze data before we see those data. And that’s really important because it gets around some of the issues that I know you’ve been interested in—and your colleague Derek Thompson has been interested in—around the ability to do really good, open, transparent science that we can trust. And this is one way of doing it. It’s sort of calling your shot, almost Babe Ruth–style, you know, pointing over the fence.

And it doesn’t allow us to do some things afterwards where, you know, researchers have been shown, at times, to essentially use statistical methods in order to find an effect that often doesn’t replicate in the future, because it really wasn’t as robust or rigorous as we wanted. And preregistration is one of the tools that we have to do that.

Demsas: And so what did you expect the impact would be then? Because you also preregistered, sort of locking in, your hypothesis ahead of time.

Sanderson: Yeah, we largely expected what, in fact, has happened, which was that there were, aligning with the theme of this show, all sorts of unintended consequences that maybe took this policy that was good on paper and, at best, complicated it and, at worst, you know, has suggested that it’s ineffective or potentially even harmful.

Demsas: So walk us through those. What were the main findings of your paper?

Sanderson: Yeah. So we had three primary questions. The first is: Did compliant websites see lower search volume as a result of the laws? The second was: Did noncompliant websites see higher search volume as a result of the laws? And the final was: Did people search for VPNs, which would help them circumvent these laws?

And I should mention that we use Google Trends data for a few different reasons. The first is that it’s granular, and it’s free, and it’s accessible. And so what that allowed us to do was actually drill down with some temporal granularity to see the way that search volume around these topics—in our case, Pornhub, which was the compliant firm, XVideos, which is the most popular noncompliant website in the U.S., and then searches for VPNs—we were interested to see how those shifted over time.

Obviously, Google search results are imperfect. We would prefer to have access to the actual sort of data of who was visiting these websites. However, that’s not data that’s freely available. It actually costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so instead, we use Google search results. But what we do is we look at the correlation between Google Trends data and similar web data, which actually looks directly at traffic at the national level, and we show very high levels of correlation. And so we expect that what we’re seeing in our results would actually sort of directionally align with real, actual visits to those sites.

Demsas: Give us a sense of the magnitudes here. How much did you see search traffic decline towards the compliant websites?

Sanderson: Yeah, so for the compliant website—again, we focus specifically on Pornhub because it’s the most popular adult-content website in the country—we see over the three months after implementation, search volume drops 51 percent.

Demsas: That’s a lot.

Sanderson: Yeah. It’s a lot. And I think one of the important things to emphasize about Google Trends data is that it’s all relative. So we actually don’t know exactly how many searches someone did. Instead, it’s normalized on this sort of zero to 100 scale, where 100 is the peak search interest in the given region in the given time. So in this case, it would be the states that we were focusing on in the time period of the study.

So we also think about this in a slightly different way that might be more meaningful, which is that Pornhub lost about 4.4 weeks of peak search traffic over those three months. Similarly, or rather conversely, we saw XVideos, which didn’t comply with the laws, see a dramatic increase in search volume.

So over the three months after state implementation, we saw searches increase 48.1 percent—which, you know, similar to the previous statistic, would sort of account for roughly a 3.62-week gain of their peak traffic during that period.

Demsas: So it’s, like, almost offsetting the decline in Pornhub traffic.

Sanderson: Yeah. So, I mean, because Pornhub started at a higher level, it doesn’t fully offset it. But it does certainly offset some of it.

Demsas: I hear what you’re saying. Yeah.

Sanderson: One of the other interesting things, though, is: You can think about this law as attempting to do many things, right? The main thing that it’s attempting to do is protect kids from having access to adult content. But there’s also this economic effect, which is that these are really large websites that make a lot of money. And what you’ve effectively done via these laws is you have benefited a firm that was noncompliant, because it was noncompliant—which creates these really perverse incentives in this sort of regulatory environment where noncompliance allows you to gain market share from your main competitor that complies with the laws.

Demsas: But I guess on the first question, it seems like you probably did see less people watching porn online, given the information that you had. I would expect there’s a decline, even if it is offset by increases in traffic to noncompliant sites.

Sanderson: Yeah, so I largely agree that what I would assume is that there probably was some drop in overall porn consumption in these states. Again, it’s tough for us to tell, because we’re using Google search data. And one person, when we were presenting this paper, asked, Who searches for porn? Like, Why is this actually good data to use?

Demsas: That’s so funny. Any question you ask is a confession in this space. (Laughs.)

Sanderson: Totally. But one of the reasons that we think these data end up being relevant to our question and why we would see this behavior is because Chrome is the most popular browser in the U.S., and if you go into the [search] bar and you type in a word—let’s say you type in “New York Times”—and you don’t put “.com” on it, it does a Google search. And it would do the same thing for pornography. And so what we expect is happening here is: People, essentially, are just typing in a word, and that’s why we’re picking it up in the overall search volume.

Demsas: I guess the way I would think about it if this were to matter a lot is, I guess, the more sophisticated porn users, whether they have pages saved or whatever, those folks are less likely to come up on your Google search as part of that traffic. And then so you’re getting—I don’t know what it means to be a less-sophisticated porn watcher, but using that terminology, like, those folks are the ones you’re largely capturing, because—

Sanderson: But I think there’s another important dynamic here, bringing us back to kids—which, again, is the focus of the law—which is if we describe this dynamic: The major adult website in the country that complies with laws, in one state, they actually have age verification. In all the other states that pass these laws, they pull out.

And it requires either substitution or circumvention, right? You either need to substitute with a different website, or you need to circumvent via some technology like a VPN. If I just said, Who’s probably better positioned to navigate this new sort of legal environment if they are motivated to access adult content: digitally native kids or adults? I think, you know, as people living in the world, even though we don’t have direct access to this data, our priors would probably be that kids are much better equipped to substitute and circumvent.

And so in some ways, even if we saw overall porn consumption drop, which, again, is something that we hope to test in the future, I personally wouldn’t really expect kids to be part of that drop. I mean, they’re quite ingenious at getting around technical barriers.

Demsas: You think they wouldn’t have dropped at all?

Sanderson: I’m not sure.

Demsas: I think I would expect that there’s some drop. Like, there are some people who are just marginally like, Okay, I’m just not going to search this now.

Sanderson: Anytime you add friction to anything, it’s very rare to see an increase as a result of the friction. So again, our prior should be that you would see some drop. But the challenge, of course, is: How much of a drop was there? And for the kids, or for everybody but especially the kids who are still consuming content that the policy makers and the public are quite concerned about, has that content changed? And I think that’s a really important question for the policy community to ask here, because these two firms are not the same, right? Pornhub and XVideos are qualitatively different, if only to start because we know that one complies with the law and the other doesn’t.

Demsas: And so I want to talk about this, though, this noncompliance, because I think that obviously you probably would see a much larger decrease if there were no major noncompliant websites at all. Yes, some people would figure out VPNs, but a lot of people have trouble figuring that out and don’t even know what that is or don’t know how to set it up—and, like, it’s not crazy complicated, but it does take some effort to set that up for yourself. And it feels a little bit more illegal than, like, just, Oh, I’ll just go to the next site on Google. That’s a very different sort of friction you’ve created for people, to use your language there.

But, you know, the reason XVideos is noncompliant is, in part, because the government wasn’t willing to go nuclear and say, ISPs, you have to stop hosting websites that are noncompliant, right?

Sanderson: Yeah. And, I mean, obviously, it’s possible to do that sort of with the scalpel, right? To say, okay, you know, ISPs don’t route any data from XVideos to the states that have passed these laws. I’ve made the mistake exactly once in a public context of speculating on legal questions, so I’ll try not to do that again here. But my guess is that would need to come from the federal government, given its various effects on other states.

There’s also been a lot of development in much more sophisticated age-verification protocols that many of the states just decided not to take up here. And to a certain extent, that wouldn’t solve this problem, which is that any age-verification protocol will be accompanied by some level of friction. And so, you know, if any level of friction is a deterrent to using a compliant site, then maybe you would still see people move over to noncompliant sites.

But there were much better ways to age verify with fewer privacy considerations where potentially we wouldn’t have seen such stark effects. That said, we saw stark effects in Louisiana, where Pornhub stayed active in the state, where they had this sort of digital wallet. And in our numbers, like I mentioned, we show a 40 to 50 percent drop, depending on the state. But Pornhub itself actually reports an 80 percent drop in volume from Louisiana after the law, so even larger than ours.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: Is there really a right to access porn privately?

[Break]

Demsas: I want to ask you about this privacy question, because I think it’s at the core of a lot of the pushback to this. As you said, there are a lot of people who would be amenable to stopping or blocking kids from accessing this sort of content. But when it runs up against their own ability, as adults, to access adult content or any kind of content on the internet without the government having to verify their ID or their age, I think that’s when it becomes kind of tricky for a lot of people.

And, you know, I started thinking about this because, I mean, I’m a digital native. I grew up on the internet. I was on Tumblr with my pseudonymous account, and I enjoyed being anonymous on the internet. That was, like, a fun thing, and I think that can be valuable. And, you know, there are free-speech concerns and, of course, you know, political-activism concerns with the government intervening too much in this space and with corporations intervening too much in this space.

But at the same time, the expectation that your access to pornography is private is pretty new. I feel like I was watching a Gilmore Girls episode when I realized how normal this was, and there’s a back room of the video store where they’re all going to get porn, and I was just like, What? I can’t even believe this.

But it’s like, that’s genuinely the main way that people were accessing porn, or they were going to get it shipped to their house. But there was already verification with these steps. Like, you had to have some sort of verification happening. It was difficult to get it. Obviously, kids were still able to, like, you know, get someone else’s magazine, have someone buy it for them. But in the same way that we ban alcohol, even though some kids can get around it, we see that as possible.

So walk me through how you think about this privacy question, because it is one where my knee-jerk reaction around the internet is that I care about privacy. But it also is quite new to demand a right to privacy around getting porn. Like, that’s quite novel.

Sanderson: Yeah. So I feel like in this episode, I probably have already pissed off some psychologists, some First Amendment lawyers, and now I’ll add the privacy community to the mix. But so I think that there are sort of two things here, right?

So the first is that I sort of broadly agree with you. This is sort of, like, a novel privacy right to affirm that we can have access to porn in a fully private setting where we don’t need to affirm our identity in any way. However, on the other hand, in order to build a sort of identity architecture into age verification across various, you know, websites and apps, we really need to fundamentally rethink the way the internet works.

And I don’t want to pretend like trying to solve the problem around age verification on adult content would get rid of, like, anonymity everywhere. That’s certainly not the case. But I do want to emphasize that really thinking about identity affirmation online is something that comes with all sorts of trade-offs and broadly is not the norm, right? Broadly, while we might need to identify ourselves as a user, right—we have a username and a password—in many contexts, we don’t actually need to turn over any personally identifying information about ourselves.

And so one of the interesting things here is that this is where a lot of work—and really exciting work—has been done, and there are various methods for thinking about how you might be able to do age verification in a way that actually does preserve privacy. I don’t really want to go into—I think the technical details, in some ways, are less important than the overall logic here.

And the logic is that you sort of have a service or a platform or a website on one side that needs to verify someone’s age. And on the other side, you know, you have another service that knows, at minimum, an age range. And what you really want to do in order to effectively do age verification while preserving privacy is let the website know that a particular user is above or below a certain age, without letting that website know anything about that user and without letting the age-verification system know what website is asking the question.

So recently, Apple came out with a white paper where they sort of proposed a particular mechanism by which parents set up child accounts, and they have an age range that is stored on the phone, and that age range can be made available to apps via the App Store. But again, these two things aren’t really talking to each other. And obviously, Apple has long held privacy as a core of what they’re doing. So yes, there are some companies doing this. I really hate saying this word at all, but, like, this is an application for a blockchain or some sort of—

Demsas: I was waiting for it. I knew it was going to come up. (Laughs.)

Sanderson: —or some sort of distributed technology. There’s been a lot of technical advancements in something called zero-knowledge proofs—so, essentially, a protocol in which one party can convince another party that some given statement is true, without conveying any information to the verifier beyond the fact of that statement. So, like, that’s the sort of logic of the computation that’s going on. And so, you know, again, not a crypto person, though I think that, in general, thinking about genuinely useful applications of distributed technologies is interesting. And this might be one.

Demsas: I wonder, from the perspective of trying to attack this from a different actor, like, right now, we’ve talked a lot about: How do you address this by finding the website, by making the websites compliant, by creating that sort of change? How do you think about this from a parent standpoint? Like, holding parents responsible in the same way that we hold them responsible for truancy, for instance, in some states? Responsible for installing porn blockers on kids’ computers and, you know, responsible for ensuring that kids are not using this on their smartphones. Like, what do you think about that approach, and is there research that illuminates whether this is actually effective?

Sanderson: Yeah, so I’m really happy you asked this question, because it emphasizes, I think, this sort of broad dynamic in tech policy that you can’t solve, sort of, “insert societal challenge” at the level of tech policy. If what we’re after is more developmentally appropriate content consumption broadly around kids, because we care about their development, tech policy like age verification is going to be one small piece of a much larger policy and nonpolicy agenda. And parents play a huge role in this.

Demsas: When I was doing some research for this episode, I came across this interesting survey that was trying to ask people about their first exposure to pornography. It’s not a huge sample, but it was a 2017 study that surveyed 330 undergrad men, 17 to 54 years old. I assume that is an outlier 54-year-old.

But the participants were 85 percent white, primarily heterosexual. And when they were asked about their first exposure, the mean age was 13.37 years of age, so kind of in line with what you told us at the top of the episode. But what’s interesting is that 43 percent of men indicated that their first exposure was accidental, which reminded me—again, who knows—maybe there’s social-desirability bias here, where you don’t want to say you were looking for porn at 12. I have no idea.

But part of what struck me is: It is very, very normal, particularly now that X has changed its protocols significantly, to just be, like, on the internet and come across porn accidentally. Like, that will happen. Like, now you see this on Reels, on TikTok, where you see content that is very close to porn or, like, porn adjacent or even really explicit content on websites that are not normally predominantly serving that sort of content. And that’s something that I think that these sorts of laws really don’t do much about but I would imagine have a larger impact on, you know, adolescents that we’re trying to prevent from having to see this in an unwanted way.

So, you know, when I was, like, in elementary school, I remember I was at the school library, and these were big desktop computers. And I saw a group of kids huddled around a computer, and I walk over. And, like, I’m 6 or 7 years old at this point. And they’re, like, kids looking at porn, and they’re laughing and showing this around. And I remember being horrified at what had just occurred, and I kind of ran away and pretended it hadn’t happened. But it stuck in my brain for a long time.

And I imagine, like, that’s the sort of thing—beyond just, like, normal healthy sexual interactions people are having—you’re not trying to prevent kids from, in a way that feels uncomfortable or unwanted, having to experience sexual content like that. Are there laws that could even address something like that? Because that is not something that you can go to, like, a central provider like Pornhub or XVideos or whatever it is. That’s just, like as you said, kind of littered throughout the whole internet.

Sanderson: Yeah. So the short answer is yes. There are sort of policy mechanisms by which we could imagine getting there. And I say, “imagine getting there,” because, you know, we don’t pass a ton of tech policy at the federal level. A lot’s being passed at the state level. But for various reasons, a lot of what’s being passed at the state level, it’s sort of simple approaches to quite complicated problems. And what I’m about to sort of try to describe is, like, a complicated problem to try to solve.

But you could imagine, let’s say, on something like X or Reddit or Instagram that there’s some legal requirement where they’re making some determination about the type of content that’s on the platform, right? So on Instagram, you have two photos. They can have a bunch of automated classifiers running that are able to say, This photo is not adult content, and that photo is adult content. And baked into this general push to try to expand age verification across the, like, social internet—think about what sort of social media platforms kids have access to and how—one of the things that you could do, as part of that, is if you’re age verifying kids to go on social media, you also have legally mandated content filters that strip out adult content from that feed. And it would obviously be imperfect, but it would probably solve for a fair amount of what you just described, which is, like, large-scale incidental exposure.

Demsas: Yeah. It doesn’t stop random 7-year-olds from, I guess, showing each other porn. But—

Sanderson: Yeah, I think that’s sort of an age-old problem.

Demsas: Exactly. I know that you’re not a lawyer, but I did want to ask you about the changing—it seems changing—legal environment around these questions. For a long time, as you mentioned, there’s been kind of this distinction between getting porn in person, and you can check ID at, like, the video store or whatever it is, versus getting it online, where there’s been sort of a free-speech argument that you can’t really regulate that in the same way. That might be changing. Can you tell us what’s going on?

Sanderson: Yeah, essentially, there was a major law in the mid-’90s that was passed called the Communications Decency Act, and it was the first really serious piece of federal legislation that attempted to regulate minors’ access to online materials. And it did it in a few different ways, but ultimately, it was struck down. And it was struck down not because the government didn’t have a legitimate state interest in regulating or limiting access for kids to adult content, but instead because the court believed that the way that it was happening would have infringed upon the First Amendment right of adults.

And so in general, there is sort of this legal precedent that kids’ access to adult content is not First Amendment–protected speech so long as the mechanism by which you do it doesn’t limit adult First Amendment–protected speech and that there’s a legitimate state interest in attempting to accomplish what I just described.

And in the mid-’90s, they really didn’t have a good way of doing it. They also, you know, didn’t have a great way of defining what adult content was. I think that largely because age-verification mechanisms have gotten so much more sophisticated and granular, that we’re moving towards—and I think we saw this in the court hearings—we’re moving towards that because there is this precedent that this state can attempt to regulate kids’ access to porn, so long as it doesn’t infringe upon adults.

Demsas: So we’ve kind of, throughout this conversation, really accepted the premise that this is a problem, that children accessing pornography is a problem. And one thing I want to do is just maybe stress test out a bit with you, because some people think this is just another moral panic. Whether it’s about youth and internet porn, whether it’s about smartphones, whether it’s about, you know—it’s just like comic books, like it’s rock music, like it’s video games. Public fear can often race ahead of what the evidence shows. And this is a difficult space where finding really high, qualitative, causal evidence is difficult, if not impossible to do.

Are you afraid that this is kind of just a spun-up moral panic, and that’s driven by these high-profile anecdotes from Billie Eilish or whatever, and we’re having kind of, like, a social-conservative backlash and a bunch of vectors, but that this is really not the sort of thing that requires a bunch of government intervention, and that maybe the best thing to do is just hold off and see if private-sector technologies and culture can kind of correct for itself?

Sanderson: I mean, what’s interesting to me is that this is much more an ethical question than it is an empirical question. I think one of the fascinating things studying tech policy, in general, and then especially this area, is that the sort of evidentiary standard that we have to be able to definitively say, X causes Y, is something that in so many areas around technology policy trying to protect kids we just don’t have. And so the question is: What do we do in a context where getting that sort of causal standard or, you know, the gold standard for causal evidence probably isn’t possible?

And so whether or not this is a real problem is, I know, a debate in the psychology literature. It’s a debate amongst parents. And in many ways, what politics and policy making are is an infrastructure to sort of figure out or come to some consensus of that debate. However, I think the challenge becomes, we want policy to do something, to have some effect. And as part of that, what we also want then is this sort of evidence-based feedback loop, where we’re not just passing policy, wiping our hands, and saying our job is done, but instead actually doing something similar to what we’ve done here.

You could imagine policy makers partnering with academics, preregistering studies to understand the effect of these sorts of laws on the outcomes that we’re really interested in. And so my fear is less that this is just a moral panic, because I think, in part, politics is there to figure out a distribution of moral preferences across a population. And instead, what I’m more concerned about is that there isn’t this really rigorous, evidence-based feedback loop where we’re able to just continue to iterate and make policy better.

And I think this is one area where we’ve clearly seen it, where we show, Look—like, a compliant firm has dropped. A noncompliant firm that platforms content that we would be more concerned about has risen. And it’s not clear to me that any laws are going to change as a result. And that’s where I don’t think we want to be in a policy environment.

Demsas: It feels like a lot is about to change with AI in this space. Right? Like, I was on Instagram, and I don’t know if you’ve seen these suggested AI chatbots that they have. And there have been stories of people kind of developing, you know, romantic relationships with them. There was a really sad one in the New York Times about a young boy who actually took his own life after having a relationship with a Character.AI chatbot. I don’t know if it’s causal there, but the story indicated that he had really developed a romantic and personal relationship with this AI agent. And, you know, it’s not going to be just porn websites soon. It’s going to be people having, like, personal interactions with AI girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever.

And that sort of thing, I think, would require even greater privacy violations to prevent from happening, and would create bigger problems for companies trying to be compliant with regulation. It feels like any solution is going to be kludgey. So if you’re going to try to stop kids from accessing porn online, you’re going to stop them and adults from accessing a lot of things. And it’s going to create a bunch of friction and annoyance. It’s going to create some level of privacy violation, some level of First Amendment violation, and maybe not literally constitutionally, but it’s going to create some feeling that your speech has been quelled.

How do you think through this problem? Because, to me, if you’re asking me, okay, you either have to accept a world where you know, kids are having really intimate relationships with AI chatbots, and it’s degrading their ability or desire to interact with people who they’re attracted to in real life, and that continues the degradation of, you know, the children’s experiences in the real world—I guess “real” in quotes. It’s real to them, but, you know—

Sanderson: The embodied world.

Demsas: The embodied world. That’s a better word. Then it’s a much more difficult question. I think as policy wonks in D.C., we want there to be this really perfect solution—there’s, like, some technological solution or some sort of policy solution that actually targets the specific thing you’re worried about. But largely, a lot of effective policies are effective because they’re expansive. I don’t know how you think about that.

Sanderson: Yeah. I mean, tech policy, like every policy area, is just a set of trade-offs that we figure out how to navigate. I think if we want to steelman the argument for age verification broadly, is that if we develop sort of low-friction ways of verifying age without any serious sort of privacy violations, we’re able to essentially do that quite broadly, but we’re never going to be able to be perfect. Perhaps it’s that, you know, porn dropped somewhat overall, but the stuff that remains shifted to worse places. Like, those are the sort of trade-offs that we constantly need to make when we think about policy interventions here.

The one interesting, unique challenge, though, about regulating the sort of digital-information space is that the companies that are making these tools or running these platforms have a monopoly on the data they collect. And that’s really different from other policy spaces. Can you imagine if we needed to figure out sort of, like, interest-rate policy, but some company owned all of the employment-rate data? Like, that would just be this really challenging, I would argue impossible, environment in which to craft good policy.

And that’s essentially what we’re doing here. And so I don’t think that data access solves everything, but I think one of the things that I wish that—there was some momentum around this a few years ago in Congress, and I would love to see it come back up, is as we think about making policies and as we really try to rigorously quantify the trade-offs that will inevitably be there, we need to do so with as much really good data as possible. Otherwise, the fear is that there are all sorts of unintended consequences, the severity of which we’re not able to measure. And so I think that needs to be part of any sort of broad solution that we bring to regulating online spaces and online access.

Demsas: So I think that’s a great place for our last and final question: What is something that you thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Sanderson: Yeah, so I was a basketball player growing up, and I was a pretty good basketball player, and I ultimately became a mediocre Division I point guard.

Demsas: That’s pretty impressive. This is turning into a humblebrag already.

Sanderson: No. Not at all. It’ll quickly not. And, you know, I dreamed my entire life of sort of playing in a Division I program. And I got there. I played at Brown. And when I was there, we were sort of the back of the Ivy League, which itself was one of the worst leagues in America.

And, you know, I went from, like, a high school where lots of people would show up to games to a number of friends not even knowing we had a basketball team to, you know, practicing 40 hours a week while all of my other friends were having fun, and thinking, Is this something that I really want to do? What was it that I was dreaming of?

Demsas: Well, Zeve, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Sanderson: Yeah. Thank you so much, Jerusalem.

[Music]

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

There’s No Coming Back From Trump’s Tariff Disaster

2025-04-12T10:38:54-04:00

Watching the wild lines of the S&P 500, U.S. Treasury bond yields, and various foreign markets is how I’ve spent most of the past week. This felt familiar; I’d spent much of 2017 doing the same, following the vagaries of the first Trump administration and tracking the markets’ reactions like a nurse checking a patient’s heart rate.

But despite that familiarity, this isn’t the same as last time. I actually wish it were. This time, there’s no coming back from this quickly. Whoever is elected the 48th president won’t be able to easily rebuild what Donald Trump is busy destroying. Countries can and will move on without the United States. Their firms will establish new supply chains and pursue other markets. Even if the U.S. were the ultra-dominant trading partner it used to be, the credibility of the nation’s promises, its treaties, its agreements, and even its basic rationality has evaporated in just weeks.

The first Trump administration flirted with protectionism, but nothing like what the second Trump administration is trying now. Those earlier efforts seem quaint in hindsight. Not only were tariffs imposed selectively on specific goods such as solar panels and aluminum, but they were much smaller in size and escalated gradually over the course of 2018 and 2019. This was trivial compared with the plans launched and unlaunched over the past 10 days that have sent bond markets reeling. Usually, investors in search of a haven from a plummeting stock market will flee to buy safe, reliable U.S. Treasury bonds, but the opposite seems to be happening, indicating that investors no longer view the U.S. government as the safest bet in town.

America sports a half-earned cockiness that has mostly served the country well. But as the Financial Times’ Tej Parikh pointed out earlier this week, the United States “isn’t the main driver of global trade growth,” and despite being the world’s largest economy, just over 13 percent of world imports flowed into its borders (as of November 2024). Instead of reshaping trade partnerships to further benefit the U.S., it could be left behind. One analysis Parikh cites—as something of a thought experiment, hopefully—tries to model what would happen to America’s trading partners if the country were to be fully closed to trade in 2025. That analysis predicts that, within the year, nearly 41 percent of U.S. trading partners would have fully recovered from the lost U.S. exports, and by 2029, 100 out of 144 trading partners would have recovered the entirety of their loss of U.S. sales because of the expected growth in other economies.

[Read: The tariff damage that can’t be undone]

America’s economic dominance has long been supported by alliances, faith in U.S. debt, and the independence of the Fed. Those three things “were all built on trust that took decades to build,” the economist Ernie Tedeschi told me. Over the course of the rest of Trump’s new term in office, “they could be decimated, taking decades more to rebuild, assuming our politics even has the energy to do it.”

This will be a painful process. Firms will go out of business, workers will lose their jobs, and the world will be poorer for it. But it can move on without us. As the economist Scott Lincicome pointed out earlier this year, countries have not stalled on signing free-trade agreements. In just the past few days, the European Union and the United Arab Emirates have launched free-trade talks, as have the EU and Australia, the United Kingdom and India; and senior officials from China, Japan, and South Korea have already held their first trade talks in five years.

The problem facing future administrations—and this one, in the unlikely event that it gains a modicum of rationality—is that the country has killed its reliability. “Trump has unilaterally decided that I’m going to wreck the credibility of international agreements,” Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of the research and advocacy organization Employ America, explained to me. “If you’re a manufacturer, industrial firm,” he said, “what is the confidence you have that the rules are not going to change for arbitrary and capricious reasons?”

Trump himself is certainly to blame. Yet many of the people I have spoken with lay blame at the feet not of the president, but of the legislature, which refuses to assert itself as a co-equal branch of government.

The right to levy taxes is reserved for Congress, not the president. To enact these tariffs, Trump is using emergency powers that he has invoked because of what he views as a “national emergency posed by the large and persistent trade deficit” between the U.S. and other countries. This is a breathtaking use of these powers; the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 was meant for an “unusual and extraordinary threat,” which, of course, trade deficits are not. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, no president has ever invoked tariff authority through this law. As a result, Congress or the courts could constrain him. “Somebody in the federal government is going to need to demonstrate that these laws on the books are not blank checks for a single individual to destroy trillions of dollars of wealth with the stroke of a pen,” Lincicome argued to me.

It was once possible to believe that Trump’s first reign was a fluke, a glitch, a deviation from the slow, unyielding march of liberal democracy. After all, he lost the popular vote in 2016, carried into the presidency on an Electoral College bias that discounted the votes and voices of millions. Moreover, he was deeply unprepared for the actual job of being president, his campaign having been shunned by most of the Republican establishment that had experience running White Houses past.

When former President Joe Biden ran for election in 2020, he did so to restore normalcy. In his announcement video, he proclaimed, “I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time.” No such luck.

A principled ideologue can be more dangerous than a craven politician. Trump may have paused some of the tariffs enacted earlier this week, but he’s still plowing ahead with the largest trade war America has seen since the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. The bond markets are in serious trouble, and Trump’s polling on his handling of the economy is plummeting. But the president seems remarkably stalwart. He is, it turns out, a true believer. Wrong as he may be, Trump is behaving like a man seeking an age-defining legacy.

I’ll bet he gets one.

The Kids Who Got Bused—And Became Democrats

2025-04-08T06:00:00-04:00

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The school-busing policies of the 20th century weren’t just unpopular; the ensuing fallout to school integration was so great that many Americans have written it off as a total failure. White flight, political backlash, and continuing segregation: This is the legacy of court-ordered desegregation.

And on quite a few metrics, the pessimism is warranted. Schools across the nation remain segregated; one academic measure of the nation’s 100 largest districts finds that segregation between white and Black students has increased 64 percent since 1988.

But a new study complicates this narrative of total failure. In today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the economist Ethan Kaplan about his research on the rare two-way, court-ordered busing program implemented in Jefferson County, Kentucky, in 1975. Kaplan and his co-authors traced the cohorts of students affected by this policy through the decades to see how their experience shaped them. Because the students were assigned to be bused in a semi-random way (based on the first initial of their last name), it provided an ideal experiment for researchers.

The findings surprised me. White students who were assigned to be bused into majority-Black inner-city schools were significantly more likely to identify as Democrats later on in life, more supportive of redistributive policies and unions, and less likely to believe that success is earned. But what’s even more interesting is Kaplan’s explanation for why this is happening. The political shift wasn’t driven by softened racial attitudes, but rather, by white children witnessing the deprivation of inner-city schools.

This conversation revisits an era that many Americans would rather forget—and asks what it means if one of the most controversial policies of the 20th century might give us a clue about how our adult political identities are forged in adolescence.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: School integration is largely thought of as a depressing and failed saga in American history. According to a GAO report, during the 2020–21 school year, more than a third of students—that’s 18.5 million kids—attended schools where 75 percent or more of the population was of a single race or ethnicity.

And it’s not even that things are just slowly getting better. Research by the University of Wisconsin shows that in 1988, roughly 37 percent of Black students were enrolled in majority-white schools. Fast-forward 30 years, in 2018, that figure was just 19 percent.

[Music]

Demsas: My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

When I first saw the paper we’re going to discuss, I felt a stab of hope—was it possible that the political impacts of busing policies were better than I’d believed? Ethan Kaplan, an economist at the University of Maryland, and his co-authors had zeroed in on Jefferson County, Kentucky. In 1975, a federal court had ordered the public schools there to desegregate. Now, 50 years later, Kaplan and his co-authors found that this experience had affected the politics of children who had been assigned to be bused.

According to this research—busing significantly increases support for the Democratic Party and causes important and measurable shifts in the ideological outlook of white children who experienced the deprivation of inner-city schools.

I’m excited to dive in. Ethan, welcome to the show.

Ethan Kaplan: Thank you for having me.

Demsas: So let’s go back to the summer of 1975. The Louisville Jefferson County School District was forced to implement a school desegregation plan by the courts. What did they do?

Kaplan: So there had been a couple of lawsuits that have been long-standing, and they finally got resolved in the spring of 1975. And then the higher courts told the lower courts that they had to actually implement it for the fall of ’75 school year. And so they had to very quickly merge two school districts, one that was largely the city of Louisville—and Louisville, by the way, was not a part of Jefferson County at that time; it later became a part of it—and the other was largely Jefferson County but had a few mainly white schools that were in the city of Louisville, which actually was important for the legal case. And so they, first of all, got the heads of the school districts—the city school district and the county school district—together with a judge, and they created a plan to integrate the school systems.

And in doing that, there were, you know, really three types of schools. So there were some schools that were exempt because they already were integrated enough. There were some schools—and as a sub-part of those schools, there were actually some schools that, since they were in the city, but they were in largely white areas and areas that have been carved out to be very white and have white schools, they were actually, through redistricting, able to meet the qualification for not having to have busing. And so they were also exempt.

But then there were the predominantly white schools in the county that needed to bus white kids into the inner-city Black schools and Black kids in the inner city that needed to be bused to the white schools.

And, you know, there are many different types of busing programs that were implemented across the country. This was a two-way busing program, so they really tried to integrate—they weren’t just bringing Black kids into white schools. They were also bringing white kids into Black schools. And so there was this two-way busing.

So they tried to really roughly equalize the flows, you know, so that the fraction of Black and white were basically the same in all of the schools. And so they had to come up with a kind of way to do this in a very short period of time.

Demsas: And what was kind of the tenor of the desegregation fights in Louisville, Jefferson County? Was this something where, I mean—I think we have the traditional story in our heads of, you know, parents extremely upset, pulling their kids out of the school district, rioting, protests, a lot of animosity. Black parents are also similarly concerned about their kids. Can you set the stage for us here?

Kaplan: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say it was less conflictual than some of the most conflictual integration experiences.

Demsas: Like Boston.

Kaplan: Yeah, so that’s the funny thing, is a lot of people think of the Deep South, but Boston was incredibly violent. But nonetheless, you had large KKK rallies. They polled white parents at the time, and 98 percent of white parents surveyed were opposed to the busing plan, and it’s really hard to imagine 98 percent of people today agreeing on anything.

So there was just near-unanimous opposition to busing. Some of it maybe was just due to not wanting your kid to be on a bus for a long period of time. But, you know, some of it might also—I mean, certainly a bunch of it was motivated by racial animus, as evidenced by the prevalence of the KKK at some of these rallies.

Demsas: There’s an interesting debate—I’m not sure how big it is in the literature, but—trying to characterize why people were opposed to busing. Of course, there’s the racial animus you mentioned. How seriously should we take arguments that there were other, larger concerns that parents may have had, whether it was distance their kid was going to get to the new school or the fact that you’re interrupting where they were going to school to begin with, or the idea that, you know, a lot of parents when polled care a lot about being in their neighborhood school for whatever reason?

Are those really big reasons for people not to want to integrate their schools? Or I guess we could test this with: Are parents more happy if their kid gets to stay in their neighborhood school while integration is happening versus having to get bused themselves?

Kaplan: And we do see that. There’s around—we don’t have perfect estimates of this, and we have estimates from different sources. But, you know, roughly 15 percent of students who were scheduled to be bused differentially left the school system. So definitely part of it is that they didn’t want their kids to be bused to another school. Now, that could still be related to racial animus. Like, it might be that they didn’t want their kid to go to, you know, an inner-city school in a Black neighborhood, right? So, you know, I wouldn’t say that’s proof that there was a really large component of this that was really just about opposition to time spent on a bus.

But certainly, kids who were bused out were much more likely to leave the school system and go to other public schools or predominantly Catholic schools. Actually, in the Deep South, there were segregation academies. They were actually literally called “segregation academies.” That was quite common.

Demsas: Yeah. And do we know what percentage of white students who had their schools integrated by Black students left?

Kaplan: Yeah, we don’t have perfect estimates of that. So one way that we do this is that we look at yearbooks. So if you look at the fraction of people who, in the fall of ’74, before they knew if there was going to be forced integration and before they knew anything about the particular plan through which integration was implemented—if we say, What fraction of those people can we match to a yearbook after integration has started?, that’s 70 percent.

Demsas: Okay, so 30 percent leave.

Kaplan: I think it’s not that high, is my guess. You know, like, for instance, if you’re not there on the day when they’re doing the yearbooks.

Demsas: Yeah. Or you move for other reasons, or whatever.

Kaplan: Right. But those people actually would’ve left the schools. And you’re right that there is a background rate of leaving the school system, period. But anyway the point is, you know, most people stay. I think if you look at the aggregate data from the school system, there is a large decline right around this time. So it’s really hard to disentangle, but my guess is somewhere around 20 percent, is a guess of what percent left.

Demsas: So I want to come back to the interviews you did and the yearbook analysis. But I first want to ask you about why you chose to study this desegregation program.

Kaplan: Great. So they had a very unique way of implementation that was really perfect for causal analysis. So, you know, in economics, we are concerned a lot about causality. So we see a correlation—how do we know it reflects a causal relationship versus some type of correlation? So for example, education is very highly correlated with wages. The higher your education, the higher your wage. But does that reflect the causal effect of education, or are there some things that lead you to get education that also lead you to get higher wages? So economists spent a lot of time trying to figure out that kind of causal relationship.

And so one thing that can do that is randomization. You know, so if I randomly assign you to get bused versus not, then we think that we’re getting the effect of busing. Right? Whereas if you’re choosing whether or not to get bused, then we think, you know, maybe your political opinions might be correlated with whether or not you’re signing up to get bused.

So, you know, we really look a lot for these randomizations, and in our case, we actually found something that we think is close to an experiment. In the summer of ’75, they sit down together, and they try to figure out a way that they can send some kids every year—not the same kids in every year. So some kids get bused every year so that they equalize the fraction Black and fraction white across schools, but they don’t have the same kids being bused every year. That’s different kids. Everyone ends up with roughly the same amount of busing over their 13 years of school experience. They come up with a plan based upon the alphabet.

And they say that if your last name begins with, for instance, A, B, F, or Q, then you get bused in 11th or 12th grade. If it’s D, G, or H, then you get bused in third and eighth grade. So the first letter of your last name determines when you get bused. And the thing that’s really great about that for us, in terms of our research design, is that in those initial cohorts, if I’m in, like, eighth grade when this busing plan is announced, if I’m in A, B, F, or Q, that alphabet group, I’m going to get two years of busing. But if I’m in D, G, and H—that’s third and eighth grade—I don’t get any busing at all.

So for the initial cohorts, particularly in later years, the assignment by first letter of the last name of when you get bused leads to a difference in whether you get bused or not. And so we use that, and we say, Okay, let’s look at the cohorts who differentially end up getting bused. So if A, B, F, and Q just graduated when the busing plan was implemented, they don’t get busing, but the next cohorts would get busing. Whereas for D, G, and H, those same cohorts are both not going to get bused.

So then we can compare the change in politics 45 years later for the A, B, F, and Q group, where there was a change in whether they got bused, versus the D, G, and H groups—in the same cohorts, in the same years—but where both groups didn’t get bused. And so that kind of odd, random variation is what we use to basically figure out what the long-run impact, basically permanent impact, of being bused on politics is.

Demsas: So clearly, someone in Jefferson County wanted to design this natural experiment for you. But the question I had when I was reading your paper is that, at first glance, I was like, Okay, the last name likely doesn’t correlate with a bunch of stuff. Probably doesn’t correlate with, you know, your political opinions or whatever other things, like racial animus. But I suppose it is possible that last names are not randomly distributed, right? Like, there’s a lot of Lis that are Asian American, and that’s less likely to be, you know, white. And so did you look at the distribution of last names with race or with other things to see if they actually were uncorrelated?

Kaplan: So we didn’t do exactly that—and that’s a great question—but we did other things. And also, our design actually tries to take that into account. So suppose Z is a much more Latino name. Now, it turns out there weren’t really Latinos living in Louisville and Jefferson County at that time. But, you know, let’s say that there were, and so you were concerned that there might be more Latinos.

We’re comparing the change in A, B, F, and Q to the change in politics for D, G_, and H. So in order for there to be some type of difference, they have to be on differential trends right around those years. And we don’t find evidence for that. So one way that we show that there’s no evidence for that: We actually do also look before they get bused—we look at the difference between the groups that get bused versus not in the year that they get bused. And then we look at the years prior to that, differences across the groups, and what we see is large differences in the year that they get bused and no difference in the years before.

So we kind of take care of that because we’re looking at changes in politics across cohorts for the same alphabet groups, but we also show that, actually, it turns out that there really isn’t any difference in politics between the groups that get bused and not before busing starts.

Demsas: Okay. So this paper is about long-term political attitudes, which you forecast. And, you know, you find that white students who were bused into poor, inner-city schools develop more liberal economic views decades later. Before we get into how you found that: Was that your expectation going in? When you were kind of doing your lit review, did you think that—I mean, I think most people, when they think about the busing experiment, they think of it as, like, a failed experiment. They think of it as: The backlash was really intense. We have really segregated schools right now. People really hated being bused. And so, you know, blanket background expectation is that, you know, it would make people more conservative or more opposed to sorts of these programs that they experienced themselves. Was that your expectation going in?

Kaplan: So, you know, when you choose a paper to write, you have to think about these things. Is it likely to work out? And I think, first of all, we thought that we could find the results that we found. We also thought that it would be possible we’d get the exact opposite results, that, you know, even though the Democratic Party was the party of slavery, there’s a lot of evidence that shows, starting in 1964—when the Democratic Party implemented the Civil Rights Act, and in ’65, they implemented the Voting Rights Act—that things changed in terms of the perception, and a lot of, particularly, southern whites turned against the Democratic Party starting in ’64.

Moreover, a lot of the legal decisions that led to busing—so there’s a lot of legal innovation. So you might think that busing should have happened in 1954, after Brown v. Board of Education, or in ’55, with Brown II, which said that it had to be done quickly, and then nothing happened for a decade, until ’64, ’til the passage of the Civil Rights Act. After the Civil Rights Act, the Department of Justice starts to get involved, and there’s a bunch of lawsuits that really parameterize that this has to happen and how it has to happen.

And so, you know, we thought that there would be some chance that this process would have led to—and that legal innovation was largely done by Democratic appointees—and so we thought that there was very possibly going to be a backlash, and so we’d see a movement to the Republican Party, because of the incredible unpopularity of busing when it was implemented. That would’ve been interesting as well.

There could have been a movement towards the Democratic Party. So there’s this theory of the contact hypothesis by Allport. There’s this theory that says that when you have exposure to racial groups and there’s racial animus, that exposure will, under certain conditions, lessen the animus. And so it’s possible we could have seen that. And then it’s also possible that we could have seen nothing. And from our perspective, actually, any of those three would be interesting. And so, you know, that was a great thing about the paper.

I would like to push back on the perception of the failure of busing. Our paper doesn’t speak to whether busing was a failure or a success. You know, certainly, it was not incredibly popular. And I think that continues to be true ’til today. And, you know, in terms of the politics, you know, there’s no way to assess. It depends on your politics as to whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing.

But my co-author Cody Tuttle actually has a separate paper that he’s working on where he uses this to look at the impact on economic outcomes. And what he finds is that, again, 40 years later, if you were white and you were bused, there’s no impact on your income. But if you were Black and you were bused, I think it was around 3 percent per year. And I would call that a success of busing.

Demsas: That’s a good point. I think it’s, like, a very pessimistic view we have. Because, you know, I was in South Carolina, actually, working for Kamala Harris’s 2019 presidential campaign when she made the That little girl was me moment on the debate stage and pointed out that she had been a part of Berkeley’s voluntary-busing program to Biden.

And I remember this: I grew up in Maryland, and so when I was in South Carolina and I was traveling around the state, it was the first time I’d really, really seen real rural deprivation before and that level of segregation. I mean, it’s not to say that D.C. isn’t segregated, but because it’s denser, you kind of have a lot of, like, normal integration happening by the fact of people going to their shopping or, you know, Metro or whatever. But you know, you could go your entire day and not see someone of a different race when you were in some of these counties in South Carolina. And it really struck me during that time just how it felt like, Wow, this has been a complete and utter failure. Like, you know, that was my perception of integration.

Kaplan: Can I make two comments about that in terms of the law?

Demsas: Yeah.

Kaplan: So I think you’re right. So actually, one of the legal decisions that comes out in the early-to-mid-’70s that almost leads Jefferson County and Louisville not to be integrated is that they decided that, really, you should only integrate within counties. And so if you have very segregated counties, then you’re not going to have integration, just because the courts had decided that integration should only happen within counties.

Now, there was an exception made for Louisville because they had already drawn districts to incorporate these very-white schools in the city. They argued that they could actually merge the school districts and have a cross-county school system. And there actually was a separate request made of the state, and the state actually agreed to this, to merge the school districts between the city and the county, independent of the busing. That was a separate thing that was going on at the same time.

The other thing is that there was a lawsuit that made its way to the Supreme Court where they ended up deciding that busing is not forever, that busing was until places achieved what’s called “unitary status.” So once you had unified the district so that there wasn’t segregation anymore, then the Department of Justice could not be involved anymore. And there wouldn’t be any forced integration anymore. And so there has been, over the last, you know, 30 years, a reduction in integration.

So there’s a really nice graphic on Vox, the news outlet, that shows the peak of integration. They look at the percentage of Black students going to majority-white schools in the South. And, you know, it’s a misnomer to think this is only about the South. It’s not. And actually, Maryland and Kentucky are both kind of odd cases because it’s not clear: Are they the South or the North? Because they’re both slave states that sided with the North in the Civil War.

Demsas: In Maryland’s case, forcibly.

Kaplan: And so what you see is that there’s a peak right around the time of that Supreme Court decision, in the late ’80s, early ’90s, in the fraction of African Americans going to majority-white schools in the South. And there’s been a large decline since then. And I think some of that is done by cross-county segregation. That busing does lead to white flight. And so some whites do leave the county. And we actually have evidence of this in our paper. We document that there are some kids who leave to go to other, more all-white public-school districts.

A far greater percentage actually stay where they are and go to Catholic schools. But as I said, in the South, they actually created these segregation academies as well. That was another source. But there definitely are people who leave the county because of this. And so some of the white flight out of cities, you know, is due to busing.

Demsas: So I want to dig in on the finding, though, because I think it can be hard to imagine isolating the effect of an event that happens in someone’s adolescence or when they’re a kid, and saying decades later, that affect their economic views, their likelihood of voting for a Democrat versus a Republican. So just walk me through what you did and how you figured that out.

Kaplan: Right. So what we did is we basically compared the changes across cohorts. We take the universe of voter-registration data from the United States, and we look at the changes across cohorts who were differentially bused—so an older cohort that wasn’t bused compared to an earlier cohort that was bused, and compare them to other kids at the same age, and see if there’s the same kind of differences across cohorts in politics. And we see that there’s basically very little difference for the kids who were not differentially bused, but decades later—this is 45 years later, so this is essentially a permanent political effect—we find a three-and-a-half percentage point movement to the Democratic Party.

Demsas: And that’s big.

Kaplan: That’s big. And two and a half away from the Republican Party. What’s a little confusing and interesting is that we find much larger effects in our survey on whether you vote for Obama in 2012 and Biden in 2020. We actually didn’t look at 2016, just because we thought that there might be some confounding things about having a woman running. And so we just looked at those two elections, and we find something around a 20 percentage-point flip, which is astronomical.

And we were pretty skeptical. But then we also asked, Are you a Democrat or a Republican? And then we see very similar numbers to the numbers we have in our paper. So when we ask them, Are you a Democrat or Republican? we see something in around 3.5 percent, which, as you said, is a large effect for something that’s 45 years later. When we look at who you vote for, it’s actually a lot larger. And so one thing that might be happening is, you know, it could be that registration is stale. And so, I’ve flipped to being a Democrat or a Republican, and I just haven’t changed my registration so that voting is more reflective of my true partisan beliefs.

But again, in the survey, we see them saying that they’re Democrat or Republican at very similar rates to what we see in the voter-registration data. So we think that part of what is happening is that a lot of independents become more Democratic-leaning independents if they were bused.

Demsas: I want to distinguish here, because when you’re comparing the cohorts and you’re finding that there’s a three-and-a-half percentage point difference, that is coming from the comparison of looking at voter registration and voting data in modern day compared to the names of people who were bused in the 1970s. But the survey, I feel like, is maybe, like—you tell me: I have a little bit less confidence in the survey because I think that there’s a lot of people who might be embarrassed about their behavior or views from the 1970s, and there’d be a huge selection effect of who’s going to respond to that survey.

If I was bused as a white student or, you know, I chose to skip out on that school because I knew there was going to be integration, there’s a lot of wanting to give you the answer that feels socially responsible and the social-desirability bias that is inherent in all surveys. But I think it might be bigger in this one because it’s just, right now, seen as so bad if you were someone who was opposed to busing, and it’s so embarrassing for you to do that. So are you concerned that you’re finding these big effects in the survey because of that?

Kaplan: This is great. Are you a referee on the paper?

Demsas: No. (Laughs.)

Kaplan: So that’s a fantastic question, and it’s definitely something that we’re concerned about, and I think you’re absolutely right that it’s plausible. And so maybe those estimates are too large. So we thought maybe they’re too large because of the social-desirability bias. We also thought that the registration results could be too small because registration might be stale. And then we also thought that maybe the independents are just more Democratic leaning.

And to be perfectly honest, we can’t perfectly address that issue. It’s a very fair point. What I will say, though, is that the evidence for shy Trump voters is pretty limited. Like, you know, the polls are not that off. They’re a little bit off. So I think the shy Trump voter is real, and the polls are a little bit off, but they’re not that off.

Now, let me give a counterargument to my argument, which I think would bolster your concerns. If you look at the response rates, there’s been an incredible drop in response rates, and particularly from the groups who are likely to be supporting Trump—you know, whites with lower levels of education—in recent years. But response rates are really, really low on the phone.

Demsas: Yeah.

Kaplan: So we did a multimedia approach, a multimode approach. So we did letters. We did online possibilities. We did phone calls. But we also incentivized it: We paid. So we gave people money up-front, and then we gave them extra money if they finished the survey. And so we got a much higher response rate. I think our response rate was, like, 30 percent, 25 percent. And so maybe among those people who are less likely to respond but will for incentive purposes, maybe they are more likely to be shy Trump voters. That’s possible. I can’t rule that out.

Demsas: Well, I guess, like, for you, though, you said when you first saw the results that you felt like 25 percent is just, like, really massive. Are you concerned that this is too big? Or do you find it plausible?

Kaplan: Yeah, I am. I mean, I’m not saying it’s totally implausible, but it’s really large. You know, I work a lot on, you know—so for instance, I wrote a paper on the impact of Fox News on voting many years ago. And you know, we found that between 1996 and 2000, the impact on the aggregate vote share was about 0.5 percentage points.

Demsas: Which matters for elections.

Kaplan: Which matters for elections. Absolutely. But you know, this is a lot larger than that. Even the registration numbers are much larger. And maybe that makes sense because (1) it’s a more formative part of your life. Political opinions are much more malleable when you’re younger. There’s a lot of evidence for that. And the second thing is: It’s a very intense experience.

Demsas: You mentioned this, and this is something that I’m really interested in, which is this notion of times in your life when you’re particularly susceptible to forming your identity, or particularly susceptible to ideas or experiences that help shape your future identity.

And you said there’s a lot of research on adolescence and childhood as being a formative time. Can you tell us a little bit about what that research tells us or what it says or how they find that out?

Kaplan: Yeah. So, you know, there are other papers that look at your risk-taking behavior differentially—if you grew up in the Great Depression, for instance, a paper by Ulrike Malmendier. She’s at Berkeley

I’ve also done work looking at 18-year-olds in Chile. Pinochet was kind of—in 1980, there was a lot of isolation of Chile from international markets because of the repression. He then—

Demsas: He’s a dictator.

Kaplan: Yeah, he’s a dictator, and he commits to having a process for a vote in eight years on whether to return to democracy. And so that eight years later comes, and he tries to renege, but even the military thinks that they can’t not do this and still participate in the international economy. And so he goes through with it, and he loses. But there’s this massive mobilization.

First of all, they’ve destroyed all the voter-registration records, and so they have to reregister everyone. And so we look at kids who turn 18 just in time to be able to be eligible to vote, versus not. We literally look at the day before versus the day after. And there is a massive difference. There’s something like, you know—I’m probably going to misremember the exact number, but there’s something like—a two-or-three-percentage-point difference in turnout.

I could be overstating that. But turnout’s really low in Chile, like 30 to 40 percent. So it’s, like, a 10-percent impact of being born just one day apart on voting 30 years later. And there’s actually a large literature in political science and in economics—both—documenting the effect of important events. And by the way, we then look at subsequent elections, and we don’t see similar things. So this is an incredibly, you know, formative event.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: Busing may have made kids more likely to vote for Democrats, but it didn’t make them less racist.

[Break]

Demsas: So one thing I wanted to ask you about is: You’re only studying compliers, right? So there are a lot of people, as you’ve mentioned, that choose to leave the school system. Or we don’t know why exactly, but there’s a large reduction in them.

So when you’re seeing these effects over 45 years of people who are bused or who experience busting in their own schools, you’re not seeing those effects on the people who have left. So is it fair to say that what we’re actually observing in this paper is: People who were not so full of racial animus that they would remove themselves from the institution they were going to, those people see durable shifts towards Democrats? But it’s possible that the people who had to leave maybe even offset that because they are forced to leave their institution, and they’re pushed towards Republicans as a result of this experience?

Which, you know, we don’t have data on that, but I just mean, there’s a whole section of people who are most likely to have the most racial animus, most likely to be upset about what was happening to them, who—because we know about heritability of political beliefs—likely have parents who are full of racial animus themselves. We don’t really see those people in your research.

Kaplan: So we actually do. And so that’s why it’s important that we collect the yearbooks in the fall of 1974. So this is before the final decision on whether or not there would be, you know, forced busing in Jefferson County. And in fact, I don’t remember the exact timing, but it’s possible that by fall ’74, I think this other decision had already come out—it was from Michigan—that said you could only integrate within counties. And in fact, the judge that was overseeing the case initially decided against busing, based upon that decision. It then gets reversed at a higher level because they had already crossed these county lines to go into the city and grabbed these three mostly white schools in the outskirts of the city.

So we are looking at everyone who is assigned to be bused. We’re not looking at people who necessarily were bused. And so some of them did leave the school districts. We’re still looking at them. Some of them did go to private schools; some of them did go to other counties. We’re still following them.

So you can think of two different things. You can think of the effect of being assigned to be bused. That’s what we’re estimating. If you want to then convert that to the effect of being bused and for the people who were likely to stay in those school systems, then you would have to divide by the fraction of people who actually were bused.

And so if you think that fraction who stayed was, like, say, 70 percent, then you have to divide our estimates by 0.7, which means that they are about, you know, 30 percent higher.

So it could be that different types of people choose to stay, as you rightly said, and so if you get a correlation between those who stayed versus those who didn’t in terms of their political outcomes many years later, maybe that’s because of preexisting political differences. Or maybe it’s because of the impact of busing on one group and not in the other. We don’t have a good research design to disentangle that.

But we can say that being assigned to be bused increased the Democratic Party support by three and a half percentage points 45 years later. And as long as you don’t think that going to a Catholic school, a segregation academy, or a mostly white public school makes you more likely to support the Democrats many years later, then the effect of being bused is probably larger.

Demsas: So one thing I find really interesting, though, is that you don’t find strong evidence that being bused changed explicit racial attitudes. So you find that it makes people more likely to vote for Democrats, but not that it changes wildly people’s racial animus, etcetera. And I wonder what the mechanism here, then, is.

Because we would expect, like you mentioned earlier, that contact theory, that people are coming into contact with people who are different from them—they’re observing their interactions with Black students and seeing, like, Oh, I had these preconceptions about who Black people were, and now I am revising these in light of: I have a friend who plays with me, or we worked on a project together and they made a really smart point. So clearly not all Black people are stupid. Like, you know, these sorts of interactions make people more likely to reduce their biases, is how the contact-theory paradigm goes. But if you are more likely to be a Democrat but not more likely to revise those racial attitudes, then what’s going on here?

Kaplan: That’s a great question, and that is something that we grappled with a lot. And to be perfectly honest, this was probably the biggest surprise of the survey—though in some senses, I think it also makes a lot of sense. So I think the thing is that contact among peers was not that different, right, because of the two-way busing.

So if I’m white and I left to go to a formerly mostly Black school in the city, I’m going to have, you know, 20 percent African American and majority white. If I stay in the county, it’s going to be the same thing because of the two-way busing. So it’s not really clear that there’s differential exposure to peers. Now, still, it’s possible that being exposed to different-raced peers on your different-raced peers’ home turf might be a different experience and might alter opinions.

Demsas: So if you’re a white student going to a Black inner-city school, that’s a different experience than if you’re a white student now having a Black student in your class.

Kaplan: Bingo. Right. And so we still thought that there might be some effect because of that. It turns out that there wasn’t. And actually, you know, the Allport hypothesis does have certain conditions from it, and this does speak to kind of the scope of that Allport hypothesis. Because it is possible that we could have found a differential effect of being a white student going to a Black school, having the same fraction of Black peers but being in a formerly Black school versus in a white school. And we don’t really see tons of evidence for that.

But what we do see a lot of evidence for is and—oh, let me tell you about my pet theory before we did the survey that also was wrong. I thought that it was all going to be about teachers. So I thought there were going to be higher fraction African American teachers in the city schools. We actually asked them about that. And, you know, we don’t have great evidence on this, and some of the evidence we do have goes a little bit against some evidence from the Department of Education Civil Rights Division, at the time. But I thought there was going to be a higher fraction of African American teachers, much higher in the city schools.

And I thought that (1) being exposed to—maybe you’ve been taught racist tropes, and then being exposed to a great teacher who’s African American would change your views. But also there could be curriculum differences, right? So it might be the war between the states in the county and the war to end slavery in the city. And so you might get different exposure to a narrative about history, and that could change your views. We don’t see much evidence for that.

What we do see is that if you were bused, you were substantially less likely—even with the small sample size that we have in the survey, we’re able to detect this very strongly—you’re much less likely to think that the world is fair. We also see that if you were bused, you’re much more likely—by the way, we have a free-response question, Tell us about your high-school experience, and we don’t mention busing at all—and if you were bused, you are much more likely to mention that you were bused. You were much more likely to mention busing, period. But you’re also more likely to state that—we have questions about this—you have friends who were poor, that you had friends who were poor back then. You were more likely to mention the poverty of the surrounding areas and the resources of the schools.

And interestingly, we ask a lot of attitude questions, which are common in political science. So, you know, there’s partisanship, which is, Am I a Democrat or Republican? There’s ideology, which is, Do I support higher taxes, lower taxes? Those are different. You know, historically, if you go back to the 1960s, they were not very correlated at all. Today they are more strongly correlated, but not that strongly correlated.

So we ask about ideology. And in general, we find that on most things, people who were bused are definitely more progressive. But we don’t have the statistical power to say that with any statistical certainty, because of our small sample size, which is only, like, 500-and-something people. Like, I think it’s 529.

The one thing where we find really strong effects on policy-related views is on unions. People who were bused are much more likely to support unions—much more likely. Again, the unions and the world being just, we find very statistically significant effects, even with our relatively small sample size.

Demsas: So that would indicate that a lot of what’s going on here is, it’s contact between classes, not about race contact. That kind of experience makes you much more aware of different class privileges and the general unfairness of being born into deprivation in that way. So do you think that has generalizability beyond this case? Like, do you feel like there’s a lot more to be made and studied about class-contact hypothesis, and most of the literature is about race?

Kaplan: That’s exactly what we think. So we don’t know, right? We have just this one case study. But we think that there’s strong evidence for that in this case, and that makes us wonder how widespread this is, and we think it would be worthwhile for other people to look at that in the future.

Demsas: Did you recently read, Matt Lowe conducted a meta-analysis of the contact hypothesis?

Kaplan: Yes.

Demsas: So we’ve been talking about Gordon Allport’s contact-theory hypothesis. And so, you know, I think the first time I can remember coming into contact with this body of work is when David Broockman’s and Josh Kalla’s paper on trans canvassers came out. And that one made a splash because it was in 2016, and people were really concerned about the political divide. And they essentially found that there are durable effects to canvassers having deep conversations at the doors and talking about trans issues. And people were durably moved months down the line and maintained these kinds of more progressive-on-trans-issues views.

And it’s interesting—I went back to look at it, and I realized that they don’t actually find significant differences between whether the canvasser is trans or the canvasser is not trans, which indicates to me that it’s not the contact hypothesis, that people are like genuinely being persuaded, which is a kind of a beautiful story in and of itself.

But you know, a lot of people have kind of looked back at contact theory and I think found it to be a bit more wanting in its explanatory power than we might’ve hoped. It’s a very nice story that you just come into contact with people who are different from you and you update your views about them. But can you tell us about Matt Lowe’s paper and whether it kind of downgrades your assessment of whether contact theory is really—

Kaplan: Yeah, so Matt Lowe’s paper is great. And Matt Lowe is fantastic. He surveys a lot of literature, so the Annual Review of Economics is kind of an academic review of literature. And so he does this for the contact hypothesis. There’ve been a bunch of papers written. And what he shows is that a lot of the papers that are the best done don’t find really large effects. And so that definitely makes me more skeptical of the contact hypothesis.

And I will say, I actually have another paper that I’m doing right now where we look both on race and on politics at what happens after having a cross-racial neighbor move in next door to you, someone from a different political party. And we find nothing.

Demsas: Wow.

Kaplan: So I do think, though, that this is a really good setting, that this is a really important experience, where you go to school. And it’s at a time that was very formative and, you know, school is an environment where maybe these types of relationships can somewhat be handled well. And so this might be different than, say, having a neighbor move in next door. And so there, again, if you look at Allport’s original theory, he has four preconditions where he doesn’t think that contact everywhere ends always with—

Demsas: Yeah. Not just brushing arms in the supermarket.

Kaplan: Yeah, exactly. And so maybe, you know, the scope of the conditions for the Allport hypothesis were valid in this case, and oftentimes in these studies, they are not. I don’t really know, but I think this is a great open area for future research.

Demsas: So as long as we’re throwing out alternative hypotheses, one thing I was wondering is whether it’s possible that it’s less about desegregation in class and more about being forced into an extremely uncomfortable situation. Like, I think that when I look back at my life, the areas where I think I’ve exhibited the most personal growth are, like, the most stressful moments in my life, when I was just like, Wow, I’m now doing this job that’s, like, really hard. I feel really unprepared for it. But I’m having to throw myself against the wall. Or, I’m in college. I’m taking this class. It’s quite difficult, and I feel really out of my depth, that I’m forced to really work at problems for long periods of time.

And, you know, when you’re a kid, you move to a new school, having to make new friends. These are very difficult life experiences for young people sometimes and increases your need to socialize differently, engage with people across cultures differently, maybe get into arguments and fights and have to resolve those in ways that are different than maybe you would be used to. And so I wonder how much stock you put into the possibility that the effects you’re finding have something to do with this kind of personality effect, because we know from the Big Five personality tests that people who are open to experience are more likely to be liberal. And I wonder if that’s shaping people in this way.

Kaplan: So, you know, as with most papers and economics also—I keep a quarter of a foot in political science too, and, you know, the same thing is true for political science—we’re much better at estimating treatment effects than analyzing the mechanisms, because it’s easier to get plausibly causal variation that we can use. And so I think I’m much more certain about the fact that being bused had this effect then I am about the exact mechanisms. The mechanisms are definitely more speculative.

What I would say in defense of this view—but again, I don’t want to push it too far, and I think you’re absolutely correct to think that there’s other possible things that could be going on—is that we don’t find an increase in empathy related to race, and we do on class. And we think that there was differential exposure to class and not on race. And I think that, in my mind, is probably the biggest evidence that supports the view that maybe this really does have something to do with a class-based contact hypothesis. But again, I wouldn’t want to push that too far.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, I think that’s a great place to ask our last and final question. What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Kaplan: So I remember in the late Clinton administration when there was an investigation into Bill Clinton, starting with Whitewater; it ended up with Monica Lewinsky. And because of that, the Department of Justice said that the Department of Justice shouldn’t investigate the president. And you know, at the time, because of the politicization of investigatory powers, that seemed like a good idea. But in retrospect, I think that having greater oversight over public officials of both parties is a good idea.

Demsas: And this is just apropos of nothing.

Kaplan: Yes. No, absolutely.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was fantastic.

Kaplan: Yeah, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you very much for having me.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Are Blue Zones a Mirage?

2025-04-01T06:00:00-04:00

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Do you want to live forever? How about to at least 105? You’ve probably heard of blue zones—amazing places where a disproportionate number of people live into very old age. From Okinawa, Japan, to Ikaria, Greece these regions of the world have captured the imagination of an aging world.

Most of the advice that researchers have extracted from these places are what most people consider just common sense. Don’t stress too much or eat too much or drink too much alcohol. Make sure to eat plants and legumes, build community, and protect familial relationships.

But while this might be fine advice, at least one researcher is skeptical that the underlying research holds up.

On this week’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Dr. Saul Newman, a researcher at the University of Oxford and University College London, who seeks to debunk the blue-zones research with studies of his own. His critics accuse him of writing a “deeply flawed” paper, keeping the debate active. (You can read their arguments here.)

Newman’s argument is pretty straightforward. The documentation certifying people’s births is really hard to verify, and there are many documented cases of age fraud. Some of that fraud is intentional—people claiming to be older than they are for cultural or financial benefit—and some is unintentional, thanks to shoddy recordkeeping or researchers getting fooled or making mistakes.

While this debate rests on methodological questions that we can’t fully explore in this episode, Newman’s provocation raises important questions about how much we should trust some of the most popular ideas in longevity research.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: According to Our World in Data, in 1800, not a single region of the world had a life expectancy longer than 40 years. By 2021, the global average life expectancy was more than 70 years. It’s still not enough. We want to live longer, healthier lives. What can we do about it?

You’ve probably heard of “blue zones,” regions of the world where researchers claim to have found disproportionate numbers of people living into their hundreds. The first such Eden was Sardinia, Italy. Then Okinawa, Japan, and Loma Linda, California, among others.

But in recent years, despite the prevalence of cookbooks and diets and Netflix docuseries about these places explaining how to learn from the lifestyles of people living in these regions, something hasn’t quite added up.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

Saul Newman is a longevity researcher at the University of Oxford and the University College London who has become convinced that this research doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. First, when he looks at the regions of the world designated blue zones, they just don’t look like particularly healthy places. The blue-zones theory claims that people live longer in these regions because of their naturally healthy lifestyles, but what Saul finds when he looks at these regions is low literacy, low incomes, high crime, and even short life expectancies relative to the national average. But even more tellingly, according to his research, introducing official birth certificates suspiciously coincides with a steep 69 to 82 percent fall in the number of people claiming to be over 109. A number of other statistical oddities indicate that the people claiming to be over 100 years old are either misleading us or are misled themselves.

Here at Good on Paper, several of the studies we discuss are preprints, which means they haven’t finished going through the formal review process that can take years. We do this because waiting to discuss studies until after they’ve been through that process would mean missing out on tracking important live debates. But I say all that now because, while Saul is convinced of his findings, this is not yet a settled debate. The proponents of blue zones are fighting back and claim he “omits or misunderstands” how rigorous their methods are.

But to hear his perspective on the science of longevity and why he doesn’t trust the blue-zones research, I’m excited to have Saul joining us today.

Saul, welcome to the show!

Saul Newman: Pleasure to be here.

Demsas: So why do people die?

Newman: Why do people die? Well, this is a fascinating question, and many of the people in aging research sort of still admit that we really don’t understand the fundamentals. So it’s actually a surprising thing that something so obvious is something we’re still figuring out. The best approximation we have at the moment is that we look at the inverse question: Why continue to live? What is the sort of evolutionary advantage of continuing to live?

There are two main thoughts. One I favor, and another that’s quite out of date. The out-of-date one is this sort of Darwinian idea that we exist just to make children. And this is the idea that has the problems, because if we exist just to make children, you get stuck with all sorts of awkward questions, like why does menopause evolve? Why evolve not to have children? Why evolve to help other people at the cost of your own reproduction? And we know all these things happen, and they happen across the animal kingdom, which brings us to the second idea.

And the second idea is that we evolve to pass on genes. And because we are related to so many different people, there are a lot of ways to pass on genes, including indirect ways where we help others. This is a sort of still-developing field in answering that question of why we exist, essentially. And it’s a very exciting one because it can explain things like the evolution of menopause, where we’re taking care of grandchildren.

But it can also potentially explain a lot of traits that are very difficult to analyze. Traits like homosexuality don’t make sense in this sort of cruel, hard Darwinian sense of, Oh, you’re just a baby factory. But there is a potential to explain them using inclusive fitness. I mean, that said, there was also the flip-side argument to that: Why do I need to justify myself in terms of evolutionary theory in order to exist? Well, of course you don’t. So it’s a very difficult debate to get through, but it’s also an open question at this point.

Demsas: What exactly is happening, though, when you die? Let’s say you don’t get an illness, right? Like, we know what happens when someone dies of a stroke or has a heart attack or has cancer or some other kind of long-running illness. But if you are just a generally healthy person—you’re in your 80s, or you’re in your 90s—what’s happening to your body?

Newman: It is slowly degenerating, in functional terms. So this is, you know, often very hard to measure, because you have to define what the function of your body is to say, you know, how it’s degenerating, but there are sort of obvious signs. So your metabolic function declines with age. Obvious things, like your physical capacity to run a hundred meters, for example, declines with age. Mental capacity does decline, but it can be much slower. And you know, I think that’s really fascinating, because if you look at, for example, the rankings of top chess players, they decline, but they decline extremely slowly. But essentially, there’s this sort of general systemic decline as you get older in terms of how well you can function.

Demsas: There’s a paper that I know that you wrote about this idea of, you know, as you get older, of course, your likelihood of death increases as you age. But there was a hypothesis that perhaps at a certain point, the rate at which you were likely to die kind of leveled off. So if you made it to 80, if you made it to 90—yes, your likelihood of dying every year was still, you know, elevated relative to a younger person, but it no longer was increasing significantly. What happened with that hypothesis?

Newman: Well, this touches on the best way we have to measure age and aging, and the sort of functional decline is increases in the mortality rate, because once you hit about age 40 or 35, your odds of dying double at a sort of fixed clockwork rate.

Demsas: Wait—what year was that?

Newman: Around 35 to 40. It depends a little bit because—

Demsas: Okay, great. Just logging that. (Laughs.)

Newman: Yeah. It starts to decline earlier, but it’s obscured by something called the “accident hump.” And this is basically, like, what you do when you’re a teenager, right? There’s a big bump in mortality caused by, you know, cars running into trees or jumping off of buildings into swimming pools or whatever it happens to be. But this clockwork doubling means that your mortality, your odds of dying, double usually around every eight years, and there’s really nothing we can do about that.

We can change the baseline, but every eight years, your odds of dying will double and double and double until you reach old age. And so in old age, there’s a hypothesis that mortality rates stop getting worse with age, and therefore that aging rates kind of stop or at least slow down considerably. Now, it doesn’t mean that things are getting better. You end up in this sort of Russian-roulette scenario where it’s a “see if your odds of dying flatten out.” And essentially, you’re playing Russian roulette every three months in terms of your mortality risk.

And what does that mean in terms of human lifespan? So it means something very interesting. It means that there’s no actual limit to how long you can play roulette without losing. You know, there’s a probabilistic sort of cap where eventually you are going to lose.

Demsas: Yeah, unless you’re the luckiest person alive.

Newman: Exactly. So there’s nothing per se ruling out a run of good numbers. But the problem here is that this idea is something that has been fought over for 50-odd years and has not been resolved, because it may be that your odds of dying do keep doubling and doubling and doubling until they hit the odds of dying that equal to one, right? So this is what I call the “maximum survivable age.” And it’s not clear to scientists which of those two was correct—whether we strike a maximum survivable age, where we can’t possibly live older than this age, or whether we reach a sort of grim Russian-roulette scenario.

Demsas: But life expectancy has improved remarkably over the 20th century. I mean, we’re seeing, you know, people with average lifespans of late ’70s in many developed nations, and rates of child mortality have declined significantly. So it seems like there’s a lot that policy, development, changes in public-health strategies can do to improve lifespan.

Is it your sense that—I mean, you just kind of brought up this idea of a maximum survivable age. Is it your perception that there is a number—there is a threshold at which, despite all of these things that you can do to make yourself healthier, to make yourself better, the genetic selection that might exist over generations, there’s just not a chance that humans are gonna live to be 300, 400, etcetera?

Newman: Well, in 2016, I waded into this debate because, like I said, there are two sides. And one of the sides had published an idea that there was this hard limit to maximum lifespan. And they published it in one of the most elite scientific journals there is. And I realized they had made colossal mistakes in their analysis—really just fundamental mistakes. They had rounded off most of their data to zero. They had accidentally deleted everyone who died in May and June, and just really made a complete mess of it. But they had argued for one case, and this case was that there’s a limit to how long you can live, a single limit.

I had another group come along and argue the opposite. Now, the opposite was this Russian-roulette scenario. The problem was that they had done something even worse, because they had taken everybody in Italy over the age of 105 and used them to build this sort of flattening-out curve. And when they had made this curve, they needed to say what it was flattening out from. So they needed to say, Well, what’s the normal midlife probability of death, and how fast does it get worse? What it boiled down to is that they had picked out the only estimate from earlier life-mortality models that gave them a flattening-out result.

So they had 861 options, and they chose the only option that gave them a significant result. So here I was, in the middle of a very vitriolic and long-running debate, saying that both camps were wrong. And I think both camps are wrong, because if you take that maximum survivable age and you estimate it, it doesn’t converge to a single value mathematically. And so in plain language, what that means is that if you grow up in a different environment, your maximum survivable age is different. And it moves over time, really clearly moves over time. So there is not one limit to human life. There is, at best, a smorgasbord of limits that depend on where you grew up, what population you’re in.

Demsas: So essentially, there is a maximum survivable age, but it will differ based on the environmental and policy choices that are being made at that time. And so I guess that then the question just becomes, like, how much can you really do on environmental factors?

So I want to get to this question about this theory of blue zones, which I think has become very popular. I mean, there’s been, you know, a popular book, a Netflix docuseries. It has inspired tons of attention.

There are regions of the world where people have claimed to live remarkably long lives—past 80, even past 100—at rates higher than you would expect just based on if it was just distributed normally: places like Okinawa, in Japan; Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece. What was originally the evidence for the idea that these places were unusually good for long life?

Newman: Well, the original evidence was rather amusing, actually, because like everything else in extreme-age research, there’s only one data source for human ages, and that’s documents. You know, you have government documents or informal documents that say, I’m this old. But the amusing factor was that the first blue-zone study found a bunch of people within Sardinia that seemed to be living a long time. They didn’t measure anyone outside of Sardinia. They decided that this was a global outlier for extraordinary ages, and they thought that incest, that people sleeping with each other was making this island—

Demsas: I’ve never heard this. (Laughs.)

Newman: It’s extraordinary. It doesn’t make it to the documentary—

Demsas: —to the Netflix docuseries. (Laughs.)

Newman: —for a very good reason. Yeah. I mean, there’s nobody making this lifestyle recommendation, I hope. (Laughs.)

Demsas: Dear God.

Newman: It’s kind of amazing. And that was the start of the blue zones.

So, you know, I sort of vaguely knew about this idea while I was getting involved in this fight between the plateau people and the people who think there’s a limit to human life. And, you know, I sort of thought of it as an amusing aside, but as time went on, it became less and less amusing, more and more concerning—like, starkly concerning. And the reason is that everything in these studies is based on looking at documents and saying, Oh, they’re consistent.

Demsas: You mean, like, birth certificates?

Newman: I mean birth certificates. So there are a lot of problems with that, that really came out of the woodwork over time because, you know, it’s on paper.

But when I started looking into these extreme-age cases, it really snowballed. Everything snowballed in a way that completely destroyed the idea and the underlying data of the blue zones. And effectively, you know, people are just believing their own fairy tales here. This really, you know, goes beyond cases, though, because early on in the investigation, I discovered that Japan, where it was claimed Japan had among the world’s best evidence for birth records. And in 2010, it turned out that 82 percent of the people over the age of 100 in the country were dead.

Demsas: And was it pension fraud, or what?

Newman: It was not pension fraud. It was the remarkable fact that in Japan, the household has to register your death, and if you are the last person in the household and you are dead, how do you do that?

Demsas: Oh, wow.

Newman: So they had, like, literally hundreds of thousands of people who had died in World War II or had died subsequently, and who were just getting older on paper, including the oldest man in Tokyo and the oldest woman in Tokyo.

Demsas: Were they paying them, like, Social Security?

Newman: Oh, yes.

Demsas: Like, what was happening? Where was the money going?

Newman: Well, in the case of the oldest man in Tokyo, the money was going to the family. And he was an extraordinary case that kicked off this investigation because—so there’s a sort of week in Japan where there’s a respect for the aged [day], and in preparation, city officials in Tokyo had gone looking for the oldest man. And eventually, they found out that the oldest man was in Tokyo, but he’d been dead in his apartment for 30 years, and his family were living in the apartment. And the oldest man in Tokyo had been steadily collecting his pension checks.

Now, what’s extraordinary about that is that his paperwork was perfectly in order. Like, if you handed their paperwork to a demographer, they would not be able to see anything wrong with it. I mean, it’s not like you die and automatically a form pops out in the central bureaucracy, right? There’s no actual way to know.

So it turned out that most extreme-old-age data was undetected errors, and this happened in every blue zone.

Demsas: So you went through all the blue zones and saw the same pattern?

Newman: I went through all the blue zones. The same thing happened. In Greece, at least 72 percent of the people in Greece who were over age 100 were collecting their pension checks from underground. And what’s remarkable about that is they had just passed a government audit, despite being dead. They passed a government audit in 2011, and in 2012, the government turned around and said, Actually, all those people were dead.

Demsas: So walk me through this a little bit, because I think there’s a few different arguments that you’re making here. One is that there are places where it’s quite difficult to know what’s happening with the population, because there’s [a situation] like what you mentioned in Japan, where the reporting of death is happening in a method where you actually can’t validate, when the oldest person in a household has died.

And then there’s a second strand of things, which is that people are actively committing fraud because of pensions and Social Security or other sorts of welfare benefits. And then there’s a third, which is just that these documents are not consistent or good, and so when demographers are trying to do this kind of research, they’re ending up having to rely on pretty shoddy documentation or to make broad claims.

So how much of this is happening in each place? Like, what do you think is most prevalent?

Newman: We don’t know what’s most prevalent. I mean, this is actually part of the problem: that we can see when an error has happened, but if we have documents in front of us that look good, we don’t know if they’re in error or not. And this pattern repeats itself. So there are many, many ways. There’s a whole layer cake of different methods by which you can screw up someone’s age.

Like you said, you can just write it down wrong at the start. There was a case where the world’s oldest man was actually just his younger brother, and they just swapped documents. It’s completely undetectable, and it’s happened three times. And there are other cases where there’s active pension fraud. I mean, there’s also cases where you just have someone who is illiterate and has picked up the wrong documents. The list goes on and on and on.

But the point is that demographers keep validating these people, and then decades—or even in one case, a century later—find out that they aren’t who they say they are. And that process is pretty much random. So you have to ask yourself, you know, what happens to a field over the course of more than a century when the data can only be checked for being consistent? You can’t actually tell if it’s true?

And I think it really set up this extraordinary disaster where not only are the blue zones based on data that doesn’t make sense; we actually have this sort of fundamental problem in looking at the oldest people within our society. Blue zones are an exemplary case of this, but it’s more general.

So to give you an example, health in the blue zones was poor before, during, and after they were established. Even in America, at least 17 percent of people over the age of 100 were clerical errors, missing, or dead—at least 17 percent. Many of them just did not have birth certificates. And we have no way of knowing. Like, it’s not as if I can take a person into a hospital, and they can put them into a machine, and it tells me how old they are.

Demsas: Cut their arm off and count the rings (Laughs.)

Newman: Exactly. The old pirate joke. You cut the leg off and count the rings. You can’t do that.

Demsas: Yeah.

Newman: And that means we are just taking all of this evidence at face value. Normally, that would be fine. Right? And this is where I’m going to apologize for talking numbers. But this is a theoretical result I came up with in 2018.

Let’s imagine you have 100,000 people who are 50, really 50. Like, they’ve got their documents, everything. And then you have an extraordinarily low rate of error in which you take 100 40-year-olds, and you give them documents to say they’re 50. If you do that, normally you’d expect, Oh, I can just ignore this. My statistical model will take care of it as noise. But something happens instead that is extraordinary, because those 40-year-olds are, like I said, less than half as likely to die than the real data. So your errors have a lower rate of dying and being removed from the population than your real data—

Demsas: Wait—sorry. Can you explain that? I don’t understand.

Newman: So you remember: I told you about the clock where your mortality rate doubles every eight years? That means if, let’s say—and I call them “young liars.” If my young liars are eight years younger, their odds of dying day to day are half. So the errors have half the mortality rate of the real data. Every eight years, the percentage of errors doubles, and by the time you get to 100, every single person or almost every single person is an error.

So you can’t ignore these tiny error rates. It doesn’t matter what country you’re in. It doesn’t matter where you are. You can’t just pretend they don’t exist, because they build up in this weird, nonlinear way over time, and it means that you would actually mathematically expect all of the oldest people in the world to be fake. So, you know, I’ve published this in a scientific journal. No one’s ever been able to argue the math, but they do not want to face up to sort of the repercussions of this.

Demsas: Yeah. Part of this is very familiar to me. I don’t have a birth certificate. I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and the only document I have about my birth and parentage is a baptismal certificate, where I’m pretty sure it was filled out by a member of the church that I was baptized into. I’m not joking: It’s written in teal ink.

We were asylum seekers here. I’m, like, taking this to the State Department. I’m like, I swear to God, my father is my father. You literally have to give me a passport. I’m a citizen here. And it was such—it was awful. It was such a hassle. And then—now I’m getting off topic here, but—my brother had to get a DNA test to prove that our parents were his parents in order to get his driver’s license eventually, and his passport. So I’m very familiar with this.

And there’s another phenomenon—which, I mean, I don’t know if this is something that you’ve seen in your research—wherein some cultures and communities, of course, being older is, like, quite an advantage. And so there will be people who you’re like, I know how old you are, but you are telling everyone you are 10 to 15 years older than you are. Have you seen this in your research?

Newman: All the time. Yeah, I mean, constantly. There was a study in the BBC a couple of months ago where they looked at heart age. And this is a National Institute on Aging–funded study on people in the rainforest, right? And they say, We don’t have any idea how old we are. And the headline is, Oh, these people have really young hearts for their age. You know, they don’t know their age. They’re literally telling you, We are making it up.

And, you know, if you have any doubts about the blue zones, there used to be something called the “longevity zones” that predates the blue zones. It was put out by National Geographic in exactly the same way. It had exactly the same hallmarks of, Oh, you live in a mountainous region that’s very remote, and you eat yogurt and vegetarian diets.

And it was exactly what you’re saying. These people gave status to village elders, so people were inflating their ages to an extraordinary degree. They were saying, I’m 122. And that’s all it was. You know, this was three regions across the world: Soviet Georgia, where apparently yogurt was the secret; the Vilcabamba Valley, in Ecuador; and the Hunza Valley, in Pakistan. These were the blue zones, and every single case was based on rubbish recordkeeping. And, you know, it just seems to be that’s exactly what’s happened again.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: Even if blue zones aren’t real, does that really change how we think about living longer?

[Break]

Demsas: The thing I’m wrestling with when I engage with this, because, you know, you have published this work; you’ve written about it in the Times and other places. But the fundamental idea that there are locations that are better for people’s lifespans seems not overturned by this, right?

Like, we know that location matters a lot for health outcomes, air pollution in particular. It feels like there’s a new paper every other week showing that there’s massive impacts of air pollution on life expectancy, on cognitive functioning, on general health. Is the fundamental concept that there are certain places where people are going to live longer still one that we should be putting more research into?

Newman: I think that’s not controversial. But I also think it’s very well understood, for exactly the reasons you say. There’s a study every week on average life expectancy. And what’s striking about this is that those places are very different from the places that get extreme life expectancy.

So I basically took a sample of 80 percent of the world’s 110-year-olds and most of the world’s 105-year-olds, and looked at their distribution within countries. So I’m sitting in London right now. And in all of England, the place with the best rate of reaching 105 was the single poorest inner-city suburb with the single fewest number of 90-year-olds.

So those two things—where it’s good to live, on average, and where it’s good to reach extreme old age—were exactly the opposite. This is like saying Flint, Michigan, is the healthiest place in the U.S.A. No shade on Flint, Michigan. The government is really the cause of this, but it does not make any sense. It fundamentally doesn’t make any sense. And it gets even worse when you start looking at the details.

So the single U.S. blue zone is Loma Linda. I mean, the CDC measured Loma Linda for lifespan. They measure it, and it is completely and utterly unremarkable.

Demsas: I’m not, you know, deeply reporting in the longevity space here, but the way that you have talked about your interactions with some of these authors makes me think it’s an especially contentious field. Why has it kind of remained so difficult to sort of overturn this popular narrative around blue zones?

Newman: Well, it makes a lot of money.

Demsas: Yeah.

Newman: It’s really that simple. I mean, there are multiple best-selling cookbooks, you know. And I’d like to point out, of course: Don’t take your health advice from cookbooks. Its really sort of needs reinforcing every now and again. (Laughs.) But, you know, if you really had a cure for aging, you’d be winning the Nobel Prize.

Demsas: You wouldn’t be writing a cookbook? (Laughs.)

Newman: You would not be writing a cookbook. You wouldn’t be on late-night television, you know, making a sales pitch. You’d just be like, I want my Nobel Prize. I have a cure for all diseases. Where’s my money? It’s really fundamental.

But there is another aspect to this in that a lot of research careers are built on examining the oldest old, and even more research careers are built on just assuming that birth-certificate ages are correct. And to show that they’re not correct in an undetectable fashion on such a massive scale threatens a lot of people’s research careers.

Demsas: But part of the thing that I find interesting about the blue zone’s recommendations is that a lot of them are things that are just straightforwardly good advice, right? Move naturally. Have a sense of purpose. Stress less. Don’t eat too much. Eat beans and legumes. Have community. Put your family first. The only one that I think is potentially not actually good is: Drink alcohol in moderation. But the rest of them are generally associated with good health to different extents and, you know, with longevity to different extents.

I guess, like, what drove you to become so interested in pushing back on this narrative, given that the advice that people are getting is generally still, like, you know, good health advice? Like, you probably should do most of these things if you’re not already.

Newman: Well, I think the problem is the way in which the people in these regions are really kind of culturally being exploited. Because they don’t bear any connection to what actually happens in the blue zones. And I think that was what really drove it home for me, is that you have this sort of flavor of some guy who turns up for a few weeks, looks around, decides it’s the ikigai, and goes home. And if you actually go to the government of Japan, they’ve been measuring Okinawa, for example, since 1975. And every single time they’ve measured Okinawa, it has had terrible health. It has been right at the bottom of the pile.

Demsas: Wow.

Newman: I’ll take you through some statistics that were robustly ignored by people in selling these blue-zones ideas. Body mass index is measured in Okinawa and compared to the rest of Japan, and it’s measured in over-75-year-olds. So if you go back to 1975, that’s people born 1900 or before, and they measure how heavy they are. They have been last every year, by a massive margin.

And then you look at the next claim. So that sort of knocks a hole in the “move naturally” claim. The “move naturally” claim also has this sort of idea that people grow gardens in the blue zones, right? The government of Japan measures that, and they are third to last out of 47 prefectures, after Tokyo and Osaka, where everyone lives in a high-rise. They don’t grow gardens. And we’ve known that since the beginning of records.

And then you look at the idea that they eat plants. It seems really noncontroversial. But people in Okinawa do not eat their veggies. And we know this because we ask them. They’re last in the consumption of root vegetables, last in the consumption of leafy vegetables, last in the consumption of pickled vegetables. They’re third from the top in other raw meat. You know, they eat 40 kilograms of meat a year, at least, which is way above the global and national average. And even sweet potato—sweet potato is on the front of the Netflix documentary, these purple sweet potatoes—they are last for sweet potato consumption out of all the 47 prefectures of Japan.

Demsas: Wow. Okay.

Newman: And they always have been. There’s another idea that, you know, they have a sense of belonging, that they belong to a faith-based community. They’re 93.4 percent atheist. They’re third to last in the country, and it is a very atheist country. So the problem is that none of these claims have any connection to reality whatsoever.

Demsas: Yeah.

Newman: And it’s been sitting in the open for decades.

Demsas: Have you become a lot more cynical about scientific research as a result of this?

Newman: Oh, I mean, absolutely. It’s extraordinary, the sort of cognitive dissonance that goes on. And really, I mean, all of these claims just have no connection to reality. And you see this sort of sad thing playing out with the locals, where a beach resort will get built. People will fly in for three days, and they’re still sitting there going, like, Why don’t we have a hospital? Why are we all still poor?

You know, just basic social problems get overlooked because of this. So yeah, it has made me much more cynical, because these, I guess you would call them “lumps and bumps,” should have been obvious right from the point when someone said incest was good for living a long time.

Demsas: So, like, I mean, preregistration helps reduce a lot of issues in social science. There’s also been increasing attempts to subject, you know, big findings, important findings to replication by various groups and individuals.

I mean, is there something fundamental that you think needs to happen differently in terms of how reputable journals accept new findings? Do you think that all the data needs to be open? What needs to happen here to prevent these sorts of problems in the future?

Newman: In short, the answer is: really a lot.

Demsas: Yeah.

Newman: The slightly less short answer is that the core of science is reproducibility. It is the core idea. And these results are not reproducible. And it’s not just that they’re not reproducible. After 20 years, nobody has published the underlying data. And there needs to be a much heavier emphasis on replication in science and on testing claims—especially profitable claims—before they’re just thrown out into the open.

Because, you know, I find it amazing. This is something that was discussed at an elite level at the World Economic Forum. Now, we cannot have a cookbook-based piece of lifestyle advice governing global health. So we need to really rejig the—I mean, first, the level of skepticism in science needs to go up considerably. And second, we need to really start hitting back on papers that need to be retracted, papers that need to be removed from the scientific record because they do not replicate or because, you know, like the first two—the studies I pointed out here—because they’re based on extremely questionable choices.

Demsas: So most people listening to this will have heard of this topic before, but have you found anything that indicates it’s been especially influential in public health in that policy makers are taking it quite seriously as a way of trying to push different nonvalidated recommendations?

Newman: Yes. I mean, the presentation at the World Economic Forum is really a low point, an extraordinary low point. But I think what is, like I said, more troubling is that you have an entire machinery of public health here that didn’t spot how completely wrong this is. In retrospect, it’s so wrong that everybody’s sort of giggling. But it’s been 20 years of this being perhaps the most popular idea in demography.

And so I get worried about this because I’ve just completed a new study. And in this new study, I have taken every single 100-year-old in the world and analyzed where they’re from and what countries attain the age of 100 at the highest rates. And to do this, I took United Nations data contributed by every government on Earth, in good faith, with the best efforts at data cleaning—both by the governments and by the UN. And the places that reach 100 at the most remarkable rates don’t make any sense.

Malawi, which is one of the 10 poorest countries on Earth, is in the top 10, and it’s in the top 10 routinely. You know, Western Sahara, which is a region that does not have a government, is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, according to the UN. I mean, that’s fundamentally absurd. And it’s fundamentally absurd that it has been 70 years that this data has been produced for, and nobody has noticed the absurdity. And I find that deeply shocking.

Puerto Rico was one of the top 10, and that initially passed muster. You’ve got a place in a rich country that has a long history of birth certificates, until you realize that this is one of the best places in the world for reaching 100, and the reason seems to be that the birth certificates are so badly documented that they restarted the entire system in 2010. They said, Birth certificates are no longer legal documents. They threw it all out and started again because of systemic levels of error.

Demsas: Wow.

Newman: And that’s how you reach 100.

Demsas: Yeah.

Newman: You just write your age down wrong. And you know, there is this sort of public-health element that is deeply troubling because you are one of the people in the world that doesn’t have a birth certificate, and you’re not alone.

Demsas: Yeah.

Newman: A quarter of children now don’t have a birth certificate—a quarter of all children. And we are just ignoring that.

Demsas: I want to take a step back because I think that even though I think that this is deeply troubling, there is still a desire—I mean, part of the reason why there’s such a focus on this issue is people really want to figure out how to extend their life. Every year they get older, they’re, you know, deeply concerned with yoga, with protein intake, with lifting weights. A lot of different things begin to occupy your mind as the number turns to 3, 4, 5 at the beginning of your age.

I want to ask about how much we know about the role of environmental versus genetic factors in determining longevity. Is all of this effort to try and tweak our life expectancy—is it really that worth it, or is it largely just a question of your genetics kind of determining what your life expectancy is going to be?

Newman: I mean, there’s good news and bad news. And I’ll start with the bad news. The bad news is—well, it depends on your perspective, I suppose. The bad news is that the people who live the longest, on average, are born into rich countries with free health care. It’s that simple. The good news is: When it comes to the environment, it plays a big role, a very big role in how long you live. And there is a lot you can do about it, not a single one of which costs any money, right?

So I’ll break it down. The simple things that we really know about lifespan: Don’t drink. There you’ll get, it depends, but if you [weren’t] going to get addicted, you’ll get about an extra 30 years of lifespan over what you would if you got addicted to alcohol. And for context, the CDC estimates that that’s about the same as heroin addiction. But if you drink without getting addicted and give up drinking, you’re still going to gain roughly three to four years.

Demsas: Wow. Okay.

Newman: Right. So that’s simple.

Don’t smoke: You’ll gain about seven years. Do some exercise: You’ll get probably—it depends how much you exercise, but let’s say four years. And go to your GP, and that’s it. You don’t need to buy the cookbook.

I think the reason the cookbook sells so well is that those three things are somewhat difficult, right? They’re kind of hard, and I think this is why longevity cures perennially do so well, is that they’re always easier than those three things. Almost always, you know, the ones that do well. And that is what underpins this market. But if you really want to live a longer time, just don’t drink; don’t smoke; do some exercise.

Demsas: Well, tell me a little bit more about the genetic factors here. I mean, there was a study I saw that looked at 20,000 Nordic twins born in the late 1800s, and found that genetic differences had negligible impacts on survival before about age 60, but after age 60 and particularly those reaching their 80s and beyond, genetic factors become more important. I don’t know if you’ve seen that paper or if you’ve seen other research about this, but what do we know about the role of genetics in longevity?

Newman: I haven’t seen that paper, but I’ve seen some extraordinarily bad papers on the roles of genetics and longevity. There’s just something called a genome-wide-association study, where you effectively say, you know, what genes are associated with extreme longevity. And I’ve seen that conducted on sample sizes of less than 200 people, which is, I mean—it’s a bit like saying you’ve got a space program when you let go of a carnival balloon. It’s a joke.

So I would be extremely skeptical of longevity claims. You know, there is just this fundamental problem with our documents that if you go into that study and dive into that study, you’ll realize that they, like everybody else, have to trust what is written down on the piece of paper that says how old these people are.

And there’s no way to check that. You know, I think we’re on the edge of a situation where you can. There have been some extraordinary scientific advances in estimating people’s age, but nobody seems to want to face up to that fundamental problem yet.

Demsas: Well, Saul, this has been fantastic. Always our last and final question: What is something that you thought was a good idea but ended up being just good on paper?

Newman: I’ll tell you something that turned out to be bad on paper in the moment. When I was an undergrad, it’s kind of like someone said to me, Go to the best U.K. university. It’s the one in Oxford, Oxford Brooks, which is not the University of Oxford. They told me completely the wrong university to go to, and I’d gone to it. And so to sort of crawl my way out of this hole, I found out that my university offered an exchange program to the Ivy League. And it was the first year they’d run it. So they just didn’t understand how much it was gonna cost.

Demsas: Okay.

Newman: And I was like, Great. I could be the poorest kid in the Ivy League, right? So I went on exchange, but without me knowing it, they realized how much it cost and pulled my visa status after the first six months. So I wound up in the FBI building in L.A., you know, in a locked elevator, going to one of the rooms for an interview, just completely not knowing that I’d overstayed.

Demsas: Is that even a good on paper? That just sounds like you got screwed.

Newman: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s as close as I got. I mean, it was good on paper right up until that point.

Demsas: Yeah. What school were you going to?

Newman: I was going to Ithaca—Cornell, in Ithaca—and paying, I think, $1,000 a semester in student loans.

Demsas: Oh my gosh. That is, like, one of those things where you really gotta check to see if that deal’s going to pan out.

Newman: Yeah, I think it worked out long term, but short term, yeah, not so great.

Demsas: Well, this was great. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Newman: Thank you very much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Demsas: If you like what you heard on today’s episode, I have a suggestion for you! My colleagues here at The Atlantic are exploring how we talk about aging, in our newest How To series. You can hear a trailer at the end of this episode, and then go subscribe to How to Age Up, coming April 7, wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Rob Smierciak composed our theme music and engineered this episode. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Politicians Think Voters Are Dumb. Are They Right?

2025-03-25T06:00:00-04:00

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Across 11 different democracies, politicians share a shockingly pessimistic view: They believe that their voters are uninformed, unreasonable, and short-sighted. In a paper recently published by the American Political Science Review, the University of Calgary political scientist Jack Lucas and his co-authors surveyed 12,000 citizens and conducted face-to-face interviews with nearly 1,000 elected officials. In this wide-ranging study of countries including Australia, Denmark, Germany, and Canada, the researchers find that elected officials and voters diverge wildly. Unlike politicians, voters believe themselves to be policy-oriented, politically knowledgeable, and engaged.

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I speak with Lucas about how this research reveals a striking divide between democratically elected officials and the voters who put them into office. Even in countries with extremely varied political systems and demographics, this difference persists, suggesting that something fundamental to democracies—at least modern ones—is creating this division. Tellingly, Lucas’s research shows that senior politicians tend to be more cynical about voters than junior ones, suggesting that expecting the worst from voters doesn’t carry an electoral penalty.

Despite this, Lucas is an optimist:

“I’m more on the ‘voters aren’t that dumb’ side of the spectrum,” Lucas tells me, acknowledging that this puts him in the minority among political scientists. “There is pretty good evidence that at least on issues that voters care a lot about, they’re thinking carefully about policy.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: When Donald Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” he was ostensibly making a joke about the loyalty of his followers. But another way to read it is that it is a revealing comment on how he thinks about voter psychology—that they care little about personal virtue and are with him for his other qualities.

Deciphering voter psychology can feel like an insurmountable exercise. If you talk to individual people about why they voted for their chosen candidate, their answers range from reasonable to incomprehensible.

In a new paper, the University of Calgary political scientist Jack Lucas and his co-authors investigate this through survey evidence. Their interests lie in both how voters see themselves and, crucially, how politicians see their voters.

In face-to-face interviews with almost a thousand elected politicians across 11 countries, as well as survey data from over 12,000 citizens, the paper seeks to map how voters think across several key dimensions. Unfortunately, none of that data includes the United States, for reasons we’ll get into, but it’s still relevant to understanding the American electorate.

[Music]

Demsas: The paper seeks to understand whether voters vote based on policy or identity. Are they short-term or long-term oriented? Do they tend to be single-issue or multi-issue voters? Are they pocketbook oriented, or do they vote based on their perception of the national economy? Do they make decisions based on past performance and behavior, or on what they expect to see happen?

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. To tease out what we know about these questions, I asked Jack to come on the show and give me a better sense of voter psychology.

Jack, welcome to the show.

Jack Lucas: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Demsas: So a recurring question on this show, and unfortunately in real life, is: Are voters dumb?

What’s your take? Are voters dumb?

Lucas: Well, this is the age-old debate in theories of voting behavior. There are a number of competing theories, as you know, and one of the things we’re looking into in this paper is to try and understand where politicians stand on this question. But if you ask me where I stand on this question, I guess I’m more on the “voters aren’t that dumb” side of the spectrum.

Demsas: It’s a bold claim to make right now. (Laughs.)

Lucas: Yes, I know. (Laughs.) It’s tough times for those of us who believe policy voting is a thing.

But I think that arguments that come out of the democratic realist kind of tradition and the work of Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels in their book, Democracy for Realists, really poses an important challenge to any theories of policy voting that we have to grapple with, and there’s a lot in there that’s, I think, quite persuasive.

But I also think that when we look at the wider picture of examples, where we can really tease apart whether people are voting on the basis of policy versus whether they’re voting on the basis of things like social identity or irrational retrospection, there is pretty good evidence that, at least on issues that voters care a lot about, they’re thinking carefully about policy.

So I don’t want to go all the way down the road to say, you know, I’m hard-core spatial voting, and nothing else ever. But there’s, I think, some pretty good evidence to suggest that voters aren’t perhaps as dumb as they seem, if the only thing you look at is the, kind of, democratic-realist theory of voting and voting behavior.

Demsas: And can you define “spatial voting” for us?

Lucas: Yes, absolutely. We’re right, straight into the jargon. I apologize.

Demsas: No, you’re good.

Lucas: The idea of spatial voting is that all of us carry around in our heads a bundle of policy preferences. You can summarize that bundle of policy preferences with something called an “ideal point,” but this is really just kind of where you live on the left–right spectrum.

And when you vote in an election, spatial voting theory suggests that you look around at the candidates or the parties; you identify the one who is closest, whose policy promises are closest to your own ideal point, your preferred bundle of policies; and you support that candidate or party. That’s sort of the basic logic of spatial voting. And it’s prospective, so people are looking forward at the candidates’ and the parties’ policy commitments, and they’re voting on that basis of future promises. And it’s policy oriented because you’re not voting on the basis of how well things are going in your life or your social identity or any other kinds of things like that. You’re really voting on the basis of your policy preferences. So that’s sort of the theoretical arguments at the heart of spatial voting.

Demsas: So you’ve sort of alluded to this, but there’s a variety of axes on which you could be more of, like, a democratic optimist versus a democratic realist. Though, in my head, maybe realists, I would classify them as pessimists. And there’s whether you’re looking forward (you’re prospective) or you’re looking backwards (you’re retrospective). Are you actually voting on a specific issue, like a single-issue voter? Are you a multi-issue voter? There’s just, like, lots of different ways that you can evaluate whether you’re kind of fitting into one of these two camps.

You’re kind of an outlier, I would say, in political science. Maybe I’m wrong here, but I feel like most political scientists are more on the realist, pessimist side. Or am I reading that wrong?

Lucas: No, I think that’s probably right. I mean, all of the debates that we’re exploring in this paper, we selected because they are genuine debates in political science. So you can find examples—and I’m not talking about obscure arguments that nobody ever looks at—but serious, well-cited arguments on both sides of all of these debates.

So there’s certainly active debates in political science on all of these dimensions. But I think you’re right that, at the moment, you know, we haven’t done a survey of political scientists, so we’ve always talked about how we should, so that we can actually—

Demsas: Oh, yeah. That’d be great.

Lucas: —tell people what proportion of political scientists hold these different theoretical positions. I think that my guess is that, as with everything, most people are kind of in the center. And so what you’re going to see if you talk to political scientists is varying degrees of acceptance of the core tenets of democratic realism or spatial voting or whatever.

But a lot of people will say, as I do, this slightly more hedging kind of argument that there are circumstances in which we would expect to see policy voting matter a lot. And there are a lot of circumstances where voters don’t have sufficient information on candidates, or the election issues aren’t especially salient, or whatever might be happening in that particular election, where people are just gonna fall back on social identities, partisan identities, ingrained rational or irrational retrospection about the past. So you’re going to see different examples of this depending on the election.

So part of the debate after Achen and Bartels’s book, Democracy for Realists, has been—I think much of the debate has been—not so much about, like, Let’s show that they’re completely wrong, but Let’s try to understand the conditions under which the kinds of phenomena they observe in that book happen, and how common are these things?

And so, you know, Anthony Fowler, for example, has a paper where he uses some experimental designs to try to understand how often we would expect people to just vote with their party, regardless of the party’s policy commitments. And he finds it’s, like, maybe a little less than a third of the time. And that’s not nothing. I mean, that’s an enormous proportion.

Demsas: Wait—how does he identify that? How does that paper go?

Lucas: It’s based on a conjoint experiment, and the conjoint experiment adds additional policy items. So you know the candidates’ parties. The way these conjoints work is you get two hypothetical candidates, and you’re asked, basically, which one you prefer.

And so not only does the partisanship of the candidates vary, but the policy commitments of the candidates also varies, and the number of policy commitments varies. So what he shows is that as you add more policy information to the experiment, people are less likely to just vote straight party selection.

And also, as you add more kind of counterintuitive policy commitments on the part of the candidate—like, you have a Republican who is, I don’t know, supportive of income-tax increases on the rich or something—that in those circumstances, you also see that people move away from those candidates. So they’re incorporating the policy information when they can, and about, I think, 29 or 30 percent in that study of the respondents just stick with the party candidate regardless of the policy commitments of the candidate.

So, you know, that’s a large number. The conclusion I draw from that is definitely not Okay, well, Achen and Bartels’s Democracy for Realists is wrong. But it’s also informative to try and understand, like, how often would it be the case that people would just vote for a partisan candidate, even if that partisan candidate doesn’t share some of their core policy commitments?

And obviously, most of the time, these things are observationally equivalent. The Republican candidate is also more conservative on policy, and so it’s really hard to disentangle what is driving the choice of the voter to select that candidate. But there are these cases, both experimentally and also just some weird events that happen in the course of history, where you can try and disentangle that. And when you do, you see that there is some evidence to suggest that voters are able to incorporate their policy commitments into their voting.

But to come back around to your original question: Yes, I think if I were to preregister a hypothesis on this, my guess is that the democratic realists are the majority among political scientists who do voting behavior right now.

Demsas: Turning to your paper, you’re interested in evaluating two things: one, how voters see themselves, and secondly, how politicians see voters. To this end, you designed a pretty massive survey. Can you walk me through what you and your co-authors did? What was the survey? Who did you talk to?

Lucas: Sure. So we wanted to understand on all of these debates that we’ve been talking about where politicians and members of the general public stand, rather than political scientists. So we have theories—political scientists have theories—about voters and voting behavior, and we spend much of our career arguing with each other about those theories. But especially when you watch politicians do their work, or you listen to what they say in speeches, or you even just pay attention to what they say in their memoirs about elections, they, too, seem to have theories of how voters behave and how elections work. And so we wanted to try and measure those among politicians and then also measure them among citizens to have some point of comparison for the politician’s theory.

So what we did was we wrote up eight questions that we hope capture eight of the more important theoretical debates in voting behavior, without kind of technical language or jargon or anything like that, and we just asked politicians and the members of the general public in 11 countries where they position themselves on each of those debates.

So we end up with data from just short of a thousand politicians, as well as data from about 12,000 citizens in the same country. So we can compare the citizens and the politicians within countries. And this is all part of a project that’s led by Stefaan Walgrave at the University of Antwerp called POLPOP, which stands for Politicians and Public Opinion.

Demsas: And what kinds of politicians are we talking about here? I mean, I know these are very different systems. You’re looking at Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland. These are very different political systems. But are these, like, local? Are these federal? I mean, what kind of mix are you looking for?

Lucas: In this POLPOP project, it’s all national and regional politicians. So these are politicians who are in the central legislature in their country, as well as in some cases, some federal countries like Germany or Canada, where we have really important subnational systems, and we interview provincial or state politicians as well.

So these are kind of top-level politicians, if you think about the ladder of ambition in politics. We’ve done earlier studies with local politicians, but there are no local politicians in this study.

Demsas: As you said, the questions are pretty straightforward. Like, for example, you just ask straight out, “Some say that voters are impatient and think about the short term when they vote. Others say that voters tend to focus on the long term. Where would you position yourself in this debate?” Zero to 10, with zero being short-term.

It’s very, very clear to the politician or the voter—you know, the general public that you’re surveying—what you are actually asking them to do. Why did you choose to have this kind of straightforward question versus, like, a question that could get at this answer, perhaps, by asking like, “Would you prefer a candidate whose policies you think would create long-term economic growth or one who would help address immediate cost-of-living concerns?” What was the benefit of the former?

Lucas: I think that you’re already onto the basic idea here, which is we just wanted it to be maximally clear. These are, in some cases, sort of complicated social-science debates, and we wanted to say, here, Look—there’s two poles in this particular debate. Here’s one pole; here’s the other. Where would you position yourself in that debate? So there are a number of ways to think about measuring this. And we’re thinking about ways to try and do some of those measures in the future. But because this was the first time that anyone had set out to measure these things among politicians in the kind of way that we do, we wanted to be able to make a clear case about what it was that we were measuring.

And so asking sort of straightforward questions, having people position themselves in those debates seemed to us the best way to get started with this sort of work. And this, Some say X; others say Y. Where would you position yourself? is a really common structure for survey questions, and so that was something we thought would feel familiar to the people who are responding, which might also help with some understanding and clarity in the responses.

Demsas: Cool. So let’s get to the findings. What do politicians think of voters, and what do voters think of themselves?

Lucas: So politicians, we say, are democratic realists. That is, they tend to subscribe to theories of voting behavior in which voters are not particularly well informed. They focus on short-term considerations. They focus on single issues rather than many issues. They blame politicians for things that are outside the politicians’ control. All of the sort of key ingredients of that book, Democracy for Realists, seem to be reflected in many politicians’ views.

And we find that three-quarters of politicians across all of our countries fall into that theoretical type. And that contrasts very starkly with the members of the general public, who are much more evenly divided between the democratic realists and the other group, which we call “democratic optimists.” And these are a much more optimistic theory of a policy-oriented, well-informed, long-term-focused kinds of voters.

Demsas: I thought this was really interesting. Most variation that you find is within country rather than cross-country, which is not something I expected. So essentially, it’s just in two of 22 cases that the country someone is from explains more than 10 percent of the variation in their position. To make that maybe even more clear: In the rest, 90 percent of the variation had nothing to do with whether you were Canadian or Portuguese or whatever. Does that surprise you?

Lucas: Yes, absolutely it does. I think it’s really remarkable that in countries as diverse as the ones we’re studying—some have proportional-representation systems, some have single-member plurality systems, some have compulsory voting, and some have mandatory—I mean, it’s just really diverse party systems and institutions. And we see really similar patterns among both the politicians and the comparison between the politicians and the general public across all of these countries. And yes, that was a surprise.

Demsas: But there were two cases where it did explain more than 10 percent of the variation. What were those countries, and what happened there?

Lucas: The two areas where we do see meaningful cross-country variation are the question about whether voters focus on a party’s policy commitments or on the leader’s characteristics and competence—the characteristics of the party leader. And we see there is some cross-country variation on that one for sure. It does make sense because some electoral systems and party systems create more personalized politics than other systems. And so we do see that’s reflected in the results.

And the other difference is on policy versus identity. This is really the question that’s kind of at the heart of a lot of debates about voting behavior these days—whether voters are oriented toward policy commitments that candidates and parties make, or if they vote based on deeply held social identities. And we see that a pretty substantial amount of the variance in responses on that question is explained by cross-country variation but, again, only among the politicians.

So it seems that there is something to be said for the experience of particular kinds of institutional structures or party systems in the development of the theories that you have about voters, especially on these two debates. But on the others, it’s much more consistent across countries.

Demsas: One way to read your results, right—the fact that there’s such a difference between how voters view themselves and, you know, I guess many people would view it as, like, voters have a more rosy picture about themselves and what they’re doing than politicians do—is that voters are lying about themselves. And I think particularly in this moment, where there are a lot of people who are calling voters stupid for one reason or another, it can be tempting to just assume that voters are full of it, right? Like, that they’re just wanting to sound nicer than they are.

But there’s another study that pairs quite nicely with this that just came out recently in PNAS by a friend of the show, David Broockman and his frequent co-author Josh Kalla, about whether political practitioners have good instincts. So what they do is they basically measure the effects of a bunch of messages, real ones that politicians have either tweeted out or, like, the Heritage Foundation, for example, has put in documents, or other partisan outfits have put out about, you know, marijuana or guns or whatever. And then they ask political practitioners and lay people to predict which ones were effective. They find that political practitioners and lay people both performed barely better than chance at predicting persuasive effects. And you don’t really see much difference in those two groups.

This is obviously a different sort of study. They’re looking at different questions here. But there’s something here about our expectations that political professionals really understand the public better than the public understands itself. Like, maybe it’s the case that voters are more correct. So where do you fall in this? Like, I know you already said that you are more of a democratic optimist, but why would politicians be wrong about how voter publics are thinking about voting?

Lucas: Yeah, that’s a great question. One of the things I love about the work that David Broockman and his co-authors, Luke Hewitt and the others, have been doing on persuasion is that, in a way, it reveals how important politicians’ theories of the world really are. Because if it’s extremely difficult to know, for example, what kind of message is going to be persuasive in advance—in the absence of an experiment, kind of A/B testing persuasiveness, it’s really hard to know in advance—that opens a lot of room for people to rely on their intuitive working theories of the world to make decisions about what they’re going to do and how they’re going to behave, and in that case, what kind of advertisements to run, but also how to campaign or how to represent their constituents more generally.

So I think it’s just really difficult to learn about voting behavior from direct experience when you’re a politician. So there’s a lot of noise mixed in with the signal. It looks, based on our evidence, like politicians tend to be surrounded by democratic realists, and so it’s a little less likely that they’re going to update starkly on what seems like policy information. If you’re surrounded by people who have a different theory, you’re more likely to sort of retain that theory.

And just in general, it’s very easy to interpret election results in a variety of ways. So you can imagine a scenario where a party runs an election campaign which is really focused on social identity, in-group appeals, anti-outgroup kind of sentiment, etcetera, and that party loses. And sure, a politician in that party could say, Well, I’m gonna update my theory a little bit and say, maybe, social identities aren’t as important as I thought. Or they might say, Well, we didn’t go far enough. We need to double down. We didn’t really fully commit. I mean, we hear this kind of thing in politics from campaign strategists and politicians and so forth sometimes.

So the feedback mechanism is really noisy, and the way that politicians learn about voting behavior is sometimes—you know, you’re getting conflicting signals sometimes, and it’s really hard to know. So I wouldn’t necessarily say that they’re always wrong, but you can imagine a mechanism where politicians, even though they have an incentive to know true information about how voter behavior really works, could hold theories that aren’t actually accurate.

Demsas: So if voters were right about their own views of themselves, then wouldn’t that sort of imply that they were able to get good information about what elected officials are trying to do? We had this episode a few months ago on the show with Hunter Rendleman, who had a paper about the earned-income tax credit and looking at, in the United States, whether voters were actually responsive to governors expanding this social-welfare benefit in their state. And she is kind of an outlier in this field—well, I wouldn’t say outlier. She’s in the minority in the field of believing that voters, especially at the state level, are able to see and respond effectively to policies that may benefit them, that they say that they like.

So like, I guess my question to you is, like, why don’t we see more of these results in political science then? Why don’t we see voters responding positively to policies that they say that they want, that they like? Why don’t we see politicians recognizing this? Like, doesn’t this kind of push against a lot of our intuitions about how democracy is not really working right now?

Lucas: Yeah, I think it does. I will say, though, that we do have, even now, quite a bit of evidence that things like clear-eyed retrospection and policy commitments among parties still may matter. I mean, we have some evidence, for example, that more extreme candidates who run for office do worse than more moderate candidates coming from the same parties, and that suggests that voters are incorporating the information about the policy positions of these candidates into their choices.

The other thing to say is that I don’t think even the most fiercely committed spatial-voting theorists today would probably not want to claim that voters have the same level of importance or attach the same level of salience to every policy issue. And on a lot of issues, it does appear to be true that voters haven’t thought about it much. A party takes a position on that issue, and they just adopt the position of their preferred party.

But there can be an important difference between policy issues in general and the issues that you really do care about or think about a little more regularly. And we have some pretty good evidence that a lot of people—not all, but a lot of people—do have one or two issues that they care about with particular strength. And if their party abandoned their preferred position on those issues, there’s some reason to think that the voters would notice.

So I think you’re right that the citizens’ responses in the survey reflect a level of optimism that doesn’t seem to be manifested in the kinds of voting behavior that we’re seeing in elections right now. And so recent elections, I think, maybe lead you to think that there’s something persuasive about democratic realism. Let’s put it that way.

Demsas: Well, I guess to steelman it, right, because the case that some people will make about Donald Trump, for instance, who I think is maybe the elephant in the room in every conversation right now, is that, you know, Donald Trump did attempt to moderate on key political promises. When he was running for office, he disavowed—well, he distanced himself, at least—he distanced himself from the most extreme parts of the pro-life movement. How reasonable you find that, given that he appointed members of the Supreme Court who were responsible for the end of Roe v. Wade, you know, your mileage might vary there.

But you know, he did distance himself verbally during the campaign. And there are reports that people believed he was interested in expanding IVF access and that people found that promise to be credible. On Medicaid and Social Security, he’s made multiple comments in public that he doesn’t want to touch. Of course, this was when he was running. Now that DOGE is happening, it’s unclear whether those promises will remain true.

But there is a story you could tell where Donald Trump really attempted on key issues to the electorate to appear more moderate. And there was—I mean, speaking of spatial voting—a survey where they looked at how the average voter saw themselves on sort of a left–right spectrum. And they saw themselves much closer to Donald Trump than to Kamala Harris. And to me, that indicates that, you know, regardless of whether people find some of his other policy positions and commitments to liberal democracy to be disqualifying, the voting public clearly saw many of his policy commitments as closer to where they were.

Lucas: Yes. Well, let me first say, as you well know, there’s quite an industry of research on the correlates of vote choice for Donald Trump these days, and I don’t have a particular comparative advantage on that as a person who mostly studies Canadian politics.

But a couple of pieces to put into the mix here that are absolutely happening: I mean, one, the point you made about policy voting, I think, is true. You see much more attention to cultural policy issues, in general, in recent elections and particular attention to immigration. And on those issues, there was some kind of policy alignment that Donald Trump was able to create, I think, that’s really important.

But the big thing I think I would point out is just this long-run trend toward personalization in politics. This is captured by our “party versus leaders” kind of theoretical debate in the paper—that people seem to be voting more and more on the basis of a particular leader’s character and competence in the eyes of voters, and that’s separate from their specific policy commitments. So even though we still see some evidence of spatial voting these days, it’s also true that when you look at many countries, including the United States, there’s very strong evidence of leader-based voting, where people are voting for somebody because they like that person, they like their character, or whatever.

And they’re adopting the policy positions of that leader kind of after having decided that they really like them. So it’s, If this party leader has this view, then maybe I should have that view as well. And that’s not something that we would expect from spatial-voting theory, and it is something that seems to be happening in many countries, and so I think that’s definitely true.

Demsas: After the break: the foreign national election that is somehow about Trump.

[Break]

Demsas: Well, let’s bring you to Canada, which remains a separate country from the United States. (Laughs.)

In Canada right now, the Conservative Party was slated to win quite handily. But things have changed, both after Trudeau resigned but notably after Trump was elected. And in particular, the kind of bump comes in January, when he is about to come into power and the threat of tariffs was becoming more real. How does that drastic shift towards the Liberals fit within these theories of voting behavior? I feel like there are a lot of stories you could tell.

Lucas: There are a lot of stories you could tell, and I suppose the story is still in the process of being written.

But one of the things that has happened in Canada since Pierre Poilievre became the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada is that we’ve had a radical shift in the kinds of issues that we’re talking about. And so whereas this time last year, we might have been talking about carbon taxes and the excesses of woke politics or whatever, now the focus is trade, economic health, economic survival, etcetera.

And so we have an incoming leader of the Liberal Party who’s a former governor of two national banks, who is, I think most would agree, very competent on economic-policy issues. And that’s occurring at a moment when economic policy is just more salient than it has been in a long time. And there’s some really nice examples in the literature where researchers have seen that for parties, either an issue becomes extremely salient unexpectedly, or parties surprisingly change positions on an issue.

And that gives you an opportunity to see what effect it has on voting. So a policy-voting theorist would expect in Canada that, because trade and the economy have become so salient, voters are going to—maybe a voter who would have otherwise supported the Conservatives, for example, but they trust Mark Carney’s Liberals to deal best with the trade issue—may shift their vote in the direction of the Liberals if it’s about that particular policy being important to them.

Demsas: That raises, for me, a question about how stable you would expect findings about people’s self-assessments and politicians’ assessments of voter publics to be on these political theories. Like, do you think you’ve captured something lasting or just a snapshot of 2022 and 2023, when you were doing these surveys?

Lucas: There is evidence that politicians’ theories of voting behavior do evolve over time. There’s a study by John Kingdon many years ago, which compared candidates who had recently won an election and candidates who had recently lost an election. And as you may imagine, the candidates who lost were a little more cynical about voters’ capacities.

So certainly, politicians learn from experience. They become more or less optimistic, I think, based on how things seem to be going. But we have been asking these same questions of local politicians in Canada each year, going back a number of years now, and we see that there is some meaningful stability to the responses they give.

So we find that there’s some correlation year over year in their responses, in the way that you would expect if their responses are tapping into some meaningful position on the debate. So they’re certainly not perfectly correlated; there’s plenty of measurement error in these questions. But there’s a relationship over time that suggests that politicians have somewhat stable views on this.

Now, among the general public, our working theory of what citizens are doing when they answer these questions is essentially accessing top-of-mind cultural narratives about how democracy works. We don’t want to make the claim that when members of the general public encounter these questions, they think, Well, I’m glad you asked, because I’ve been spending the last eight months thinking about prospective versus retrospective voting, and here’s my position.

It’s more like, What is the most common top-of-mind, culturally available or culturally acceptable narrative about how democracy works? I think that’s a reasonable inference about what those general-public responses reflect. And so the important thing for our purposes is to say, If it’s true that this is your kind of default, culturally accessible story about voters and voting behavior and elections, then it’s remarkable that politicians have developed a very different kind of theory that doesn’t reflect those highly accessible kinds of cultural narratives.

Demsas: Yeah. I wonder, too, about which way the causal arrow goes, right? Like, is it that working in politics makes politicians more likely to have these democratic-realist views of voters? Or that there’s a selection effect going on whereby democratic realists are more likely to become politicians? Does your study give us any insight into that?

Lucas: Yeah, I love this question. I’m sort of obsessed by it, actually. How politicians come to develop these theories, I think, is super interesting. So we have some clues about this, but really nothing more than clues in the paper as it stands.

One thing we can say is that more senior politicians are a little more likely to be democratic realists than more junior politicians. So it’s not a huge difference. It’s, like, 60 percent versus 68 percent when you compare the junior to the senior. But there’s a difference there, which suggests that politicians learn; they become more democratic realist in their theories over time as they move through their political careers. So they’re not arriving on the scene kind of fully formed, hardcore democratic realists, it looks like from the data.

The other sort of clue that we have is that we can compare members of the general public whose demographic characteristics most closely resemble politicians—because, of course, politicians are not a random draw from the public. They tend to be older, better educated, more wealthy, and so forth. So we can look at citizens who match those characteristics of politicians and compare them to the politicians. And we still see there’s an enormous gap between citizens who are kind of like politicians in their demographics and politicians.

And so that suggests there is something like the selection effect you describe going on, where people who have these kinds of views about politics—maybe because they’ve become involved in politics, and they’ve learned these theories from others, more senior people who are involved in politics, early in their career, before they even jump into politics themselves as a candidate—but something is going on to select people who are disproportionately likely to be democratic realists in the first place. And then it seems like the political experience is reinforcing those views over time.

Demsas: So I guess another story I could tell is that the reason why older, more experienced politicians are morally democratic realists is: Maybe cynical people kind of stick it out longer in politics.

Lucas: Could be.

Demsas: And I guess the reason why I am pondering that story is because if you abstract away from politics, if you’re just talking generally about someone with expertise in a field or in a job, you’d expect that over time, that you get better at doing the job, right? Even if you’re just, like, learning from your environment. You’re, like, picking things up generally. But also just in politics, it’s not exactly like the private sector, but there is, like, a win-loss condition that’s extremely impactful, both to your financial interests but also your identity, like desires in life and your self-conception as a successful person. And so you’d expect people to get better over time the longer they stay in there, or at least better at winning elections, which I would think requires understanding how to get voters to vote for you. So I don’t know how plausible you find that story.

Lucas: It’s true that there’s a certain species of very senior politician that has become quite grizzled and cynical about voting and voting behavior. We heard from them because we did these interviews face-to-face with the politicians. So as they work through the survey, because they’re politicians and they generally like to talk, they would sometimes provide a little color commentary as they’re working through the questions. And I certainly remember some very senior politicians in Canada saying, Well, you know, I’m sorry to say it, but voters are not that knowledgeable. You know, that kind of “grizzled old veteran” view of politics.

But yeah, I mean, I think that you would expect there to be some kind of learning mechanism. The tricky thing is, and the thing that we have to ponder here is how involved politicians are in different countries in making decisions about the campaigns they run and the consequences of those campaigns.

So we think it really matters what politicians’ theories of voting and elections are for the choices they make about how they behave as representatives and how they communicate with constituents and maybe how they campaign. But how they campaign is quite variable. Depending on if you’re looking at, like, a closed-list PR system in Portugal or a single-member plurality system in Canada, you have kind of varying levels of control over how you present yourself to voters.

So I think you would expect that the machinery of campaigns would improve over time. But that may not be reflected very directly in the theories that individual politicians hold about voters and voting behavior. And the other twist on this, going back to the paper you mentioned and more generally the research agenda that David Broockman and his co-authors are doing on persuasion: Using the swayable experiment data, they show that the factors that predict whether an advertisement in their case is persuasive are quite context dependent. They change over time. So what predicts persuasiveness in one election looks different in the next election. And so it may be harder to learn. There may be less of a sort of evolutionary convergence toward the optimal election strategy than you expect, because each election has dynamics that are so different from the previous one.

Demsas: So one of the axes I definitely want to ask you about is on sociotropic versus egocentric voting, because I think that’s been a big point of debate in the American context. To define things, sociotropic means, like, kind of voting in the national interest, versus egocentric, in self-interest, sometimes referred to, I think, as pocketbook voting.

So my friend and colleague Derek Thompson had this fun piece titled “‘Everything Is Terrible, but I’m Fine.’” We’ll link it in the show notes. And he points to a couple of indicators where people say that their own personal situation, you know, they’re doing pretty well. Like, on finances, they look at consumer sentiment. But if you ask about the nation as a whole, they think we’re, like, being fed to the dogs. You know what I mean? And it’s, like, this massive divergence between people’s self-assessments and even their local-community assessments and the national context.

You know, we’ve seen this, also, in crime, as well, when you ask people about how much crime is happening, but also about public schools. Like, people usually like their public schools, but they’ll say, like, Public schooling in the country is just absolutely trash. So lots of poli-sci literature shows that voters are sociotropic in their voting, which feels pretty weird to me. I would assume people would be self-interested.

And there was a 2017 study in ASPR by Andrew Healy, Mikael Persson, and Erik Snowberg, which showed that voters do focus on their own pocketbook as well as national assessments of how the country is going, which is a more moderate view. I guess, like most things, people are doing both of these all the time. But what do you find in your survey? How are people thinking about these questions?

Lucas: Politicians overwhelmingly think that voters are egocentric. And citizens are a little more divided, but they tend to think that voters are more sociotropic. And if there’s any one of these debates where one could I most strongly claim that the politicians have it wrong, this is probably the one that you’d pick. I mean, this is actually one where we got a little bit of pushback when we were presenting the paper to some colleagues, and they said, Well, you call these debates, but we all know that it’s sociotropic. So it’s not really a debate, is it? But as you say, there’s the “Digging Into the Pocketbook” paper by Healy et al. And it uses really high-quality Swedish registry data, where you know survey respondents’ actual tax records and their personal financial situation, and it suggests that the pocketbook voting does happen.

There’s some other evidence like this, but I do think that the consensus for a long time—and it was unexpected at first but has grown over time to be, I think, accepted as consensus—is that sociotropic voting is most of what people are doing when they engage in retrospective thinking about: How well are things going? And on that basis, will I reward or punish the incumbent? So on this one, I think you could make a pretty good case that the politicians’ general consensus is not the same as the political scientists’ general consensus.

Demsas: I mean this “sociotropic versus pocketbook” really fits into what happened with the Biden administration. I mean, I hear from Biden officials all the time that they’re like, Well, if you look at people’s personal financial situation, they were doing much better when you look at real wages, or all these, like, debates. But then, of course, you know, a lot about the American economy was great in the last couple years in terms of growth, but inflation as a macro story was really high.

And it’s funny—even as people have understood that inflation was a big part of this election, they still talk about it in terms of their pocketbooks, right? They’re still like, Oh, the reason why inflation was so harmful to the Biden administration’s reelection efforts and, of course, Harris’s election effort was because people had to pay too much for eggs or for milk or for whatever. But it seems like: No. People actually really do care about the national vibe of these things. And I mean, to me, that’s actually a very optimistic view of my fellow countrymen, that, like, Even if I’m doing okay—you know, my wages are pretty good; I got a house in 2021 with a 2 percent mortgage rate—like, I still care that inflation’s doing really badly across the whole country.

Lucas: Yeah. Well, I’m all for your optimistic take on your fellow countrymen. I mean, why not? But I suppose the democratic-realist response, the sort of slight devil’s advocate response here would be that the sociotropic retrospection depends much more clearly on a perception of how well things are going that may be quite a bit less clearly linked to reality. So you kind of know what your income is and how it’s changing and probably know how much your groceries are costing week by week, but to have a clear perception of how well the economy has done over the last four years on a number of indicators is more challenging, and so more susceptible to elite framing and so forth. So I suppose the-glass-half-empty story would be: It’s just much more malleable.

Demsas: I was looking at the response rate from your data collection from the politicians, and it’s highly variable. I was really surprised. I don’t know if you read anything into it. In Canada, where you are: 12 percent response rate, and that’s the lowest of any country you guys reach out to in this study. And in Belgium, the response rate is 85 percent. Does that mean anything to you about the politicians you have or the system? (Laughs.)

Lucas: What it means to me is that my colleagues on this project love to tease me about our low response rate in Canada. So thank you for bringing that up. This is sort of an enduring mystery of elite research that nobody really quite understands.

So there’s two pieces to this. One is that the Belgian team are a bunch of wizards when it comes to attracting and recruiting politicians to participate in their studies. They’re just tireless and really amazing at what they do, and so part of their high response rate is definitely down to their hard work and the credibility that they’ve built over the years with the politicians in that country.

But we also see systematic differences in response rates across countries. When you do surveys of politicians, the response rates in North America are just lower, no matter how much you beg, what strategies you employ. They’re just a lot lower, and nobody seems to know—I mean, even within Europe, there’s a lot of variation—nobody seems to know exactly why. It’s not entirely a function of how many requests they receive. Because we see some very large countries, where the politicians are getting a lot of requests, have low response rates, and some big countries have high response rates. It’s a bit of a mystery, to be honest with you.

But yes, the response rates are quite variable across countries. And even though we have a large number of politicians in total, it is certainly true that more of those politicians come from some countries than from others.

Demsas: Do you worry about selection effects in countries with low response rates? Like, you’re getting responses from people who are especially motivated to engage in this research versus one where you’re getting kind of broad representation?

Lucas: Yeah, absolutely. This is something that we worry about, and it’s especially the case because this isn’t a random sample of politicians. I mean, I suppose there’s really no random samples out there anymore. But this is certainly an opt-in study. We invite them to participate. We send invitations to all of the politicians, and those who choose to participate, they do. And the other ones don’t. So yes, we have to think about this a lot.

And so one of the things you can do is just collect as much background information on all of the politicians in the country that you can, and then you can compare the people who participate in the survey to the full population of politicians to get some sense of how different they are. And what we find is that on most of the observables that we collect, the politicians who participate in our study look a lot like the broader population of politicians. So that’s true on age, gender, on the party they come from, the ideological flavor of the party they come from. On many of those things, we don’t see any particular reason to worry.

The one thing I would flag as a difference between our sample and the population is that the participants in our study do tend to be a little bit more junior in their careers. So the amount of time they’ve had in office is a little less, and it’s not surprising that’s the case, because if you’re a cabinet minister or a prime minister or a party leader or something who’s been around a long time, you probably have less time to spend with us answering questions about politics. So—

Demsas: But that could actually cut both ways, interestingly. Because one way you could read that is like, Oh, are you missing out on people with the most information about voters? But junior people are the ones who just had to win potentially more difficult elections, because they don’t have, you know, the incumbency advantage or the party connections in parliamentary systems. And so, you know, they maybe are actually more closely aligned with what voters are looking for right then.

Lucas: Yeah, that’s exactly the logic I think you have to use to think this through, is if you do have a slight underrepresentation from some group, like, what evidence is there that the people in that group would be different in their responses to the people, when compared to the people who did respond? So we can look at the smaller number of very senior politicians who are participants in our study, and we can say, Is there any evidence that our findings are really particularly influenced by a slight underrepresentation among those folks? And that’s a way that you can kind of test this out.

And we find that the people who don’t participate in these surveys, partly because of how many politicians do participate, they would have to be so dramatically, kind of implausibly different in their views from the people who do participate to change the results. That gives us some confidence. But yes, you’re right. I mean, it could be an advantage. Sometimes you want overrepresentation from certain kinds of participants in order to get their views a little more clearly.

Demsas: So can I ask why you guys don’t have America in your sample? Just because it’s an American show.

Lucas: Yeah. This is a good question. It’s a little bit above my pay grade, but I think that if I can speculate a little or put words in Stefaan Walgrave’s mouth a little bit: I mentioned how response rates in Canada are quite low relative to Belgium or Switzerland and so forth. The response rates in studies of national politicians, especially, in the United States are even lower.

Demsas: Brutal.

Lucas: So the prospect of getting members of Congress to sit down with us for 30 or 40, 45 minutes and participate in this study, I think, are really low. Now, we could still explore maybe state-level politicians or state-level politicians in very big states. There are alternatives here, but for the moment, I mean, this project started in Europe, and it seems to be continuing to expand. So it may be that down the road, the United States is included in future rounds.

I will tell you, though, that we have collected data on these questions in the United States, separately from the POLPOP project. There are local-politician responses. It’s not the national politicians, but we still do have some information about where American politicians stand on these questions. So if you’re curious about the American politicians, I can tell you a little something about them. Although, they’re not exactly equivalent to the others in this study.

So we have data from about, I think, 580 American local politicians. These are mayors and councilors from municipalities above about 1,000 population. And what we found is that two-thirds of the American local politicians are democratic realists. So what that tells me is two things: First, the majority of American local politicians are democratic realists, just like every other country that we study, and second, in Canada, we can compare local politicians to federal and provincial politicians. And we find the local politicians tend to be a little bit less likely to be democratic realists. And so if we extrapolate that logic to the United States, my guess is that you’re probably seeing proportions that are similar to Canada, like 80–85 percent of national politicians espousing these democratic-realist positions. That’s a guess, but it’s an educated guess based on the data that we have from American local politicians.

We also see some differences across party. For the most part, two things: The American local politicians are more democratic realist in character than the Canadian local politicians, and second, there’s not that much difference between the two parties. So only on the question of identity versus policy do we see meaningful, statistically distinguishable differences between the parties, where the Democrats are more identity-oriented theorists, and the Republicans are more policy oriented. So Democrats are a little more likely to think that voters are identity oriented, that they kind of make their voting decisions based on deeply held social identities, when compared to Republicans. So that’s an interesting—

Demsas: When did you do this survey? What year?

Lucas: It was 2022 when we did this survey of American local politicians.

Demsas: So I guess that would indicate that Democratic politicians—well, like, if we assume that voters are correct about why they vote and voters in the United States are similar to the voters you’re seeing in your sample of other Western democracies in your newer paper, that would indicate to me that Democrats are worse than Republicans at assessing voters’ behavior. Is that what you’re getting?

Lucas: It could be. It could be that Democratic voters really are more oriented to social identity. I mean, there’s this long-standing argument that the Democratic Party is more of a coalition of groups, and the Republican Party has been, at least historically, focused on particular kinds of policy commitments. I don’t feel like I’m in a position to adjudicate the persuasiveness of that argument. But it is out there that maybe the factors that predict voting are a little bit different among Democratic voters than Republican voters. So that’s possible.

And it’s also possible that just by virtue of being socialized into a particular political party, you learn slightly different theories from your mentors and campaign strategists and campaign managers and so on, and that there’s just, like, a slightly different subculture in those two different parties.

Demsas: Always our last question is: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Lucas: Well, I’m embarrassed to admit, I have always had a bit of a weakness for the life-hacks genre of online writing, which means I’ve tried many, many things that turned out to be a bad idea. But let me give you a non-life-hack example.

So when I started my job at the university, I was so excited to have gotten an academic position, and I felt like I really wanted to give this new role the respect that it deserved. So I came up with this romantic idea that I was gonna write all of my lectures word for word, and there are gonna be these beautiful lectures that had allusions to poetry and history and so forth.

And I can tell you that the look on my students’ faces when I showed up in a classroom in 2015, and they realized I was gonna be lecturing at them like it was a sort of Oxford College in 1875, they were not thrilled. So I quickly realized I needed to adopt a teaching style that was somewhat more appropriate for the century I was living in.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much, Jack. This was a fantastic conversation.

Lucas: Thanks so much for having me. It’s a real thrill to be part of the podcast.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Liberals Can’t Blame Trump for California

2025-03-18T06:00:00-04:00

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The book begins by asking the reader to dream. This particular dream is of a world in which clean, abundant energy flows from nuclear plants and rooftop solar panels; medical advancements have made life better and longer; and artificial intelligence has come not to doom us but to save us from the drudgeries of work. This is the shared vision—part techno-optimism, part liberal reverie—put forth by The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and The New York Times’ Ezra Klein in their new book, Abundance.

In their telling, what stands between humanity and this future are not just the usual culprits—conservatives and Big Business—but also liberals. The self-described champions of clean energy, transit, and affordable housing have allowed those goals to fall by the wayside while they prioritize onerous regulations, processes, and a myriad of competing interest groups.

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, Thompson and Klein join the show to talk about why states like California and New York struggle to achieve the priorities they claim to have. Why is high-speed rail nothing but a dream? Why does Texas build more utility-scale solar than California? Why is New York, a state run by Democrats, unable to tackle its affordable-housing crisis?

“My first book about polarization, Why We’re Polarized, was very much about how polarization, particularly asymmetric polarization on the right, has deranged national politics,” Klein told me. “But I think it’s also important, then, to ask: Well, okay, in the places where liberals govern—you know, California, Illinois, New York—how come I can’t point to that and say, Hey—look at utopia over there?”

“Liberalism should be an advertisement for liberalism,” Thompson added. “Democrats should be able to say, Vote for us, and we’ll make America like California. And instead, Republicans can say, Vote for Democrats, and they’ll turn America into California. They’ll turn America into Portland; they’ll turn America into Oregon.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: The United States is the wealthiest nation on Earth, at a time when the world is richer than it ever has been, and yet our politics are defined by scarcity. Scarcity of housing, of energy, and even of space has allowed zero-sum thinking to permeate the electorate, and that has been a boon for the forces of illiberalism.

Donald Trump rode to victory last November fueled by zero-sum thinking. If there’s not enough to go around, then he’s your man. And now the question is whether the liberal response will be to fight him on his own terms or change the script.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

In a new book out today titled Abundance, by The New York Times’ Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, the authors argue for a sea change in how liberals have approached politics. It’s a great book; we’ll put the link in our show notes. And I’m quoting from them here:

“We imagine a future not of less but of more. We do not subscribe to the seductive ideologies of scarcity. We will not get more or better jobs by closing our gates to immigrants. We will not turn back climate change by persuading the world to starve itself of growth. It is not merely that these visions are unrealistic. It is that they are counterproductive. They will not achieve the futures they seek. They will do more harm than good.”

That paragraph is like catnip for people opposed to Donald Trump, but there are some very difficult intra-coalitional fights that will have to be waged in order for this world of abundance to become reality—because what’s standing in the way of abundant housing, transportation networks, and renewable energy is not only Republicans in Washington, D.C., but Democrats in California, New York, Massachusetts, and beyond.

It is Democrats who have stood up policies and practices that have allowed scarcity to fester in their own states, fueling a cost-of-living crisis unparalleled in Republican-led jurisdictions.

Here to talk to me about this are the authors of Abundance. Ezra, Derek, welcome to the show!

Ezra Klein: Thank you. Good to be here.

Derek Thompson: Great to be here, Jerusalem.

Demsas: You guys co-wrote a book, and in the book, you write “our” and “we” a lot. And I had a fun time playing mini detective, trying to decipher which parts felt more Derek and which ones felt more Ezra. But what were some places of disagreement you discovered while writing the book? Are there ways you think differently about the problems of scarcity, Derek?

Thompson: I don’t think we disagree in the conclusions of the book, but I do think that our approaches are different. I think that I’ve never really been a politics-first writer or a politics-first podcaster. And when I wrote the original abundance-agenda essay, that was me dipping my toe into politics.

And I’ve always felt a little bit more comfortable starting with economics or technology and then working my way into politics. And so I think that working with Ezra, who is so much more versed in modern politics and political history, was really educational in terms of thinking about many of the ideas that I debuted in that abundance-agenda essay as firmly political issues.

And I think that as we worked together and talked on the phone and read each other’s drafts, there was a theme that’s not present in that original abundance essay, really very much at all, that we began to see as being absolutely essential for this book, which is the theme of: If you’re going to remake liberalism for the next generation, you have to take very seriously the shortcomings of liberalism in the previous generation. And that, for me, just speaking entirely personally, is something that absolutely emerged in conversations with Ezra, rather than appeared initially in my first conception of an abundance book about progress.

So that’s, I think, one place where it’s not so much a matter of disagreement as a matter of, sort of, our differences in approach leading to what I think is a very fruitful combination.

Klein: So I think you can really see the differences between Derek and my approach if you just look at the titles of our two original essays here. So Derek, as he mentioned, had this great piece on abundance, and, you know, the framing of that is so sunny and optimistic, and everybody’s for abundance. And my piece was called “The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting,” and I called it “supply-side progressivism.”

And in that way, I think one of the really great things about working together on this is that Derek brings, I think, a forward-looking, sunnier optimism. And I bring a somewhat hard-nosed, Where the fuck did all this policy go wrong? you know, jaded-policy-reporter sense that I think creates a book that has the two sides of the coin that it needs.

Demsas: Despite growing up on the East Coast—I feel like I’ve said this to Derek a bunch of times—he’s, like, the most West Coast East Coaster I’ve ever met, just perennially optimistic about the future.

Klein: Sure. (Laughs.)

Demsas: In a way, that just seems super wrong. But, Ezra, you’re actually from the West Coast, so it’s like you’re switching.

Klein: I’m the West Coaster, which is why I’m so pissed, because I was in California while doing all this work and thinking about why California was performing so terribly, despite being the greatest state the world has ever known.

Demsas: So I’m going to ask you to harness some of that anger now, Ezra. So who are the roadblocks to abundant housing, clean energy, transportation, and tech innovation? Give me a villain.

Klein: Just a nice, small question there.

Demsas: Yes, exactly.

Klein: Well, they’re different in the different areas. I think that’s one thing to say.

But I’ve thought about the set of roadblocks here as in different categories. So one is interests. You can think about trying to build an affordable-housing complex in San Francisco, and you get interests that are lined up against it for different reasons.

So one set of interests might be local homeowners who do not want a six-story affordable-housing complex down the block from them. They think it’ll hurt their parking. They think it will bring people they don’t want to the neighborhood. They think it’ll hurt their home values. So that’s very classic. Then you might have—depending on how this is built, you might have—unions, right? If the complex does not want to use union labor or does not want to pay prevailing wages, or they want to do modular construction off-site—as in one of the examples I reported on—you might have unions begin to fight that. You also have, just in general then, what I think of as policy drift. So there are certain programs, procedures, approaches that came into being at one time, maybe without anybody even really noticing it, and they become binding and difficult over time, but nobody’s ever revisited.

So again, holding on to the affordable-housing example, there is this kind of strange process in San Francisco—it was in California, I guess, but this specifically in San Francisco—around this thing called 14, I think, B or D; I forget which one. It began life as a racial preference. So it was meant to give the—in city contracts, you would have a preference for minority-owned contractors. Then the California Supreme Court—or no. I’m sorry. It was actually a proposition. California voters said, You can’t do that.

So then they went back, and the state, the city of San Francisco edited that procedure. And they said, Now it’s for small businesses and subcontractors, micro subcontractors, right? We, in San Francisco, have a rooting interest in making sure we have a healthy small-business ecosystem, and so there’s going to be a preference here for small businesses over big contractors, either in the city of San Francisco or even coming in from the outside.

And everybody kind of knows that, in terms of how the city looks at it, it’s still sort of also a racial preference, if you can get there. But specifically, in language, it is a small-business preference. Most people just don’t know that’s there. That’s not really interests—I mean, small subcontractors do. But in general, that’s not a well-known thing. It’s not even doing the thing it was initially intended to do. So just over time, it’s become more binding. It’s drifted. It’s become a kind of procedural crust that I think would not be passed into law today if somebody was thinking about it. So that’s another one.

Then you have sort of overlapping and complex authorities. You get this a lot in environmental issues. So, like, when you’re dealing with transmission lines, the number of players who have to sign off on something: Sometimes it’s local; sometimes it’s state. There’s overlapping federal authorities. That’s really difficult. You have very fractured authority. Nobody can consistently make the decision. So you begin to just have sort of category after category of things that, when you stack them, it just makes it very, very hard to get anything done.

But they’re not all ideological. They’re not all interest based. They’re not all anything. It is the problem of, as Steve Teles once called it, like, a “kludgeocracy” that has evolved over, you know, many decades.

Thompson: Let me jump in there. I think Ezra provided a really nice zoom-out answer from the local individual level to the higher-level factions and groups, starting with voters and homeowners, moving to economic factions, moving to the regulatory and legislative drift that exists in the laws and rules that are written, and then the overlapping authorities.

I do want to introduce here the most macro answer to your question, Jerusalem, Who’s standing in the way of progress? Sometimes, it’s just the federal government, and I think it’s sometimes the federal government, in terms of the way that a lot of these policies that seem to be policies that would forward progressive ends end up stymieing progressive ends. There’s an incredible echo of that story that’s unfolded in the rollout of broadband-internet construction across the country after the Biden infrastructure bill.

And so the top-line headline that I think a lot of people read in the Politico article, or other articles about the slow rollout of broadband construction, is that Biden authorized $42 billion to build broadband internet, and just a fraction of that money was spent, because of the paperwork required.

But why wasn’t the money spent? Why didn’t we actually do what we wanted to do? And I was asking people about this at a dinner that I went to recently, where everything was on background and not for attribution. But, you know, suffice it to say that people at this dinner had job titles that made it very clear that their testimony was highly relevant to the question of why it was hard to build rural broadband in this country when the government put $42 billion behind the effort.

And their answer was: It wasn’t so much about the language of the legislation as the funding rules published by the Commerce Department that had workforce requirements and pricing requirements and climate-change requirements and bidding requirements, and so on and so on. And so essentially, you have the federal government saying, On the one hand, here’s federal money. Go forth and achieve a Democratic initiative, which is raising living standards for low-income Americans. I mean, just the most classic bread-and-butter progressive initiative. But also, they made the application process so onerous that nothing was built. And so, in fact, very little was actually done on behalf of the Americans for whom we wanted to raise their living standards.

And I think this is a question that goes to—and this is a theme throughout, I think, Ezra’s answer—trade-offs in policy making and taking those trade-offs seriously. I think climate change is an important thing to care about. I don’t want the state of Virginia taking, say, federal money to build broadband internet and then charging poor rural folks, like, $200 a month to go online.

But by holding those values so closely and creating an application and funding process that extended the time that those authorized dollars were actually spent by two, three, three-and-a-half years, we accidentally built just about nothing. And now the entire program looks like it might just be, like, block granted to Elon Musk Inc. so he can do Starlink for America.

So this is what happens, I think, when at the federal level you also have this confusion of process versus outcomes, of wanting to fit everything in Ezra’s everything bagel into the process such that every you’ve stymied your ability to actually achieve the outcomes that you’ve indicated.

Demsas: In both of your answers, I hear, and I think many people will hear, a critique that conservatives and libertarians have been making for a long time. From Ezra, I’m hearing, you know, there are too many interest groups that are demanding that their priorities be preferenced over the outcomes that benefit a broad number of people. And from Derek, I’m hearing pretty straightforwardly that government is standing in the way, that regulations are standing in the way, that process is standing in the way of free enterprise, of government. And in the book, you have, like, heavy citation of Mancur Olson’s work. And what distinguishes your project from the conservative kind of critique of liberalism? Is that—are you just trying to lib-wash conservatism?

Klein: Goals.

Demsas: Yeah?

Klein: Goals, very simply. Which red state has decarbonized? Which red state is even trying? Which red state has high-speed rail? Which red state is even trying?

I hear this sometimes from people, and I always think it’s weird. I always think it’s libertarians and conservatives so underselling their own project. Their project isn’t just deregulation. In many cases, they’re adding lots of new powers. Right? Like, look at their relationship to the surveillance state. Their project is to actually do things. It’s to gut Medicare and Medicaid because they feel that it is an unwise use of money to spend all that money on health insurance for poor people and the elderly.

Their project is to actively impede the construction of solar and wind [power], as we see the Trump administration doing right now. I was thinking about your question a second ago, Jerusalem, and thinking that the much cleaner answer I should have given was the villain is liberals in government who’ve oriented towards process and not outcome. The enemy is people who have said they’re going to deliver something, who believe in delivering that thing, and then have accepted process in which they do not end up delivering it, and then they explain it away, or explain away how hard they worked.

But by the way, this is how all the coalitions work. What is ultimately meaningful is outcome—the kind of world you are trying to live in, the kind of world you are trying to build. When Elon Musk and DOGE go in and decapitate USAID and cut off that funding, what they are doing, their outcome, their intention, their aim, their goal is not deregulation or cutting the federal workforce a little bit. Their aim is to stop delivering aid to poor people. That is what they believe that “America first” means: You do not spend our money preventing HIV/AIDS from infecting children in Africa. I think that’s monstrous. But that’s the aim. That’s the goal. And the means—decapitating USAID is the means to the goal.

So the difference between, I think, Derek and I, and conservatives and libertarians, is that we have different outcomes we’re trying to reach. I don’t think it makes sense for me and Donald Trump’s Department of Energy lead to debate how best to decarbonize, because he doesn’t want to decarbonize. Right? So I’ll have different things to do from that.

Demsas: But does that matter? Because, I mean—

Klein: Yeah.

Demsas: No, but, I mean: in terms of the outcomes that you’re talking about here. So, I mean, in the book, you even cite this, but in response to your question about whether Texas has decarbonized: No, but they’re sure as hell siting a bunch of renewable energy. And when we talk about high-speed rail, I wouldn’t call it the highest-speed rail, but Brightline is reviving passenger rail in Florida; it might be reviving passenger rail in Nevada. It’s possible that Texas might even be given the opportunity to do high-speed rail now.

I mean, there’s ways in which I, as a liberal myself, hear this all the time. And I struggle with this question because these places, despite their lack of interest in many of the goals that the three of us may have, are still executing on these goals.

Klein: Yeah. I think that speaks to the power of defaults. And, I mean, we talk about this in the book. I mean, we cite specifically that Texas is building—and by the way, so is Georgia—a lot of renewable energy, but that’s because the default in Texas is to build things very easily. And so when the market sees an opportunity to make money building things—which, particularly under the IRA, it’s seen a very big opportunity to make money building renewable energy—it’ll be able to build it there, because they’ve simply made it straightforward. Although it is a question, I think, how long that would last for. You see a lot of political efforts in the Texas legislature to make it harder to build renewable energy.

And now you see at the Trump level a lot of efforts to destroy the solar and, specifically, the wind industries, right? They’re actually trying to make that actively harder. So I think over time, there might be a lag before policy catches up with politics, but typically they do eventually begin to align on, you know, efficiently or inefficiently. You know, there are other things where Texas has just, like, way better affordable housing than California does, but conservatives don’t oppose affordable housing.

So I do think it’s absolutely true that you have places where there is a default, a path dependence that has made things happen even when you wouldn’t really expect it from a policy architecture. And in many ways, you know, probusiness conservatives should probably look at California and ask, Well, why does California dominate technologically to the extent that it does, given that you all seem to think your low taxes and your probusiness environments are so much better? Why aren’t any of these new AI companies located there? Why are they in California and not in Texas, and not in Oklahoma, and not in Florida?

And some of that is California. But some of that is things that have been going on there for a long time. So the default is very, very, very strong. But that’s more how I look at that. Like, I think you should, as a liberal, look at how much easier it is to build renewable energy in Texas, and feel ashamed and try to change things. But I don’t think in the long run you will get liberal outcomes through conservative government, and you will not get the reverse. You will not get conservative outcomes through liberal government.

Thompson: I’ll pick up where Ezra left off, and then I’ll wind it back to your question, Jerusalem. I think it’s fantastic that Texas builds so much housing. I think it’s fantastic that Texas sites so much solar energy and has so much wind power. That’s a wonderful outcome for Texas and scale to be a wonderful outcome for America. But you know who doesn’t seem to recognize that? Our national libertarians and, more importantly, conservatives, right? Donald Trump could have run on the message, Let’s make America like Texas. Let’s build more solar. Let’s build more wind. Let’s build more housing.

But instead, despite the fact that he was lofted to power by, I think, in many ways, lots of frustration and furious anger about the state of housing in America, what is his housing agenda? He’s raising tariffs on essential housing materials that come from Canada and Mexico. He’s certainly doing nothing to help the construction industry, which is 25 percent foreign born, meet the demand that is absolutely going to be necessary to catch up with the housing deficit that we’ve built up over the last 20 years.

So while, yes, I think we should give Texas credit for the fact that its defaults lead, in many cases, to outcomes that liberals would want, it is not at all clear that at the national-politics level, this has trickled up into some kind of positive vision for how to remake America in a way that would help liberal ends. In fact, I think in many ways, it’s the opposite. And it brings us right back to, I think, Ezra’s great first answer to your question.

The difference between us and libertarians, and certainly the conservatives, is a positive vision of America. And I think it’s cool that this book starts off with, in maybe a little bit of a surprising way, a sci-fi vision of what America in 2050 might look like if we got everything right.

What would clean-energy superabundance look like? What would AI look like? What would clean supersonic travel look like, and how would that change people’s lives? How could we eliminate so much of the suffering that’s been the result of chosen scarcities over the last 20 years by fixing it in the next 25?

So this book, in a very clear way that I don’t think you would see in a lot of conservative manifestos, starts with a very clear vision of a future that I think is unembarrassed about the degree to which its priorities are progressive. But I do think that the processes that progressives have built up over the last 50 years get in the way of making that future buildable.

Demsas: So I absolutely loved the intro that you all wrote. As a sci-fi reader, I just felt completely immersed in that dreamworld. I want to ask you, though, about— there’s a sense in the book that many of the roadblocks to abundance are almost unwitting, right?

Like, you talk about environmental regulations from a past era that were developed to block highways and pipelines, and to clean up the air and water, but are now, unfortunately, blocking solar power and transmission lines and affordable housing. Or that procedural rules—the ones that, you know, Ezra and Derek, you both outlined—are meant to prevent corruption and are, instead, preventing getting contracting done quickly and efficiently.

But, you know, here’s a place that I struggle because that’s a really, like, friendly story to liberals. It’s a story like, you know, You made a mistake. You know, now it’s time to fix it now that, you know, we’re pointing it out to you. But there are a lot of pieces of evidence that indicate people are not unwitting; they simply disagree. I’m sure you’ve come across this in your reporting, but, you know, there are environmental-justice advocates that have been loud critics of carbon-capture-and-storage technologies, who are fine arguing, to quote, “We simply cannot replace Big Oil with Big Renewable.”

Another example is Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who is actively undermining her most successful affordable-housing program because it was too good at getting housing built, and is layering on a bunch of process onto a very successful affordable-housing program because of complaints that it was actually siting multifamily housing.

So how much is this a story of liberals just, you know, We have laws and procedures that were well meaning from another era, versus there being a lot of liberals who simply disagree with these goals, even if they’re not willing to say it explicitly?

Klein: I don’t think the story we tell is that it’s just unwitting. I mean, I quote you in the book, Jerusalem, in the housing chapter about the way in which part of the difficulty in building enough housing is that there is an ineradicable tension between making housing a core financial asset and building enough of it—because financial assets, valuable ones, become more valuable in conditions of scarcity. And so there is good reason for people who already live on a block where the housing, you know, is going up and up and up to not want to see that block suddenly get a very large apartment building in it.

Now, there is a kind of alley-oop between the overhang of past legislation, statute, regulation, process, and some of those interests. I don’t think—in fact, I think I tell: I think the story is pretty clear that when California passed the California Environmental Quality Act under [then-Governor Ronald] Reagan—under Reagan—and nobody thought it was a very big deal, and the LA Times didn’t devote a single, sole article to its passage. And then, only later, after a series of court cases, did it apply not just to government projects but to any project requiring government permitting, which is sort of every project, actually, in California.

So all of a sudden, it becomes a much bigger deal than it was when it passed. And now it becomes a tool to stop housing, not just to do what the legislature initially intended. Well, then that’s different, right? You have a sort of union, then, between a bill that maybe you could not have passed under that argument, but now interests that have learned how to use that bill to follow their current interests.

So I don’t think—I mean, I would say that if I’ve given anybody the view that I don’t think this is going to be a series of unbelievably bloody fights in liberalism, I apologize. But I don’t actually think that’s the nature of the book. We do try to have a relatively optimistic tone throughout, and we do try to be understanding, because I do believe this to be true—and so does Derek, I think—that much of what was built in past statute-wise, much of what was built in the ’60s and ’70s was built for good reasons. Many of the things we need to unwind today were not villainous constructions. They were thoughtful responses to problems of another era that do not fit our current era.

One of the lines I like that we have is: Institutional renewal is a task that faces every generation anew. You can’t expect all the institutions and laws and bills and processes from 40 years ago or 50 years ago to fit the moment you’re in. But it’s just, I think, not the case. And I’ve been part of a lot of these fights already that that we’re particularly naive about whether or not people are protecting their interests here. Of course, they are.

Thompson: The origin of zoning and the origin of these environmental rules was absolutely inextricably bound up, in many cases, with pure, old-fashioned racism and a kind of selfishness for which neither I nor Ezra have any patience. I mean, Yoni Appelbaum in his book, Stuck, I think very clearly sets out the case that the first zoning laws in California in the 19th century were rather explicitly about finding legal ways to oppress and segregate and ghettoize the Chinese population after the Gold Rush.

I mean, there’s no question that many of these rules have explicitly racist aims—had explicitly racist aims. And when you look at the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, for all of the objective good that it did—I think you’ve written about the fact—some people used the overhang of environmentalism to essentially just be people against people.

And it’s no accident, I think, that Rachel Carson’s book and [Robert] Caro’s book also happened to come out at the same time that [Paul] Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. And a lot of environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s was in cases of fear of and an almost aversion to the idea of masses of people living on this planet. And we have no patience for, certainly, the most racist and hateful aspects of those laws from 60 and 70 years ago.

That said, I do think that it is true that some liberals today are simply antibusiness in a way that’s I’m not antibusiness. But I also think that it’s important to be fair to the environmental movement that came up in the 1960s and 1970s by pointing out that it was trying to solve problems that, in many cases, we don’t see in the same way today, because those problems were, in many cases, solved.

The air was disgusting in the 1950s. The rivers were disgusting in the 1950s. The amount of pollution that came out of tailpipes was freaking gross. And we passed a set of rules with the Clean Air [Act] and [Clean] Water Act and all sorts of other laws and regulations that cleaned up the air and cleaned up the water so that every time someone inhales in order to criticize environmentalism today, they are blessed by the fact that the air they inhale is cleaner as a result of the movement that they’re criticizing.

But to Ezra’s point, institutional renewal is the job of every generation, and we have allowed, I think, in many cases, wise rules that answered problems in the 20th century to become a disease of the 21st century, which is the inability to build in ways that would actually solve those problems, especially when it comes to, you know, rules like NEPA getting in the way of citing and constructing clean-energy technology.

So I want to be fair to what I took to be the thrust of your question, which is that, yeah, there were a lot of nauseous pieces of this ideology as it came up. But I also want to be fair to the fact that the environmentalist movement had very serious problems to respond to, in many ways solved lots of the problems they intended to solve. But now we’re left with the overhang. We haven’t done institutional renewal in this generation, and it’s time.

Demsas: So both of you have touched on this a little bit in your answers, but the book is pretty explicitly written to liberals. You write, clearly, quote, “We don’t see ourselves as effective messengers to the right.”

I wonder if you can talk a little bit about your decision to make that so clear. I mean, there are a lot of books where you can implicitly tell that it’s written to a specific audience. But, you know, the YIMBY movement, the Yes In My Backyard movement, has been really, really focused on trying to maintain bipartisanship and not cast the housing-abundance element of this as being a problem just for Democrats to focus on. And you, in your book, of course, cite this as well. So why is this book written for the left?

Klein: I think you have to, in any writing project, decide what your problem that you’re trying to solve is. And, you know, Derek and I probably have different versions of this, but for me, some of the genesis of writing this book was simply what has gone wrong in California. California’s my state. I love it. And in California, every statewide elected official is a Democrat.

You had to sort of—my first book about polarization, Why We’re Polarized, was very much about how polarization, particularly asymmetric polarization on the right, has deranged national politics. But I think it’s also important, then, to ask: Well, okay, in the places where liberals govern—you know, California, Illinois, New York—how come I can’t point to that and say, Hey—look at utopia over there? You know, like, It’s going great. So that’s one dimension. I mean, there’s actually just a question for me I was trying to answer.

Although, I will say, then, to the other side of it, I think that people on the right are going to get a lot out of this book. And I think in some ways, the decision to focus this as a kind of conversation among different flavors of people on the left will make it a little bit easier for them to hear it. Now, it’s going to come into this context of Donald Trump and Elon Musk and J. D. Vance and Russell Vought trying to destroy the federal government. So the right’s got its own sort of questions it’s going to need to figure out.

But in terms of state-level issues, in terms of, you know, affordable housing, I think there’s a funny dynamic right now around YIMBYism particularly, where, look—the YIMBYs, they want to be bipartisan, but they arose in California, right? That has always been, in its initial incarnation, a movement that is different flavors of Democrats talking to each other. But they have had a bigger effect, I think, in some ways, on red states than on blue ones, because as much as their intellectual victory has happened among liberals of different sorts—you heard, you know, Kamala Harris promising 3 million new homes and Barack Obama talking about the DNC—like, as we both know, as we all know, there’s not a housing-supply increase in San Francisco, where YIMBYism really begins. There’s not a housing-supply increase in California.

Like, I was just looking at FRED data for private housing starts over the past 10 years, and it is lower in January 2025 than it was in January of 2015. On the other hand, Montana has put forward great YIMBY policies, right? Florida and Miami, in particular, have done some really, really good things. And I don’t want to take away. Like, there was a good upzoning in Gowanus, in New York City. The “City of Yes” policies in New York, I think, are promising.

But I do think sometimes other coalitions can look without having to activate all their internal defenses at a fight happening on the other side and think, Okay, what can we learn from that? So I think our hope is to have constructive conversations with people on the right, as well. But specifically because a lot of this book is about achieving liberal goals, it just, I think, didn’t make sense to try to say that the problems were going to be the same everywhere, because a lot of the things that the right is doing that I don’t like, they’re doing it because they want a world I don’t want. And telling them they’re wrong to be doing it then doesn’t make a ton of sense.

Thompson: Certainly, a good excuse for us is that a book about how the left needs to get better at focusing is a book that explicitly focuses on its audience and says in the opening chapter, here’s who we’re writing this book for. Because if you’re writing a book about what went wrong in America over the last 50 years, there is maybe an infinitude of stories that you could tell, an infinitude of audiences you want to tell those stories to. But I like the fact that we say, This is a book about how we want liberalism to change. And telling liberals to not be conservatives is essentially telling them to not do the thing they’ve already decided they definitely don’t want to do.

So that’s a way in which I think the focus of this book, even though you’re absolutely right that it says from the start, Look: There are conservatives who are doing their own thing. We wish them well—I think that’s the line explicitly—this is a book about how we want liberalism to change in America, because we have a vision of America that we believe to be in keeping with liberal outcomes and liberal priorities.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: Is localism standing in the way of abundance?

[Break]

Demsas: So I definitely want to come back to the electoral side of this, but before then, because you both are trapped on my podcast, I’m going to ask you about my work, which has been really focused on decentralization and localism. And this is a thing that I think you know: I loved your book. I think it’s great. I think everyone should buy it. We will put links to everything you are saying at the—

Klein: You gotta say that at the top, Jerusalem. (Laughs.)

Demsas: It’ll be in the intro. Don’t worry. (Laughs.)

Klein: You can’t hope people are going to make it all the way here. (Laughs.)

Demsas: Yeah. People aren’t going to make it to even minute 30 of this podcast.

So, you know, I think the thing that’s missing in your book, for me, was a discussion of decentralization and localism, because something I have become pretty strongly convinced of is that even when you have alignment of a lot of these interests towards abundance, towards growth, the thing that becomes difficult is: It’s really, really hard to do anything if you have to get a thousand people on board.

And so you get the situation where, you know, someone who I was talking to who works really strongly in transportation told me that he’d had a conversation with a Swedish transportation planner who was shocked to realize that when a project got a right of way, when it got permission to use an area of road from one part of the government, it did not mean that it didn’t have to go to multiple other levels of government to get that. Like, he just could not believe that’s how we did things here.

And so to me, I think that this is a core problem of abundance that abundance has to deal with. And I think it’s one of the hardest parts because there’s a way to get people animated about housing. There’s a way to get people animated about energy. I mean, these are core things that people think about in their lives. But trying to get people on board with a vision of how you streamline government, in a very boring way—putting together offices, making sure there are fewer local governments in consolidation—like, this is not a popular thing, and it’s not a thing that people are willing to focus on. So is the fact that it’s left out an indication that you don’t view this as a core part of the goals of abundance? Or what’s going on here?

Thompson: Jerusalem, you know the dynamics of localism better than I do, but I’ve done a bit of reporting on opposition to housing and the [Research] Triangle area, in North Carolina. And the layers here are very interesting because you have NIMBY residents who understand the machinery of opposition. So if there’s a new development that’s up for a vote, these folks know where to show up. They know what council meetings to make statements at. They know how to pitch those statements directly to the council.

And then in many cases, the council members are, in some cases, antibuild activists who ran for office and pride themselves in standing up against developers. And so it’s not just about changing minds in the public; it’s also about the phenomenon of these meetings. And it’s about the people who sit on the councils.

And I’ve asked people down here in government, What would change this? What would change this dynamic and make it easier to build housing? And some of it they said is just, You need new people in the city council who are going to vote for housing rather than associate good governance with the ability to always discover reasons to oppose new developments, right? Some of it is just a matter of personnel in the city council.

Some of it, they said, is a matter of retail politics and persuasion. It’s a matter of making the case when you’re talking to folks that you’re the mayor or you’re the city council because your priority is to expand housing development no matter what. And you’re going to repeat that priority at every city council meeting over and over and over, and it’s going to be your north star. And you’re not going to allow other process-oriented priorities to eclipse it.

But sometimes it’s just a matter of political courage. It’s a mayor or a city council member standing up in one of these city council meetings where the audience is, you know, 80–20 against new development and pointing out a fact that I believe you, Jerusalem, have told me many times, which is that: For every one person in this room who has the time and energy and resources to appear here, there are 10 people not in this room who will be helped by housing abundance. And so what we are seeing, what we are seeing in this room in the city council meeting, is a meeting that is oriented around caring for the people who get up in front of the microphone. But being in government means caring about the people who don’t have time to come here and step up to the mic.

And I think that kind of political courage is akin to—not equivalent to, but akin to—what we saw in Pennsylvania with [Governor Josh] Shapiro and [PennDOT Secretary Mike] Carroll essentially saying, Look—we’ve got a bridge that fell down in I-95, and we can go through the regular processes, and it can take—What?—12, 24 months to rebuild this bridge. We can have, you know, procurement rules, and we can have bidding rules, and we can have environmental review that goes on and on, and we can have permitting. But fundamentally, we need to put this thing up in two weeks. And so that’s what they did. They put it up in two weeks. They said, No environmental reviews. We’re going to get this contractor over here, and this contractor over here to build the damn thing as soon as possible. And they built the damn thing as soon as possible. It took 12 days and not 12 months.

So I do think that a lot of this comes down to political courage, and it’s going to take political courage to do what you are talking about, to take a culture of federalized localism and say, You know what? I think we might be better off if we limit the number of opportunities that people who oppose development in this city have to block every single thing that happens. And I’m just going to go on the road and say over and over again: I’m not doing this to limit citizen voice. In a way, I’m doing it to raise citizen voice, because I care more about the voices of the people who are not complaining on the mic every two months. I care about those voices more than I care about the people who happen to have time to go up in front of the microphone.

That’s a hard thing to say, and I cannot guarantee that it’s politically popular enough to win election after election. But I do think that fundamentally what you’re asking for is not just a procedural, not just a sort of a governance, organizational change. It’s a matter of personality. It’s a matter of courage as well.

Klein: I think that’s right. I really want to pick up on that idea that it’s a matter of personality. One of the core theses of the book—I’m not sure how explicitly we say it outside of the Mancur Olson section—is that modern liberalism is overly process focused, that it has repeatedly substituted process for outcome. And that takes different shapes in different places.

So when you’re dealing with things that require local approval, like housing, you often have that as the problem of decentralization, right? The power is split, fractured—these meetings that have very, very unrepresentative samples of the population showing up. But when you’re dealing with other areas, right? Like, I spent a bunch of time on the CHIPS and Science Act in the book, and the Notice of Funding Opportunity and all of the everything-bagel provisions and added standards and goals that got put into there.

And that wasn’t localism. That wasn’t even decentralization. That was done centrally at the Commerce Department. And I report on that, and I know a bunch of the people involved. That was just coming out of a culture in liberalism, of personalities, as Derek put it a second ago, that just kind of doesn’t want to say no to anybody, that wants everybody in the coalition to be as happy as possible.

So I think that the view that I at least came to, ultimately—I don’t want to speak for Derek here—is that this is all manifestations of something similar that we don’t have, like, a really good way to talk about. But it’s closer to the temperament of a coalition. If the temperament of the MAGA coalition right now is autocratic, the temperament of the liberal coalition is bureaucratic. And in becoming bureaucratic, it shapes itself differently at different levels of government. But sort of at all of them, somebody needs to be in the meeting who can say, Enough. Thank you, everybody, for your opinions. We are going to do this. Sometimes that is a question of power. Sometimes that is a question of leadership. Sometimes you don’t have the ability to do that, and we need to restructure the way, in theory, at least, that the overlapping, jurisdictional issues are handled.

That’s very, very hard to do, and I think you should be very pessimistic about good outcomes if that’s your only approach that will work. And sometimes it’s that somebody needs to just say it and, like, be willing to take the political pain for saying it. I sort of think this is somehow connected to educational polarization in the parties—this is not in the book, because I can’t prove it—

Demsas: (Laughs.) That’s what podcasts are for.

Klein: Right? I think this is connected in a way that educational polarization in the parties, in the way that the Democratic Party has aligned to become the prosystem party, and the Republican Party is aligned more to become the antisystem party. And you just have a relationship to systems and processes and bureaucracies that are different on the two sides.

And there are huge pathologies in the Republican approach to this. It is not good that nobody can tell Donald Trump no. It is not good that they don’t listen to anybody else, that they don’t give a shit what any of the Republicans in Congress think. It is not good that if you tell Elon Musk he’s believing conspiracy theories, he will tell you to fuck off, and fire you from his company or throw you out of the meeting, right?

I actually have this whole view—and, again, not in the book, but we’re in Podcast Land here—that the temperaments of the two coalitions have polarized into very unhealthy personality types. Basically, the coalitions need an ecosystem of different personalities in them: some who are more authoritarian, like, a little bit, right? Some who are much more process oriented. It was good for the Democratic coalition that it had its antisystem hippies inside of it. Now that, you know, as Matt Yglesias puts it, the crank realignment has put RFK Jr. and all those people in the Republican Party, they’re too crankish. And, in a way, the Democratic Party is insufficiently skeptical of big corporations and big systems.

So there’s something here that I think is really important. It’s very hard to prove, but I do think it’s temperamental. And it sometimes comes out, as you were saying, in too much localism, but not only in that. If it were only in that, then we would just have a big chapter on how localism is a problem. But because we see it rhyming across so many places often where localism has nothing to do with it, I think it’s something broader.

Demsas: One of the things that I love about your book is how much you focus on abundance as, like, a vibe shift and not just a laundry list of policy changes, but that there needs to be a serious reorientation in how people think about themselves, their roles, what liberalism is for. I mean, you analogize it to how environmentalism was this lens that gave everyone a different way of viewing government and industry and the goals of liberalism. And, you know, abundance is hopefully another lens that people can use and apply.

But both of you have brought up Trump and Musk a bunch of times in this conversation, and I imagine someone coming to this conversation fresh—coming to your book fresh, and hasn’t been deeply involved in the debates that we all have been for the past several years in the abundance space—might be confused as to why this book is coming out now, hitting liberals for undermining government. And, of course, publishing timelines are what they are.

But Ben Wallace-Wells wrote a review of your book, and books of friends of the show Yoni Appelbaum and Marc Dunkelman, for The New Yorker. And he made the following comment that I hope you guys can respond to: “The abundance advocates emphasize the problem of ideology, because of who usually wrote the rules, but what’s happening is also, more simply, about wealth and power. When it comes to the expense of New York’s subways, the latest studies identify some specific culprits: the city builds many more mezzanine levels in its stations than is the case in stations overseas, and it hires more consultants. How much of that is really about liberalism?”

He goes on to say that it is “flatly ahistorical” to blame liberals for lack of progress on climate change. So I guess the question that has been posed to me multiple times as well is: Are we all just engaged in a long line of liberal self-flagellation and are ignoring the elephant in the room that is the Republican and Trump-Musk administration? Or is Ben wrong?

Klein: I think Ben is wrong. (Laughs.)

Look: I wrote a whole book about how much you can’t get done at the national level because of Republicans. So I sort of take a back seat to nobody on that, and that’s a huge amount of my coverage. But does Ben think California is well governed? Does Ben think New York is well governed? Does Ben think Illinois is well governed? Does Ben think these places where Republicans hold zero power are losing people by coincidence?

At some point, you have to be able to say, It’s not the only thing happening in the world that the other side is bad. Now, it’s awkward to bring out this book—I mean, in some ways, it’s helpful; in some ways, it’s awkward—to bring it, you know, during the Elon Musk–Donald Trump–DOGE era. Although, I do think that it gives us a kind of way to talk about: If you don’t make government work—really make it work—if you do not actually truly care that people can feel it in their lives, that you don’t have these debacles, like $42 billion for broadband that doesn’t give anybody broadband access, then you’re going to open the door for right-wing populists to come in and burn it down.

But I think that there is—sometimes I’m reading reviews. I’m actually pretty comfortable with bad reviews. I’ve been in this game for a very long time. And—

Demsas: I don’t think it’s even a bad review.

Klein: Ben’s wasn’t a bad review. That’s not what I’m saying. Ben’s was actually a very good piece.

But the thing I was going to say is that sometimes in reviews, you can tell when you have tripped people’s preference for affect, right? They just, like, want more Republican bashing in the thing, right? They want what Tyler Cowen would call more “mood affiliation.” And I just think we actually need less of it. And I think one way you develop credibility as a political tendency is you admit where you’ve gone wrong.

Yes, it is the case that it is substantially due to Republican opposition at the national level that we have not been able to pass more on climate. On the other hand, it is not the case that Republican opposition is why, after the Inflation Reduction Act passed, Democrats never did permitting reform to make sure that the money it is spending could build enough of the green infrastructure it intends to build at the speed that we need to build it.

Republicans actually were willing to work with Democrats on that. It was Democrats who did not want to go forward there. Now, the Biden administration sort of hid behind Joe Manchin and supported Joe Manchin’s permitting bills, but liberals hated Manchin. And by the way, Joe Manchin’s permitting reform is not what I would’ve done.

So I think you just gotta be really careful. There are, I think, very good critiques of this. But why, you know, we have to spend more time blaming Republicans for our own failures I actually just don’t think is one of them, and I think it’s a kind of intellectual-failure mode in politics.

I think we’ve got to spend a lot of time blaming Republicans for Republican failures, and they’re currently attempting an autocratic breakthrough at the top of the U.S. government. And, like, obviously, I cover that day in and day out, but I think liberals don’t take their own failures nearly seriously enough. And the real problem with that, in addition to that then we can’t fix them, is also: Voters notice. And voters don’t trust you.

Gavin Newsom wants to run for president with the burning desire of a thousand suns. Right? He wants it so bad. And Gavin Newsom has every right to run for president. The guy’s governor of California. He’s going to have a huge problem running for president, because people don’t think California’s well governed. And it’s not even that he hasn’t been trying to change a bunch of that. I think a lot of what Gavin Newsom has been trying to do is good, but the fact of the matter is: Housing is a disaster. Homelessness is a disaster. They haven’t built high-speed rail. And none of it has been solved.

So that’s another issue. You begin destroying total generations, really, of political talent because they’re coming out of a place where they can’t defend what they’ve done. Like, does anybody want Kathy Hochul to run for president? When people don’t think the places you run are working, it doesn’t then work to say, Trust us.

And so I just don’t think you can—like, it is true that part of why various decarbonization actions have not worked is due to Republican opposition and obstruction. And again, that’s all mentioned in the book. But it’s just also true that we haven’t done a good enough job. And that’s part of the reason Texas and Georgia and a bunch of red places are building more out of the IRA than liberal states. The places where liberal states are getting more IRA money is in the credits to buy things that are built elsewhere.

Thompson: Yeah. To the extent that Ezra and I disagree about anything, certainly no disagreements have been revealed in the last 55 minutes. Because I want to echo and amen with hands over my head everything that he just said, and also, ladle some extra defensiveness on top of it.

You know, to the extent that Ben thinks it is flatly historical that liberals are the principal enemies of climate change, I just want to be very clear: All four of us—me, Ezra, Jerusalem, Ben—all know that this is in the book and that we all agree about this. I mean, we say in the first chapter that it’s no point talking to Republicans about climate-change goals if so many Republicans don’t even believe in or prioritize climate change.

And then as we talk about in the penultimate chapter, the U.S.—I don’t think this is well understood—in the 1970s was, in many ways, the world leader on solar energy. And we basically gutted our energy R&D and our solar industry because Ronald Reagan comes into office and puts a dentist in as the head of the Department of Energy and takes the solar panels off the roof of the White House. And basically, we decide for the next 30 years that we’re not going to do anything about the development of solar energy.

So that is in the book, and it is absolutely the case that if both parties agreed with the fervor of the Democrats that climate change was a problem, we’d be in a very different state in terms of the amount of zero-carbon energy that we produce in this country. That’s No. 1.

No. 2: I think the most important part of Ezra’s message right there is that liberalism should be an advertisement for liberalism. And if it isn’t, then we’ll lose. One of the best lines in the book, and this was Ezra’s addition, is that Democrats should be able to say, Vote for us, and we’ll make America like California. And instead, Republicans can say, Vote for Democrats, and they’ll turn America into California. They’ll turn America into Portland; they’ll turn America into Oregon.

We don’t want to give them this ammunition, because it’s incredibly effective to say that the places that liberals run are, unfortunately, not run well. And finally, on the issue of, say, the Second Avenue subway, you know, I was talking to Sam Bowman for an article in The Atlantic about the degree to which the U.K. could use an abundance agenda. And he made a really interesting point, because if there’s any country that has a worse problem of building than America, it’s clearly the U.K., which has basically been on a downward slope since, you know, something like the Victorian era when it came to building things in that country.

And I said, you know, Why does Spain and Portugal—why do these countries, which don’t rival Britain in terms of wealth—seem to do so much better on building things? And he said, In Spain in particular, you’ve had coalitions in government that run on their ability to build quickly and effectively. And I was like, Jesus Christ. What a concept. I mean, imagine a mayor of New York running on New York accelerating the degree to which it’s building the Second Avenue subway at a cost that isn’t $2 billion per square mile. Imagine someone being able to run for governor of New York for, say, another term by saying, Look at our progress in high-speed rail, and look at our progress with homelessness.

This idea of people running for government by pointing to their achievements at making government work, that’s unbelievable to me. And that’s what we should aim for. We should aim for liberals being able to run by saying, Look at how I made liberalism work where liberalism had power. And right now, I don’t think that there are enough places that can do that. And as a result, I think it’s hard for liberalism to build power without those advertisements.

Demsas: You guys are making a couple of electoral arguments, both in the book and implicitly in what you’ve been saying here. One is that, you know, the specific messaging-argument problem, which is just, like, If you can’t point to the thing that you’ve done and say it’s good, then why would people vote for you? But then you also are kind of drawing out some math problems for Democrats when it comes to population loss in blue states making it harder for Democrats to win the electoral college, reducing congressional representation in the House.

But I think the thing that struck me as the most important are the arguments you make about how scarcity fuels illiberalism. Can you draw out those arguments for me?

Klein: I love it. Well, we do quote you in those arguments. Do you want to draw those arguments? (Laughs.)

Demsas: That’s why they’re so good. (Laughs.)

Thompson: What’s your favorite passage of a Jerusalem Demsas article? And just read it slowly and mellifluously.

Demsas: Sure. Let’s do that.

Klein: Yeah, there’s a lot of Jerusalem Demsas in the book. I think you had the best piece on this, so I’m going to do the weird podcaster thing and be like, How do you think scarcity draws out of liberalism?

Demsas: Well, first of all, you guys are very generous citers. Anyone who is interested in reading more, it’s very easy. There’s, like, a hundred pages of notes and acknowledgements in here. But I think on this question of illiberalism, this is something that got into my head, particularly, when it came to Trump and Vance’s campaigning against immigration. And of course, I’m not making the claim that there are no legitimate concerns about immigration. We’ll park that for a second.

What we saw was clearly a weaponization of scarcity, and the problem of scarcity incites one of two possible responses, right? Either it’s: There’s not enough. I have to defend my own. I have to, you know, eventually make sure that other people can’t take housing that could go to my child, or this really good job might go to an immigrant or to a person of color, or to a woman and not to me or my family member or friend. And that’s, like, one very natural response to scarcity.

And the other is liberalism. It’s the promise that you can make more, that there can be enough housing for everyone who needs it, that there can be, you know, enough good-quality jobs that new people coming into your community isn’t a threat to your way of life. It’s actually making your life better. But the problem is that that has to actually be true, right? And as you talk about in these blue states, I mean, there is a problem where they have made housing scarce That has created a serious problem. And, I mean, we saw that in Springfield, Ohio, as a very effective cudgel for Trump and Vance to wield.

And so to me, abundance is a necessary prerequisite for liberalism at large. If you want people to feel open to expanding rights to people who are different from them, to be open to new things happening, to change immigration, whatever it is, they have to feel like there’s an abundance of opportunity. You’re never going to look at a choice between an immigrant and your child in the housing market and decide to go with the immigrant, you know what I mean?

So the thing I want to get from you two is, like: I worry that many people are taking a policy critique, something about the goals that we might have with decarbonization, with abundant housing, with a bunch of other things and trying to make it into an electoral argument. Because right now, in particular, the Democratic Party is searching for a way towards relevancy, and there’s room to make an argument to that set of policy makers.

So do you think that we are—and I mean me, in particular, that I’m—overstating the importance of abundance from an electoral standpoint? Like, how much of it is important, given that we’re in this populist moment, you know, that’s very anticentralization, very opposed to government, lots of people excited by the so-called DOGE efficiency move? So how much of this is just wish casting that we’re doing? And is it really relevant to Democrats’ electoral outcomes that they’re focused on abundance?

Klein: Well, let me say a few things. One is that we’re definitely not in a moment that is anticentralization, because we’ve never seen a presidency working as hard to centralize power. Not never, but in the modern era, we haven’t seen a presidency working as hard to centralize power and actively centralizing power as Donald Trump. And certainly his, you know, quote-unquote populist right is loving that, which, to be fair, is how the populous right usually is. It’s a highly centralized, you know, The people will have their voice through the leader who authentically represents the will of the people and wields power without check, balance, or oversight.

So it’s always kind of a contradictory mess. But that’s, I think, the moment we’re in. And I do think it does exist a little bit as a response to highly bureaucratized liberalism, although that’s not the only thing, obviously, it’s responding to.

One of the things I was thinking about when you were saying that, Jerusalem, was Elon Musk and the way in which, I mean, it’s like we’re in Dark Elon Musk territory, very much so. Because you can imagine this other Elon Musk, right? Elon Musk as a political figure, you know, from 2012, 2014 who is proabundance, because Elon Musk’s career is, like, an amazing set of proof points for at least part of what, you know, Derek and I want to see in the world.

Here you have an immigrant who came to America. He then set up, first, a series of businesses in the lightly regulated digital sector. But then he began moving into the highly regulated automobile and go-to-space sectors, and solar, for that matter. And then he built these companies on the back of government subsidies, government loan guarantees, and government contracts, becoming the single-best example—living example—for what public-private partnerships can accomplish.

Like, you can really imagine Elon Musk as this unbelievable messenger of abundance and trying to make possible more of the kind of thing he did for more companies, more people. Instead, he’s trying to pull up the ladders behind him and get more contracts and, you know. And I think a lot of what he’s doing is ideologically motivated as he’s fallen down darker and darker right-wing rabbit holes on the platform he bought to derange himself.

But there’s something else there that could have happened. And it points to—and this is the thing I say that I do think is an addition to some of the stuff you’ve written in that New York Times essay—where the core of the populous right’s politics has to be scarcity. It just has to be. Because its first commitment is fewer immigrants. Its first commitment is that trade is a zero-sum game where there’s always a winner or a loser. Abundance is fundamentally positive sum, and the populist right is fundamentally negative sum, or at least zero-sum. There is nothing more fundamental to the way Donald Trump views the world than the things that are zero-sum negotiations. All of them. There’s always a winner and loser.

And it’s just not how we see it. So he has to choose the pathway he’s choosing, because that is the dark engine of his politics, both here and in other countries. He didn’t invent this. This is something we’ve seen in many places, at many times. So electorally, then, I think you get into a couple questions. And look—there are a lot of electoral pathways that might work. And I don’t run in elections and win a lot of elections, but I’ve covered politics for a long time.

One thing that I do believe is just true is that you tend to win when you represent the future and not the past. And I think a really dangerous thing electorally for Democrats is that Donald Trump’s meaning has fundamentally changed since 2016. In 2016, he represented a kind of past against Hillary Clinton representing a different kind of past. And now he represents a future because Musk and RFK Jr. and Vance and Marc Andreessen—all of them together, the sort of flooding in of Rogan World—it has changed the meaning of Donald Trump from a defense of what there was to an idea about what’s coming.

And I think they’re going to fuck that up, because they’re breaking things they don’t understand. You know, and if we don’t fall into autocracy, I think the backlash to the tariffs and everything else is going to be really profound. I could be wrong, obviously. But I think it is fundamental that Democrats are going to need to, if they’re going to be a successful political party, recapture a vision of the future.

I mean, it’s a reason why in our book we put invention so at the core of things, right? We start with that slightly sci-fi vignette because we are trying to get people to imagine a future. This is about what world you are trying to build. And I think that is potent in American politics. I think that in politics, you need to have—to be as successful as you often want to be—a new vision.

I think that you need to reorient politics around a divide that is healthier for you. Polarization is—the next question should always be, Well, what are we polarized over? Right? And is the nature of that cleavage good for us or bad for us? And I think one of the real cleavages right now is abundance and scarcity. And I think people have, like, underplayed this. They’ve wanted to say it’s sort of a moral regressiveness or an anti-institutionalism, right? Like, those are the things Donald Trump represents to liberals. He’s like a racist who hates the fundamental institutions of modern life. And that’s true in many ways. But it’s clearly not enough.

And I think as Democrats begin to lose the future and lose the sense that they have a vision of what should be coming, that has become a really profound weakness. So what I’m looking for is, like, not just candidates who can sort of manage the politics-of-evasion problem and accept where Democrats get out of step with people, but candidates who can see some other way of organizing American politics, some other set of conflicts that are better for them and more constructive for the country than what we’ve had. And I think that, like, at a vibes level is what we are trying to offer. Like, a different way of cutting what this is all really about.

Thompson: Yeah. One way we sometimes talked about it is that American politics tends to be built on axes: Are you liberal or are you conservative? Are you proimmigrant or are you anti? Are you pro-DEI or are you anti? And we’re trying to introduce a new binary, a new axis here, which is abundance versus scarcity. And the reason why we’re trying to introduce this axis is not just because we think that axis is important, and it’s not just because we think that axis is illuminating to understand American policy and American economics. It’s also an axis on which liberals can win.

We’ve seen, I think, in the last few months that scarcity doesn’t just empower illiberal movements, as Jerusalem, that was the basis of your question. It’s also the case that scarcity empowers illiberal movements to pursue scarcity. I mean, look at what the Trump administration has done in the first few weeks. By saying, America can’t afford our debt—scarcity—we therefore cannot afford health care for the poor. More scarcity. Because America doesn’t have a healthy economy—scarcity—we have to accept American hardship—more deprivation. Because we don’t have enough manufacturing, we have to suffer the consequences of tariffs—scarcity for scarcity. Because we don’t have enough housing, we therefore need fewer immigrants. Oh, we don’t have enough of this, therefore we need less of that which we need. I mean, this is an argument of scarcity requiring scarcity, and it is an argument that we should be, as liberals, excited to take on, right?

Every administration invariably creates the conditions for its own opposition. Every single administration does this. That is the basis of thermostatic politics in America, and it’s the basis of thermostatic politics around the world. I think that liberals need both a negative identity and a positive identity. And this is my gloss, my wrapping paper on what Ezra just said: You need a negative identity, which is what you’re against, and you need a positive identity, which is what you’re for.

It’s obvious what the Democratic Party is against. Open any newspaper any day of the week: That’s what we’re against, right? Donald Trump is taking a wrecking ball to politics. Elon Musk is tweeting nonsense after nonsense on social media, while, at the same time, pretending he understands things that he’s absolutely demolishing. That, I think, goes catastrophically against American interests. The negative identity of the Democratic Party is incredibly clear. That is the unfortunate toxic gift of Donald Trump in power.

But what’s the positive identity? What are we actually for, beyond just being against Donald Trump? That’s where I think we need to offer a positive-sum vision, right? And that vision is what we call abundance. And it’s why, again, I think it’s really cool to have a book that is predominantly, in so many ways, a self-critique of the body of liberalism in America. But it begins with a sci-fi positive vision. Here’s what we’re aiming for. Here is our north star. This is what we want to build. Let’s see if we can get out of our way and build it.

And of course, that requires winning elections against a movement that right now is dominated by Donald Trump. But I don’t think we need further clarification on how to be anti-Trump. I think we need further clarification on how to stand for something bigger than being anti-Trump.

Demsas: So one thing I wanted to ask about—and I mean this: A big part of your book is about invention and about scientific innovation. We haven’t talked a lot about that. But one thing I think I wanted to ask about it is that it feels, in many ways, that the barriers hampering housing, transit, energy are different than the ones standing in the way of scientific innovation.

I mean, in housing, we know how to build a house. Transit: We see high-speed rail. We see energy. We know how to build solar panels. These are things that other countries are building. Of course, there’s innovation that can happen in all of these spaces, and I appreciate all of the focus on productivity that you have in the book. But are the problems preventing scientific innovation—are those really in the same wheelhouse as these other baskets that you guys are focusing on?

Thompson: Some of them absolutely are, and some of them absolutely are not. You know, in one way, you can think about abundance as being a kind of three-part process. Part one is: You decide what the good is that you’re aiming for. What’s the positive vision?

Part two is: You have to actually understand the market, the industry that is responsible for producing that vision. You have to understand local housing markets to figure out what’s wrong with housing. You have to understand clean-energy technology and siting rules in order to figure out how to build more clean energy. And in science and technology, you have to understand science markets and how scientific funding works and how the discovery process works.

And then part three is: You remove the bottlenecks that are in the way. And sometimes that means taking things away, and sometimes it means adding things. So in the world of science, right, what we want are more lifesaving medical breakthroughs that add the most important thing in the world, which is more healthy years of life. And the difficult thing about science is that you don’t exactly know what you are aiming for specifically, because unlike building a house or unlike siting a solar farm, discoveries are, by their very nature, unknown before you discover them.

So what I did for this piece is try to figure out, Okay, what are the inputs to scientific breakthroughs? It’s smart people, it’s time, and it’s money. The problem that we identified with the National Institutes of Health is that we have created, over the last 60 years, a set of bureaucratic procedures and paperwork requirements. This created a situation where the typical scientist now spends his or her time filling out paperwork or filing grants and not doing actual science.

I consider that to be an absolute catastrophe, and so do many scientists. And you can reframe the catastrophe this way: Imagine if we discovered one day in the near future that typical American scientists suffered from a virus that created a chronic-fatigue disorder that knocked out 40 percent of their working years, such that they had to sleep, say, between January and late May of every single year. We’d say, Well, obviously, this is an enormous crisis for American science. But in many cases, this is not an exogenous bacteria or virus. These are requirements in paperwork laws that we have created for ourselves and for our scientists.

So first, I want to find ways of experimenting with funding that reduces the paperwork requirements in ways that I see very similar as the benefits of reducing bureaucratic and paperwork requirements in, say, affordable-housing construction or broadband-internet construction with the Infrastructure Act under President Biden.

So there are some things that I think we want to take away and reform and streamline in ways that are totally similar to many earlier parts of the book. But also, I’m not a pure libertarian on this standpoint. I don’t think that the road to scientific abundance flows purely through just taking things away.

I also think we need to create new programs and recognize, for example, the absolute wonder that Operation Warp Speed did. I mean, Operation Warp Speed truly is one of the most remarkable programs in modern American history because it was fantastically successful at producing a life-saving medical therapy, and also, in a weird way, has been abandoned by both the Democratic and Republican Parties.

Democrats don’t talk about it, because it’s a Trump initiative, and Republicans, I think, don’t talk about it because, in many cases, they’re an anti-vax movement. And so it’s been orphaned, but the lessons of Operation Warp Speed—the way it created incentives for scientists, the way it removes roadblocks for actually building therapies that you invent—I think are incredibly important if we want to create science that saves people’s lives and build that science into products that extends people’s lives.

So the way I see it, the message in science intervention is absolutely in keeping with the thrust of abundance. It depends on a positive vision. It depends on a very keen understanding of the market that’s relevant to making that vision a reality. And then it looks very clearly at: What are the bottlenecks to take away and what are the policies to add?

Demsas: This talking about innovation and the failures inherent in the scientific process feels like a great time to ask our last and final question. Derek, let’s start with you. What is something that you originally thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Thompson: When Laura and I had our first kid, we were getting a lot of advice from people about the need to put the baby first and the fact that, of course, when you have a baby, the baby is what suddenly must come first. And that sounded fantastic. It’s certainly something close to the cliché of what new parents are told, that something has been introduced to their life around which they have to reorient their life. And that’s absolutely true in so many ways.

But the truth is, the best advice that I got about being a parent was the exact opposite. I was talking to a friend, Brian, who said, I think my favorite parenting advice is, No. 1: Look out for yourself. No. 2: Look out for the relationship with your partner. And then No. 3: Look out for your child. If you’re not your best self, he won’t be the best possible partner. And if you’re not the best possible partnership, you won’t be good parents.

So in a weird way, the child comes last. And there’s something beautifully counterintuitive and lovely about that, about the need for and the benefit of a kind of wise selfishness in parenting. And I love that that goes slightly against the good-on-paper advice of when you have a baby, that new baby needs to be the pure and unassailable sun around which your solar system must orbit.

Demsas: We get a lot of parenting responses in Good on Paper. Ezra, what’s yours?

Klein: Ooh, I mean, I think before Derek gave that answer, I was going to give a very book-related answer about something about regulations or—not all regulations, but, you know, there’s certain categories of regulations and comment structures that I took just as generally good before that I don’t now.

But I’ll give a more personal one, so I don’t seem like a robot: Getting less sleep. For a lot of my life and definitely a lot of my career, my 20s as a journalist and early 30s maybe, probably particularly before I had kids, I was a very much, like, a sleep-is-a-cousin-of-death kind of person. And I would try to set the alarm earlier and earlier, and would just push through, and sort of felt that every hour I was spending asleep was an hour I wasn’t spending alive.

And I really just now understand that to be the opposite. I had this one moment at some point where I thought I had been just kind of anxious for years, and maybe I was just tired. Like, maybe I just mixed up the two feelings, or the two feelings were just feeding into each other, certainly. And so now, I do not always succeed, because I have kids and a job and all the rest of it, but I really would like to get as much sleep as I possibly can as opposed to as little sleep as I can possibly get away with. And that has been a pretty big conceptual change.

[Music]

Thompson: I would warn listeners: Don’t take these pieces of advice in the opposite order. Don’t try to sleepmax and then have a baby. That will lead to a little bit of priority confusion. Nonetheless, I do think that when you do have a kid, being protective of sleep is unbelievably important for all of the obvious reasons.

Demsas: Well, thank you both for coming on the show. I’m so excited that this book is in the world. I’m so excited to continue this conversation with the both of you.

Klein: Thank you, and for all your work here, which is hugely informative to what we ended up doing. Really, really appreciate it.

Thompson: Yeah. Thanks for being an inspiration.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Trump Is Unleashing a Chaos Economy

2025-03-14T08:30:02-04:00

Americans hold all sorts of views on tariffs. Some are opposed on free-market grounds. Others are in favor for reasons of national security or to bring back American manufacturing. Those debates are part of a normal democratic process. But President Donald Trump’s first weeks in office have shown that a principled discussion over tariff policy is simply not on the agenda, because the administration’s tariff policy is nonsense.

What we have is chaos. One U.S. uncertainty index of economic policy, which goes back to 1985, has been higher at only one point in the past 40 years: when the coronavirus pandemic began. That, of course, was a global phenomenon that the United States could do little to avoid. What’s going on now, by contrast, is entirely self-inflicted.

[Read: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet]

Chaos is Trump’s calling card, but few could have expected how quickly the president would ricochet all over the place on the size, nature, and timing of—not to mention the justifications for—one of his signature policies. Before markets can adjust to one pronouncement, the world’s smartphones buzz in unison announcing that the wealthiest nation in the world, whose dollars hold up the global financial system, is hurtling in another direction once again.

Just consider this abridged timeline of the most significant twists and turns thus far:

November 25, 2024: Trump posted on Truth Social that on the first day of his new term, he would “sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25 percent Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders.”

January 20, 2025: The first day of Trump’s term. No tariffs announced. Instead, Trump signed a memo directing the Commerce secretary to “investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits.”

January 26: After the Colombian president rejected U.S. military flights carrying deportees, Trump threatened 25 percent tariffs on all Colombian goods. Colombia threatened to respond but deescalated before the new taxes were put in place.

February 1: Tariffs against China, Mexico, and Canada are on.

February 3: Tariffs (for Mexico and Canada) are off.

February 4: Chinese tariffs go into effect, and the Chinese government announces retaliatory tariffs as well as export controls on key minerals.

February 11: Trump imposes a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum from all countries.

February 13: Trump threatens reciprocity to any country enacting tariff policies against the United States.

February 25: Trump raises the possibility of tariffs on copper.

February 27: Canada and Mexico tariffs maybe coming back on?

March 1: In the middle of a housing crisis, Trump raises the possibility of tariffs on lumber and timber.

March 4: Okay, yes, the Canada and Mexico tariffs are back on.

March 6: Just kidding, only for some stuff.

March 9: Tariffs “could go up,” Trump says on Fox News.

March 11: Ontario threatens 25 percent tariffs on electricity, causing Trump to promise a 50—yes, 50—percent tariff on Canadian aluminum and steel. By the end of the day, both countries backed off these threats.

March 12: A big day for tariffs. The 25 percent tax on all imports of steel and aluminum go into effect, and in retaliation, the European Union enacted duties on $28 billion worth of American goods, while Canada announced $21 billion in tariffs on American goods.

March 13: Not to be outdone, Trump threatened 200 percent tariffs on wine and other alcoholic beverages from Europe.

To recap, the United States is now in a trade war with its largest trading partner (Canada), its second-largest trading partner (the European Union), its third-largest trading partner (Mexico), and its fourth-largest trading partner (China).

It’s obvious to the point of cliché that businesses rely on regulatory—and fiscal—policy predictability in order to plan hiring, capital investments, and pricing strategies. And that means these past few weeks have been very rough. How can you begin a capital-intensive project if you have no idea what anything will cost? The chaos of the current trade policy is a strange parallel to the chaos that the Trump administration has unleashed on the federal government. One difference is evident, however: Although markets expected the new president to go on a deregulatory spree, they failed to take his affinity for tariffs seriously—or at least thought things would be executed a little more deliberately.

An adviser to prominent energy companies told me that because “infrastructure projects require five to 10 years for permitting and construction,” some of her clients are pausing normal business decisions. “The current environment is so chaotic that it’s difficult to understand effects [on] permitting pathways, community approvals, and supply-chain costs.” She requested anonymity to speak freely about her clients’ struggles in the early days of the new Trump administration.

The big companies are in a better spot than small businesses. As we’ve already seen when the Big Three automakers were able to get direct relief from the tariffs, large companies that can provide Trump with good PR are able to get carve-outs from tariffs. But small businesses are less suited to absorbing shocks and are less likely to stay abreast of the day-to-day shifts of tariff policy. Many will be unable to game the system.

Uncertainty may also be paralyzing the labor markets. As my colleague Rogé Karma reported last month, job switching is at its lowest level in nearly a decade, even though the unemployment rate remains low. Part of what’s going on is that lack of confidence in the future breeds risk aversion: Employers are too rattled to make a bet on a new hire, and employees are too worried to leave a safe position.

[Read: A great way to get Americans to eat worse]

Some people—such as those who are worried that a backlash may invigorate American support for free markets—would like the public to believe that the country is in the throes of an “economic masterplan” and that the chaos of this moment will cohere into a reasonable strategy. Color me skeptical. For one, the president and his team have yet to articulate a consistent set of arguments for supporting his vision. Instead, the justifications for the tariff policies change as fast as the policies themselves.

If the tariffs are about rebalancing America’s trade and restoring its manufacturing greatness, then why are they being removed? If they’re about improving America’s negotiating position vis-à-vis bordering nations on issues such as fentanyl and immigration, then why are we putting them on Canada?

Is Trump doing this to make Americans richer? Is he doing this to balance the budget? To hit back at other countries for their unfair policies? For national-security reasons? To solve the child-care-cost crisis?

As the Yale Law professor Jerry Mashaw wrote for Fordham Law Review, “The authority of all law relies on a set of complex reasons for believing that it should be authoritative. Unjustifiable law demands reform, unjustifiable legal systems demand revolution.” That our elected officials are required to explain themselves, to give reasons for the actions they take, is a cornerstone of democratic accountability. Without clear reasons, it’s not just businesses that are at stake. It’s democratic governance.

But if sifting through Trump’s roiling sea of rationalizations is important for democratic purposes, it’s also personally significant. Every business, worker, and consumer in the country has a stake in figuring out the why and what of tariffs.

[Read: Don’t invite a recession in]

Ideologues across the political spectrum resent the American voter’s materialism. Environmentalists moan that the public refuses to bear higher energy costs in order to help mitigate the effects of climate change; animal-rights advocates worry that people won’t pay to ensure better treatment of livestock; farm advocates who already benefit from distortionary subsidies have even advocated for price floors. Now it’s the economic populists insisting that the public should be willing to pay higher prices on the path to restoring American greatness. On Truth Social, Trump posted an article with the headline “Shut Up About Egg Prices,” and Republicans are insisting that it’s worth it to “pay a little bit more” to support the president. But “America First” has always been a better slogan than organizing principle. When people have the option to pay for domestic goods at higher prices, they opt out, time and again.

The speed with which Republicans have gone from hammering Democrats about high grocery prices to justifying the inflationary effects of tariffs is remarkable. Yet Republicans are likely to learn the lesson that Democrats did last November: Before they are Republicans, Democrats, or even Americans, my countrymen are consumers first.

The Scientific Controversy That’s Tearing Families Apart

2025-03-11T06:00:00-04:00

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In 1971, a British doctor was trying to puzzle out a mystery: How can a child with no signs of external trauma or injury present with bleeding between the skull and brain? That doctor, A. Norman Guthkelch, was part of a wave of physicians and researchers newly concerned that an epidemic of severe child abuse had been passing, undetected, beneath doctors’ noses.

As one law-review article recounts, “Prior to the 1960s, medical schools provided little or no training on child abuse, and medical texts were largely silent on the issue.” A turning point was the publication of the 1962 article “The Battered-Child Syndrome,” which urged physicians to consider that severe child abuse may be at play when children came in with injuries such as bone fractures, subdural hematomas, and bruising.

The article goes beyond offering medical advice to prescribing an ethical framework that would take hold: “The bias should be in favor of the child’s safety; everything should be done to prevent repeated trauma, and the physician should not be satisfied to return the child to an environment where even a moderate risk of repetition exists.”

Armed with these new insights, Guthkelch hypothesized that the children showing up to his hospital were being abusively shaken. Although they did not show up with the usual fractures or visible forms of physical trauma, the presence of a subdural hematoma could indicate what would come to be widely known as “shaken baby syndrome.”

Decades later, Guthkelch would publicly worry that his hypothesis had been taken too far. After reviewing the trial record and medical reports from one case in Arizona, NPR reported that he was “troubled” that the conclusion was abusive shaking when there were other potential causes. “I wouldn’t hang a cat on the evidence of shaking, as presented,” Guthkelch quipped.

The narrow claim that shaking a baby abusively can result in certain internal injuries morphed into the claim that if a set of internal injuries were present, then shaking must be the cause. On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with a neuroscientist who found himself personally embroiled in this scientific and legal controversy when a caretaker was accused of shaking his child.

Cyrille Rossant is a researcher and software engineer at the International Brain Laboratory and University College London whose Ph.D. in neuroscience came in handy when he delved into the research behind shaken baby syndrome and published a textbook with Cambridge University Press on the scientific controversy that embroiled his family.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: Many forms of scientific expertise in criminal-justice proceedings have been debunked or come under scrutiny in recent years. Things like bite-mark analysis and blood-spatter analysis used to be commonly understood as rigorous empirical analysis. But these questionable theories often fall apart on closer inspection.

This is how science is supposed to work. Experts observe, they hypothesize, they test, and they revise their previous understandings of the world. And in academia and in scientific journals, that’s all well and good—but what happens when evolving science is brought into the courtroom? In a courtroom, no one is well positioned to rigorously evaluate a scientific debate: not judges, not jurors, and not even the people calling expert witnesses.

[Music]

Demsas: My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper. Today’s episode is about abusive head trauma, but you probably know it by its older name: shaken baby syndrome.

Babies cannot speak for themselves. As a result, when doctors or prosecutors accuse a parent or caregiver of having violently and abusively shaken their baby, they are often relying on something that has come to be known as “the triad.”

The triad refers to three medical findings: subdural hemorrhage, or bleeding in the area between the brain and the skull; retinal hemorrhage, or bleeding in the retina; and brain swelling. If these findings are present, according to shaken-baby-syndrome adherents, that would mean a baby has been abusively shaken. Shaken baby syndrome also indicates that since these symptoms arise rather quickly, the child must have been shaken by the last person he or she was with.

It’s important to understand that for many years, the presence of all three of these medical events was not indicative of child abuse; it was dispositive. In 2015, Kentucky’s former chief medical examiner, who had personally diagnosed SBS, told The Washington Post that “doctors, myself included, have accepted as true an unproven theory about a potential cause of brain injury in children.”

My guest today is Cyrille Rossant. He’s a researcher with a Ph.D. in neuroscience who plunged into the world of SBS when a caregiver was accused of shaking his child, an allegation she denied.

This is a very serious topic, and I want to be clear—child abuse is very real, and our public and private tools for addressing and helping children at risk are distressingly insufficient. But in their zeal to help children, many doctors, prosecutors, and scientists have allowed what one New Jersey appellate court has called “junk science” to tear apart the lives of thousands.

Let’s dive in. Cyrille, welcome to the show.

Cyrille Rossant: Thank you for having me.

Demsas: So you have a very personal connection to this issue. Can you tell us about how you first learned about shaken baby syndrome?

Rossant: Yeah, sure. So I actually lived a situation myself. So nine years ago, I had a baby who was being cared for by a caregiver. And when my baby was, like, five months old, he was sick. He was vomiting, and his head was getting bigger and bigger. So we brought him to the hospital, and they did a CT scan. And they found so-called subdural hematoma, which is blood around the brain.

And from that, they told me that it was shaken baby syndrome. It could be nothing else. So that meant that my baby had been violently shaken. So obviously, it was a very difficult thing to hear, and I was really distressed by the health of my baby. So he was taken care of. He had surgery, and fortunately he was fine after that.

So now he’s a healthy 9-year-old boy. But at the time, it was very hard. And obviously, since it was a situation of suspicion of child abuse, the hospital had to report the case to authorities and to call the police. And that’s how it all started.

Demsas: When that determination was made about your son, they didn’t leave you any doubt. When they saw the subdural hematoma, they said, Without a doubt, this is shaken baby syndrome?

Rossant: Yeah, exactly. So at the time at the hospital, most doctors were really sure that it was shaken baby syndrome, that it could be nothing else. So the thing is that we had a nanny. And my son had symptoms when he was being cared for by the nanny. So she was, like, the prime suspect. But still, it was very hard for us to believe that it was possible at the time.

That being said, there was one doctor who was less certain about the diagnosis. It was actually the only doctor who was a specialist of child neurology. And he was telling us that it could be shaken baby syndrome, but it could also be something else, namely a medical condition where there’s an excess of fluid around the brain. He told us it could be a risk factor for subdural hematoma and that he was not really sure that my son had been violently shaken.

So it was a bit confusing for me, to have, like, most doctors who are really 100 percent sure that it was shaken baby syndrome and another one who is supposed to know more about these issues to be less certain. So I was really confused, and I couldn’t really live with this uncertainty, and I needed to know what had happened to my baby.

Demsas: And what happened with the caregiver? Did they arrest her?

Rossant: So yeah, basically, it took them maybe six months or something. But yeah, after six months, she was put in custody because, in the meantime, there was a medical expert who looked at the case and said, Well, yes. It’s a shaken baby. So it happened when my baby was being cared for by the caregiver, so it had to be her. So she was put under custody. She was interrogated by the police. And then she was being prosecuted for four years.

Demsas: Oh my God.

Rossant: And in this longer legal process, another expert looked at the case, and he did not really agree with the first one.

He said, like the child-neurology specialist at the hospital, that it could be a medical condition and that maybe it was not shaken baby syndrome. So there were two different opinions in terms of medical experts. And on this uncertainty, the judge decided to drop all charges, and the nanny was cleared after four years.

Demsas: This, I think, really underscores how serious of an issue this is. I mean, when a doctor or a scientific expert tells a court or a public-policy official or a policy maker that they’re certain about what something means, it sounds like they’re talking about a natural law or they’re talking about physics. And there’s often not the ability for public-policy makers or lawyers or judges to independently evaluate the research.

So as a result of your experience, you dove headfirst into the research here and have even written a book about the finding of SBS. I’m gonna just refer to it as shaken baby syndrome, even though there’s some controversy about whether it should be called that or abusive head trauma, just because I think most people know the term shaken baby syndrome, but I want to note for listeners that there’s some controversy over the use of that term.

But there are basically three areas of controversy I want us to explore: the mechanism of injury, the diagnostic reliability, and the evidence quality. Let’s start with the mechanism of injury. The fundamental question here is whether shaking your baby is the only way to cause the classic findings of SBS. Can you lay out the scientific debate here over that question?

Rossant: Yeah, so actually, I think you can say there are two different questions here. First is: Can shaking cause the injuries that are typically associated with SBS? And second: Are these medical findings always caused by shaking? So it’s kind of two inverse relationships—the causal link, and is it the only cause? If it’s a cause, is it the only one, right?

Demsas: Yeah. The way I’ve been thinking about it is: Can punching a wall create a hole? Versus: If we find a hole in the wall, does that prove that someone punched it?

Rossant: Yeah, exactly.

Demsas: I think we can start with, like, can punching a wall create a hole? Can shaking a baby lead to the injuries of the classic findings of SBS?

Rossant: So the short answer for this is: We don’t know. We cannot shake babies for science, right? It’s not working like that. So we don’t know today. I really looked a lot for that question in the literature, and I could not find good, reliable scientific evidence linking shaking without impact—and that’s important—to the medical findings associated with SBS: so typically, subdural hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage, and brain swelling.

What’s for sure is that babies are shaken. It exists. There’s no doubt about it. We know that many babies who are shaken—they are shaken not in the most violent possible way. There’s a whole spectrum in the degree of violence you can inflict to a baby. And when it’s not so much violence, it’s still child abuse, obviously, but it might not be enough for the baby to be injured. Okay?

So we have some interesting data from a lot of countries who asked a lot of parents and caregivers, Well, do you shake your baby? Do you hit your baby? Do you slap your baby? A lot of types of child abuse. And so it’s really just, like, self-admitted abuse, right? And parents actually say yes. And a proportion of them admit doing these kinds of things to their babies, including shaking.

So it’s something that exists. And still, we can think that 2 percent is not that much, but it’s still, like, 100 times more than the number of shaken baby syndrome diagnoses. So it means that we miss most babies who are really shaken, but maybe they are not shaken that violently, because they don’t appear to be injured. They don’t go to the hospital, and they are not detected. That being said, sometimes the babies are shaken so violently that they are being injured, and it’s hard to imagine how a baby could be shaken in the most violent possible way without the brain being injured.

Now, the exact type of injury you are going to find around the brain, etcetera, we don’t really know. We don’t know. We can imagine that it’s going to harm the brain, but we don’t know how, exactly. There is some data that was obtained on animals. So there’s a whole literature on animal studies, like mice, rats, piglets, lambs, who are shaken for science—it’s horrific when you think about it, but these are things that are done by researchers. So animals are shaken, and they are injured. And we find some injuries in the brain, but they do not really look like what you find in shaken baby syndrome. It’s not exactly the same kind of findings. It doesn’t really match.

Demsas: What’s the difference?

Rossant: It’s really technical, but you will find some injuries in the brain itself, like traumatic lesions to the neurons and to the cables between the neurons. You might find some bleeding, but again, it’s not the type of bleeding you find in shaken baby syndrome, which is really specific.

Same for the retinal hemorrhage—you will find very severe retinal hemorrhaging in shaken baby syndrome. And this is not typically what you find in animals who are shaken. It doesn’t really match. So the way researchers are interpreting this typically is to say, Well, these animals are not good animal models for human babies, and human babies seem to have specificities for the kind of injuries we find. So far, we are not able to prove the causal link between violent shaking and the classic medical findings of shaken baby syndrome.

Demsas: So models have failed to show that shaking can generate enough force to cause those injuries, and studies that are on animals haven’t been able to reproduce the classic findings through shaking alone. But there’s still a lot of uncertainty, right? So it’s still possible that shaking your baby could result in the classic presentation of shaken baby syndrome. But it’s also possible that it might be something else.

So we’ve talked about, can punching a wall create a hole? Now I want to ask you about, if you find a hole in the wall, does that prove someone punched it? Because I think one of the core parts of this controversy is that it’s not just that when a baby presents with these injuries that doctors will say, It’s possible this baby was abused. There’s been a training of doctors to indicate certainty, that if you find this—it’s often called “the triad”—if you find this triad of injuries, then you should presume that the baby was shaken and that the baby was shaken abusively by the last person who was with the child when it began presenting with those symptoms. So why was that the medical consensus? Why did that training happen?

Rossant: Yeah. I think you’re right to say that it’s not just a cause; it’s the only cause. That’s the theory, right? Shaking is a possible explanation for the findings. It’s the only possible explanation, and it occurred just before the baby showed symptoms. So it’s a really, really strong theory that has been taught to doctors. Now, why has that been the case? I don’t know.

What I know is that historically, and you really need to dig down into the history of shaken baby syndrome to understand how it was born—it was born in the ’70s with this hypothesis that maybe shaking was one of the possible causes of subdural hematoma, but at the time it was just a hypothesis. And today it’s still a hypothesis. And that was in the beginning of the ’70s. And a few years later, doctors in the U.S. started to presume abuse whenever they found subdural and retinal hemorrhage in infants. Why that has been the case, why this mere hypothesis, Maybe it’s shaking, was transformed into, It is shaking, and we need to call the police, that I don’t know. But by the ’80s, you start to see prosecutions based on this theory.

So somehow—I don’t know—some doctors in the U.S. started to do this. It’s important, also, to say that there was the context of reporting any suspicion of child abuse to authorities. That started in the ’60s. There was a big subject here in pediatrics at the time, because before the ’60s, it was not really obvious for doctors to think about abuse. They didn’t really think about it. And it suddenly changed in the ’60s. And they really realized that it was important for the medical community, and especially pediatricians, who see children all the time, to think about abuse whenever they find suspicious findings, like fractures, bruises, and subdural hematoma. That came in the ’70s.

So there was this big push for doctors to really report as many children as possible to the authorities whenever they have the slightest doubt on abuse. And since there was this hypothesis that maybe subdural hematoma is one of the signs that should make doctors suspicious of abuse, well, they started to call the police and to report these cases to authorities.

That being said, I think there’s a difference between being just aware that maybe children are abused and calling the police, and going to court and saying, This is abuse, and this is nothing else, and this is certain. This is a big difference to me. And this is really what I don’t understand, because, to me, doctors should treat patients and report possible child-abuse cases to authorities. But going beyond that and saying to the courts, I’m a doctor, and I know that this child was abused, even though there’s no other piece of evidence apart from the medical findings, this is the thing that is going too far for me.

Demsas: What other things can happen that can cause these symptoms to present in babies? Are there other potential explanations that you found when researching this?

Rossant: Yeah. So actually, now we know a lot of possible causes of subdural and retinal hemorrhage. First, there’s everything involving accidental trauma, like short falls and domestic accidents. Whenever there’s an impact to the head, even what appears to be a small impact, it can really cause severe injuries, including what we see in shaken baby syndrome. There’s also biomechanical data about this. Impact is really dangerous for the skull and for the brain in a child.

Then you have many rare diseases, like a genetic, metabolic, neurological conditions that can all cause subdural hematoma or be a risk factor for the development of subdural hematoma after a minor impact, which really happens in most babies. Once they start to sit down, they can fall, and when they try to get up, to stand up, they can also fall. So it’s really, really common for babies to hit their head. Most of the time, it’s not going to cause anything, but if there is a medical condition, if there is a risk factor, then it might cause the findings of shaken baby syndrome.

There are infections that can cause blood-clotting disorders. There’s really a lot of things. It’s really complicated. It’s really not possible to say that only shaking is the only cause of the SBS findings. There are also risk factors—again, it can be medical conditions.

But it can be just a prematurity. It’s a big risk factor. These babies are much more fragile. Babies who have a low birth weight, babies who have a large head—there are many little things like this that can increase the risk of a subdural retinal hemorrhage after minor impact. So yeah, it’s really complicated.

Demsas: I want to talk about some of the pushback that people like you have received from other scientists who stand by the shaken-baby-syndrome diagnosis and say that it is perfectly reasonable for doctors to presume, and for the courts to presume, that when these injuries present in babies, that we should assume a caregiver has shaken the child. What they often point to is the fact that numerous perpetrators have confessed and admitted to shaking their babies, and that the confessions often will provide detailed accounts that match the medical findings of shaken baby syndromes, and that they have these consistent patterns.

Why is that not convincing to you that, perhaps, maybe it’s the case that science hasn’t figured out exactly how shaking will cause these symptoms, but if people are admitting to having shaken their baby and then their baby is presenting with these symptoms, that’s a reasonable cause and effect to presume?

Rossant: Yeah, it’s true that confessions—today, it’s the main piece of evidence for shaken baby syndrome. The question is not whether confessions exist or not; it’s how reliable they are, and what you can learn from the confessions. So confessions do exist. And I also want to stress that, obviously, some of these confessions are true, and that some parents do abuse the babies, and they end up confessing when they are being interrogated by the police.

So yeah, you cannot possibly say that all confessions are false. It’s not working like this. That being said, I’ve studied this question a lot in the scientific literature, and it’s true to say that they are really unreliable scientifically. They are not scientific evidence. And it’s not obvious to realize that, because when you don’t know the subject, you think, Well, if the person admits something that horrible, it must be true. There’s no reason for an innocent person to say they did it if they did not.

But it’s much more complicated than that. The topic of false confessions in general—not just for a shaken baby, but for any type of crime—has been known for decades. You know the Innocence Project that was able to exonerate a lot of people based on DNA evidence? Well, it turns out that between 25 and 30 percent of all the DNA exonerations had falsely confessed, and they were factually innocent, because that was proved by DNA, which could point to someone else. So it’s something that exists.

Now, you wonder why innocent people confess. So there are many reasons. There’s even a classification that was done by a psychologist and scientist. There’s a psychologist called Saul Kassin, who is an expert of this, and he has devised a classification of false confessions.

So for example, one of the reasons is just plea deals. So they plead guilty, and they might not go to jail, and they can walk free, but they have to say they did it. But even without that, even in the police interrogation room, innocent people can be led to confess what they did not do, in this context.

For example, the police can say, Well, if you confess, the child, who is in foster care, can go back to you. You can get back your child if you confess. Or maybe, If you confess, your child can go back to the other parent. There are many incentives that are given by the police to the persons to confess. And the reason for that is that the police are being taught, like medical doctors, that shaking is the only possible cause and that it has to be that last person with the baby at the time of the collapse, right?

There’s also the whole thing of internalized false confessions. It’s really mysterious. It’s really a psychological effect that can lead innocent people who deny having harmed their child while being interrogated to slowly, in the course of hours or even days of interrogation in a very stressful context, to believe that maybe they did something that they did not think was harmful but was actually harmful, or at least that’s what they are led to believe. And it really happens a lot in this particular type of case. The police can make a lot of scenarios: Okay, maybe you didn’t want to harm your child, but you took the child from the bed a bit quickly, or maybe the head hit something, or you were not careful enough.

There’s a lot of scenarios that are being fed to the suspect. And in this specific stressful context, innocent parents who are really—they have this guilt of maybe they think they did not do everything they could to save their children. Maybe they tried to resuscitate their child with cardiac massage or something, or maybe they tried to slowly shake the baby, but it’s a very mild type of shaking. It’s really not a violent shaking. So you can always find something.

And this really happens, and I’ve seen it a lot, and it’s been documented on videotaped police interrogation. You can see it in some transcripts. So when you really dig into the details of what has been confessed exactly and how it has been confessed, and when you look at all the context of the interrogation, you realize that it’s really not, Okay. Well, okay. I admit it. I just lost my nerves and violently shook my baby. This is very rare. This is not the type of confession you see in shaken baby syndrome. It’s: Oh my God. Okay. Maybe I did it. I didn’t realize my baby was collapsing. And yeah, I tried to revive my child. And maybe in the process, I harmed my child, and I—oh my God.

It’s a really complex phenomenon. But it’s been documented, and I think it happens a lot. So you cannot just say, Okay, confessions exist, so it must be true, right? That being said, most confessions are obtained after the diagnosis—so typically, after the police have been called, and it’s most often in the police interrogation room, right?

So there’s this big contamination, and it’s more than that. It’s really a pressure, because the police think they know that the baby was shaken and that this person is guilty, so there’s a whole bias, right? What would be interesting would be to see if confessions can be obtained before—before the police interrogation and even before the medical exam that will show the medical findings that are associated with SBS. Because if it’s obtained before, then there’s no way the diagnosis could influence the confession. Obviously, this kind of confession is very rare, but there is at least one study that was able to find something like 36 cases where the confessions were obtained before any kind of medical exam.

So there’s a lot of reason to believe that these kinds of confessions are genuine, true, right? And what’s interesting is that, in those cases, you are not going to find the medical findings of SBS. So yeah, there are many reasons to be skeptical of this theory.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: Shaken baby syndrome goes by a different name now, but the same problems persist.

[Break]

Demsas: I’m hoping you can explain why the term shaken baby syndrome has fallen out of use. Now we’re more likely to hear the term abusive head trauma, and I’d assumed that was due to the criticisms levied by folks like you who’ve become skeptical of the SBS diagnosis. But in a policy statement about the diagnosis, the American Academy of Pediatrics said that the name change to abusive head trauma “was misinterpreted by some in the legal and medical communities as an indication of some doubt in or invalidation of the diagnosis and the mechanism of shaking as a cause of injury.” And then they say that the AAP, “continues to embrace the ‘shaken baby syndrome’ diagnosis as a valid subset of the AHT diagnosis.”

So what’s your interpretation of what’s going on there?

Rossant: Yeah, so it’s true that in 2009, the AAP published a position paper stating that from now on, “abusive head trauma” should be used instead of “shaken baby syndrome.” And the way they justify this was because it was to encompass a broader source of abuse inflicted to babies—not just shaking, but also impact to the head. That’s the justification.

And there was one big study in ’87 by [A. C.] Duhaime and a few biomechanicians who really showed, first, that there were very often signs of impact, which was not really compatible with the idea that these babies were just shaken, right? And also, they did a biomechanical study to show that the forces involved with shaking are much lower than when there’s any kind of impact to the head. So impact to the head is really, really severe and implies very big forces to the head and big deformation and big energy. So it’s much more dangerous.

And there was some controversy in scientific articles about this that partly led to, I think, this decision to change the name from shaken baby syndrome to abusive head trauma, because it was not just shaking very frequently; there’s also impact.

Now, it’s true that before 2009, especially since the Louise Woodward trial in Boston in 1997, there was a lot of controversy in the media and the scientific articles on specifically shaken baby syndrome, the hypothesis that you could infer abuse just with the triad, without any sign of impact. And yeah, some people believe that this change of name is a consequence of this controversy. Obviously, the AAP, the medical institutions do not really acknowledge this, because their position has always been to say that there is no controversy at all, right?

So here we are. I mean, we have this change of name that has been more or less accepted by everyone, even though the term shaken baby syndrome is still quite widely known in the public.

There’s something else that should be pointed out. It’s that the term shaken baby syndrome was criticized—the very term—in particular by Norman Guthkelch, who first identified shaken baby syndrome, or at least the link between shaking and subdural hematoma, in 1971. He criticized the fact that the same term is used to describe both an act—shaking—and a set of injuries. So it conflates a unique hypothetical cause to objective findings. And it’s a real problem because you can’t talk about what you see without accepting that there might be other causes than shaking.

So that’s why he recommended to use another term, which was, I think, retinal-dural hemorrhage of infancy. That really just describes the fact that you find subdural and retinal hemorrhage in an infant without presuming anything about the cause. Unfortunately, that was not the choice that was made, and now we have abusive head trauma, which is also problematic because it also implies that, well, it’s abuse. So it’s a medical diagnosis that comes after you discover specific medical findings in an infant, and you give the term abusive head trauma, which implies that it was caused by abuse.

So there’s this whole thing of intent that is really not the job of medicine. It’s for the police and the justice to determine what happened and what the intent was. So the previous term was a problem with this respect, and the new one is still problematic in this respect.

Demsas: Yeah. It was really interesting when I was reading about the controversy with Norman Guthkelch, who you just mentioned. I mean, he’s called, like, the father of shaken baby syndrome because of his 1971 paper. NPR reported that he reviewed a case in Arizona, and they wrote that “he was troubled to see that the medical examiner’s autopsy had concluded that the baby died of shaken baby syndrome while discounting other possible causes.”

So, you know, given that, why do you think it’s been difficult for the medical community to become more agnostic about whether these injuries that show up in children are necessarily the result of abuse or of some other thing going on? Like, why is the AAP still saying this? I mean, I know you can’t speak about them specifically, but why do you think there’s just been such reticence from the medical community?

Rossant: Oh, that’s a very good question, and I am wondering this. I mean, it’s been almost 10 years that I ask myself this very question, and I don’t really know.

I think there’s—I mean, it’s more general than that. It’s, you know, in the human psychology, the fact that it’s very hard to recognize that you were wrong before. It’s very hard to change one’s own mind, especially when doctors have made a lot of diagnoses with very severe consequences: with removal, going into foster care, and, you know, criminal prosecutions, etcetera.

It’s very hard to accept that, as a doctor, you were wrong and you maybe did some misanalysis and you were responsible for, you know, miscarriages of justice, etcetera. I think it’s really the No. 1 thing that is blocking everything, this psychological aspects of doctors, who are humans, like everyone else.

Some doctors do change their minds with the new science, the new articles, new data, their new experience, new cases. They realize that maybe it was not as easy as we thought before, and they start to change their minds. They start to work for the defense, and then they are being targeted and bullied, attacked, especially by the establishments, and it’s always the same. So yeah, it’s really in human nature.

I think it’s also the scale. I think it’s not just a few errors here and there. It’s really, really massive. I think there are many, many cases which are misdiagnosed and that the so-called shaken babies were not really shaken. I mean, obviously, it exists, and there are many cases where the diagnosis was true, but many where it was not the case. So that’s also why it’s so hard to accept one’s own mistakes, because it's a really massive mistake that was done.

Demsas: Something you just said about how much they react to public censure here: There was a quote from this Milwaukee prosecutor. I believe this is from a ProPublica article, but he’s a deputy district attorney in Milwaukee, and he said it was, “providing reasonable doubt for sale.”

Essentially, there’s some criticisms of people who will provide reasonable doubt or arguments that provide reasonable doubt to accused criminals, whether it’s forensic evidence, like fingerprint analysis or DNA analysis or things like the SBS. But there’s been a real backlash from within the law-enforcement community to scientific evidence being muddled in courtrooms. And I wonder: Have you come across people who react to your work and believe you’re giving cover to child abusers? What do you say to them?

Rossant: Yeah, I think I kind of understand because there’s always this tension between, you know, being too safe on the safe side—I mean, is it better to put an innocent person in jail, or to let a guilty person walk free and potentially harm children, right?

And personally as someone who believes in democracy and, you know, les lumières, which is a really French thing. I think it’s really important not to harm innocent people. So it’s really kind of philosophical attitude, I think. But yeah, I can understand why some people believe that it’s not possible to take this risk of letting potentially dangerous people walk free.

But you know, in the end, I think we should all try to do our best and try to be as accurate and scientific as possible. Try to look at all the evidence on the one side or the other side, and then let the criminal-justice system do its work. And that’s why we have this notion of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” you know, the burden of proof, all of these things. They were designed precisely to avoid, as much as possible, putting innocents behind bars, which is a very terrible thing to do as a democracy, I think.

Demsas: Do you have thoughts on how you would’ve preferred to have things play out in your case? When a doctor is concerned about SBS with your child, what do you wish had happened?

Rossant: I think most parents, most families would accept something, some kind of measure that is not removing the child. So, you know, a follow-up with the psychologists, social workers, people that go to your place and that look at the room, how you handle your child, that follow you from a few months, maybe one year, I don’t know. It depends on the situation, but that is fine.

And we actually had that. Even though the nanny was being prosecuted after the first month, we did have a follow-up with a psychologist and social workers for, like, two years, I think. It was very light. It could have been, you know, more intrusive, and it would’ve been fine. I mean, there’s no problem as long as you have the freedom to have your child with you, right?

It’s really the fact that to remove a child from its environment, it’s a really big cost, so that should really be done in the most extreme cases. And typically, some judges do say that it only happens in the most extreme cases, and that they tried to do their best not to go that far and to find all possible solutions before resorting, as a last solution, to foster care.

But in practice, in the cases I know—and especially in the abusive-head-trauma cases—for very, very small children, babies who don’t speak, it’s very often removal into a foster family in a nursery. And that’s really, really hard for the child, and for the parents to know that the child is suffering from being suddenly put into a different place and without parents, without siblings, without the teddy bears and, you know.

Demsas: Yeah, I guess it depends on where you are and how the authorities function. But, you know, I could imagine that most parents would be okay with having an interview with Child Protective Services if, you know, it was respectful and there’s a clear protocol for what was being followed.

And I think there are a lot of civil servants who take their jobs seriously and want to make families better. But I think it’s very variable, especially in the United States, where this is not a federalized system. There’s very many different administrations of child protective services. And where you are can vary very differently, how you’re treated and how you interact with and how the state interacts with you.

And so, I agree—we would want to create a system where parents felt fine and open and welcome to that kind of surveillance and interaction, but I worry that we don’t actually have that in the entire world.

Rossant: Yeah. And it’s actually the same in France. Today there’s no centralized child-protection system. It’s each department, each region of France that has its own system. So there are great disparities between the different regions, and we do see very, very different treatments of similar situations, depending on where you are in the same country. So yeah, it’s a very difficult problem, and some families do not understand why it’s worse in their own case compared to other families.

Demsas: This was obviously a very serious episode, but I always like to end on a question that draws people to think about and reflect on a time when they themselves have believed something that didn’t turn out to be true. So in your life, is there a time where you believed something that ended up being only good on paper?

Rossant: Wow. Good question. I really never thought about this. But maybe I can say that initially—and sorry; it’s still about shaken baby syndrome, but initially—I believed that shaken baby syndrome was a thing.

Why? Because my own father was a pediatrician and an expert in court, and he told me many times about shaken baby syndrome, and he did testify for the prosecution in shaken-baby cases. So I knew it.

Demsas: Wow.

Rossant: Yeah, it’s really a crazy coincidence, right? Sadly, he passed away one month before the symptoms of my child. So just before that. He could have been very helpful, obviously. But that’s why I had this bias at the beginning, when I was starting to look into the literature. I was sure that shaken baby syndrome was entirely legitimate, and I thought there was no controversy.

So when I started looking into it, I really didn’t think that I would change my mind, but I actually changed my mind. It was really hard for me to do it, because I was so convinced that the scientific consensus was right. And even my own father was testifying in court that this theory was correct. So it was not easy for me to change my mind, but I had to, because that’s what the evidence was telling me.

Demsas: Well, that’s a model for what we’re trying to do on this show. Cyrille, thank you so much for coming on.

Rossant: Thank you. Thank you a lot.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Erica Huang and Rob Smierciak engineered this episode. Rob Smierciak also composed our theme music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

The Age of Anti-Woke Overreach

2025-03-07T05:50:00-05:00

American politicians must have a very low opinion of their own voters. In recent months, the Trump administration and the Republican Party writ large seem to have bought into the idea that Americans are craving cruelty, and as a result they are using their power to “own the libs.” The country’s new leaders have kicked trans service members out of the military; sent nonviolent, “low risk” immigrants to Guantánamo Bay; and appointed a defense secretary who has written that “dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military.” But they have miscalculated.

The Republican Party’s views on what they call “DEI” are far outside the American mainstream. This became apparent when, after a Black Hawk helicopter collided with a passenger jet in January, the president launched into a public broadside saying it was “common sense” that DEI in hiring air-traffic controllers was at least in part responsible for the crash. That wasn’t an isolated event: Public schools risk losing federal funding if they continue to administer DEI programs; the administration has even launched a portal where people can report their community members (or really anyone they want to) for “concerning practices.” The portal is accompanied by a quote from a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a conservative parents’ organization, calling on parents to dish: “Now is the time that you share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: DEI has lost all meaning]

Not content with just attempting to purge public institutions, Trump’s executive order “restoring merit-based opportunity” requires a witch hunt in the private and nonprofit sectors as well: “As a part of this plan, each agency shall identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of publicly traded corporations, large non-profit corporations or associations, foundations with assets of 500 million dollars or more, state and local bar and medical associations, and institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.”

Given the way this administration has targeted DEI and “woke” policies, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Americans were completely on board. Yet according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted right before the election, just one-fifth of employed adults think that focusing on DEI at work is “a bad thing.” Even among workers who are Republican or lean Republican, a minority (42 percent) say that focusing on DEI is “a bad thing.” In a January poll from Harris/Axios, a majority of Americans said DEI initiatives had no impact on their career; more respondents among nearly every demographic polled (including white people, men, and Republicans) said they believed it had benefited their careers more than it had hindered them. (The sole, amusing exception being Gen X.) A June 2024 poll from The Washington Post and Ipsos found that six in 10 Americans believed DEI programs were “a good thing.” And all of this was before any backlash to Trump’s presidency had time to set in.

An early signal that the administration is overreaching comes from a Washington Post poll on early Trump-administration actions, which found that voters oppose ending DEI programs in the federal government (49–46) and banning trans people from the military (53–42). When asked about one of Trump’s signature issues, deportation, the poll showed that, by a nearly 20-point margin, Americans do not want people to be deported if they “have not broken laws in the United States except for immigration laws.” It’s hard to imagine that those same Americans approve of sending a man to Gitmo for riding his bike on the wrong side of the street, or of calling a city’s administrator for homelessness services a “DEI hire” because she’s a white woman.

So-called wokeness was responding to something when it emerged as a dominant political force in 2020, and its argument was broadly convincing to the public. Concerns about racial justice had been building for decades before the murder of George Floyd, and that event was unusually galvanizing across American demographic groups. Economists have found that the June 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were—in terms of gender and race—more representative of Americans than even the voting public of that year’s presidential election. Similarly, a 2022 poll showed that just 21 percent of people opposed the #MeToo movement despite the relentless messaging from the right that people were sick of the feminist coalition. As the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote last year, “However overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities.”

[Listen: Who really protests? And why?]

At its core, public-opinion polling is difficult, and certainly many Americans have become exasperated by the last decade’s progressive ideological winds. But some of the extreme positions—and appointments—of the Trump administration are self-evidently at odds with Americans’ views in the main. Recently, Trump appointed Darren Beattie to a senior diplomatic position at the State Department. Beattie is notorious for making arguments such as “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” I don’t need to look at survey data to argue that this is a fringe position.

Being “too online” is a dig the right has long leveled at the left. Liberal and progressive ideological commitments regularly get framed as fringe and unconvincing to “real Americans.” Republicans, not Democrats, in this view, are the ones speaking to the so-called median voter. This mindset has emboldened the right—perhaps to their eventual detriment; they now appear bound to provoke backlash from the “real Americans” they were elected to represent.

There are signs, in fact, that extremists on the right know their moment might be short lived. One recent anecdote was telling. A “top banker” was gloating to the Financial Times: “I feel liberated,” he told the reporter. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting canceled … It’s a new dawn.” I was struck by the performative contradiction: The quote was anonymous.

You May Miss Wokeness

2025-03-04T06:00:00-05:00

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Progressive ideas around race, gender, and immigration are under scrutiny by both the Republican-controlled federal government and Democrats chastened by the loss of the 2024 election. In this modern context, it’s easy to forget how persuasive these ideas once were. In 1995, just 25 percent of Democrats identified as liberal, while 46 called themselves moderate. Twenty years later, a sea change in public opinion had happened: In 2015, 45 percent of Democrats called themselves liberals.

Two political scientists and a researcher found that from 2011 to 2020 the attitudes of Democrats and independents became notably more liberal on racial inequality and immigration. But even looking after the period of anti-“woke” backlash that has characterized much of the past few years, attitudes among all Americans (including Republicans) are noticeably more liberal than they were in 2011, according to their research.

That’s not to say that every part of what has been called “wokeness” was popular or even persuasive to the most liberal of poll respondents. But I think in the next few months and years, we’ll come to see the anti-woke glee that has permeated through the first month of the Trump administration to be out of step with public opinion.

Today’s episode is a conversation I had last August with The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg about a column she wrote, “Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It.” The words she wrote then ring truer even now:

“There are aspects of the New Progressivism—its clunky neologisms and disdain for free speech—that I’ll be glad to see go. But however overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: A few weeks ago, Darren Beattie was appointed to a senior role at the State Department—acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy.

Beattie is a known quantity. He was fired by the last Trump administration after it came out that he’d attended and spoken at a conference with white nationalists.

But this experience doesn’t seem to have rattled him, in the following years he made many controversial remarks on twitter including that “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”

Just watching the first few weeks of the new President’s term indicates that curbing wokeness and cultural liberalism is top of mind for the administration. It’s remarkable to look back on polling that shows that the economy, not the war on wokeness, was the top issue for Trump voters.

But from directing removal of trans Americans in the military to rolling back DEI initiatives throughout the government, the Trump administration has made anti-wokeness a core focus.

[Music]

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at the Atlantic and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. These past few weeks have had me thinking back to a conversation I had with New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg last year about whether Americans would miss wokeness when it was gone.

No one, including myself, will defend every part of a movement’s form. There were many ridiculous DEI trainings, offensive instances of language policing, and stupid and counterproductive overreactions. But, as Goldberg wrote last year: “however overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities.”

I’m excited to revisit this episode with you all today.

Michelle, welcome to the show.

Michelle Goldberg: Thanks for having me.

Demsas: I read an article you wrote a few months ago, and it was called, “Wokeness is Dying. We Might Miss It.” And it’s been something I’ve been reflecting on myself because I think that there’s a conventional wisdom that’s been built up in traditional media—and then just a lot of our public discourse—that the backlash of the progressive tilt of the 2010s is a good thing, and that we’re seeing a good correction of a time period that went too far. And I thought that your article was a really interesting take on that idea.

But before we get into all that, I wanted to ground us in what we’re even talking about. When we talk about wokeness, what are we talking about when you use that term?

Goldberg: Well, it’s a hard term to define. I actually rarely use it except in quote marks because it’s one of those terms that was—obviously started out in Black vernacular and then was appropriated by people who are really hostile to it.

Basically, any time someone uses woke, you assume that they’re using it as an insult. Very few people actually identify their own politics that way. But how I often describe it, even if it’s a little clunky, is like a style of social-justice politics that is extremely focused on changing the world by changing the way we talk about the world.

Demsas: It’s funny because as I was preparing for this episode, I was just looking back at before the 2010s, and it feels like we had a version of this before then. People would complain about political correctness all the time. And I wonder how you distinguish the two eras. Is this just a piece that has always been in our politics—it just changes forms and maybe the specific issues it cares about?

Or is it actually something completely separate and different?

Goldberg: No. I think it’s basically a replay of the political correctness and the political-correctness backlash of the 1990s, which also came about at a time when you were seeing a lot more ethnic-studies, women’s-studies, area-studies programs in universities; some academic language starting to filter out into everyday life, a lot of people feeling really annoyed and alienated by that; and then a right-wing backlash, which was out of proportion and was so much more damaging to progressive politics than any gains that they might have made through the evolution and language that people were pushing at the time.

Demsas: So when you chart the beginning of this—I think it’s hard because it’s fuzzy. I was looking back to see when people really started talking about this. Matt Yglesias has this piece in 2019 in Vox where he coined the term the Great Awokening, and he charts it then as beginning with the 2014 protests in Ferguson after Michael Brown was shot by a police officer. He looks at the increase that you see in polls in concern for racial inequality and discrimination and the simultaneous divergence of the Democratic Party, where you see racially conservative Democrats leave the party.

And his story is very focused on race and immigration there. I think there are other people who would go even earlier, and then others who think it really takes off with Hillary Clinton. What time period are you really thinking about?

Goldberg: It’s interesting that Matt Yglesias says that. I felt that was also maybe the year that this style of politics became really dominant in certain circles, if not in the culture at large. And I wouldn’t just limit it to the debate about race and policing, because I think some of it comes out of Tumblr culture and just the perverse incentives of social media, the perverse incentives of left-wing politics.

I wrote a piece in 2014 for The Nation, where I was a writer at the time, called, “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars.” And it wasn’t about quote, unquote, “wokeness.” I don’t remember if people were actually using that word at the time. But it was about this really destructive style of competitive self-righteousness. And one of the texts that helped me make sense of what was going on was an essay by a feminist writer named Jo Freeman from the ’70s called, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” that was about how—when you have ostensibly horizontal, leaderless organizations—people do, in fact, fight for power and leaders emerge, but they do it through passive-aggressive and emotionally manipulative means. And so, this has always been an issue on the left; it’s just that social media supercharged it.

Demsas: Yeah. I’ve been thinking about how much of this is a story about technology, right? Social media, as you say—to unpack a bit, there’s obviously an incentive to move to the extremes. People often only think about this in terms of talking about politics, in terms of, Oh, people are saying radical things.

But if you scroll through TikTok or anything—and I’m sure you’ve seen this stuff, too—you see pretty shocking content in general: people doing weird things with food, really bizarre things with different toys and things in order to just get the viewer confused and really fixated. (Laughs.)

Goldberg: (Laughs.) Right. Social media does two things: On the one hand, it just incentivizes extremism because you need to catch people’s attention. And extremism can also serve as a form of novelty. But it also—and I’ve written about this, as well—there used to be this idea that the problem with social media was that it kept people siloed in quote, unquote, “filter bubbles,” and I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the problem is that it exposes you to some of the most obnoxious examples on the other side, so it ends up furthering this negative polarization.

Demsas: Let’s turn to the piece that you wrote. You titled it, “Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It.” Why is wokeness dying, and why do you miss it?

Goldberg: Obviously, I don’t miss all of it. As I write in the piece, there was tons of it that I have always found—I’m kind of a cranky Gen-X person. I didn’t like these clunky neologisms. I find some of the language, like the people-first language—I’m trying to think of even—

Demsas: Like saying person without housing, or saying unhoused instead of homeless?

Goldberg: Right. I do understand some of it. And that’s the problem, that all of this you can understand in certain instincts. I do understand that there’s certain language that can be really stigmatizing, and that there’s reason for language to evolve. I’m watching—my kids are super into 30 Rock right now, and they’re constantly saying things on 30 Rock that my kids are like, Oh, my God. You can’t say that!

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Goldberg: And that show—I don’t remember at the time feeling particularly provocative. And so the natural evolution of language is often a good thing. The forced evolution of language in a way that feels like it comes down from some really sanctimonious, prissy commissar is not a good thing. Although I just said that, we have to remember that there actually was no commissar.

People, I think—in reaction to stuff that really annoyed them, the kind of people who made their identity around opposition to wokeness—they almost had to inflate its danger to match the scale of their annoyance. Rather than something that, like, really bugged them or really seemed obnoxious, it had to be totalitarian. It had to be something that was remaking all of the systems of our society, which I just don’t think was ever really true.

But anyway, there was this very laudable attempt to correct systemic injustices in our society, systemic injustices that were really thrown into high relief for a lot of people by the election of Donald Trump. And one of the reasons I don’t like this approach to politics is that changing the way you talk about things is one of the easiest things to do, as opposed to making concrete, material change.

But nevertheless, it’s a step. It was a good thing that people felt less comfortable using certain kind of slurs. Let me put it this way: It was a good thing that when J. D. Vance was writing to one of his left-wing classmates, who I believe he had described as a lesbian, but they were trans, and wrote (these emails have now leaked) this sensitive email that, you know, I love you. I’m sorry if I misgendered you. I hope you know it was coming from a place of respect—I think it was good that conservative men, or all sorts of people, felt the need to be a little bit more thoughtful and sensitive.

Obviously, there was plenty of places where it veered into self-parody, and those places were exaggerated and amplified by a social-media panic, which has now led to a really ugly right-wing backlash.

Demsas: The definition you gave for wokeness, too—it really speaks to the idea that it’s about language and discourse policing in a way. And I wonder—because it seems almost like a definition that has been won by the opponents of it, right? Because I would imagine the people in the 2010s who are really parts of these movements—whether they’re part of #MeToo movement or they’re part of racial-justice movements—there were very specific policy ideas and things that they were upset about.

And many of them were very popular. Police brutality becomes—even amongst independents and, in some polls, even with Republicans, you see support for measures that would rein back police. Of course, the prosecution of people like Harvey Weinstein was very popular. And then, of course, something like abortion, which is seen as now the best issue for Democrats, is something that’s obviously an issue about women’s rights and feminism.

But there’s a way in which we’ve bifurcated these two things that I’m not really sure how to think about. Because, at one point, I totally agree with you: There is clearly an increased focus on what types of things people are saying, but that seems it was at least intended by some people to be a way to get people on board with a policy agenda.

But those two things seem difficult to also separate. If you’re looking for who your allies are and you’re like, Who’s misgendering trans people? That tells you who’s part of your political movement. And I wonder how you think about how we’ve bifurcated the policy goals of these movements from the discourse policing, and were those two things really necessary to be together?

Goldberg: It’s a complicated question. But I would agree with you that the intention of a lot of people was to make real-world change, not just to change the way people talk about things. Do you remember, at a certain point on the internet, there was this taboo against quote, unquote, “tone policing?”

Demsas: Yeah.

Goldberg: Which meant, in turn, that it was almost impossible for the left to either make or listen to any kind of critique of its rhetoric or the way it approached people who might be partially on board but not fully on board. And it ended up really alienating a lot of people outright and then creating this rumbling, subterranean resentment that was then able to be harnessed by really sinister forces. And I think it’s easy to say, Well, if you were attracted to fascism because you don’t like being told what to say or because you’re angry about some new terminology, then that’s on you. And that shows that you always had these inclinations.

But people have lots of different inclinations. And it’s the job of a social movement to, I think, meet people where they are and draw out the parts of them that you want to encourage.

Demsas: Well, it seems in your piece that you’re skeptical about the framing that wokeness has won in any way. And I wonder why you think that, because, from my perspective, I mean, it’s obviously hard. People can point to different areas in which different movements have been successful or not.

But when you look at attitudes amongst the general public on many progressive issues, they’ve shifted dramatically to the left. And, of course, a lot of that is being driven from people moving really far left within the Democratic Party. But even independents on these issues—they’ve moved people left on these things.

And I think there’s also material gains that have happened. People don’t talk about these a lot, but in the year after the murder of George Floyd, for instance, half of U.S. states passed legislation in at least one of the following categories: use of force; duty for officers to intervene, report, or render medical aid in instances of police misconduct; or policies relating to law-enforcement misconduct reporting.

Goldberg: Well, can I just say—I don’t think we should tar all. Again, I feel like this category of wokeness is so unstable and amorphous. But I definitely would not want to put criminal-justice reform under that auspice, right? When I’m saying that I think this style of politics is dead, I certainly don’t mean all left-wing politics, and I don’t mean all criminal-justice reform.

What’s dead is—not only is the Democratic Party trying to memory-hole calls to defund the police, but there was a social pressure to get on board with that language that is completely gone. And so I’m talking about something a little bit more hard to pin down, but something that a lot of people felt and responded to.

The reason I say it’s dead—and I wrote this piece in response to a book by Nellie Bowles called the Morning After the Revolution. It was sort of satirical, but it was also so exaggerated that it was kind of ridiculous. Like at one point she says, I heard people saying that roads were racist. And that didn’t come from some asshole teenager; that came from Robert Caro writing about Robert Moses. But I think that, in part, just to either justify her project or to inflate its importance, she said, This movement hasn’t calmed down because it lost; it’s calmed down because it won.

And I think that for some people that means they have to go to various HR workshops or whatever. But let’s just look at the evidence: You see company after company dismantling their DEI initiatives, states banning DEI in colleges. One of the examples I gave in that column was a school named after a Confederate general that had changed its name and then decided to change it back.

Target, for example, responding to these right-wing backlashes, taking Pride merchandise out of a lot of its stores—there was a sense, at one point, that corporate America wanted to ride the social-justice train. And it might have been hypocritical, but it also suggested that they saw these views as ascendant and something that they wanted to latch onto for their own purposes. I don’t think they see things like that anymore.

[Music]

Demsas: All right. We’re going to take a quick break. More with Michelle when we get back.

[Break]

Demsas: I just want to run my theory for you why there was such a focus on discourse policing and on language versus these policies. I think that often—and I found that it felt a little disingenuous sometimes—you’d ask people, Hey, it seems like your organization’s really focused on these language things. Why are you policing whether someone says they’re Latino or Latinx, or something like that. And they would say, Well, we’re actually focused on all of these issues that impact people on the material level. And it’s like, Yeah, but what are you tweeting about? What is it that you’re actually talking about in public constantly? What is your driving ethos?

And so, when I see this, I don’t think of it as disingenuous. I think a lot of people have read this as sort of a disingenuous thing, that people don’t actually care about changing the material reality of people that they’re working for. But I think it’s actually just that the structures of movement organizations have changed so dramatically, such that movement building is now both really easy and really hard.

Any individual person can put up a flyer or an Instagram graphic and say, Hey, we’re gonna do a protest here. And that doesn’t require an organizational capacity to really get someone out and be a part of a group. And that means that people are just showing up for something—or not showing up for something—and it’s completely unrelated to whether they’re being drawn into a broader group.

In the past, you had an NAACP that could speak credibly and say, We actually have organized the groups and the individuals who care a lot about racial justice in this country. And if you don’t vote X or Y way on a bill, that means that we’re going to turn up and we’re going to protest you. But now they can’t credibly say, No one will protest you if you do X or Y, because anyone can do it. And in many ways, that’s great.

Goldberg: Did you read this book—a great book by my colleague Zeynep Tufekci—called, Twitter and Tear Gas?

Demsas: I have not, but I’ve heard it’s a great book.

Goldberg: That’s what the book is about.

Demsas: Can you tell us about it?

Goldberg: So the book—I mean, she could obviously speak to it better than I could, but the book is basically about how before social media, your ability to muster a large protest was an outward sign of your organizational capacity, right?

It meant that you had members. It meant that you had people working on all the stuff that it takes to get people out, and that you were building relationships. And you also had to build an internal structure just in order to get this stuff done, and that structure would be there after the march was over.

Now you have these protests that come together very quickly and virally. But there’s nothing to buttress them. And then the issues that I mentioned earlier, with “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” come up. Because, especially in left-wing spaces, there’s often an aversion to hierarchy, which makes sense to a point, but you need some lines of organization in order to keep something going. When you don’t have that, you do still have people emerge as leaders, but the way that they emerge as leaders is either about cultivating celebrity or shivving other people for not being radical or committed enough.

Demsas: Yeah. I think the horizontal nature of a lot of social movements now, it leads to the point where it becomes actually quite difficult to be a credible partner to or credible bargaining-table member with politicians. Because if they say, We’ll do what you’re asking us, but that means you have to mobilize your people in support of it, and if you can’t credibly do that, then it becomes politically disadvantageous for any politician to work with you.

And that doesn’t mean I agree with that. I think they should just do what they think is right. But at the same time, what ends up happening then is the places where you can see a lot of pressure is just around virality and around these issues where you don’t actually need to work through the formal systems of political power or electoral power. You can work discursively.

Goldberg: I also should say: Somebody who’s deep into progressive organizing once told me that they saw this also as just a form of work avoidance. And maybe people don’t mean this, but it’s just the path of least resistance. The easiest thing to do is to complain about the word somebody is using.

Demsas: But the most cynical argument that I think has been advanced by, especially, a lot of people who are on the right or in the center is that a lot of the movement on liberalization on these views has come from white Democrats, a lot of whom are materially advantaged already. So you have, for instance, people who are maybe homeowners in, or live in, really high cost-of-living cities, and they make a lot of money. And maybe they don’t want to see material changes happen, because that would actually affect their lives.

For instance, I do a lot of reporting on the housing crisis. And it’s clear that a lot of people who consider themselves progressives, who fight for a lot of these causes and seem very genuine and caring about that sort of thing, often will revolt if you say, I think that you should allow for affordable housing to exist in your community.

And I think that there’s some people who take that dynamic and attribute it largely and say, Yeah, the reason they’re focusing on whether you’re saying the right words is because they don’t want to focus on the sorts of material changes that would require something actually being taken from them.

Goldberg: I don’t think it’s that intentional. I find it very hard to imagine that somebody is saying, I don’t want zoning reform in my suburban neighborhood, so I’m going to distract people with a fight over whether it’s ableist to say that we’re standing up for ourselves. I just don’t think that’s how people work.

I do think that people who both went to elite colleges, where these concepts are really prevalent, and are highly verbal and work in fields where communication is a central part of the work they do—it’s not that surprising that they default to questions of communication when they’re involved in politics. And so I think that people have blind spots.

But, again, I think the right-wing version of this is often that it’s a conspiracy to deflect from real challenges to the material privilege of rich, white liberals. And I don’t think it’s a conspiracy.

Demsas: Yeah. I think your previous frame is more likely correct—that it is more a path-of-least-resistance argument. But that also, I think, still implicates people in this, Why is it the path of least resistance for you not to want to allow people who make less money than you to live in your neighborhood? Why is that so difficult to mobilize people around? And maybe it’s not intentional, but that is just a harder thing to do.

And so you see organizers at the local level—they’re often like, Well, we can get people to sign onto an agreement to get the city to raise a Pride flag, but we can’t get people to change the school-boundary lines near them to make it more inclusive to lower-income kids where they go to school. So there is a reason why I think progressive activists get pushed in a direction. And I do think that there’s probably some truth to the idea that the material changes would be much less politically popular.

But I want to turn a little bit because a lot of your writing is about feminism that I’ve followed for years now. And you wrote an article called, “The Future Isn’t Female Anymore,” and that’s very much in line with what we’re talking about today, so I’m hoping you talk a little bit about that piece. In it, you cite a poll from the Southern Poverty Law Center that asks respondents whether they agree that “feminism has done more harm than good.” And you write that while only four percent of Democratic men over 50 thought feminism was harmful, 46 percent of Democratic men under 50 did. And nearly a quarter of Democratic women under 50 agreed that feminism has done more harm than good.

And so you see this split here, where you have older Democrats still towing the familiar line that feminism is, of course, on net, beneficial, and then younger folks increasingly feel that their feminism has done more harm than good.

And that’s among Democrats. What’s happening there, and why is this space really polarizing people?

Goldberg: I don’t think it’s younger folks. I mean, yeah, there is a section of women, but, in general, I think it’s younger men. I remember when I quoted that poll, a lot of people were suspicious of it, and you can always have one poll that’s an outlier, but there’s been a few polls since then that show that young men, specifically, are moving to the right. And there’s a growing political chasm between young women and young men that was really showing up a lot in the polling around the upcoming election. And I also just think there was a broader backlash.

It’ll be interesting because we’re at a different inflection point now. When I wrote that, there was a backlash to the idea of the girl boss. It had suddenly become really embarrassing to a lot of people, which, on the one hand—a backlash against unfettered ambition and burnout-inducing devotion to your career—I get that. But it came along with the rise of tradwives and stay-at-home girlfriends and these old forms of female subservience in hip, new clothing.

And you see this again and again in the history of feminism, right? Because it’s hard to work. It’s hard to work and be a parent and fulfill all the expectations of ideal womanhood. People will look at being a kept woman of various guises and think that that’s an out. You saw this with Susan Faludi’s Backlash, and then you saw it with a whole bunch of articles about women stepping back from the workplace.

Demsas: And who is Susan Faludi?

Goldberg: Susan Faludi wrote one of the classics of modern feminism in a book called Backlash, which came out in the early 1990s and was about basically a decade of backlash propaganda telling women that feminism had made them miserable and that women wanted to return to cocooning and wanted to return to domesticity.

And what you see when you actually look at the people who are pushing this message is either that they’re not doing it themselves—you know, Martha Stewart was certainly never a homemaker, but neither was Phyllis Schlafly, right? These are professional women with high-powered careers. Or else you see women who do do that and then find themselves in really precarious situations if it falls apart. And so, again, there was this moment where, We don’t need girl-boss feminism. We want a soft life. You know, don’t we all? (Laughs.)

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Goldberg: But there was a refusal to see the traps that generations of feminists have identified in that life. Now we’re at a different moment because you’re starting to see women get really, really excited about the prospect of a female president again and getting really, really angry about patriarchy. Obviously, the Dobbs decision that ended Roe v. Wade was a big turning point for that. The Kamala Harris campaign is a big turning point.

It was interesting because when Hillary Clinton ran for president, there was always a dearth of organic enthusiasm compared to, say, Barack Obama. But there were people who were really, really excited about Hillary Clinton and were really, really excited about having a woman president. But a lot of them felt really embarrassed and afraid to admit that publicly.

I remember going to some of the places after Donald Trump was elected, going to some of the suburban communities where these women who hadn’t been very political before had suddenly gotten really political because they were so outraged and disgusted. And often they were like, I didn’t even realize there were other Democrats on my street. And so there was this sheepishness. And now that sheepishness is totally gone. It’s pretty new, but this is the first female campaign for president that is being really carried aloft on a tide of very vocal popular excitement.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, when I think about the wokeness message, the presidential candidate that tried to do this the most was Ron DeSantis, and it didn’t really work out for him. He obviously is not the presidential nominee for the Republican Party, but he also flamed out in a way that I think people were not expecting.

There was a ton of enthusiasm after he won his race by around 20 electoral points in Florida, when he ran for re-election for governor. And he was very clear on the national, at the local, at the state level that he was fighting a war on woke. But then you saw this message falter. You saw it falter in the Republican Party. People were much less interested in polls for voting for someone who’s fighting wokeness than they were for people who were following traditional economic messaging. And obviously he himself did not do well there.

Goldberg: Although, let’s remember—let’s look at who the Republicans chose as their vice president. J. D. Vance—he gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021 that was called, “The Universities Are the Enemy,” and it was all about—I don’t know how much he used the word wokeness, but that’s basically what it was about. And he is obsessed with this stuff. It’s part of what makes him weird.

Demsas: I agree with you. I think it’s interesting because it seemed like, at the end, Trump was between the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, who’s a much more traditional Republican, and he ends up picking J. D. Vance, who I think is part of this wing of the party that’s defined themselves by wokeness.

During the Olympics, Imane Khelif, who is an Algerian boxer, beat an Italian boxer Angela Carini at the Paris Olympics, and it sparks this conservative outcry. Khelif is a cis woman; she was assigned female at birth and continues to identify as such. But people have really turned on her as being a man. J. D. Vance literally tweeted that Khelif was “a grown man pummeling a woman.” He called it “disgusting” and blamed Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender.

This is obviously a very small vignette in a bunch of different areas in which you’ve seen the right radicalize in this space. But, to me, while of course Trump did pick Vance, it doesn’t seem like this is actually a message that’s a winning message for voters. I think a lot of people feel that this is actually going in the same way that maybe wokeness harmed the Democratic Party in some ways—that this version is actually not palatable to even Republican voters, but definitely not to independents or swing voters.

There’s polling—this is when Biden was the presumptive nominee, from May—by Data for Progress that asked 1,200 voters whether they think Joe Biden’s woke. And 21 percent said they didn’t know what that meant. Twenty-seven percent said they didn’t care. And 22 percent were the only people that said he was woke and that was a bad thing. So how much of this is just a fight that’s really happening but is not actually electorally relevant or even electorally desirable?

Goldberg: Well, I don’t think it’s super electorally relevant in that, yes, vanishingly few people, if you ask them, What are the issues that are important to you? are going to say any version of wokeness. Where I think it’s relevant is around the edges.

I think that people really underestimate just how much of politics is about emotion and how much of it is about how candidates make you feel. And so whether the language that candidates use resonates with you or is alienating to you really matters. Again, this is where I say that a lot of these linguistic changes, I feel like, are irritating and alienating, but that’s very different from saying that they’re part of some totalitarian conspiracy, which is often how the anti-woke side comes off. And so I think it’s why even voters, again, to the extent that they’re even aware of these arguments over linguistic conventions—and I think they are in a vague way.

Demsas: Especially at the office, if you have DEI training or something like that.

Goldberg: Right, or even just when I would go to Trump rallies, the thing I would hear over and over again—I remember in 2016, I would try to draw them out. You know, Did a factory close around here? Are you having trouble getting a job? But mostly it was like, No. But you just can’t say anything anymore. There was just so much anger. And then sometimes you would ask them what they wanted to say, and you’d be like, Oh yeah. You definitely can’t say that. (Laughs.) And you shouldn’t be able to say that. But I do think that it grates on people. But there’s a difference between it grating on people and it being an all-consuming fixation.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, how do we then understand the nascent Kamala Harris campaign? Because you’ve been doing some reporting about her campaign. And her candidacy, as you said, it’s a historic candidacy. She’s the first Black woman and South Asian woman presumptive nominee for a major party ticket. She will be only the second woman to achieve that, after Clinton.

One thing I think that’s interesting is Clinton really leaned into her identity as a woman. And there’s some reporting that indicates she was trying to follow the mold of Obama, who clearly made that a part of his historic rise and tapped into that “first” energy to build momentum.

Harris seems to be tackling that quite differently. I know you said that you’re seeing this energy finally out in the open, of women getting to be excited publicly for the first female potential president. But, at the same time, it seems like there’s not as much attempt on the part of her and her team—at least so far—to really lean into that. Are you seeing that?

Goldberg: Right. And she doesn’t need to. Well, no, she doesn’t need to. And I don’t see any reason why she should. The people who are excited about it are getting excited about it.

Demsas: But why not? Why not lean into it?

Goldberg: First of all, because most people I think who are really, really excited to vote for the first woman candidate for president, the first Black woman candidate for president, the first Asian American woman candidate for president—those people are mostly voting for Harris. She doesn’t really need to remind them of the historic nature of her candidacy.

And she does in some ways, right? She speaks to the AKAs, the other members of her Black sorority. But I just think that, for the people that she needs to win over, she needs to convince them that she’s going to make their lives better in some tangible, material way, rather than achieving a symbolic victory for certain identity groups.

Look, obviously the identity component is there. You see people self-organizing these huge Zoom calls. But I guess the difference is that it would have been a big mistake for the Harris campaign to take the lead on doing that kind of stuff. People want to do it themselves. You can see that that’s really powerful.

Demsas: I also think that because she avoided a primary, it was much less important to base mobilization that that rhetoric would sometimes be used. You’d encourage it in that case, right? I think Warren and Harris both leaned into this during the 2020 presidential primaries—their historic nature of their candidacy. There were lots of references to Shirley Chisholm in Harris’s 2020 primary.

Goldberg: Oh, yeah. And I saw people wearing Shirley Chisholm shirts at the Harris rally in Atlanta. People are obviously really aware of it. I think you’re right about the primary. She didn’t need to distinguish herself in that way in a primary.

And the fact that there was (a) no primary and (b) that so many Democrats feel like they were saved from near-certain doom means that the fissures that are usually left over after a really bruising primary just aren’t there.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much, Michelle. I’ve been reading your work for years, and I’m so glad to have you come on the show.

Goldberg: Oh, thanks for having me.

Demsas: I want to ask you our last question, which is: What’s an idea that seemed good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Goldberg: I’m going to say communism.

Demsas: Oh, okay. Tell me more.

Goldberg: I mean, I’m honestly surprised that anybody answers anything else. (Laughs.) It just seems so obvious—it just seems obvious to me that, at a time when industrial capitalism was so brutal and exploitative, along comes this utopian theory promising human equality, gender equality, the brotherhood of man, the end of poverty, right? I don’t know if you have kids, but my kids—and I think a lot of people have this experience—when they first learn about communism, they’re like, Yeah, that sounds great. It does sound great. It just has not worked.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, that is the most one-word-only-needed “good on paper” we’ve heard so far. (Laughs.)

Goldberg: (Laughs.)

Demsas: Usually it does require a lot more explanation. Communism—good on paper. Thank you again for coming on the show. We’re so excited to have you on and continue following your work as you write about this issue on the campaign trail.

[Music]

Goldberg: Thank you so much.

Demsas: This episode of Good on Paper was produced by Jinae West and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Erica Huang and Rob Smierciak engineered this episode. Rob Smerciak also composed our theme music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

The Human-Neanderthal Love-Story Mystery

2025-02-25T06:00:00-05:00

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Whenever science has to defend itself from the skeptics, it tends to fall back on medical or other technological achievements that have improved our lives—such as the personal vehicle, solar energy, insulin, or ibuprofen.

Many scientists currently feel under threat to justify their research as the Eye of Sauron—sorry, DOGE—turns to the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, jeopardizing grants to university research programs. Some have tried to draw the link between the cuts and their harms to patients and medical progress. But much of science can’t build a one-to-one connection between the curiosities of researchers and the immediate needs of humanity. Does that mean it’s worthless?

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Johannes Krause, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology as an archaeogeneticist and paleogeneticist. His research focuses on trying to uncover the mysteries of early human life-forms: Homo sapiens, yes, but also Neanderthals and other hominins.

The first hominins evolved in Africa and began to leave the continent about 2 million years ago. But, unlike today, Earth was home to many different forms of human life. Krause and other scientists are curious about Homo sapiens, or modern-day humans. Figuring out what made us so special requires figuring out exactly when we distinguished ourselves from our other upright, walking cousins.

Basically all of humanity is descended from people who left Africa and mixed with Neanderthals—but when? A study of a handful of very old bones revealed that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were living and procreating with each other much more recently than anyone realized: just 47,000 years ago.

“We’re really driven by finding out new stuff,” Krause says, “trying to understand, in our case, where humans came from—What’s their kind of evolutionary course? How did they adapt? What makes humans humans? How are we different to other mammals? How are we different to other types of humans?—which is largely driven by curiosity and will not result directly in products that you could easily sell to your mother and say, Look—I did this research, and now we have a new vacuum cleaner, or something like that.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: There are only a handful of known venomous lizards in the world.

The Gila monster, found primarily in the American Southwest and Mexico, is one of them. Gastroenterologist Jean-Pierre Raufman analyzed animal venoms from various species, including the Gila monster. Raufman eventually discovered some intriguing molecules in the lizard’s venom, a discovery he declined to patent.

Other scientists took interest in the Gila monster, and, eventually, those molecules became the foundation for GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic and Mounjaro. These drugs are best known for their help treating diabetes and obesity, but recent studies have raised hopes that they could address chronic kidney disease, reduce the risk of heart problems and even cognitive issues and addictions to opioids.

As David Deming recently wrote for The Atlantic, “You can imagine a member of Congress in the 1980s denouncing the NIH’s wasteful spending on useless studies of Gila-monster venom.”

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Today we’re talking about another unrelated line of research that defies even my attempts to find clear, practical applications for modern-day humans. My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

My guest today is Johannes Krause. He’s a researcher with a Ph.D. in genetics, working at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. When early modern humans came out of Africa, at some point, they interbred with Neanderthals. The evidence of those unions are in the genes of most humans alive today. A paper Krause recently co-authored with several other scientists helps pinpoint when this happened. Figuring out this prehistoric mystery is one step towards understanding why Homo sapiens are the only form of human left standing.

Johannes, welcome to the show.

Johannes Krause: Yeah, I’m very glad to be here, Jerusalem.

Demsas: So in 2022, the Nobel Prize went to your colleague—and I hope I’m saying his name correctly—Svante Pääbo for determining that Neanderthals mated with prehistoric humans. In an interview, he said, “The last 40,000 years is quite unique in human history, in that we are the only form of humans around.” If, right now, you and I could travel back 40,000 years ago and take a sort of census of human Homo genus species, what would we find in different parts of the world?

Krause: So if we could travel back to, let’s say, 100,000 years ago, we would find at least three different forms of humans—and we can debate whether we call them “species.” We are careful just calling them “forms,” because species is a concept from biology, which has definitions. And there’s many different definitions of what makes a species.

There’s at least 25 concepts of what makes a species, and for some groups, they work, and for some, they don’t. So we’re careful. That’s why we call them forms. If you pay attention, we are also calling them only Neanderthals—some of those archaic humans, other forms of humans that existed—and not Homo Neanderthalensis, which would be this nice Latin term that has been introduced in the 18th century, which, again, comes with a certain species concept. So we’re trying to be a little bit careful and neutral, and just call them forms of humans.

So Neanderthals were one of them, which is probably the most famous one that most people have heard about. Then, of course, there’s us—modern humans. But then there were also other groups, like one that we discovered a few years ago that lived in Asia, the so-called Denisovans. They were named based on a cave where the bones were discovered in, where we got the first genome.

But there were also other types of humans that have been discovered based on fossil evidence. So for example, there was a group of humans that was called Homo floresiensis that lived in Flores, which is an island in Indonesia, probably until about 50,000 years ago, when the first humans came there. And there was also a group called Homo luzonensis, which was living in the northern part of the Philippines, on the island of Luzon. That’s where the name comes from.

So those are at least five different groups, then, including us. But there’s also some people that suggest there’s something called Homo malayensis, Homo daliensis, Homo erectus maybe still present in some parts of Southeast Asia. So there were a whole bunch—at least half a dozen, maybe even more—types of human forms that lived at that time, 100,000 years ago.

And then 50,000 years ago, we emerged on the scene. We came out of Africa, and we largely replaced most of them, for whatever kind of mystical reason. One of the big questions we have in evolutionary anthropology: Why are we the winners, basically, of that type of competition, and what do we have that all the other groups did not have?

Demsas: What sorts of things distinguish these different types of forms of humans from one another? I know there’s probably a lot, but we have an image of a Neanderthal in our heads, but early Homo sapiens also looked a bit different than we look right now as well. So what made us different from them and other types of humans?

Krause: So as geneticists, we can quantify the amount of differences, which is just counting the number of base pairs in the genome that are different between those, say, Neanderthals and kind of modern-day people, which is not a lot. So this is about 0.1 percent of the genome. So 99.9 percent—they’re identical in their genome to the people that live today or to modern humans that lived maybe even 50,000 years ago. So they share a common ancestor half a million years ago, Neanderthals and us. So at that time, we were one population, and then we started to get different and diverge from each other.

And over this time period of maybe half a million years, they also got morphological differences. So I think if we would meet them today, we would probably recognize they look a bit funny. They had pretty big eyebrows. They had a bit of a protruding nose. They were a bit more stocky than we are today. If they were sitting on the New York subway, some people have argued that maybe you wouldn’t even recognize them if they were wearing a hat and maybe just have some clothes. And there’s a lot of diversity in the world today of people that are a bit taller and a bit shorter and a bit more stocky. So in a way, it might even be something that you might not recognize. But if you really pay attention, then they would look a bit different.

Some people even say, you know, there are people with similar features, individual features that are still living today, because there is a lot of diversity in the world today. So you might have the individual characters that are found in the Neanderthals in people today but not in combination, basically, in one person, like it was back then.

But they were quite similar to us. I mean, we would have recognized them as people. We would say they’re humans. That’s also, when we talk about them—they’re humans. They’re not modern humans. They’re not us. But they’re humans, so they’re quite similar. And again, we’re 99.9 percent identical in our DNA to them. So they’re probably not different. They probably had some sort of language. Maybe if we would have tried hard, we could have also kind of communicated with them over time.

But then, at the same time, they must be different enough that there’s a reason that they are gone and we’re still here. They got extinct, so there must be something that we have that they did not have. Otherwise, I think all those other groups of humans would not have gotten extinct.

And that’s kind of part of the motivation, why we’re so interested in them, trying to understand what is different in us, because that kind of, then, also comes close to these questions, What makes humans humans? What is so special about people today? What’s so special about humans, in general? Why are we the dominant mammal on the planet? And maybe those archaic humans can actually help us to understand, because they, obviously, did not have what we have today, because, otherwise, they would be the dominant mammal on the planet.

And then what, basically, happened between them and us in this kind of short time period? We’re talking about half a million years between a common ancestor with them and us today, which sounds like a lot—half a million years. A lot of people would say, Wow, that’s a lot of time. But in evolutionary time, it’s a very short time period.

Demsas: So I want to turn to this study that you co-authored. And I absolutely love the origin story of this because I think it underscores just how random discoveries can be. Can you tell us about how your new project came about?

Krause: Yeah, it all started in 2020, when one of my colleagues, Hélène Rougier, who’s a professor at Los Angeles—she’s a paleoanthropologist, so she specialized in identifying little pieces of bone and kind of knowing whether those bones are human bones or whether those bones are animal bones—she was supposed to do a sabbatical, so spend a certain amount of time with us at our institute, in Leipzig, Germany. And she came, but then she was supposed to look at some bones from a site that we had studied, which was in the Czech Republic, where there were a lot of bones. The border was closed, so she couldn’t go to the Czech Republic. So we were like, Okay, what to do?

I mean, we’re sitting with her here. She can’t go anywhere. So I’m calling some of my colleagues from the neighboring cities, [seeing] if they have some boxes of bones that she could maybe look at from the past. And then one of my colleagues, Harald Meller, from Halle, the closest city to our city here, was like, We have those 120 boxes from a site in Thuringia, in central Germany, that were excavated in the 1930s from a site that’s called Ranis. And it’s, like, below a castle. It used to be a cave that collapsed thousands of years ago. And it was excavated in the 1930s, and they had to stop because World War II started, and then they, basically, put all the boxes somewhere in the basement, and no one really looked at those boxes for, like, a hundred years.

And then, we were like, Okay, sure. Hélène was very happy to have something to do. So we just got all the boxes here to the institute, and she spent three weeks looking into the kind of boxes. These were tiny, little bone fragments that were excavated from the, basically, Pleistocene—old layers from the Ice Age, thousands of years ago.

Mostly, those were animal bones, but she found about 120 bones that she thought could be human. And there were about 28 that she said—they were from a very old layer, because they were from boxes that were labeled from the lowest layer of the cave. And they said, That would be really cool because, based on the archeology that is associated with those old layers, they should be very old—very early modern humans, potentially.

And so we said, Okay, let’s analyze them. And we were not sure if they are modern humans, if they’re Neanderthals, and what kind of human they could be. And we sequenced the DNA, and—yeah—to our surprise, we, first of all, found they were not Neanderthals, but they were actually modern humans. And what was amazing was that we also dated them.

So we radiocarbon dated them, determined how old those bones were, and they were 45,000 years old. And they were, at that point, with that kind of radiocarbon dating that we had, the oldest human bones—modern human bones, the Homo sapiens bones—that we had available. And one of them, even, was the best-preserved bone from the Pleistocene, so from the entire Ice Age. We had a lot of human DNA, enough to do a very high-quality genome.

And then we did a whole genome analysis, and we found very old people from 45,000 years ago, from the site in Thuringia where we had genomic DNA that we could study. It turned out one was a mother and a daughter. And we also found that some of them were related by fourth, fifth degrees to each other. And what was even more amazing was that we had published, just a year before, a genome from a very old individual, from a female individual, from a site in the Czech Republic that’s called Zlatý kůň, which means, in translation, “the golden horse.” That’s the name of the mountain above the cave where it was discovered in the 1950s. Unfortunately, that could not be radiocarbon dated, but, based on the genetic analysis, we could already say this was a very old person, not in terms of age, but, like, how old that person lived in the past.

And it turned out that this individual was related to our individuals from Thuringia, from Germany, which is 300 kilometers away from each other, which was an amazing surprise. I mean, what’s the chance that you look at some Ice Age people from 45,000 years ago and you find the great-grand-cousin of that one person and the other person? We have 10 genomes, and they happen to be related, which is really incredible.

Demsas: It’s like putting your DNA into one of those databases now and, like, finding a relative who lives next door.

Krause: Exactly. What’s the chance, right? Or someone that you went to school with or something like that. It’s very unlikely, but here we go. We had a very close relationship, and we had complete genomes. And those genomes are really interesting to analyze, because they also turned out to have, still, very long chunks of Neanderthal DNA.

I mentioned it before—we could already show that about 15 years ago, we sequenced the Neanderthal genome at the time, and we also sequenced the genome of the Denisovans, of this other type of human that we then discovered. And when we looked at those genomes of those archaic people, we actually saw that all people outside Africa carry Neanderthal DNA today. And people in Southeast Asia carry the DNA of the Denisovans, so there was some gene flow between those other forms of humans and modern humans.

Demsas: So the first thing I want to jump in on is one of the big contributions of this paper, which is that we had learned that there had been admixture between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. But you’re finding that this is happening much later than we had previously believed and that there’s this overlap of about 5,000 years when both human forms are coexisting. What is important about learning that?

Krause: So we actually found that, instead of some people saying it happened 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, it happened only about 47,000 years ago. And how did we find that? We found in our old genomes from Germany and Czech Republic that they carried very long chunks of Neanderthal DNA in those people’s genomes. They had the same admixture event that everyone outside Africa carries today. So people in Europe have that, and people in Asia have that. So they are part of the population outside Africa.

But they had very long chunks because, over time, the chunks become shorter. So when you have, basically, two people recombining—so a mother’s and father’s DNA recombining—then the chunks get shorter and shorter over time. But they had very long chunks, which told us when, actually, the admixture happened, because it’s like ticking off a clock.

So long chunks become shorter and shorter through time. So if you have longer chunks, you can actually calculate when the admixture happened, and we did that to about 47,000 years ago. So about 50 to 80 generations before our individuals lived—they had admixed with Neanderthals. And now this is the admixture that is common to all people outside Africa. So for the first time, we were able to say, This happened 47,000 years ago. Before, it was very indirect, using genomes of today. And there was lots of uncertainty when it happened.

And why is this important? It’s important because there’s hundreds, maybe even thousands of archaeological findings outside Africa that are attributed to modern humans, where people say, This was made by modern humans. This was a modern human skull. This was a modern human tooth. This is evidence of modern human presence outside Africa that is older than 50,000 years.

So there’s a lot of evidence for modern humans being present outside Africa before 50,000 years ago. But now we are saying that Neanderthals and modern humans only admixed 47,000 years ago, and everyone outside Africa has the Neanderthal DNA, so it’s basically not possible that modern humans—at least, how we know modern humans today: Europeans, Asians, Australians, Aboriginals—that it has to be, then, a different type of modern human, because all the modern humans today go back to a common ancestor that left Africa or intermixed with Neanderthals only about 47,000 years ago. So everything that’s older than 47,000 years ago has to be made by someone else. Or if it’s a bone, it has to be someone else.

And that’s very important because there really have been a whole lot of different studies published in highly prestigious journals over the last few years for evidence of modern humans being present in Papua New Guinea 60,000 years ago, modern humans being present in Australia 60,000 years ago, modern humans being present in Vietnam 70,000 years ago, modern humans being present in China 100,000 years ago, 80,000 years ago, 70,000 years ago.

And basically, all of that is, then, not us. It’s, basically, not the people that we know today outside Africa, because all of the people today outside Africa are from that common-ancestor population that we were now able to date to 47,000 years ago. And that’s quite important. So this is basically now dating, if you want, the “out-of-Africa event,” because that is, really, the last point that all people outside Africa were a common population, because we all share the admixture with Neanderthals that we could now date. So therefore, it’s really important for human evolution to understand when that happened, because it gives us a common ancestor of all the people outside Africa.

Demsas: And I want to make sure that listeners fully understand why you’re distinguishing outside of Africa versus what’s going on there. Can you expand on that?

Krause: So humans evolved to modern humans, Homo sapiens. We evolved in Africa. So of course, our entire lineage evolved in Africa. So the first kind of upright, walking, early hominins evolved probably 7 million years ago. And then about 2 million years ago, the first hominins left Africa. So Homo erectus left Africa, came to Europe, Asia, evolved into different types of Homo erectus.

So there were different types of humans—I call them humans—so hominins outside Africa, and that then includes also Neanderthals, Denisovans, the different forms that we talked about. But then, 50,000 years ago, we had the emergence of Homo sapiens, modern humans. So we left Africa about 50,000 years ago and went outside Africa.

And this was something that, of course, is a major event in human evolution. So something that, basically, gave rise to the human diversity that we have on the planet today. Part of that, of course, is that the people that left Africa were not everyone leaving Africa. It was just part of the genetic diversity. It’s just a part of that population. People even calculated: It’s only about, probably, between 5,000 to 10,000 people that left Africa. So there is more genetic diversity that’s left behind in Africa, which is also reflected today. Just looking at the genetic diversity, there is more genetic diversity in Africa than outside Africa.

There is, basically, larger genetic diversity present. So if you compare the genomes of two people from somewhere in Africa, you have an average of about 6 to 7 million differences in the genome, whereas if you do that for people outside Africa, you have 4 to 5 million differences in the genome. So there is, basically, more genetic diversity, which is part of that story, because just part of that population left.

And then when people came outside Africa, about 50,000 to 47,000 years ago, as we now know, they met Neanderthals because they’re there. They’re outside Africa. They’re probably somewhere in the Middle East. They’re probably somewhere in the Levant, so modern-day Israel or Lebanon or Jordan. And there, they meet Neanderthals; they mix with Neanderthals. And from there, they expand into Europe, Asia, Australia, later on into the Americas. And they take this Neanderthal mixture with them. And that is a really big event that we’ve known about for 15 years now, but we didn’t know when it happened, and now we do know when it happened.

Demsas: One unexpected finding in your study that you flagged for us earlier is the familial relationships that you’re finding between individuals who are pretty far apart. There’s one that I remember that was about 230 kilometers, or roughly 140 miles, apart. You also find that there’s a pretty small population, and you’re estimating these early populations as numbering only in the hundreds. So first of all, how are you doing that? How are you figuring out what the population size is? And given that it’s a pretty small population, is it surprising to find familial relationships among the fragments that you’re finding today?

Krause: So it is not completely surprising that we find closer relatives to the small population. So of course, if you go into a rural region somewhere in the world and you kind of sample people genetically, then it’s a higher chance that they are closely related than if you take that in New York City, where there are millions of people living. It’s basically a result, also, of the small population that we find so many relatives.

How we do that, how we can actually measure that, I mean, how we look at relatedness is how you do it today, how companies are doing it. You send the DNA to just compare the genetic profiles and see how much is identical, how much is different. And from that, you can measure how much relatedness you see between two individuals.

But what you can also do is, to calculate, for example, population size, you don’t compare the genome of one person to the genome of another person, but you actually compare the genome that you get from the mother and the father within the person, because you actually have two genomes, right? You do not have just one genome; you have two. You have to have two copies of chromosome 1, two copies of chromosome 2, two copies of chromosome 3, and so forth.

So if you compare those two to each other, if you have a very large population, you expect that on almost every part of the chromosome, there are differences between mother and father. But if it’s a small population, there happens to be, by chance, regions in the chromosome that come from a common ancestor quite recently. Because in a small population, you don’t have much choice with whom you can have children. And therefore, it’s often the chance that you have children with someone who’s actually not too far related from you.

And that basically causes regions in the genome that are identical, where both chromosomes are identical. They come from a common ancestor. And this happens in small populations and doesn’t happen in large populations. So you can directly calculate, basically, what that means for the population size. And then we came to a calculation of about 100 to 300 individuals. So that’s quite small because we’re talking about the region that stretches from the British Isles, which were, at that time, connected to Europe, and Poland. So it’s a large region. It’s, like, thousands of kilometers, only a few hundred people.

I mean, imagine that, right? Today we have a billion people living in Europe. And at that time, it was maybe just a few hundred people living in Europe, which is really insane. But then, of course, if you then happen to just find some of them, there’s a good chance—if you find them, by chance—that they are actually related, because there were just a hundred of them. It’s like an extended family, basically. So if it’s from the roughly same time period, then there’s a good chance you’ll find relatives, and that’s exactly what we found.

So we have basically two lines of evidence: First, the finding that we have relatives is expected if it’s a small population, but also, within the genomes of those people, we see that there were not a lot of people living at that time.

Demsas: So given that there was this interbreeding happening between different hominins that you’re finding in your research with Neanderthals, do you expect to find the same sorts of things with other types of human hominins mixing in other parts of the world?

Krause: We have actually seen that. We have found, already, 15 years ago, when we sequenced the first genome of the Denisovan, this other type of human, which jumped out of a box. It was like a super big surprise that we found in the lab a new form of human. If you think about that, when you do an excavation, you dig somewhere, and you find a skeleton, a fossil. You’re like, Wow, amazing. We found a new type of human, but imagine that happening in the lab.

I was the lucky person to discover it some years ago. And I was busy working in the lab. I looked at DNA sequences and looked at them on the computer and was like, Wow, this is not Neanderthal. This is not modern humans. That’s something else. It’s a new form of human. It’s incredible, right?

And when we then sequence the genome of this new form of human, we also found that it’s distinct to Neanderthals, it’s distinct to modern humans, but it’s actually more of a sister group of Neanderthals. It’s a bit closer to Neanderthals than it would be to modern humans. It separated from Neanderthals about 300,000 years ago, but there are also some populations of modern humans today that carry some of that DNA, some ancestry from those Denisovans.

And that includes groups in Papua New Guinea, in the highlands—so Indigenous groups from Papua New Guinea and also Indigenous groups from Australia. So Aboriginal groups carry about 5 percent of their genome from this Denisovan group. And there’s also some group in the northern part of the Philippines that has about 7 percent from those Denisovans.

In fact, colleagues of mine have shown that there were at least five admixture events between Denisovans and modern human groups in different parts of Asia. So people in China and in Japan, for example, have different ancestry from Denisovans than the people on Luzon, in the Philippines, and yet, a different type of Denisovan ancestry in Papua New Guinea and Australia. So they interacted multiple times.

And that’s different to the Neanderthals. For the Neanderthals, we have one main event that is shared with all people outside Africa, but then we also have some local events where we have local people—for example, some individuals that were found in Romania, some people that were found in Bulgaria that lived 42,000 years ago or 40,000 years ago—they had additional Neanderthal ancestry, so they had also admixed with additional groups, but they actually went extinct. They did not leave descendants. They did not give that DNA to people that live today. And so, therefore, today, all the people outside Africa only carry that one pulse of Neanderthalic mixture that’s basically shared with all the people outside Africa.

But in East Asia, Southeast Asia, it’s different for Denisovan DNA. So people from China or from Japan, for example, have different Denisovan DNA than people living in Papua New Guinea or Australia. So there have been multiple events that are still present in the diversity of people living in those parts of the world today.

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Demsas: After the break: the ancient human genomes we’ll never get to learn from.

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Demsas: One thing I want to ask you, broadly, about this research is about selection issues. Obviously, you need some level of preserved remains in order to do this sort of analysis, and most of these are found in very cold regions of the world or are things that can be fossilized and maintain their structural integrity to some extent. Are you worried about how that might bias findings about this time period in history?

Krause: Absolutely. That is a strong bias. So in fact, we have a very hard time finding ancient human genomes from, say, equatorial regions. So places that are really warm in average temperature, people that are moist—they don’t preserve DNA well like northern latitudes, because it’s just too warm.

The preservation is not good enough. We cannot go back to 50,000- or 100,000-year-old humans from Africa, which is unfortunate because there’s, as we said earlier, more genetic diversity. This is where humans evolved. That’s where the really interesting stuff is happening. But that’s actually where we don’t have a lot of ancient DNA. We cannot really go back.

I mean, there’s some genomes—there’s one, actually, from Ethiopia, which is about 5,000 years old. There’s some, again, from Morocco. There’s some from Malawi that are even older than 10,000 years. So there is some ancient DNA maybe going back to the last 10,000 or 15,000 years in Africa, but we cannot go back 50,000 or 100,000 years, or maybe even more time ago, whereas, for example, in Europe, the oldest human genome that has been analyzed so far by my colleagues here at the institute is 400,000 years old—so almost half a million years old from a site in Spain, in Sima de los Huesos, which are some early Neanderthals, it turns out, genetically.

It was also very exciting to find those early Neanderthals there, because it means that Neanderthals are at least 400,000 years old, which is also something that wasn’t actually clear. So they’re already on the Neanderthal lineage after they have diverged from the Denisovans and from modern humans.

Demsas: One big question that you raised in the top for us is this large mystery of why it is that Homo sapiens won. And there’s this general sense that I think we’re taught in K–12 here when learning about this time period in history, which is that Homo sapiens were just better. We were, for some reason, just a superior form of human and were able to outperform and outlast all of these other forms of hominins. Can you tell me what the kind of prevailing wisdom is about why this happened?

Krause: There’s a whole bunch of different hypotheses, and I summarize some of them in a book that we just published—actually, just a couple of weeks ago in English—that’s called Hubris, where we talk about the history of humankind, so the rise and fall of humankind and, also, the kind of challenges that we have in the future and looking into the past.

So the big hypothesis we’re talking about is: What makes us special? What do we have that they did not have? And I mean, there’s much speculation in that direction. So what we can see is that modern humans are extremely expansive in their nature. We are expanding very fast. We basically don’t tolerate, sometimes, borders—like, to a degree where it’s almost suicidal.

If you think about going on a little raft into the ocean to discover an island, like, 3,000 kilometers away in the middle of the ocean, who would ever do that? Like, what the hell? What kind of drives people to go on some of those kinds of crazy adventures to discover new land? I mean, even sitting in a rocket that shoots you to the moon—why would someone do that? But we are doing those things. We are adventurous, in some ways.

Our population is highly culturally diverse, and we adapt surprisingly fast to different environments. We are living in all ecosystems you can imagine on this planet, from high altitudes to deserts to living on the ocean or living in the Arctics—which, also, no other mammal has like we have, because, culturally, we have a high plasticity, so we can really adapt super fast, which is also something that we don’t really see to that extent with other earlier human forms.

And our population has been growing surprisingly fast through time. So we have a lot of children. That largely come out of later time periods, when we start with food production. So with agriculture and pastoralism, then we basically produce food in large amounts, and then the population becomes billions of people, like we have today, which is a process that happens later, after we came out of Africa.

But it’s part of the success story and also shows—and this is something where we conclude, also, in this recent book that it should have a biological basis, what I’m now talking about—that agriculture and this kind of complex way of food production actually emerges in parallel in at least five different places in the world, starting about five to 10,000 years ago.

So there must be something that modern humans had that allowed us to develop this complex way of life—food production, domestication of plants and animals—that happens independently so many times. It didn’t happen in the hundred thousands of years before, even when climate was similar and stable. But about 10,000 years ago, there is something in the kind of genetic makeup of the people that came out of Africa 50,000 years ago that we seem to have all in common, that allows us to develop this complex way of life, which I don’t think was there hundreds of thousands of years ago.

So that’s really something that is unique, which kind of tells me that there must be a biological basis to that—that something evolved in Africa more than 50,000 years ago that allowed us to expand out of Africa, to be, in a very short time, basically, replacing all other forms of humans. I mean, we were talking about 5,000 years, and all those earlier forms—Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis—all those groups were extinct, and we’re the only ones left behind. And then we came up with this incredible way of living and complex culture. We settled all kinds of distant places, the tiniest islands in the Pacific in that short time period of about 50,000 years, the entire planet. There needs to be a biological basis to that. I cannot imagine that this is just pure coincidence.

But we can’t point it now to one gene. We can’t really say, It’s this gene. It’s that gene. Maybe it’s a number of different genetic changes that happen. If you compare the genome of a Neanderthal to the genome of a modern human today, it’s a surprising kind of similarity—as we said, 99.9 percent. But even if you just look at the specific differences, like how many genes are fixed differently between Neanderthals and modern humans, there’s less than 100 genes that are different between a Neanderthal and a modern human.

But somewhere there, I think—and maybe a combination of several of them—hides exactly that type of mystery of what we have and they don’t. But that’s what we’re still after, right? So even if we now have a Neanderthal genome and some of those other earlier genomes, we haven’t really found yet the exact recipe—basically, what makes us so special. But I think we’re getting much closer to that than we were 10 years ago, before we had those genomes of those archaic humans.

Demsas: I know this is an area of research where just learning and understanding on its own terms is important, but I think that there are also some really interesting implications for modern-day humans. I came across this study that found that a major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 was inherited from Neanderthals. Can you explain how that was found?

Krause: So this was my colleague Svante Pääbo here at the institute. He found that, together with another colleague, Hugo Zeberg, from the Karolinska Institutet, in Stockholm. And what they made use of was a large study and effort from another group from Helsinki in Finland, called FinnGen. They collected patients’ genomes from COVID-19 and looked at severe cases and looked at their genetic factors that cause a stronger response or higher risk of actually having severe COVID compared to others.

And they did find regions in different parts of the genome that gave a higher risk. Interestingly, the kind of regional chromosome 3 that has the highest risk to actually have a severe form of COVID and have a three-times-higher risk to actually die of it was then found by Svante and his colleague Hugo to come from Neanderthals. So basically, they just made use of someone else finding all those regions, and they looked, like, Could that be from Neanderthals? And it turns out to be from Neanderthals.

It’s somehow a bit of a fun fact, to some degree, because it’s not really. So okay, now we know it’s from Neanderthals. That doesn’t help us to cure COVID or to do something about the disease. It does not. But it does tell us, then, of course, that this is something that actually came into the human population about 45,000 years or 47,000 years ago, when modern humans and Neanderthals admixed. It’s not found in Africa. It’s found outside Africa only because it came from Neanderthals when they admixed. It’s in high frequency in southern Asia. It’s in higher frequency in Europe.

So it points out a bit more the history of this interesting region. And what kind of story might be behind it probably has something to do with some other diseases, which are not coronaviruses but probably some other diseases that have caused this variant to be, for example, in high frequency in South Asia. So my colleagues are now studying it and trying to understand the exact mechanisms that are actually behind this more severe form of coronavirus.

And there are many other such examples where we have found that Neanderthals passed on some of their genes to us, which were, actually, good for adapting to certain environments. So for example, immunity genes that help us to tackle some of the pathogens present , probably, in Europe at the time when they came here. There’s also some genes, like a gene that people have in East Asia today, that allows them to live in high altitudes. So for example, Tibetans, like the Sherpa, which are this famous group of people living in Tibet today—almost all of them carry a gene that came from the Denisovans into the gene pool of East Asians.

Whereas the frequency in an average person from East Asia is only about 0.1 percent of the gene, Sherpa have it to 100 percent. They all have it. So it was very advantageous to have that gene. And it came from Denisovans, and we do know now, even, that Denisovans lived in high altitudes, because in some cave in China, they found a bone that is from a Denisovan. We know that now genetically, as well as based on the morphology. And that was found at 3,200 meters altitude. So they actually lived already for a long time in high altitudes and were probably, over time, adapted to live in that high altitude. And that helped the people like the Sherpa today to live in Tibet, which is quite useful.

It’s a bit more kind of a complex mechanism, what it’s actually doing. It’s actually switching off the natural adaptation that all of us have when we go to high altitudes, when your body starts to adapt to the kind of low oxygen levels. And basically, those Sherpas switched that mechanism off, so it’s not working anymore. But for living at high altitudes for a long time, it’s actually what you need. And that’s an interesting example of something that we actually inherited from those archaics and gave us something that kind of made life for people better.

Demsas: I feel like I want some more context on how different this can lead modern-day humans to be, because there’s tons of mixture that’s happened between the populations of Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas. There’s tons of intermarrying and children that have been had. Is it just that there’s such a short time period where that’s been happening, where you still see serious differences in the genetic codes of people in Tibet versus Central Europe, like you said?

Krause: Yeah. So this is indeed the case. So populations in some parts of the world have it mixed more. In some parts of the world, they have it mixed less. Like, the genetic differences between European populations are half as strong now than they were 10,000 years ago, because over the last 10,000 years, humans in Europe merged with different parts.

There was a whole group of people coming with agriculture from Anatolia. About 7,000 years ago, there was another group coming from Eastern Europe. But then there are other parts of the world where populations have been more stable, like Inuit, for example, in northern America. They have been pretty un-admixed in the last 4,000 years. But even there was some mixture, and there was some replacement with some other groups.

And this is, in a way, if we wouldn’t have modern medicine and technology, the environment still has a very strong selection on people. So one good example that I always tell my students is: Australia. Australia today has, by far, the biggest rate of skin cancer in the world. Why is that? Because they largely come from Great Britain and Ireland. That’s where most of that population descends from. They moved to almost the equator. They moved to an environment that they’re actually not adapted to.

They come from Northern Europe, basically, to equatorial regions, where the sun is very, very intense. They should have dark skin, like the Aboriginal population in Australia that has dark skin. They don’t have skin cancer, because they are adapted to living in latitudes on the equator, whereas Northern Europeans are not. It’s not so much a problem today, because you have sun blocker; you have all kinds of medical treatments. So it’s not a strong selection pressure anymore, but if you would give it a natural thousand years or 2,000 years, basically all Australians would look like Aborigines, because their skin would just adapt over time to living on the equator. And that’s a natural tendency that happens everywhere in the world.

So you have Native Americans, for example. So Native Americans in North America and far in South America—they have lighter skin than the ones living in Bolivia or Ecuador, living on the equator, because they had to adapt. They actually came with lighter skin to the Americas, and then they started to live in high altitudes, as well as on the equator, and got darker skin. So this is also a natural kind of tendency to adapt to living in equatorial regions.

And there are, of course, many other such examples. It could be the environment, like sun exposure, but it can also be a diet, right? So in Europe, for example, there is this lactase persistence, which a lot of people have. So a lot of people in Europe can drink 2 liters of milk, which the majority of people in the world cannot do. But 5,000 years ago, people started consuming milk. Probably 3,000 or 2,000 years ago, that peaked and caused a variant to emerge that gave people the ability to drink a lot of milk in adulthood, which mammals usually don’t have, because no mother wants to breastfeed the offspring for the rest of their life. They want to get rid of that.

So what Mother Nature did in evolution was to switch the gene off that allows us to digest milk, which is the lactase gene. So for normal people, that switches off, which is good. That happens with your cat. That happens with your dog. That happens with any mammal out there. But then for humans, they started to drink a lot of milk because they had cows. So they used cow milk. But then it is bad if you have that gene switched off, because you get all kinds of problems.

But then, people had a mutation that allowed them to drink a lot of milk, which was extra proteins. And then they adapted, and that’s adaptation, now, to the food but not to the environment, but basically the kind of environment that we have created. So this is something that is also part of that story. The local adaptation is something that, of course, different environments and, also, different types of foods are introducing.

Demsas: So I have really pushed to try to figure out a practical application for modern-day humans in this debate and in the research strain that you’ve been pushing on. And I was reflecting about why I was trying so hard to find that, and it probably has to do with the larger debate that’s happening in the U.S. right now about the value of research that does not have an obvious direct material benefit to people.

We’ve talked a little bit about how it can help us understand genetic risk factors and understand the way that we can metabolize different foods, and you’ve walked us through that. But I largely categorize the research you’re doing as interested in uncovering the truth about who we are and how humanity came to be divorced from immediate practical considerations. How do you make the case to people about the value of this type of research?

Krause: So I’m working in the Max Planck Society, and we do basic research. So we are not driven by what can be turned into a product, what’s applicable to some sort of new medical treatment, or what is something that will really benefit humanity directly, as some new discovery that will result in a new form of energy or a new form of medical treatment or so.

We’re really driven by finding out new stuff, kind of basic research, trying to understand, in our case, where humans came from—What’s their kind of evolutionary course? How did they adapt? What makes humans humans? How are we different to other mammals? How are we different to other types of humans?—which is largely driven by curiosity and will not result directly in products that you could easily sell to your mother and say, like, Look—I did this research, and now we have a new vacuum cleaner, or something like that, right? This is maybe what a physicist or mechanic can do but I cannot do.

But then, a lot of people are interested in ancestry. A lot of people are interested in history. A lot of people are interested in evolution and trying to understand how things evolve. And in my case, I’m also doing a lot of work. About half of my work is, actually, not on the evolution of people but on the evolution of pathogens. So where did some of the most infamous pathogens in the world come from? Plague, leprosy, syphilis, tuberculosis, and so forth. And there, I could even come up with this being relevant, because we try to understand where pathogens emerge, how they change, their evolution trajectory, their mutation rate. So I do have some examples where I could say that could be relevant, also, for medical research in infectious-disease biology.

But in terms of human evolution, I think it is largely curiosity driven. And I think there’s also what our society, the Max Planck Society, stands for—that we really want to create more basic research and try to understand various kinds of things that should be researched and should be understood. And I think that’s an incredible luxury to have, I should also say, especially in these times that we’re living today, where a lot of people question, Why should we do research, right? Why should we spend money on that? We need to save money for something else, either for defense or for certain products or certain luxury goods or just, even, for food or for health for a lot of people that are maybe marginalized in certain parts of the world. But you can also never know what your discoveries, your basic science and insights, might actually generate in the future.

Demsas: So what you were saying about what drives you to do basic research really reminded me of the same exact thing you said earlier about what may have made Homo sapiens special: this kind of desire to explore and research and find new things, even if there’s not a very clear, obvious reason to do it. Like, why strike out to go see if that island is habitable? Why look to see who your ancestors are? I mean, these are questions that maybe other mammals wouldn’t investigate, but it maybe is what makes us different.

But I think this is a great place to ask our last and final question, which is: What is an idea that you had that you thought was a good idea at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Krause: That’s hard for me. I mean, you have all kinds of experiments that you do in the lab, and that’s almost on a weekly basis where you say, We should do this. We should do that. For example, in my first book that I wrote some years ago, Short History of Humanity, we speculated that horses, when they were domesticated, were responsible for the spread of plague. Now, that sounds crazy, but we had some reasons to think, because horses are partially immune to plague, that they played an important role, because at the point when horses got domesticated, the plague spread for the first time.

And we thought that there’s some sort of a correlation here, and that might also explain why horses are more resistant to plague than other animals. At the end, what we actually could see from some of the data that wasn’t generated by some of our colleagues, together with us, was that horses were domesticated a thousand years after the plague spread. So, okay, bada boom. That kind of hypothesis is then not substantiated. And that, of course, happens often in science, where you come up with a hypothesis, and then you reject it. So that’s quite normal.

If I think about stories that kind of made me really excited over the last 20 years doing research, one thing that I was really hoping for is longevity and extension of longevity. There was much debate when I was a student: The first human genome was deciphered, and now we can read it like a book, and we can switch off certain genes. We can extend the ends of the chromosomes, called telomeres, that will help us to become hundreds of years old. And being aware of mortality is one of the hardest things about being human, that kind of sucks. I wish to be a chimpanzee sometimes, and I wouldn’t be aware of mortality as much as I am, because I’m a human.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Krause: Because it sucks if the lights turn off and that’s it, right? It’s gone, right? That was life. So longevity was something I was really excited about, but I haven’t seen any progress in that direction over the last 20 years, despite the big revolution we have in genetics and in molecular biology. So we don’t really see that people get older and older. And we eventually are still all gonna die. So that really, really sucks.

Demsas: Well, hopefully someone one day is studying our genomes in the same way you’re studying our ancestors. But, Johannes, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed talking with you.

Krause: It was really great to be on the show.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

The Dark History Behind Public Education

2025-02-18T06:00:00-05:00

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Whether over creationism or gender identity, bitter political fights have sprung up around what sorts of ideas should be taught in public schools. Education is often touted as a tool of social mobility meant to help students access well-paying jobs, but these curricula battles indicate that many adults view it as a tool for inculcating future citizens with a particular viewpoint.

How can an institution that carries so much of our collective expectation to equalize mankind also bear some of the marks of an indoctrination factory? On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I speak with Agustina Paglayan, a professor of political science at UC San Diego whose new book, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education, conducts a rigorous historical analysis of why public education spread.

“The expansion of primary education in the West was driven not by democratic ideals, but by the state’s desire to control citizens,” Paglayan argues. “And to control them by targeting children at an age when they are very young and susceptible to external influence and to teach them at that young age that it’s good to respect rules, that it’s good to respect authority.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: You’ve probably heard the name Horace Mann. He was a 19th-century reformer who championed the abolition of slavery, the rights of women, and, most famously, the American public-school system.

As Adam Harris wrote for The Atlantic, Mann “sought to mold a certain kind of student: conscientious, zealous, inquisitive.”

Agustina Paglayan would probably add another word: obedient. Agustina is a political scientist at UC San Diego. Her new book, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education, argues that the roots of the world’s modern education systems were based not on progressive ideals but on a desire to suppress unruly populations.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

Public education is largely seen as a progressive enterprise meant to provide opportunities to those who could not afford an education on their own, but its roots may have been anything but. Beginning with Prussia in the mid-1700s, Agustina looks at the curious timing of when countries invest in their education systems and finds that investment comes in response to political elites witnessing threats to their political power.

I still believe that public education, as Horace Mann put it, can be the great equalizer of the conditions of man. But after reading Agustina’s book, I’m not sure policy makers were seeking to make it so. And troublingly, modern reformers may be more interested in indoctrination than education.

Agustina, welcome to the show.

Agustina Paglayan: Thank you very much, Jerusalem. I’m very happy to be here.

Demsas: Happy to have you. So every single time I have a conversation with someone about education policy, whether on this show or in real life, I’m sort of struck by the selection-effect issues of having education conversations with policy makers and policy wonks, because, almost universally, they’re people who liked school and liked learning, and they’re people who probably, in some ways, thrived or at least managed to overcome difficulties that they had in school.

And then they’re the people who then go on to have these conversations about, What’s wrong with schools these days? and, What’s going on here? I was one of those weird kids who would get FOMO about sick days. (Laughs.) I assume that you’re also in this class of people. You have a Ph.D. and, I guess, never quit school. Do you think about how your relationship to education affects your research?

Paglayan: Absolutely. I always think not just about how my personal experience but everyone’s personal experience shapes their research. I will say your intuition is correct.

I was a straight-A student all along. But I also had, for better or worse, the benefit of having many siblings, some of whom dropped out of high school. And so within the confines of my family, I had exposure to those inequalities that we see in society more broadly. And that inequality that I observed, even within my family, was something that was always a source of curiosity for me, particularly, as you were saying, you and I—we were straight-A students.

Demsas: Not straight-A, but I won’t co-opt that. I liked school. (Laughs.)

Paglayan: Okay. And I didn’t need much support to do that. But what I saw was that some of my siblings who needed more support from school in order to do well—they weren’t getting that support. And so that was always something that was a little troubling for me to try to understand: Why is it that those who get more easily distracted, those who maybe have more behavioral problems or more difficulty concentrating, they’re not getting the support they need? That’s what schools are supposed to do and who they are supposed to be helping the most. At least, that’s what I grew up thinking.

And so that always was at the heart of my interest in education. I mean, the other really relevant piece of what drove me to study education, in terms of my personal experience, is just that I grew up in a family where education was the most important thing. And my mom, in particular—she sacrificed a lot to be able to afford one of the best schools in Argentina, which is the country where I grew up. We didn’t have health insurance for a while. There were a lot of different things that she sacrificed along the way. And so I grew up with this sense that education is the most important investment you can make in order to live a life that is not just a prosperous life but a life with individual autonomy, where you can pursue your dreams, if you want.

And then what I started seeing as I started working on education—I worked both at the World Bank, helping with education reform in different countries, and also at Stanford University Center for Education Policy Analysis—as I started getting to know more about education systems, I started noticing, well, we have these ideas about how education is supposed to be about improving living standards, promoting individual autonomy, etcetera. But education systems worldwide are not living up to that promise.

And so that was also something that led me to be further interested in education systems and figuring out this puzzle, which began as a family-specific puzzle, but then I started observing these broader patterns cross-nationally.

Demsas: Do you still believe that education holds all those values that you did growing up?

Paglayan: I think education certainly has the promise to accomplish that. I don’t think education systems were designed to accomplish that, and I think that’s a big part of the explanation why they don’t live up to that promise.

Demsas: I want to situate us in the history of the rise of state-led primary education. Before reading your book, I think I hadn’t really taken in the short timeline that we’re talking about here, just over the course of, like, 200 years. I’m hoping you can talk to us—like, when did this start? Where did it start? Give us sort of a historical grounding.

Paglayan: Yes. So you’re right. This is a 200-year history—very short in human history. Historically, what we had was that the education of children was left entirely to families and churches. And it’s in 1763 that Prussia became the first country in the world to create a compulsory primary-education system.

And that sort of is the first instance of a state-regulated primary-education system. And Prussia, in that time period, also happens to transition from being a backward economy to being one of the most developed and, particularly, a military and world power. And so there are many countries around the world who are trying to figure out: What did Prussia do? How did Prussia accomplish this major transformation?

And what they observed as they traveled to Prussia—and you have people from all over, from Horace Mann traveling to Prussia, to the education reformers in Latin American and in France and other parts of Europe—and what they observe when they go to Prussia is, well, the one thing Prussia has that no one else has is this primary-compulsory-education system. And so that sets off a set of reforms in other countries or, at least, debates about how, if you have a primary-education system, you can consolidate political authority if it is the government that’s in charge of regulating what’s being taught in schools and then using that regulation to ensure that children are being taught to obey the state and obey its laws.

But as I pointed out, it began in 1763. I would mark that as a really important date with Prussia. And then what you see progressively is the U.S. and Canada and continental Europe following Prussia successively at different points in time, followed by Latin America toward the end of the 19th century. And then much later, you see Asian and African countries sort of following suit. So the timing of the different countries varies in terms of when they push for primary education. And that’s one of the things that I examine in the book, is, Well, why are they doing it when they are doing it?

Demsas: How did parents react to this? It seems pretty rapid, over the course of maybe a generation, where you’re not expected to have any kind of regular interaction with state institutions, to, all of a sudden, You need to send your 5-year-old to a state-run public school. How do they react to that?

Paglayan: We don’t have a lot of evidence on how parents directly reacted. What we do have evidence on is what politicians perceived was the parents’ reaction. And the perception that politicians had was primarily that parents really did not like this, because the schools weren’t teaching their kids anything that was particularly useful. And those children were used to contributing to the household income. They worked in farms. They worked in factories. And so, suddenly, you were withdrawing a form of labor that contributed to the family’s economy.

And so the parents resisted that at first. Or at least, again, that was the perception that governments had, that there was this resistance. And that’s why, then, governments passed compulsory-schooling laws, to say, Okay, even if you don’t like it, you need to send your children to school, because we have this project that we want to carry out.

Demsas: I know we’re talking in generalities now, and I know from reading your book, you’ve collected a lot of data to be able to speak in these averages, and there’s a ton of heterogeneity that’s underlying a lot of this that I’m just going to pin for our listeners here.

But in general, when we’re talking about compulsory public education, are you saying that these states would send police officers to require that? Would they levy fines? How much state capacity did they really have to require this? Or was it just that people kind of just follow the law for other reasons?

Paglayan: So as you pointed out, one of the things that I document in the book is the different sets of penalties and provisions that were put in the law to encourage parents to comply with compulsory-schooling provisions. And so in some countries, what you had was the threat of fines, and sometimes it’s just the threat itself that was sufficient to encourage low-income parents to send their kids to school. You didn’t have to really have everyone fined. It was just the existence of those fines.

It was the creation of school inspectorate systems that was very heavily in charge of monitoring school attendance. So states also created this monitoring tool through hiring and deploying school inspectors to monitor whether children were attending school and identify parents who were not complying. So this system in and of itself was something that encouraged parents.

And then the other thing that was also used was not just fines but, for example, in the context of Prussia, if you wanted to get religious confirmation, you had to send your kid to school. Otherwise, they couldn’t get their religious confirmation. And so that was another way to induce parents.

Demsas: So you mentioned this before, but the question under investigation is: Why did the west lead in expanding mass primary education? What were the reasons for that expansion and the motivations underlying that shift? Before we get into your explanation, I want to run through the traditional theories and talk them through, and talk through how you were able to discard those with your research.

You mentioned a few of them in your book: democratization, industrialization, interstate wars, assimilation of immigrants. Can you walk us through these theories and why you don’t see them holding water?

Paglayan: Yes, so all of the theories that you just mentioned, I examine in the book, and I rule out only after looking at the evidence. And so let me start with democratization.

So there was a big literature that argued that the expansion of primary education in the west, and around the world, was driven by the spread of democracy—that once lower-income people became enfranchised, they wanted primary education, and governments, who now needed to win elections with votes from lower-income individuals, responded by expanding primary education.

And so to test this theory, one of the things that I did was to compile information about when governments began to regulate primary education. And also, how much access to primary education was there prior to a country becoming democratic for the first time?

And so the two things that I found there was, first, that the creation of state-regulated primary-education systems (as defined by the passage of the first primary-education law that regulates the curriculum, regulates when you need to attend school, regulates who can become a teacher, all of these things that are regulated by these primary-education laws), these laws are passed well before a country transitions to democracy for the first time—on average, a hundred years before. So that’s the first piece of evidence to rule out the democracy argument.

Demsas: And what’s your data sample? What countries are you looking at, and are you just independently doing all this research, or are there data sets that already exist?

Paglayan: No.

Demsas: Oh, wow.

Paglayan: Yeah. I did all of the information gathering. So I started with Europe and the Americas, and I used a collection of roughly 80 different books, dissertations, and secondary sources, primarily to locate the year when these laws were passed and then to locate the actual laws, because the book also analyzes the content of the laws, the curriculum, the teacher training-and-recruitment policies, and so on. But I started with the secondary sources first, and sometimes there’s discrepancies, so you have to sort of figure out who’s correct here.

Demsas: A big theme of the show is just how laborious all data collection actually is and how it’s the main part of most research. (Laughs.)

Paglayan: Yeah, it takes a little bit of an obsessive personality to enjoy the task, actually.

Demsas: So essentially, you’re plotting this first year as, like, Year Zero and then also plotting at what year democratization happens and seeing whether those things are actually happening one after the other. And you just don’t see any relationship at all?

Paglayan: Well, the relationship you see is that it happens way before democracy. And then the other thing that I also look at is, Okay, maybe they just passed laws, but they didn’t do much in the form of providing primary education to people. This was just paper but not much in the form of implementation.

And so to get at whether that was the case, the other thing that I did was to construct a data set with primary-school enrollment rates for European and Latin American countries going very far back in time, farther back than any other previously existing data set. And what I looked at is, Okay, when you get to a country’s first transition to democracy, what was the prior level of enrollment in primary education? Are we talking 20 percent? Are we talking 30 percent? And no, we’re talking an average 70 percent enrollment. So enrollment in primary education was already very high prior to democratization.

And the other thing that I also find—and this isn’t in the book; it’s in a separate article that I published—is that democratization itself didn’t lead to further increases in primary education. And this is totally consistent with theories that argue that democracy responds to a majority of people. Well, a majority of people already had access to primary education, so they didn’t want a further expansion. And you don’t see, therefore, democracy expanding primary education further, even if you still have 30 percent or 40 percent of people in some countries left out of primary education.

Democratization doesn’t do much. And the origins of primary education are nondemocratic origins. They preceded the arrival of democracy. So that’s one piece of evidence that the book provides.

The other argument is on industrialization. So here, the argument was that the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy created a need for skilled and docile workers. And industrialists themselves were demanding that the state create this docile and skilled workforce by setting up primary school systems. And this isn’t something that I have studied on my own. There are other people who’ve studied this, and I build on their work, and some of the primary sources that I collect are consistent with these arguments. The first thing you notice is that industrialists often opposed, at first, the expansion of primary education by the state.

Demsas: You’re taking away their workers.

Paglayan: Exactly. [It’s] for the same reason that the parents opposed it. Children were working, and industrialists thought, Yeah, you’re taking away our workers. That’s going to reduce the size of the workforce, and that’s going to increase salaries, so we don’t want that.

The other thing is the timing of industrialization versus the timing, again, of these laws that are passed. And you don’t see a consistent pattern of industrialization or the beginning of industrialization preceding the creation of these systems. I think a nice example is the contrasting experiences of Prussia and England. So Prussia created, as we were talking about earlier, the first compulsory primary-education system regulated by the state while it was an agrarian country. And on the flip side to that is that England, which was the leader of the Industrial Revolution, was one of the last countries in all of Europe to create a primary-education system. By 1850, England was the country in Europe with the lowest level of access to primary schooling, even though you had already had almost an entire century of industrialization.

Demsas: Okay, so we’ve run through democratization and industrialization, and then there’s also interstate wars.

Paglayan: Yes, so interstate wars is, again, an argument people have made that countries developed their primary-education systems in response to military competition and, in the context of that military competition, a desire to form a large, trained, and loyal army—and also to inoculate citizens from external invasion or attempts to capture the country’s territory. So the idea is, Well, if I teach you to be patriotic, and a foreign power comes and tries to seduce you, well, I’ve taught you to be patriotic, and you’re not gonna be seduced by those attempts.

And again, the evidence, if you look at what happens with access to primary education after interstate wars, you are seeing that the occurrence of interstate wars leads to an expansion of access to primary education, which is what you would expect if interstate-war arguments were correct. You don’t see that.

What you see in the western world is that during interstate wars, there is a big drop in enrollment, and after the end of the interstate war, there is a recovery but not new expansion of enrollment. It’s just a partial recovery of the drop that took place during the period of the interstate war.

Demsas: Largely, what you have done in falsifying the democratization, the industrialization, the interstate wars—and also, you talk about the idea that assimilating immigrants also does not fit with the timing. Like, you don’t see large waves of immigration coincide with the creation of expanding primary education to the masses. Largely, your objections are with ones of timing, and those are ones I think are really easy to grasp.

But with democratization, I have a harder time buying that you can pinpoint exactly when that begins. Of course, as you know, democratization is not a simple, binary yes or no. It’s a process that happens and exists even within very autocratic regimes. Amartya Sen had a very famous and provocative argument that democracy is a universal value. And he points to various historical examples of democratic deliberation and norms around public reason outside of the normal Greek, western tradition throughout history.

Obviously, that doesn’t prove anything about whether democratization causes education, but it makes me less certain about our ability to say, Democratization does not play a significant role in pushing for more education, because it’s possible that there were just natural reactions to the fact that people were demanding more things, or there were riots happening all the time, and that creates a response within the state to provide educational resources.

Paglayan: Right. So I think you’re absolutely right that you could have, even within the context of a regime that is still a nondemocratic regime, a response to the masses that is driven by what we would consider relatively democratic ideals. And in order to get at whether that’s what’s going on, one of the key things that we need to do—one that I do as part of the book—is to look at: What are the political arguments that are being used by politicians when they are choosing and defending the creation of primary-education systems?

And so if there was an effort to address societal demands, what you would see is that kind of language. And you don’t see that. You see language along the lines of, The masses don’t want to send their children to school, but this is something that’s going to be beneficial for the state for its own sake, for its stability and the consolidation of political authority. And so we’re going to create these systems. We’re going to force parents to send their kids to school, even if they don’t like it.

So you don’t see this demand. And likewise, one of the things that I look at is: Are civil wars, then, leading to an expansion of primary education? Because civil wars or, as you said, riots, rebellions—there are different types of internal conflicts that I discuss in the book. Are these episodes of internal conflict leading to an expansion of education because people are asking for it? And that’s maybe part of the reason why they’re rebelling, is they want an improvement in their living standards.

Well, when you look at what politicians are saying after these episodes, and they’re talking about, Okay, what’s the goal of education? it’s not to improve living standards. It’s to teach obedience, to teach submissiveness to the state’s authority. And so it’s in the arguments that are being made by political elites who are setting up these systems, and it’s in the content of the laws themselves, also—What is the curriculum that’s being taught? How are the teachers being trained? and so on and so forth—that you see that the intention is not driven by democratic ideals. I think that’s the collection of evidence, in my view, that helps realize that there’s an authoritarian route in education systems.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: the real roots of western education, according to Augustina.

[Break]

Demsas: So I think it’s a good time for you to give us your thesis, because I do think there’s a pretty-convincing refutation of many of these traditional explanations, and people are probably left wanting more now.

Paglayan: Sure. So what the book argues, essentially, is that the expansion of primary education in the west was driven not by democratic ideals but by the state’s desire to control citizens and to control them by targeting children at an age when they are very young and susceptible to external influence, and to teach them at that young age that it’s good to respect rules, that it’s good to respect authority—with the idea in mind that if you learn to respect rules and authority from that young age, you’re going to continue doing so for the rest of your life, and that’s going to lead to political and social stability and, in particular, the stability of the status quo, from which these political elites who are using primary education benefit from.

So that it’s essentially a social-control argument about the origins of primary education and an indoctrination argument about the origins of these western primary-education systems. And by indoctrination, I do want to clarify that I’m following the definition from the dictionary, because the term indoctrination has all kinds of connotations, especially in the United States. But the dictionary defines indoctrination as the process of teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.

And so from that standpoint, you can teach someone to accept, uncritically, that an absolutist regime is the best thing that could happen to you. Or you could also teach someone to accept, uncritically, that democracy or republican institutions are the best form of government.

And what makes it indoctrination is not the content of what’s being taught. It’s that the process of teaching these beliefs occurs without allowing, or much less encouraging, critical thinking. There’s no room for students to question, Oh, but why are you saying that republican institutions or absolutist regimes are the best way to structure political life? So there’s this emphasis on using education to instill a set of beliefs about: These are the existing political rules. This is how society is led by the state, and you should accept that as the right thing.

The other core argument of the book is about when exactly governments are likely to turn to education for this indoctrination and social-control and instilling obedience purposes. And that’s another key part of the book, which is to show what we were talking about earlier, that these efforts to use education as a form of indoctrination are particularly likely to intensify when political elites experience social unrest and mass protest against the status quo that these elites benefit from.

So these episodes of mass violence against the status quo generate a lot of fear among political elites who benefit from that status quo. And that fear is what leads political elites to then forge a coalition that supports, Okay, let’s invest in primary education, because clearly what we’ve been doing so far, whether it’s repression or trying to appease people with material concessions—that’s not sufficient. We just had this mass revolt or rebellion or insurrection or protest, etcetera. That tells us that what we’ve been doing is not sufficient. We need to do something new. And that’s when they either choose to invest for the first time in primary education or reform the existing education system that they have to better tailor it to the goal of obedience.

Demsas: Your book is called Raised to Obey. It’s a great title, and it’s also, I think, a very apt, succinct way of describing your thesis here. But I think that the natural question that rises is, you know: There is a desire to repress the peasantry and the citizenry of countries that have largely been authoritarian for hundreds of years. What changed about the capacity or the tools that they were using in advance that made compulsory education necessary to repress the masses? Because I can imagine someone listening to this and going, Okay, so it’s another tool in order to maintain social order, but isn’t there something interesting about the fact that it all kind of just develops in a short, 200-year time span?

Paglayan: Yes, and what happens is the Enlightenment. We have sort of this myth that the Enlightenment promoted ideas of individual autonomy and using reason to make decisions, as opposed to superstition or religion. And there’s a lot of truth in that, but during the Enlightenment, conversation and ideas that circulated around mass education, specifically, which is distinct from education for elites—the idea that took form during the Enlightenment on mass education was that mass education could be used by states to instill obedience and to consolidate the authority of the state.

And so what you see is this moment of change in ideas. It’s sort of a new idea that emerges that We didn’t have, before, any notion that the state could or should be involved in the education of children. And its people like Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and Voltaire and Kant who are saying, Well, the state has an interest of its own to educate children so that they will learn to obey the sovereign and its laws. And you get kind of these ideas in the 18th century or so becoming very pervasive in terms of circulating among elites.

Now, the ideas on their own are not sufficient for then political rulers to implement those ideas. And that’s where the role of internal conflict and social protest against the status quo becomes a catalyst for elites to say, Oh, okay. We’ve heard that maybe we could use mass education to instill obedience, but we know that’s a costly endeavor. We have to hire a lot of teachers.

So they only agree to turn to education after they experience a situation that tells them, Okay, the tools you’ve been using—repression, material concessions—those are no longer sufficient. And so that diagnosis is what then leads them to education. But you’re right that this is based on a necessary condition, which is the existence of these ideas, which occur primarily around the Enlightenment.

Demsas: Talk to me a little bit about your evidence for this here. I know you’ve talked a little bit about the research you’ve done into how elites were talking about creating public-education systems. But I assume that there were many instances of upheaval that were happening throughout hundreds of years of human history, and even over the course of this time period that we’re talking about here, when the Enlightenment ideas were in place. There were many instances of upheaval happening and concerns from elites that they were maybe losing power.

But not all of these countries choose to engage in expansion of primary-education systems after every single one of these things. So is there something particular about the upheavals or the rebellions that cause elites to change their minds here? Are you able to kind of code all of the specific types of rebellions that occur? How do we know that these things are causal?

Paglayan: So there are three different things that I want to say in response to this question, which was at the heart of my concern in studying how these instances of upheaval affect or not affect education efforts by the state.

So one of the core concerns is, as a social scientist, you don’t want to start cherry-picking the upheavals that do lead to the expansion of primary education, because that’s just like, Yeah, you’re cherry-picking the cases that meet your theory or support your theory, but there could be all these other upheavals that also take place that don’t lead to education reform.

And so what I did to get around that issue of cherry-picking is just use civil wars as a way of testing systematically whether one type of internal conflict that has been coded by other social scientists, its timing, and has been coded across countries over time for centuries—whether that type of internal conflict is associated with an expansion of primary education.

And that’s what I find, is that when you look at civil wars and expansion of primary education, both before and after a civil war, what you see is that in countries that experienced a civil war, there is a rapid acceleration of primary education following the civil war that you don’t observe in countries that in the same time period did not experience a civil war. So the civil war is leading to further expansion of primary education above and beyond what you would expect in the absence of civil war. And so that’s one of the pieces of evidence that the book provides.

There’s also specific cases that I look at that are not using nationally aggregated data but subnational data to further look at this argument. So in the context, for instance, of thinking about the case of France or the case of Chile or the case of Argentina, what I also examine is: When you have a form of internal conflict that is followed by an education reform, is the implementation of that education reform and the construction of schools being targeted specially to those areas that are perceived by the government to constitute a threat to its social order and stability?

And so, again, that’s another piece of evidence that I find, that yes, indeed, what you’re seeing in the aftermath of these episodes of social conflict involving mass violence against the status quo is that the state not only decides to create a national primary-education system and expand access to primary education, but it’s particularly targeting or specially targeting the expansion of primary education to those areas where the rebels had rebelled against the status quo.

And then this brings us back to your question: Well, but maybe it’s doing that because the rebels were asking for education or asking for an improvement in their living conditions. And they’re responding by providing education for that reason, not for social control. Which is then why I have to look at, Okay, is that what the education system is designed to accomplish? And it’s not.

And then the other thing that I discuss in the book considerably is: Not all kinds of internal conflict are likely to lead to the expansion of education for indoctrination purposes. So if you think, for example, of the context of England, one of the things that I talk about in the book is that England did have episodes of political instability. You had civil wars in the 17th century. You had mass strikes in the 19th century.

But what you have in the context of England is that—while these ideas of the Enlightenment that circulated in Prussia and continental Europe, around, States should use education for consolidating authority by instilling obedience in future citizens—in England, the ideas that exist about mass education are different. And people in England have more of a concern that if you educate people, that’s going to lead them to be more empowered and to become more rebellious, if anything.

And so one of the things that the book says is that for episodes of social unrest to lead to mass-education efforts for indoctrination purposes, well, elites have to believe that education can indeed indoctrinate people. If elites believe that education is going to empower them, as they did in England, they’re not going to respond to strikes or civil wars by expanding education. And so that helps explain in the case of England, for example, why it lagged behind.

And then there’s other conditions that also need to be in place. You need a minimum level, for instance, of fiscal capacity and administrative capacity to be able to roll out these plans. In the context of Mexico, for example, throughout the 19th century, there were all kinds of civil wars. And those civil wars led to a lot of laws that tried to create an education system that was focused on instilling obedience. But that could never be implemented, because there were no resources to do it.

Similarly, in the case of France after the French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror, there is an effort to pass laws to use education for indoctrination, but the state’s treasury is completely decimated, so they can’t implement that. So there are some conditions that need to be in place.

The other thing that also needs to be in place is that you need elites to come to the conclusion that the existing tools failed to contain the disorder, that a new type of approach is needed. So if you have a situation where you have a mass upheaval, but repression succeeds in quashing those rebels relatively quickly, then I would not expect that to be a situation where you turn to invest in education, because the existing tools worked. So it’s really in those contexts, where the masses are perceived as predisposed to violence and also elites believe that the existing tools are insufficient to address that violent predisposition—that’s when you turn to education.

Demsas: I’m very persuaded by your argument. But I think there’s another theory I want to run past you.

I’m a Protestant, and so I’m forced to ask, like, in my bones: What about Protestantism? There’s a great paper by Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann in QJE. They use county-level data from late-19th-century Prussia to figure out whether Protestantism led to better education and higher economic prosperity.

They essentially look at how close a given county was to Wittenberg. Wittenberg is where that story of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of Castle Church happened. Apparently, whether these were nailed or pasted or even posted on the church doors is up for debate by historians, but I choose to imagine him nailing the theses to the door for dramatic Protestant effect.

The economists find a strong effect of distance from Wittenberg on literacy, which they say largely explains the Protestant lead in economic outcomes. Luther himself also called for boys’ and girls’ schools so they could read the Bible, have that kind of personal relationship with God that defines Protestantism against Catholicism.

So I can imagine a story that Protestantism, the development of Martin Luther’s ideas, and the push to develop these schools as a tool of religious education—that this sort of literacy leads to the development of schooling. And then you see the diffusion from Prussia to other countries, because, as you mentioned earlier in our episode, people were going to Prussia and going, like, Why are you so much more prosperous than us, better than us? And they are seeking to just copy things that feel distinctive. What’s wrong with that theory?

Paglayan: I know the paper by Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann that you’re mentioning. I know it very well. I teach it in one of my courses on historical political economy, and I think they are definitely on to something.

It is the case, as you are articulating, that in Prussia, the Protestant elites played an important role, as well, in pushing for mass education. Now, what you have in Prussia is a situation where Protestants had been pushing for mass education for their own religious goals. And then what you then have is, in the 1740s and 1750s, a situation in which you have peasant revolts in the countryside.

And at that point, the king says, Well, we need to do something to contain these peasant revolts and prevent them from recurring in the future. And the king’s advisers tell him, Well, we should use mass education to teach obedience to the state and its laws. And the king turns to Protestants, who have been providing mass education, to get their support on how to repurpose this Protestant education into an education that’s going to help the king’s goal of consolidating his political authority.

And the Protestants, in this process, they give up some of their power to shape education. And in exchange for giving up that power, they get more resources. So for example, they get resources to fund a normal school, which is in charge of training teachers in Berlin. And the state says, Well, we’re going to give you a monopoly right over the training of these teachers, but the schools are going to be supervised by a state authority and no longer by the priests themselves. And the curriculum of the schools and the normal schools, as well, is going to be set by the state itself, not by the church.

So there’s ways in which the Protestant church gives up power in order to get more resources to do some of its projects and reach more people than it had in the past. Now, of course, that’s the story in Prussia. There’s other countries where you also have a legacy of Protestantism, and Protestantism doesn’t really do much there to expand primary education. But in the context of Prussia, I think you are absolutely right that it played a role, but it’s just not sufficient to explain why, then, the state took over this function.

Demsas: This show is about questioning popular narratives, and I think that the idea that mass primary education was expanded by the west as a tool of social control—I think that’s a pretty controversial claim to a lot of people. But I’ll often gut-check my sense of what a popular narrative is with various sources. I’ll look at polling, or I’ll ask various experts in the field or, you know, read books and papers.

One thing I did when preparing for this interview was to just ask my fiancé, who’s not in education at all—he’s a software engineer—why he thought the spread of mass education happened first in the west. And I’m not joking—he immediately walked over to our bookshelf and pulled out a copy of Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish.

You mentioned this in your book, but some sociologists, like Foucault, have argued that schools are a tool of social control. The argument goes, you know, many modern institutions—like schools but also, hospitals, factories, and the military—they use confinement, and they normalize meticulous examinations of the body and routines in order to subjugate citizens to the state. Do you view your argument as essentially in line with that school of sociological thought?

Paglayan: I do. I think that one of the contributions of the book is to reinstate that way of thinking about education. So Foucault wrote a lot, as you pointed out, on different ways of disciplining individuals, one of which, according to him, was schools. But Foucault also lost a lot of traction in sociology. There were sociologists who criticized him as providing a very cynical interpretation of history. There were also sociologists who said there was essentially no evidence, systematic evidence, whatsoever for his arguments.

And so I think one of the contributions of the book is to provide a wealth of evidence that Foucault’s work didn’t have, that’s cross-national, that’s across two centuries, showing that indeed social-control goals were at the heart of governments’ efforts to regulate and expand primary education.

And I think the other place where I think I depart from Foucault is in putting an emphasis, in the case of my work, in the role that the state played in creating schools for this disciplining purpose. He talks a lot about how schools discipline students, monitor their behavior, create norms of what constitutes good behavior and what constitutes deviant behavior. There’s a lot of that in Foucault, but what he doesn’t really talk much about is how this function of the school was something that the state itself created and used for its own sake of consolidating political authority.

Demsas: I want to bring us to modern day, because I think a lot of people may find it easier to buy that this expansion of mass education happened in the 1700s, 1800s, even early 1900s as a tool of social control but may find it harder to stomach that that’s what’s happening now.

So much of expanding education is seen as a liberal, even progressive value. It’s seen as a way of empowering people, and even if it was the case that it was the intention hundreds of years ago, at this point, obviously, schools are a democratizing force. They’re a liberalizing force. They’re an empowering force.

So you cite research that talks to, you know, people in developing countries about why they want to expand education and find something that surprised me a lot. So could you tell us about that?

Paglayan: Yes. So these days, it is absolutely true that if you ask a politician why they want to provide education, they’re going to tell you, Well, to promote economic development, to reduce poverty and inequality. In public, that’s what they’re going to say, because to say, We want to provide education to create docile and obedient citizens, would be political suicide, right? So usually that’s not what they’re gonna say.

So what this group of researchers at the Center for Global Development did was to try to get policy makers—they surveyed 900 policy makers across developing countries—to try to get them to reveal their true motive for providing education, without these policy makers knowing that’s what they were revealing.

And so what they used was these forced-choice experiments, where they essentially gave policy makers the option to choose between two different sets of education systems. And what they had was, for example, in Scenario A, an education system that promotes 90 percent docile citizens or dutiful citizens, 10 percent skilled workforce, and 30 percent literate individuals—I don’t remember the specific details, but that’s one scenario. And then another scenario is, instead of 90 percent dutiful citizens, it’s 30 percent dutiful citizens, 90 percent literate workforce.

And essentially, what you’re doing is for people to see, Okay, what do you prefer? Do you prefer 90 percent dutiful citizens or 90 percent skilled workforce? Do you prefer 90 percent dutiful citizens, or do you prefer 90 percent literate population? without them realizing that’s what they’re doing. And what they saw, by having many different pairs of comparisons and having these policy makers choose between these pairs, was that, by far, forming dutiful citizens was the goal that they prioritized over these other options.

Demsas: I hear you talking about this, and you can’t help but think about the current education-reform movements in the United States. I think that they’re pretty cross-pressured, though, because I tried to think about how I would apply your theories to this kind of modern instantiation of it, and you see cross-pressures within the movement.

On the one hand, Republicans in many states have successfully pushed for decentralization efforts, like allowing the use of public dollars to send your kids to private, religious institutions, homeschooling, places where it’s actually quite difficult to, like, instill control about how people are teaching their children or what they’re learning. But then you also see this desire to eradicate certain books or reaffirm certain ideas about American history, about how racism functioned, about what it means about American identity really in reaction to, you know, the 1619 Project. You see that both in primary [education] but also throughout education, including higher education, like in Florida. How do you think about this? Do you still see this kind of education as a tool of social control?

Because, basically, there are two ways I can read this. One is that there’s a wing of the Republican Party that sees education as a tool of social control that they can continue to use to reaffirm certain ideas about America and what ideas people should believe, whether it’s about gender or race or other things. And on the other hand, there’s a wing in the Republican Party that believes that education is clearly a liberalizing force, and so, We need to decentralize and undermine this sort of public institution.

Paglayan: That’s a very good point. So let me take a few steps back.

So the first thing I’ll say is that when I think of all of the efforts that the Republican Party has made since September 2020 with the creation of the patriotic education commission, or 1776 Commission, at that time, and then all of the subsequent state laws in Republican-controlled states to prohibit the teaching of so-called divisive concepts, such as the idea that there’s institutionalized racism, and all of the book bans that you were just describing—all of these I see as just another example of this pattern that the book identifies, which is a cross-national and a centuries-old pattern of politicians responding to mass protest against the status quo by turning to education to teach children that the status quo is actually okay. To the extent that Republicans are using public education, they want to ensure that public education is repurposed for the sake of teaching kids that the status quo is okay.

And they’re doing this precisely after the Black Lives Matter protests, because that was a set of protests that were nationwide. And that sort of ignited a fear of what the country would look like if we were to reform the institutions that these elites benefit from. Now, I think you’re also right that there are some, and a not small portion within the Republican Party, who say, Well, better yet, let’s get rid of public education, and let’s try to have more education in the hands of parents and religious institutions providing education.

But I think there’s also a realistic sense that you can’t just get rid of public schools. So they’re doing both things at the same time to try to, in some ways, shift enrollment away from public schools but, also, reform public schools so that they serve this specific agenda. The one thing I’ll say, though, Jerusalem, is that we talk right now about how they want to use education to instill a specific set of political and moral values, and that the Republican Party wants to do this.

But in my view, the issue is: Liberals are also doing this. I haven’t really seen much effort on the part of liberals in rethinking education systems and saying, Hey. Yeah, we’re still teaching the Pledge of Allegiance in many states to 5-year-olds. They’re repeating, I swear allegiance to the U.S. flag and to the republic for which it stands. And these are 5-year-olds who don’t know how to write their name yet, much less know what the republic is that they’re swearing allegiance to. What does that even mean?

So there is a lot of continued, persistent use of education to teach a lot of norms, to teach the norm, for instance, that in the U.S., if you want to express discontent, you do it by voting. You don’t do it by protesting. And if you want to protest, it has to be a peaceful protest. That’s a norm. The idea that republican institutions are the best form of government—again, that’s an idea, but it’s not taught in a way that encourages critical thinking.

And I hear a lot of liberals right now saying, Yes, and we shouldn’t teach critical thinking. We should indoctrinate for democracy. And so they’re kind of complicit in some ways. They want to teach a different set of ideas than conservatives, but they still want the education system to serve their own political agenda and teach a specific set of norms, instead of thinking, How can we use education to actually encourage critical thinking? And so that’s something that I also wanted to bring up as part of this conversation.

Demsas: Yeah, I guess we’re coming a little bit full circle from this episode here, where, because maybe I had a unique experience of school or a less-common experience of school—I don’t know—I feel like I learned critical thinking in school. I feel like I was able to get pushback or things like that, but I think there’s a lot of people who have been doing a lot of writing in the tradition of Foucault and others about how that is not the common experience at educational institutions.

Paglayan: Yes. Exactly. And the reality is that the lower the level of income of the student, the more the school tends to be focused on disciplining than on promoting critical thinking. So that’s the other thing, because I talked to some friends or colleagues who tell me, Yeah, but the school that my kid goes to—yeah, the school your kid goes to serves affluent people. And that’s not the group of people that politicians are concerned about disciplining: It’s the people who are at the bottom who need to be taught to stay in their place, to be happy with what they have, and so on. So that’s also relevant here.

Demsas: Well, I think that’s a great place to ask our final question, which is: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Paglayan: So I’ll say that, historically, I’ve been someone who was very focused on my intellectual development and thinking that my brain and my mind are crucial for my well-being. And investing in that is crucial for my well-being. And over the course of time, I’ve come to see that my body is also really important and that, oftentimes, it’s really taking care of acknowledging how I feel in my body that’s more important to figuring out what I really think for my well-being.

And so that’s been sort of a bit of an evolution in trying to not to separate the body from the mind experience, and certainly trying not to prize the mind over the body, which is what I used to do.

Demsas: I have had a very similar experience. Maybe it’s just, like, you’re getting older or whatever, but you have to get eight hours of sleep. And if you’re thinking about yourself in terms of, like, Well, I could have just continued reading. I could have continued doing more work. I could do more prep for this interview, or I could have written more.

I also just think the research is getting pretty definitive here about things like stress and not taking care of yourself in that way having serious impacts down the line, in a way that’s really kind of conflicting with advice you get as a kid, which is just, like, Put everything you can. Sleep four hours a night. Neglect all these things about self-care in order to advance your intellectual pursuits. So I feel very similar.

Paglayan: Exactly.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Agustina. I really enjoyed having you on the show.

Paglayan: Thank you very much, Jerusalem. I loved talking with you.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

The Great Political Sort Is Happening at the Office

2025-02-11T06:00:00-05:00

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Every personal detail is a tell. From your choice of college major, to the industry you work in, to the company within that industry—each decision is part of a sorting phenomenon populating certain workplaces with Democrats and others with Republicans.

We’re socialized to not talk politics at the office to avoid polarizing issues that could break norms of professional behavior. But according to a new study from two Harvard researchers, that norm may have obscured a startling partisan divide at the workplace: Republicans and Democrats are sorting into different fields of study, industries, and companies.

Workers aren’t just pawns in this partisan sorting; they’re actively choosing it, although perhaps subconsciously. As the study authors Sahil Chinoy and Martin Koenen found, “The median Democrat or Republican would trade off 3% in annual wages for an ideologically congruent version of a similar job.”

“Is [3 percent] big or small?” Chinoy asks. “It’s less than something like health care. It’s sort of actually comparable in magnitude to some of these softer amenities, things like having a relaxed versus a fast pace of work, for example, or having training opportunities at work. People seem to care similarly about the ideological nature of the job.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: I have a bit of a weird job for several reasons, but for one: Many of my colleagues’ varied ideological commitments are pretty clear due to the nature of our work.

But I was curious about what workplaces look like in less overtly political places. Do people often know the political opinions of their colleagues and bosses? Could work be a place for the healthy mixing of people with different partisan identities?

Probably not. At least, that’s what I take away from a new paper called “Political Sorting in the U.S. Labor Market,” which argues that political segregation is extremely common in the workplace. According to the authors, “a Democrat or Republican’s co-worker is 10 percent more likely to share their party” than what you might expect based on where their workplace is located.

Why? Well, it’s largely because workers are opting into college majors, jobs, industries, and companies that correspond with their partisan identities. Republicans are more likely to have studied business, finance, engineering, and technology, while Democrats are more likely to have studied the arts, social sciences, and the humanities.

Industries themselves are therefore more likely to have employees of one party rather than the other, but even within industries, companies are attracting one party’s adherents over the other.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is Sahil Chinoy, who co-authored this paper while finishing up his economics Ph.D. at Harvard. Sahil himself is on the job market, I’m sure headed to one of those ideologically diverse workplaces so common in academia.

Sahil, welcome to the show.

Sahil Chinoy: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Demsas: So before you conducted your research project, did you think that workplaces were more or less segregated than other areas of life, like neighborhoods, schools, etcetera?

Chinoy: I think somewhat less. We’ve all heard this idea that there should be, quote, “no politics at work.” And I think I took that to heart and thought the workplace might be a uniquely important site where there’s less partisan or political segregation than some of the other environments that we inhabit, like schools and certainly neighborhoods. There’s a lot of attention paid to partisan segregation, particularly across space, across neighborhoods.

And I do think that I thought that the workplace would exhibit less sorting than that. How much less? I don’t know. I certainly thought that it can’t be the case that it’s perfectly even.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, it’s like when you’re young, and you’re in, like, K-12 or something, it’s the time of your life when you’re repeatedly kind of interacting with people you didn’t choose to be interacting with. It’s your teachers, other kids at school.

And when you grow up, work is basically one of the only times when you’re being forced to go anywhere that you are not actively choosing who you’re going to be interacting with. Obviously, there’s a ton of segregation that comes from where people are in school.

But I think the fact that, like, this is arguably the only place that adults are interacting with people that they’re not opting into on a regular basis—that leads people to kind of feel like, Oh this is probably, like, the most generative space for reaching people across the partisan aisle.

But you do not find this. So walk me through your paper. What did you do to investigate whether workplaces were segregated by party?

Chinoy: Yeah. So just one point on that. I think that’s exactly right. I think the idea here is, like, people have less ability to choose who their co-workers are compared to other people that they interact with, and that’s what generates segregation.

I will note, though, that—it’s kind of funny. When I bring this point up to academics and to professors, there’s sort of the one group, I think, that doesn’t really see this. They’re like, What do you mean? We can perfectly choose who our colleagues are.

Demsas: (Laughs.) That’s, in fact, the whole point.

Chinoy: That’s what hiring is. That’s the whole point. But I think generally, yes. I think that’s the idea.

So we’re sort of starting with this basic premise that, you know, maybe the workplace is less politically segregated than some of these other environments—not such a hard question to pose or to ask. I think it’s just a hard question to answer.

And it’s a hard question to answer, I think, primarily because of a data constraint. We have very high-quality and large-labor-market surveys in the U.S., but they don’t ask questions about politics or partisan affiliation. And we have large and high-quality political surveys, but they usually don’t ask questions about where exactly people work. And even if they did, they’re large, but they’re not large enough to really capture who is working with whom.

And so the starting point of this paper is really to say we have this pretty, to some extent, obvious question: To what extent do Democrats work with Democrats and Republicans work with Republicans? And how are we going to answer it? And the way we answer it is by combining two sources of information: On the one hand, public LinkedIn profiles—so scraped LinkedIn profiles that list where everyone works and some other characteristics about them, often where they went to college or their educational background. And we combine that with administrative voter records.

And so in the U.S., who you vote for is not public. But in 30 states and the District of Columbia, which party you register with is public. And so we combine those two sources of information, and that lets us see who is working with whom and everyone’s party affiliation. And that’s how we can quantify the magnitude of this partisan segregation at work.

Demsas: So you find that “a Democrat or [a] Republican’s co-worker is 10 percent more likely to share their party than expected based on local partisan shares.” Can you just unpack that finding? What does that mean?

Chinoy: Yeah. So the idea is: We want to benchmark the share of your co-workers who share your party affiliation against what we might expect. And so, you know, to give you a concrete example, say you are a Democrat, and you work at Google in Mountain View, then a high share of your co-workers are fellow Democrats. I think it’s something like 55 percent in our data. So that’s, you know, a relatively high share of Democrats. But what should we actually expect? Should we benchmark that against the share of Democrats in the U.S. as a whole?

And so our baseline measure takes that sort of realized share of co-partisans—so the 55 percent of Democrats that share your workplace—and divides it by the share of Democrats in your local labor market, which we operationalize as a commuting zone. Commuting zones are sort of aggregations of counties that are precisely designed to capture these kinds of commuting patterns, who could reasonably share your workplace.

And it turns out—I’m going to forget the exact number, but you know, it turns out—that share is quite high for Google in Mountain View. So you’re a Democrat at Google Mountain View—your co-workers are 6 percent more likely to share your party affiliation than you would expect based on the local shares of Democrats and Republicans. And then we generalize that for everyone. We do that for every person in our sample, tens of millions of people, and that’s how we arrive at that 10 percent number.

Demsas: This is, I think, a really great way of putting it, because, obviously, someone’s going to say, you know, Okay, Google—you’re in California. You’re in Silicon Valley. This is just a high-Democrat place, so are you just, like, looking at, basically, that there is geolocation sorting that’s already happening? And you’re saying it’s not just the fact that, like, there are locational differences in partisanship. It’s that even taking that into account, workplaces are even more segregated based on party than you would expect just by, like, walking around and taking a random sampling of people who live in the commuting zone that Google is in.

Chinoy: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And, you know, I can compare against the national shares, and if I do that, that number is 20 percent. It’s twice as high as the baseline statistic that I quoted for you earlier. And that’s a meaningful number, too, but what sort of intuitively accords with people’s sense of how to measure partisan segregation? It’s probably comparing against the local environment. And that’s why that 10 percent number is kind of our preferred estimate.

Demsas: How does this compare to the level of partisan segregation that we observe in other places? We know, for instance, that there’s partisan segregation happening in schools or in dating markets and churches and stuff like that. Is the workplace the most segregated based on party in America, or is this in line with other places?

Chinoy: Yeah, so it’s hard to answer this directly for every other social environment or every other group of people. I can tell you a couple things. So one is: I think a natural comparison is residential partisan segregation. This is something that people study a lot, right—the extent to which Democrats live on the same block as Democrats, and Republicans live next to other Republicans. And so we can sort of compare what I told you—that 10 percent number, that overexposure ratio—against partisan segregation across neighborhoods.

And you can define neighborhoods in different ways. One way to do it is a zip code. And when we do that, we find that partisan segregation at work is pretty similar. So, like, a little bit less than but overall pretty similar to partisan segregation across zip codes. We can go one step further and say, you know, maybe the zip code is a little bit bigger than what you have in mind when you think of neighborhood-level sorting. And so we have individual addresses in our data, and so we can say, you know, You have 15 co-workers. Let me figure out how many of them share your party affiliation, and let me look at our sample of the 15 people who live closest to you and figure out how many of those people share your party affiliation.

And when we do that, we find that workplace-level segregation, workplace-level overexposure ratio is a little bit less pronounced than that sort of nearest neighbor level of segregation, but still pretty similar, not so different. It’s not orders of magnitude different. So that’s kind of why we say that it’s a little less pronounced than residential segregation as a whole but still pretty sizable.

This isn’t in the paper, but we can also look at colleges. That’s the other thing that we can really observe well in our sample, and when we do that, we find that colleges are less segregated along party lines than our workplaces.

Demsas: Wow.

Chinoy: And sorry—that’s college cohorts.

Demsas: Wait. Sorry. Can you break that down? College cohort—you mean, the people who went to your college and then are in the class of 2017 as well?

Chinoy: Exactly. Yes.

Demsas: Okay, so that group, the people who went to my college and are in the same class as me, are less segregated than my workplace? Well, maybe not me, in particular, but on average.

Chinoy: Yeah. And I think a lot of that is just the size of these groups. College cohorts are quite big compared to workplaces, which tend to be relatively smaller. And so there’s a little bit more room for that kind of political diversity in college cohorts. And so the extent to which you think that’s an apples-to-apples comparison, I think it is up for debate because of that size issue.

Demsas: So you’re not going to take the hard position that colleges are more open than workplaces in America? (Laughs.)

Chinoy: I wouldn’t say they’re more open, but certainly you’re in this group of people that, for many people, is quite large and might include people from diverse geographic backgrounds. That’s also something that happens at colleges.

Demsas: So is this a function of income or racial or gender segregation? Like, how much of this can be explained by the fact that our workplaces are segregated by factors that are correlating with partisanship but are not partisanship, in particular?

Chinoy: Yeah, that’s a great question, I think a natural question. I think it is important to note, though, that overall, like, what is the phenomenon of interest? It’s partisan segregation without differencing out all of those other background characteristics, right?

And I think that there’s an analogy to gender segregation at work. You know, to what extent is gender segregation at work driven by different occupational choices? The different occupations that men and women sort into or are sorted into—that’s sort of an interesting question. At the end of the day, that’s part of the phenomenon of interest. That’s part of what creates segregation at work. And so I think a similar thing applies here.

That said, we can do, I think, the kinds of exercises you have in mind, where, instead of benchmarking just against the share of Democrats and Republicans in your local labor-market area, in your commuting zone, we can additionally incorporate information about those co-workers in predicting their partisanship.

And so what I mean is: If we knew not just where your co-workers lived, in terms of which commuting zone they live in, but also their exact year of birth and their gender and their race—things which are, as you know, very correlated with partisanship and politics in the U.S.—would we still be surprised that Democrats disproportionately work with Democrats, and Republicans disproportionately work with Republicans? So these are pretty fine predictors, right? We actually interact [based on] year of birth and gender and race. So for me, you know, an Asian male born in 1995 tends to be registered with the Democratic Party at a particular rate. We can incorporate that information and say, Is it still the case that we see this partisan sorting?

And we find that, indeed, that explains some segregation but certainly not all of it. And we can add even more predictors, so not just the education level of everyone, whether they went to high school or college or have a postgraduate degree—again, something that’s highly correlated with partisanship—but also the exact college that they went to. And we can show there are partisan differences across schools.

And we can incorporate that information as well. We can incorporate not just the exact college that you went to but what you studied when you were there. And there, again, we see large gaps in the college major choices of Democrats and Republicans, which I think actually is independently quite interesting also. So college and major and then industry and occupation—we can incorporate all of these predictors, and we still find that a Democrat or Republican’s co-worker is about 4.3 percent more likely to share their partisanship than we would expect. So we bring that ratio down from 10 percent to 4.3 percent. All of these things clearly matter, but they don’t explain all the segregation that we see.

Demsas: I think that’s really significant. I think when I first saw your abstract, I was like, Okay, well, is this just like, Black people are Democrats, and women are Democrats, and men are Republicans, when we’re looking at averages?

And seeing that significant difference even without that—and I mean, I take your point well that looking at partisanship is relevant, even if it is the case that race and gender are playing into that. Like, that overall partisanship still tells you something about workplaces in America.

But I also want to ask, because I think in your paper that you’re seeing more heterogeneity for different income bands and educational attainment, that there’s a different level of partisan segregation for people who make more money or for people who have, you know, graduate degrees or college degrees.

Can you tell me about that? What’s going on there?

Chinoy: Yeah, so that’s exactly right. You know, the 10 percent number that I was quoting for you before is an average across everyone in our sample. We can see what that looks like among subgroups and, in particular, we can see what that looks like among subgroups defined by education and by income.

When we do that for education, we see something pop there, which is that people with postgraduate degrees, people who are more highly educated, tend to be in workplaces that are more segregated. And there’s a little bit of something going on for high-school graduates versus people with bachelor’s degrees, but really where it tends to stand out the most is people with a postgraduate education.

Demsas: It’s you, Sahil. You’re causing all our problems.

Chinoy: (Laughs.) I mean, yeah, like, kind of, though, right? And you can think of stories why this might make sense. Maybe these people have more of an ability to choose an employer that really aligns with their ideological interests in a way that isn’t true for other groups of workers. I can’t say for sure why.

Demsas: Or they’re more motivated, right? Like, you might be more ideological or partisan.

Chinoy: Totally. Also true. And, actually, on that point, when we subset to people who have made campaign contributions and might be more politically motivated or politically interested kind of in the way you were describing, we also see that those people are experiencing more segregation at work, particularly the people who donate to very liberal or very conservative candidates.

And then you also asked about income. And here we see a little bit less of a clear pattern, actually. So the gradient seems more pronounced for education than for income. There’s a bit of a technical point here, which is that we don’t know someone’s exact income in the LinkedIn data. You don’t put them on your LinkedIn profile, mostly. So we infer it from where people live, based on the block group that they live on, and so you might worry that’s sort of an inexact measure of income, but the education measure we have is more specific. We try to do some things to alleviate that concern.

Overall, we stand by the idea that the gradient is stronger for education than for income.

Demsas: But for income, higher-income people are more likely to have a more-segregated workplace?

Chinoy: Barely, among our sample. And our sample is people who have LinkedIn profiles, and so that’s a higher-income slice of the population than the overall workforce. And among that sample, we don’t see too much in terms of the highest-income people among them experiencing more segregation than the lowest-income people.

Demsas: This is a bit afield from your specific paper, but I remember there being a lot of talk about how diverse workplaces were more creative, and I think that literature is actually kind of more mixed, so I don’t know how good that literature actually stands up. But there’s a lot of talk about how having kind of ideological diversity, background diversity, etcetera can make for more creative teams. Does your research look at whether these sorts of workplaces, you know, have any impact on productivity? Do you have thoughts on whether that would play out, given other research you’ve looked at?

Chinoy: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think that’s the next paper I want to write.

Certainly, there are countervailing forces here. It’s probably bad for, you know, workplaces to have 100 percent people who think a certain way. That seems not optimal. It also seems like you probably want to be able to get along with your co-workers to some extent. And, you know, if partisanship and political affiliation is a measure of that, then, probably, a little bit of homophily might actually be productive. So my speculation is that there would be a bit of a U shape there. I don’t know for sure. I think that would be super interesting to study.

I think that where people do study this question, specifically, is among corporate leaders. It’s been, like, historically, a little bit easier to get information about the political affiliation and donation behavior of executives and board members, and so people have focused on that. There is one paper that basically claims that increasing political polarization of corporate America is not in the financial interest of shareholders. I’d have to remember exactly what they study in that paper, but I think they’re looking at the alignment between corporate executives and their boards, the political alignment, and looking at what happens when they leave.

Demsas: Yeah, we can put that paper in show notes for people to take a look at if they want.

There’s another paper—also, we’ll put that in the show notes—from Christopher Rosen last January [2024], and they found that employees experience negative affect after overhearing political conversations at work. Essentially, the effects are amplified when employees think their co-workers are less similar to them. So you’re more negative when you overhear someone who’s a Democrat, and you’re a Republican having kind of a conversation. And they’re attenuated when you overhear someone who has your viewpoints or you feel like it’s aligned with your ideological or partisan goals.

And so that seems pretty straightforward there, and I agree, these countervailing forces here feel difficult to sort out, particularly because an individual firm’s goal might be to increase the amount of good feelings that people within their company feel, but an industry or our goal as a society to try to create the most productive companies might be to have a lot more frictions happening in the workplace for the societal benefits that might bring.

It’s also like, the incentives are also countervailing here. There’s not really an incentive from workplace leadership, maybe, to try and make their workplaces more diverse in ideology, which I feel like is why there was such a push to try to find productivity benefits from ideological diversity—to try to incentivize this kind of corporate shift. But it seems rough.

Chinoy: I think that’s a good point. And I think the other thing I would add is that the conversation we just had is kind of focused on the interests and the efficiency and productivity of companies and workers. We also might have a social interest in partisan mixing and people who don’t think the same way politically interacting with each other.

Again, this is the kind of thing that, on its face, seems right. Like, we probably want people to interact with people who don’t think like them. Actually saying why that is good, politically, is not terribly obvious. Is it going to reduce support for, like, political violence or things like that? Probably not.

I think people have shown that people don’t generally believe in that kind of thing anyways. But you know, the extent to which I think mixing between Democrats and Republicans is good for our politics, I think that’s sort of another reason to be interested in this issue.

Demsas: Yeah, I want to emphasize for listeners, we’re not saying that, like, all these workplaces—and you’re not finding that all these workplaces—are 100 percent Democrat or 100 percent Republican. It’s just more likely to be. And so people might look around and say, I know the conservative at my job, and it’s like, Yeah, you know the conservative at your job.

So I think what you just said kind of segues into another finding in your paper, which is that there’s a persuasive aspect to this too. Just to tell you my prior, I feel like if I was constantly surrounded by very right-wing people at my job, I would probably only become more left-wing. But I do think that maybe your paper indicates that that effect is not the same for everyone—or maybe I’m just wrong about myself. Maybe I would be persuaded. But tell me about that finding. What did you see?

Chinoy: Yeah, so the story there is mixed. I don’t think what you’re saying is wrong about yourself. So the idea here is: What could explain political segregation? Well, one channel that could explain political segregation is sort of this conformity effect. People become like their co-workers, like their workplace over time. If I end up in a workplace with a lot of Democrats, I might be more likely to affiliate with the Democratic Party, and sort of vice versa with Republicans.

This has been shown, actually, with neighborhoods, and so people tend to adopt, to some extent, the partisanship of their neighbors or the people that they live around. And so we were interested in whether something similar could be happening at work. I’ll spare you the details of exactly how we estimate this, unless you want me to get into it, but the basic finding is that we find that the workplace can causally affect people’s partisan affiliation but only for people who don’t start out as committed Democrats or Republicans.

And so you’re not really getting people to change their mind. I think that’s kind of consistent with, perhaps, the story that you were telling about yourself. But people who start out as either independents or who start out as not registered with a particular political party, we find that moving to a workplace where the co-workers are more Democratic or more Republican tends to make those individuals more Democratic or more Republican, on average.

So there is some evidence of a little bit of an effect of the workplace on an individuals’ partisan politics or party affiliation. It’s not as big as in the case of neighborhoods, and so it seems like this channel has less power to explain the segregation that we see.

And in particular, the timing of this is kind of interesting. It looks less like the case that people switch to a new workplace and then adopt the politics of that workplace, and rather the case that people update their own party registration and then move to a compatible workplace, a co-partisan workplace. And that’s what kind of leads us to think, like, maybe it’s less the case that people are picking up the politics of their workplace and more the case that people are selecting jobs or workplaces, in part, based on politics or things correlated with their own party affiliation. And that’s the direction that we go in the paper.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: how firms use partisan language to appeal to Democratic versus Republican job seekers.

[Break]

Demsas: What is driving this, I think, is a very useful thing to spend some time on now. I could theorize a bunch of different streams by which partisan sorting shows up, like word of mouth and recommendations, or it might be driven through partisan networks, or Democrats are more likely to be academics, and Republicans are more likely to be petroleum engineers or business owners or whatever. And when you’re able to drill down into how people are sorting, what part of the employment timeline is this actually coming up in?

Chinoy: Yeah, that’s right. So it’s not a straightforward answer, in the sense that certainly it’s the case that we can see in our data that Democrats and Republicans are choosing different schools and majors and occupations and industries. And so, clearly, all of that matters. It sort of limits the available workplaces and the kinds of people that you could even possibly interact with at work. That is something we can account for statistically when we measure segregation. I kind of described how we did that earlier, and we still find that there’s residual segregation.

So what is explaining that residual? There are a couple of different ideas. And I think the two probably main ones are workers selecting partisan or compatible workplaces, or it’s some kind of employer-discrimination channel, where employers are hiring people of a particular party or want things correlated with a particular partisanship, partisan identity.

And we focus on worker selection in this paper, kind of for the reason that I mentioned, that suggestive timing of when people are moving to co-partisan workplaces after sort of updating their party registration. And we focus on the worker-selection channel. And we try to say, you know, Is it the case that workers are actually selecting jobs based on something related to their political identity and something related to how they perceive the politics of the company?

We do this in a survey, and sort of the key question, I think, to begin studying this is, you know, What do workers actually know about a company when they choose whether or not to apply for a job there? It could be the case that segregation is driven because Democrats, you know, want to work at companies with more Democrats, but, like, is that something you really know when you apply for a job? You don’t know that it’s 60 percent Democrats versus 40 percent or something like that.

And so to study this, we look at our big data set that we’ve assembled of all these companies and shares of Democrats and Republicans who actually work there. And we look at how these companies are signaling. We look at the language that they used to describe themselves, and we see how that correlates with partisanship, with the shares of Democrats and Republicans who are actually at that company. And we actually find that there’s quite a bit of signal here, that the Democratic companies are advertising themselves in a way that’s quite different from the Republican companies, even within the same industry.

And a lot of the actual signaling language probably won’t surprise you. It’s words related to the environment and diversity and community for the Democratic companies, and sort of the absence of those for the Republican companies. But the fact that these signals kind of come through so clearly in our data kind of leads us to study the extent to which this can drive sorting. And I’ll pause there for a second, but I can tell you more about that.

Demsas: I would like to talk more about that because I saw the ideological signals and company descriptions, and this is on LinkedIn, right? So how are Democratic firms versus Republican firms describing themselves?

Chinoy: Yes, exactly. So, again, I want to emphasize this is all within industries. So we’re not just comparing, you know, nonprofits, which tend to have more Democratic employees, to, say, energy companies or oil-and-gas firms, which tend to have more Republican employees. This is saying, Take two firms within the same industry. Look at the text that they use, the words that they use on LinkedIn to describe themselves. And we find empirically that there are these words that are quite correlated with the partisanship of the employees.

And again, it’s a lot of the kind of bundle of things related to ESG practices and things related to diversity initiatives and things that are related to more subtle, perhaps, things, like, We’re a company that really emphasizes community and teamwork among our co-workers—that tends to be empirically more Democratic—versus, We’re a company that really emphasizes customer service and efficiency and excellence. That tends to actually be more correlated with companies that have more Republicans, which maybe wasn’t necessarily obvious to me.

Demsas: Yeah. I saw this other paper come out recently by Erika Kirgios and her co-authors that looks at whether communicating measurable diversity goals attracts or repels historically marginalized job applicants. It’s a bit orthogonal to the broader conversation, but I think it plays into this part of your paper quite well.

They look at whether “adding a measurable goal to a public diversity commitment,” like, instead of, quote, “We care about diversity.” You might say, like, We care about diversity and plan to hire at least one woman or racial minority for every white man we hire. And they look at whether that impacts application rates from women and racial minorities. They find that it increases application likelihood among those groups by 6.5 percent, without sacrificing candidate quality. Interestingly, it’s mostly driven by white women. I’m not even sure that the racial-minority finding is statistically significant, though they do find that it’s positive.

I think about this in relation here to whether there are different subgroups that are more motivated to find a job with more of their co-partisans at work and how that changes with racial and gender—different subgroups. I don’t know if you have thoughts on that.

Chinoy: Yeah, that’s interesting. There’s a lot of interesting work studying how these kinds of job ads affect who applies. The other big one I alluded to before is about ESG practices. And there’s another case, I think, where you can think of ways to make that, like, verifiable. You could say that this company actually has some particular ESG designation.

And I think what is maybe interesting about our survey and our paper is that we actually aren’t signaling anything that is explicitly verifiable. There’s no stamp associated with, you know, a company that is more pro-Democratic or more pro-Republican. And yet, this sort of matters. And yet, job seekers clearly seem to pick up on these things and care about them.

Demsas: I think someone listening to this might feel like, Okay, is this just a function of this current moment right now? Like, overt partisan politics in the workplace is much more commonplace in recent years. And this prevailing narrative about, like, Politics shouldn’t be discussed at work. You know, Politics, religion—you know, leave that outside the workplace. That’s kind of an older view of the workplace.

When exactly were you conducting this? And do you have any sense of whether or not this is just, like, a 2017–2022 moment?

Chinoy: Yeah, it’s a great question. So to answer the question, our LinkedIn data is a snapshot from 2022, and our voter-file data, which we’re kind of using to track how people’s party affiliation changes as they move from workplace to workplace, starts in 2012. And so it’s covering, you know, a more recent time period, for sure.

The question of, Can we measure how this is changing over time? I think it is super interesting and a little bit hard, in the sense that you can see in our LinkedIn data, where everyone was working in 2010, but then you worry, Who are the kinds of people who have gone through and listed where they worked in 2010? And so you worry about selection, and so I find that kind of a hard question to answer.

I think that there’s suggestive stuff. So, you know, if you ask people in surveys if they’re willing to leave a job over political differences, you’ll find that it’s the case that young people are much more likely to say that. Now, was that true in 1962? I’m not quite sure. But that sort of points in that direction. You find that in other countries—in Brazil, for example—that this kind of political assortative matching has been increasing over time. You find that among corporate boards, again, this kind of thing has been increasing over time.

And so I think there are a lot of sort of suggestive indications that this might be something that is more pronounced today than it was a couple of decades ago. It’s really hard to say for sure, though.

Demsas: Yeah. It’s funny, too, because part of what’s happened over this time period, at least in the United States, is that our parties have become much more sorted on ideology. And so in the 1950s or whatever, there were a lot more conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, and that has changed significantly over time. And now most people who are ideologically liberal have sorted into the Democratic Party, so it becomes kind of difficult to measure this if you’re looking at just partisan measurements. Like, maybe there was more partisan diversity at workplaces in 1962, but ideological diversity was still really low, and people were still sorting. So I think there’s quite a difficulty with measurement there.

Chinoy: That’s a good point. It makes me sort of think of one other point, which is that for a smaller set of our sample, about 10 percent of our sample, we can measure their donation behavior. And so there, we can actually look at sort of a within-party measure of sorting. We can say, Is it the case that the more liberal Democrats, as measured by who they’re actually donating to, are sorting into workplaces with more Democrats, and vice versa for Republicans? And there, we also find pretty strong patterns. So there is an extent to which this exists even within party.

Demsas: Another question I have is about, like, obviously 2022—pretty tight labor market. So workers had tons of choice and ability to sort based on a bunch of different amenities. And I wonder if you think that this kind of sorting happens less in a high-unemployment environment. So, you know, God forbid, when there’s a recession at some point, or there’s a period of high unemployment, do you expect this kind of ideological sorting to go down?

Chinoy: Yeah, so I think the answer is yes. And I think that, again, that would be a pretty cool follow-up paper. I think that’s something that we can probably study directly in the data that we have.

I think that one piece of evidence here is, you know, how important are these kinds of what we call “ideological amenities” or “partisan amenities”? How much are these characteristics about a job—how much do workers value them, relative to other things that they might care about in a job? Our survey is designed to precisely measure the quantitative trade-offs people would make for these kinds of ideological amenities, you know, trading off against wages. It turns out to be about 3 percent of their salary.

Demsas: (Laughs.) That’s wild.

Chinoy: Is that big or small? I think it depends on your priors. But, you know, it’s certainly way smaller than what people would pay for health care or, you know, some of these sort of more—

Demsas: How do you measure that? How do you know someone’s willing to trade 3 percent of their salary?

Chinoy: Yeah. So this is kind of what I was getting at before. We pick up these ideological signals in the way these companies describe themselves. We use them to generate synthetic job ads. We want to ask workers in a wide range of occupations and industries about these different kinds of jobs. How do we do that without me sitting down and writing, you know, 10,000 job ads?

This turns out to be exactly the kind of thing that ChatGPT is good at, a large language model is good at. We can give it these kinds of ideological signals that we find, in our data, are correlated with companies with more Democrats and Republicans. We can give it a particular occupation and industry, and it’ll come back with a job ad that does emphasize these signals or doesn’t emphasize these signals, and then we ask workers about them in an online survey.

We ask them to explicitly make choices between these companies that are framed in different ways, and we vary the wages associated with these job ads, and that’s how we can sort of capture the strength of this trade-off. And so that’s where we get this 3 percent number. Is it big or small? It’s less than something like health care. It’s sort of actually comparable in magnitude to some of these softer amenities, things like having a relaxed versus a fast pace of work, for example, or having training opportunities at work.

People seem to care similarly about the ideological nature of the job. Of course, the difference is that our ideological amenities are precisely designed to split Democrats and Republicans. You know, Democrats care about the liberal one, and Republicans care about the other one. Whereas, Democrats and Republicans care similarly about, say, a relaxed pace of work. And so those other amenities can’t generate segregation, but the stuff that we study and design actually can generate segregation.

Demsas: I’m not surprised that people would trade off a little bit on wages in order to feel more comfortable at work with their ideological co-partisans. But I wonder if you were to tell people, Hey—your revealed preference is that you would sacrifice, like, X thousand dollars a year. Do you actually want to take that trade? With remote work, for instance, they’re doing these experiments now where people are like, Yeah, I will take a pay cut in order to be able to be fully remote. I wonder if people would explicitly say, Yes, in order to be at a more Republican firm, I will give you $3,000. I wonder if that’s a self-conception problem that we might run into if you made that explicit.

Chinoy: Yeah. So certainly we’re asking people in the survey to kind of make these trade-offs explicitly. You know, it’s job A or job B, and it’s $3,000 or not. I will say, also, that in the observational data, we don’t know individuals’ wages directly.

Again, that’s the problem I mentioned. People don’t list their salary in their LinkedIn profile, but we do know something about where they live and their occupation and their industry. We know what college they went to. And so we can take similar Democrats and Republicans—similar in terms of their demographics and where they live, and in terms of what exact college they went to, which is a pretty good measure of education or perhaps labor-market skills—and find that the Democrats are consistently choosing occupations and industries that pay less than the Republicans. And so there’s certainly some evidence, or some suggestive evidence, that there’s some trade-off that people are making between fit with the workplace, or their job more generally, and the actual salary associated with that job.

Demsas: There’s Gallup polling from February of last year that asked about U.S. employees’ experience with political conversations at work. And conservatives were much more likely to say that they had a discussion with co-workers about politics: 60 percent of conservatives versus 48 percent of liberals. That is contrary to, at least, my expectations. I’d expect parity, or maybe liberals would be doing it more. I don’t know why I had that expectation, but I was surprised.

It makes me think that maybe there’s some sort of mobilization aspect happening here, if conservatives are saying, in 2024, that they’re having conversations with co-workers about politics, and then, all of a sudden, conservatives win a trifecta. I don’t know if that’s playing into it.

Chinoy: That’s interesting. That probably goes against my priors a little bit too. I think I would have expected liberals or Democrats to be having more of these conversations at work. That’s interesting.

I think that, certainly, studying mobilization—it’s actually not clear to me, right? If you’re part of the majority group at your workplace, and then everyone’s like, Hey, let’s go vote for our guy, for our candidate. Is that actually going to make you more likely to turn out? Or is there some sort of backlash effect if you’re a minority and you say, you know, I really hate all these conversations I’m having with my co-workers. I’m going to go try to vote them out of office, or something like that? It’s not super clear to me what direction that goes in. I think that it is a great question.

Demsas: I’m revealing a lot about my psychology in this episode, going, like, Well, if I had 60 percent people who disagreed with me, then I’m definitely gonna go vote, you know? So maybe that’s not the average experience for people. (Laughs.)

Chinoy: Well, to tie this back, again, I think we find these, like, pretty heterogeneous effects on partisanship for people who start out as committed, versus not. And so I think there’s some sense in which maybe people who are younger and who are susceptible to political influence might adopt the politics of their workplace and perhaps turn out, and then people who already have a particular ideological stance or particular partisan attachment might be motivated to turn out as a backlash against the prevailing politics of the workplace. I’m not sure. I think that’s an interesting question.

Demsas: So we mentioned a couple times—I mean, you’re on the job market right now. You’ve mentioned academia a bit. I mean, have you seen any of this playing out in your own field? Like, this kind of sorting?

Chinoy: Yes. And I think that one fascinating thing, I think, is the sorting across college majors, which is something that we can see—sorting across colleges but also across college majors. And we can see this explicitly in our data. It turns out that economics is pretty much in the middle, which, when I tell economists, makes them very happy that it’s a discipline that doesn’t necessarily lean so far one way or another.

But certainly, higher education leans to the left in our data. Certainly, elite colleges lean to the left in our data. Certainly, many academic disciplines lean to the left in our data. And so I guess for lack of a more sophisticated answer, if you’re looking for a place with a good deal of partisan segregation, looking at universities is not a bad place to look.

Demsas: The mechanisms are interesting because you have this self-sorting. You lean a lot on people choosing these sorts of majors that are kind of correlated with their partisan identities or may help shape their partisan identities. And then they choose workplaces and things like that, and colleges, and down the line, etcetera.

But is there any impact that you can find on the employer side of selection? Like, I don’t know if you’re experiencing this at all, too, but there’s some level to which, when you’re in a job interview, they’re trying to suss out if you’re a good fit for the company. And part of that fit, I assume, might be ideological or partisan.

Chinoy: I think that’s absolutely right. And so I think that just isn’t the main mechanism or the main channel that we study in this paper, honestly, because we have to choose something. And so we focus on the worker side. Again, there’s evidence—from Brazil, in particular, there’s a paper looking at employer, you could call it, discrimination. There are audit studies in the U.S. looking at callback rates for résumés that signal whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, and there’s some evidence for that as well. So yes, I do think that kind of employer-selection story is certainly part of what’s going on.

Demsas: I think your focus on the employee side is actually really interesting, because I think it raises questions about allowing this kind of free choice, how that can lead to, maybe, societally suboptimal ends. There’s a new paper in the American Political Science Review from Jon Green and several of his co-authors that looks at demand for echo chambers.

And we think about echo chambers, and we’re like, Oh man, social media. It’s such an echo chamber. We’re talking about it as if it’s kind of imposed on us. And their intro of that paper has something interesting. They argue that “networked curation processes lead information consumption on social media in particular to be more politically homogeneous than [this] empirical literature has thus far suggested. However, this is more a reflection of democracy than a threat to democracy—a product of individuals engaging with information, and each other, on their own terms.”

Essentially, people are choosing to follow certain people. They follow creators. They follow influencers. They follow their friends. They follow people that make them feel good about themselves. There was this big outrage recently. I don’t know if you noticed—people were following the VP account on Instagram and then were shocked to realize that they were now following J. D. Vance, and now a mass unfollowing happened. And it’s like, you had curated your Instagram feed to be people you wanted to follow, and all of a sudden you see, like, J. D. Vance being inaugurated on your feed, and you’re like, How did I get on here? What’s going on?

And it’s an interesting question about—in previous generations, people went and they bought a newspaper, and you couldn’t just choose to take the parts of the newspaper that you wanted. You had to take it all. And you don’t do that anymore. So I don’t know if you have thoughts on that. Or should you want to change this, are there even ways to change this?

Chinoy: Yeah. I think that’s a really good point and interesting question: Is partisan segregation bad? Should we be worried about it? I think it is a very important, interesting question.

I will note that when labor economists study racial and gender segregation at work, they have a different set of motivations in mind. They have equity motivations in mind. These are protected categories. We really are worried, in particular, about differences in pay between groups doing the same work, whereas I don’t think we have the same equity motivations for being worried about Democrats and Republicans at different workplaces.

Demsas: DEI for conservatives in the academy is a very controversial conversation. (Laughs.)

Chinoy: Exactly. Yeah. So without going there, I think that we have different motivations to study partisan segregation at work versus these other forms of segregation.

I think that—and this is kind of getting to a conversation that we had a little bit earlier—it’s probably good that people get to do what they want and put themselves in workplaces where they feel happy and where the organization kind of aligns with their goals. It’s probably good that people work with co-workers who they get along with. It probably makes them, to some extent, more productive. Does it make the actual firms more or less productive? I think that is an open question, and certainly one that factors into this calculus about whether we think this is ultimately helpful or harmful.

And then, of course, I think the other really hard question to answer, which we talked about before, is: What does this do for democracy generally? Should we think that it’s bad that this place where we thought that partisans might be mixing more than other environments actually isn’t going to provide that kind of kind of mixing? What are, exactly, the consequences of that lack of contact between people who don’t think the same way? I think it is a hard question to nail down. I think we have this intuitive sense that probably it’s not so good if we really segregate ourselves politically. But actually quantifying or measuring and thinking about, What are the effects of that? I think is still an open question.

Demsas: One note of hope I might relay here is that—I thought about this in the context of my job, which is, obviously, not the average job in the United States, but I come into contact, in the context of my work, with people who don’t work here, all the time.

So for instance, I might come into contact with people who I’m interviewing, who are different from me, when I’m walking down the street, doing man-on-the-street interviews. But if I also conceptualize other jobs—if you’re in the service industry and you’re a restaurant worker, maybe all your co-workers behind the bar are on the same team as you, but you’re serving customers and talking to them and interacting with them, and that may also lead to a lot of that cross-partisan contact.

I think it’s both difficult—impossible, maybe even—and undesirable from a business perspective to be able to even do that sorting. Obviously, at some level, businesses do this, right? Like, if you have a rainbow flag in the window or something, you’re signaling to people. But, you know, in general, most jobs force you to interact with people outside of your workplace. And that sorting may happen much less in that context. So you could think of, like, your workplace as your home, versus, you know, when you go outside, and then you’re like, Okay, well, I’m interacting with people who are different than me, but I have a place to go back and, you know, dish with my co-workers about how rude they were.

Chinoy: Yeah, so I think that studying the extent to which different occupations interact with customers or with the public and whether that sort of has some bearing on these effects on political views, I think would also be interesting. When they say the workplace is a context for this kind of cross-cutting discourse, I think what they usually have in mind is, like, with fellow co-workers. But certainly, you’re right that those aren’t the only people that you interact with in the context of work. And so that would be super cool to study.

Demsas: Well, that’s a great place for, I think, our final question, which is: What is an idea that you once thought was a great one but ended up only being good on paper?

Chinoy: So I thought about this a bit, and if you’ll forgive me, I think I’m going to mention another academic paper, which is related but not exactly the same. So one thing that I’m super interested in, as someone who’s interested in politics and demographics and data, is the extent to which these demographic characteristics, some of which we’ve been talking about, are really predictive of politics and party affiliation and things like race and gender and age.

And I think what is tempting, then, is to say, There are these strong correlations that exist between politics and demographics. We know something usually about demographic trends in the U.S., whether a particular racial group is growing, whether people are becoming more educated, on average, or not. And so using that to make predictions about what’s going to happen to politics and to elections, I think, is really tempting.

This is the idea that, you know, people are becoming more educated, on average, and more-educated people tend to vote for Democrats, and so the Democrats are going to do better in the future. There are various versions of this argument, and it’s quite tempting to make, but it turns out it doesn’t really work.

There’s a paper by one of my advisors, Vincent Pons, as well as Jesse Shapiro and Richard Calvo where they test this. So they look at the correlation between politics and demographics in a particular election. They say, If these correlations were the same in the next election and we sort of just tracked the evolution of demographics from election to election, how good would that prediction be? And it turns out that it’s quite bad. It’s sort of worse than just guessing that it’s gonna be 50–50, Democrat or Republican.

And I think that sort of goes to show that—it’s kind of interesting that these demographic correlations are so strong in the moment. But also, these trends are kind of slow moving, and politics responds kind of quickly, and parties respond to where they see their electoral advantages.

Demsas: Demographics are not destiny.

Chinoy: Yeah, I could have just said that, and I think I probably would have gotten the same point across. But this is a longer way of saying that.

Demsas: No, it’s great. We’ll put the papers in the show notes as well. But thank you so much, Sahil. This was fantastic.

Chinoy: Thanks for your time.

[Music]

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Are We Thinking About Gun Violence All Wrong?

2025-02-04T06:00:00-05:00

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There are two Chicago neighborhoods that are, on the surface, quite similar. They are both more than 90 percent Black; the median age of both is roughly 38. About the same share of people have college degrees, and the median income of both is roughly $39,000.

But one experiences about twice as many shootings per capita as the other.

The University of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig opens his forthcoming book, Unforgiving Places, by describing the neighboring places of Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore, both minutes away from the elite university where he teaches. Ludwig’s argument begins by reframing the problem of gun violence away from the demoralizing story of American exceptionalism and toward the more granular variation that differs state by state, city by city, and yes, block by block.

“Whatever you believe about the causes of gun violence in America, those beliefs almost surely fail to explain why Greater Grand Crossing would be so much more of a violent place than South Shore,” Ludwig writes. “How, in a city and a country where guns are everywhere, does gun violence occur so unevenly—even across such short distances, in this case literally right across the street?”

Talking about gun crime almost always turns into talking about gun-control legislation, a debate that has been happening my entire life and I’m sure will continue past my death. But on today’s episode of Good on Paper, Ludwig and I spend little time on that topic, focusing instead on policy levers that could reduce gun violence but don’t require national gun-control legislation.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: In 2022, Louisiana had the second-highest rate of gun deaths in the country. I’m just back from a reporting trip to the Lake Charles area, and I had a few people remark rather pointedly to me that my home of Washington, D.C., is a violent place, seemingly unaware that D.C. has had a significantly lower rate of gun deaths than Louisiana for many years now.

Why do some places see higher rates of gun violence than others? It’s an incredibly important question to answer rigorously. Homicide is a leading cause of death for young adults, and the vast majority of those homicides happen with guns. But this is a topic where the politics rarely line up with actionable solutions.

After the COVID-19 crime wave, politicians have scrambled as they place crime at the top of the agenda again and are searching for public-policy tools to address violence in their communities.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at the Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is the economist Jens Ludwig, from the University of Chicago, who has spent his career studying the economics of crime. He has a book coming out in a few months called Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of Gun Violence.

Jens and I talk about the classic explanations for why gun violence happens in some places and not others. He pushes back against the classic right-wing explanation that the problem is bad people and the classic left-wing argument that solving the problem of gun violence requires ending mass social inequalities first.

One note about the show: We’re going to begin adding the studies and articles and books we reference in the show notes, so you can easily access them for further reading. A link to Jens’ book will be there, too, if you’d like to investigate his argument further.

Okay. Jens, welcome to the show.

[Music]

Jens Ludwig: Thanks so much for having me. It’s such an honor to be here.

Demsas: Jens, you have a book coming out in April called Unforgiving Places. What’s it about? What are you arguing?

Ludwig: The book basically makes two arguments. One argument is that we’re despairing about the problem of gun violence because we’ve thought about it as just all being about gun control, and I think that’s not true. I think the problem of gun violence in America is partly about guns, and it’s partly about violent behavior. And if we can’t do anything about the guns, we can at least try and do something about the violent behavior. And the experiences of L.A. and New York over the last 30 years show us that there’s real progress that you can make there.

And then I think the other core argument of the book is that violent behavior is not what we’ve thought. I think most people have thought of violent behavior in America as being about thoughtful, deliberate action that leads you to focus on incentives, like bigger sticks or more enticing carrots. And in fact, I think most shootings in America are instead fast-thinking, reactive—it stems from arguments. And that leads us away from relying exclusively on incentives and towards a very different type of policy that we just haven’t been talking about or thinking about.

Demsas: When I was reading your book, there was a stat that just has been rattling around in my brain since I read it. You write that shootings account for fewer than 1 percent of all crimes but nearly 70 percent of the total social harm of crime. What does that mean? And how is that even measured?

Ludwig: Yeah. So the way that economists think about that sort of thing is very analogous to how environmental economists think about environmental harm. If you go back to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska a million years ago, there’s the tangible cost of cleaning up the bay or whatever it is, and then there’s the sort of social costs that don’t show up on any sort of budget spreadsheet anywhere. That’s the “harm to this pristine place now being ruined forever” kind of thing.

And so environmental economists have come up with ways of quantifying those sorts of intangible costs. And we can use the same sort of approach to measure the harm for crime as well. It basically comes down to what people are willing to pay to avoid exposure to different types of crime.

And so what you can see is people really don’t like disorder. They really don’t like having their bicycle stolen, their car stolen. I lived in cities for the last 30 years. I’ve had almost every sort of property crime that you can imagine happen to me. But the thing that people really, really are petrified about is staring down the barrel of a gun. And I can tell you that from firsthand experience. I was held up at gunpoint myself on the South Side of Chicago, going to pick up my older daughter from her piano lesson about five years ago.

My University of Chicago colleague Steve Levitt did a study where he showed that every serious crime that happens in a city reduces the city’s population on net by one person—so fewer people moving in, more people moving out. Every murder that happens in a city—the overwhelming majority of murders in the United States, unfortunately, are committed with guns—every murder that happens in a city reduces the city’s population by 70 people. And I think that’s another way to sort of see exactly how much the gun-violence problem in America is driving the crime problem.

Demsas: I also think it’s just remarkable to really think about this in perspective of how much effort we spend in trying to eliminate certain types of crime. I mean, if 70 percent of total social harm is shootings, then the vast majority of our efforts should just be focused on guns. And property crime should take a backseat, all this sort of thing. Intuitively, we understand that, obviously, murder is worse than other forms of crime, but I think the degree to which that is driving America’s violence problem and crime problem and the harms that ricochet out into communities is, I think, not well understood.

Ludwig: Yeah, I one million percent agree. And I think it also sort of helps you see a path to a criminal-justice system, a law-enforcement system that kind of sidesteps a lot of the current political fights that we’re having. I think everybody agrees that gun violence is a hugely serious problem, that we should be holding people accountable for this.

Even the mayor of Chicago, who I think within the political distribution is one of the more progressive elected leaders in the United States—he’s going around talking about the need to improve the odds that shooters get arrested and wind up behind bars. And so I think this much stronger focus on gun violence would be a way to concentrate everything on the thing that the American public really cares the most about. It sidesteps a lot of the fraught political debates about how we do enforcement over lots of other things that the public doesn’t like, but it’s not the first-order thing that they’re worried about.

Demsas: So there’s familiar pattern that I think most people are aware of when it comes to the gun-policy conversation in the United States, and it’s: There is a tragic mass shooting—maybe at a school, maybe at a nightclub—and then there’s this intense rallying to pass gun legislation.

And economists have quantified this. There’s a study that showed that a mass shooting leads to a 15 percent increase in the number of firearm bills introduced within a state the year following that shooting. Interestingly, in states with Republican-controlled legislatures, those are often laws that loosen gun restrictions. But even when looking at Democrat-controlled legislatures and laws that tighten gun restrictions, studies often struggle to find significant impact of these laws on reducing gun violence, reducing deaths, reducing mass shootings.

In your book, you also seem kind of pessimistic about the potential for gun legislation to have a large impact on reducing gun deaths. Why is that?

Ludwig: Yeah. Let me respond in two ways. The first is: Federal gun laws set a floor, not a ceiling, on what cities and states can do. And so lots of cities and states around the country, including my home city of Chicago, have enacted gun laws that are more restrictive than what you have under the national law. And the problem with that is that we live in a country with open city and state borders. So what Gary, Indiana, is doing about air quality affects the South Side of Chicago, and vice versa, right?

And in the same way, like, my family for the last 18 years has lived in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. Our favorite ice-cream place in the area is Dairy Belle in Hammond, Indiana. So we spend 20 minutes driving down there every summer, like, way too often. And when we come back from Indiana into Chicago, nobody stops us at the city border to check what we have in our trunk.

And when you look at where the crime guns are coming from in Chicago, almost none of them come from a gun store in Chicago. They come from places like, you know—there are gun stores quite close to Dairy Belle in Indiana that are big sources of crime guns in the city. So I think the way that you want to be thinking about gun regulation, I think, is very analogous to how you would do something like regulate air quality. And that’s to think about regulation at the national level in a world in which you’ve got what an economist would call lots of externalities across jurisdictions in their own laws.

Demsas: But even federal gun-control legislation has often felt, at least from my overview of the economics literature, like it hasn’t had a massive impact, whether it’s assault-weapons legislation or other forms of gun-control legislation that’s passed over the past few decades. Is that just a reflection of the fact that these laws are pretty modest in what they’re attempting to do? Or does that indicate that we can’t really attack this problem legislatively?

Ludwig: What I would say is: Most of the national gun laws that we’ve enacted in the United States are very modest, as you said. I think the biggest problem with the gun laws that we have in the United States is: Most of the laws regulating gun acquisition—you know, gun sales—only apply to gun sales that are, basically, carried out by a licensed gun dealer.

And that’s something like 50 or 60 percent of all gun sales in the U.S. And the other 40 percent are almost completely unregulated under federal law. Some states try and regulate that, but that’s not a loophole—that’s like a chasm that you can drive a truck through. And you know, when you look at where the guns used in crime come from, you wouldn’t be surprised to see that’s the most important source of crime guns that you see in Chicago and other cities around the country.

But you know, I think the difficulty of cities and states regulating their way out of the gun-violence problem, and the difficulty of substantially changing national gun laws, has led a lot of people to conclude that gun violence in America is a hopeless problem, because we can see that the gun-control politics are stuck.

So one way that I’ve come to think about this is that that’s too pessimistic a view. And the reason for that is that gun violence is not just about guns; it’s about guns plus violence. So it’s having lots of guns around, but also having people who use them to hurt other people. And if we can’t make much progress on the gun-access part of things, the good news is that there’s a second path to progress, which is to try and change the willingness of people to use guns to hurt other people.

We have something like 400 million guns in the United States, in a country of about 330 million people. And I think the existence proof that shows us that you really can make a huge difference on the gun-violence problem by figuring out how to control violence comes from the Los Angeles and New York City experience over the last 30 years.

So in 1991, the murder rate per 100,000 people in L.A. and New York was very similar to Chicago, actually, at that time. It was something like 30 per 100,000. So to give you a sense of what that means: In London, the murder rate is something like one or two per 100,000. So the United States is just totally off the charts. Almost all of those extra murders here are committed with firearms.

And in the 30-year period following that—so 1991 (the peak of the crack-cocaine epidemic), 30 years after that, up through 2019 (the last year before the pandemic)—the murder rate in Los Angeles declined by 80 percent; the murder rate in New York City declined by 90 percent. And those are cities that are swimming in the ocean of, you know, hundreds of millions of guns in America. And I think that speaks to a more optimistic take, that it is not a hopeless problem—not just that something can be done but that something substantial can be done.

Demsas: The other variation you point to in your book that is what really intrigued me is that Canada and Switzerland also have above-average rates of gun ownership, but they don’t have particularly high rates of murder in line with what we would expect if you just took America’s experience. And I think I had this kind of model in my head that it’s just like, If you have this many guns, there’s nothing you can do. Like, that’s the situation. There will be variations based on other things, like whether the economy is doing well or whether we’re incarcerating people or not, or how many cops there are on the street and what they’re doing. You’d still see variations in crime, but you would always have some kind of baseline level of criminality.

But I want to get to the core argument of your book, which I think is maybe encapsulated by a pretty provocative question on the back cover, which says, “What if everything we understood about gun violence was wrong?” This is a very bold claim, and I’m excited to explore it with you. But I think that the first part of that is unpacking what it is that you mean by “everything we understand about gun violence.” You lay out two competing theories that Americans hold about the causes of gun violence. One is the “root causes theory” and one is the “wickedness theory.” Can you just walk us through what those two are?

Ludwig: Yeah, the conventional wisdom in America right now says that violent behavior is thought through, right? So it’s either bad people who aren’t afraid of whatever the criminal-justice system is going to do to them, or it’s people in bad economic conditions who are desperate in doing whatever they need to do to survive. And both of those conventional wisdoms on the right and the left actually have something in common, which is: They think of gun violence as being sort of a deliberate behavior, and that leads us then to focus on incentives to solve the problem. You know, We need bigger sticks, if you’re on one side of the aisle, or if you’re on the other side of the aisle, We need more enticing carrots.

I think the thing that’s so striking is that it just doesn’t fit with what all of the data tell us gun violence in the United States is. Most shootings are not premeditated, and most shootings are not motivated by economic considerations. They’re not robbery. They’re not drug-selling turf. That’s all what psychologists would call “System 2” slow thinking.

Most shootings, instead, stem from arguments. They’re reactive, or what psychologists would call “System 1” thinking. And the fact that so many shootings stem from these sorts of in-the-moment conflicts that go sideways and end in a tragedy because someone’s got a gun, that helps explain why deterrence is imperfect. Someone acting very reactively is not thinking through a jail sentence. And it also helps explain why a social program that’s intended to reduce poverty—like give somebody a job, give somebody cash, whatever—that also isn’t solving the violence problem.

Demsas: I want to hold here a bit because I think this question, Are people making rational calculations? is both at the heart of a lot of economics and also the heart of what we’re going to talk about for the rest of this episode. And I accept that I do not think that I or anyone else is constantly doing a benefit-cost analysis about every action that I take, even if it is as important as whether you pull out a gun and shoot someone.

But I wonder whether that undersells the rationality that still exists, right? Because we know that deterrence is possible. We know that when we increase the certainty of capture—if you know you’re going to get caught for shoplifting, if you know that you’re going to go to jail if you shoot someone—that significantly decreases crime incidents. And what that indicates to me is that there is a level of benefit-cost analysis happening, even if people aren’t fully using that System 2 part of their brain.

Ludwig: Yeah, I one hundred percent agree that deterrence is really a thing. I’m a card-carrying economist. I work at the University of Chicago. I totally believe that incentives matter and that deterrence is a thing. But I think that this really connects very importantly to where we started, that gun violence is the part of the crime problem that is the thing that drives the total social cost of crime.

So in many ways, crime is an unhelpfully broad term. It’s almost like disease. What would you do about disease? I mean, I don’t even know how to think about answering that. Like What are we talking about? Like, pneumonia or cancer? And crime is a similarly unhelpful, super-broad umbrella.

And there was a study, for instance, done in Sweden a few years ago where they looked at what happened when you put cameras up in the subway system. And what you could see is that property crimes go down when you camera-up the trains, but violent crime doesn’t go down, right? And I think what that tells you, partly, is that different behaviors are shaped differently.

The key breakthrough of behavioral economics and behavioral science over the last couple of decades is to realize that our minds work in two different sorts of ways. There’s the deliberate, sort of rational benefit-cost calculation that psychologists call System 2, and a sort of very reactive, automatic, below-the-level-of-consciousness cognition that psychologists call System 1—or fast thinking and slow thinking.

And different behaviors are driven by different types of cognition. And so stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family is much more System 2 than what you do in an argument. Let me just point the finger at myself, first and foremost here. I’m not saying anything about other people’s behavior that is not true of my own behavior.

I’ve lived for 18 years in Hyde Park. It’s a little University of Chicago village in the middle of the South Side of Chicago. Every Wednesday morning, I take my dog, Aiko, out for a little walk. One day, I’m walking down the street, and about three or four doors down from me, there’s a neighbor whose dog is off leash, runs down the driveway, and attacks my dog.

Demas: Oh God. I hate that.

Ludwig: No, exactly. And this guy, the neighbor—his kids are literally in the same classroom as mine at the lab school. He lives four doors down from me. I have every incentive in the world to handle that gracefully and constructively. And that’s exactly what System 2 rational thinking would have done.

It turns out: That is exactly not what I did in that case. I assume this is a podcast where people don’t curse, but you can only imagine the stream of four-letter, seven-letter, and twelve-letter words that came out of my mouth at this guy who I’m going to be seeing for years into the future. I’m going to be seeing him at the parent potluck at school.

And so it really speaks to this idea of: In these super high-stakes moments, where people just don’t have very much bandwidth and they are relying on sort of very fast thinking to navigate, we are not always our best selves. We are not thinking about benefits and costs and things off into the future. We can make mistakes. All of us can make mistakes.

And in my case in Hyde Park, I was very lucky that neither one of us had a gun. But in a country with 400 million guns, you know, lots of people are in situations like that and behave the way I did and, unfortunately, they or the other person’s got a gun, and it ends in tragedy. And those tragedies, really, I would just point out, claim two lives. Somebody does something stupid in a moment and, you know, you spend the rest of your life in prison, and somebody else winds up dead. It’s multiple tragedies stemming from that.

Demsas: First, is your dog okay? Was everything fine?

Ludwig: Yeah, she’s a big chicken. She’s, like, a 70-pound shepherd mix who decided, rather than to try and defend herself or whatever, she would—I don’t want to throw my dog under the bus here. Everything turned out fine. She’s a lover, not a fighter. (Laughs.)

Demsas: (Laughs.) Your dog also is in System 1 thinking.

Ludwig: Yeah, exactly.

Demsas: Well, first, we’ll shout out the late Danny Kahneman here and his Thinking, Fast and Slow book, which provides much of the foundation of the System 1, System 2 model that you’re talking about here.

But I want to push here a bit because I think one of the common objections people have to this line of argument is that, yes, it is the case that, whether someone’s coming at you or you’re worried about your dog, and you don’t react the in the way that you might if you used your logical brain to react if you had time to think—but given that if you place every single American in the exact same conditions, you still see large variations in how people choose to respond, right? Like, all the people who are in conflicts in the South Side of Chicago do not shoot each other. A very small minority of people are choosing to shoot each other, even if they have access to a gun.

And so doesn’t that push against this idea that the problem is this System 1 thinking? Like, there is something particular about the choice to pull out a gun and kill someone in that moment. And it’s not just, Well, anyone can make that mistake, because even if you think about this demographically, we’re seeing mostly young men make this mistake and make this choice. There is something going on here that is not just, You’re not able to think under stress.

Ludwig: Let me take your question and sort of turn it on its head for a second. One of the things that I point out in the book is like a version of an observation that Jane Jacobs made 60 years ago in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is: When you look at similarly poor neighborhoods in American cities, you see huge variation in crime rates, especially violent crime.

And as I mentioned, I lived for a long time in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. There are two neighborhoods just south of Hyde Park. There’s Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore that are socio-demographically, historically almost identical in terms of their racial and ethnic composition, their socioeconomic composition. They’re adjacent neighborhoods, so they’ve got exactly the same gun laws; they’ve got exactly the same social policies. When people get caught, they get sent to exactly the same court system. So all the incentives that conventional wisdom would say would matter are identical. And yet the shooting rate per 100,000 is, in most years, about twice as high in Greater Grand Crossing than literally across Dorchester Avenue in South Shore.

Demsas: Wow.

Ludwig: So that’s sort of taking the premise of your question and noting that the incentive explanation certainly doesn’t explain all of the variation that you see in gun violence either.

So what could it be then? I one million percent agree with you that—at its core, the argument here is: People are people, and a lot of what determines the outcome of this interpersonal conflict is the situation that someone finds themselves in. But if it’s not socioeconomics, and it’s not the characteristics of the criminal-justice system, what else would it be?

And I think in many ways, Jane Jacobs was really onto something 60 years ago in thinking about what that thing would be. To sort of connect an experience that I had in Chicago a couple years ago to Jane Jacobs’ insight, I was in the juvenile-detention center on the West Side of Chicago, I’m talking to a staff leader there, and he says, I tell all the kids in here, “If I could give you back just 10 minutes of your lives, none of you would be here.”

And one of the insights that Jane Jacobs had 60 years ago is: If the problem here is people do things in these 10-minute windows that they later regret, you could almost sort of think of fraught social interactions as like a high-wire act. And one of the ways that you can help people is by—what do they do in the circus for high-wire performers? They have a safety net there.

And one of the safety nets that you have much more of in some neighborhoods than others is essentially what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street”—prosocial adults who are around and able to step in and deconflict things when it happens. And you could see exactly that when you look at South Shore versus Greater Grand Crossing.

So there is, for instance, much more commercial development in South Shore than in Greater Grand Crossing. And what that means, in practice, is that there’s just lots more foot traffic in the community in South Shore than Greater Grand Crossing. And so if a group of teenagers is getting into an argument, there’s more likely to be, like, a neighborhood adult around to step in.

It’s also the case—so my friends Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir have a wonderful book that came out a couple of years ago, called Scarcity, where they point out that one of the many challenges of being poor in the United States is living in day-to-day circumstances that tax mental bandwidth. It’s just very stressful, right? And people with limited bandwidth wind up relying much more on System 1 than people who are less bandwidth taxed.

So when you look at the data, you can see all sorts of indicators that there’s much more stress and bandwidth tax for people living in Greater Grand Crossing than South Shore. And what that would lead you to conclude is that the people who are in Greater Grand Crossing are going to be more likely when they’re in these difficult, 10-minute, fraught interactions with somebody else to rely on System 1 to navigate that than their more deliberate, rational benefit-cost-calculating selves.

So I think the sort of left-of-center perspective that there are root causes that matter is definitely right. I think it’s totally right for property crime—you know, crimes shaped by economic considerations. I think it’s just a little bit incomplete with respect to the part of the crime problem that the public cares the most about, which is gun violence. And so I think we just need to expand our lens about what aspects of the social environment we want to be prioritizing for our public policies.

Demsas: I’m a housing person, so I’m a big fan of the Jane Jacobs book and the argument that she kind of draws out, and I think people can imagine this if they’ve been in streets and communities like this before, is when you have kind of mixed-use development—you have a coffee shop, and above that coffee shop, you have apartments, and across the street, there’s also a park, and there’s also a school nearby—is that that means that throughout the day, there are many different kinds of people watching the streets.

Versus if you had just a fully residential area, and then during the day, everyone’s basically gone because they’re either at school or work, so it really empties out of people to watch things. Or if you have a fully industrial area, where when people go home for the day, there’s nobody there. Or commercial area, same thing. And so when you have these kinds of mixed-use-development areas, it feels a lot safer because you can just always feel like there’s someone around doing normal business or taking their kids to school or whatever.

So I would love for housing policy to be the key. But is your argument, then, that the differences between neighborhoods that have similar socioeconomic problems, similar legal environments, etcetera but a large variation in gun violence is largely a function of their urban form?

Ludwig: I just—I absolutely adore that this is a sort of empirical, data-intensive, data-nerd podcast, and so in that spirit, I do think one of the big challenges for making progress on the sort of the crime and criminal-justice problem is: A lot of it is editorializing rather than guided by data. And so I think one of the key things that I tried to do in the book is really stick to the data and see what the data are telling us.

And so does the built environment matter? There was a wonderful study by Mireille Jacobson and Tom Chang that looks at what happens in Los Angeles when marijuana dispensaries open or close as a result of some regulatory change and when food places open and close.

That’s like the natural experiment of Jane Jacobs, like, let’s put in more mixed use—and what you can see is that when a retail establishment closes and foot traffic goes down, crime goes up.

There was a wonderful study by a great team at the University of Pennsylvania that worked with the City of Philadelphia to do a randomized experiment where they picked a bunch of rundown, vacant lots all over the city and picked half of them to redevelop and turn into little pocket parks. And what you can see is that the pocket parks then wind up bringing more people out of their homes and spending time there in public. And you can see that people feel safer, and they are safer. Gun violence goes down as a result of that.

My research center, the University of Chicago Crime Lab, we did a randomized trial with the City of New York a couple years ago where we helped put increased street lighting in some public-housing developments and not others. And one of the things that that would do is also potentially get more people out in public. We see violence decline there as well.

And then one other thing that I would just add—actually, two other quick things that I would add to this is: I think it gives you another way to understand all of the research and economics that suggests more police reduce crime. I know you had Jen Doleac on recently; you guys were talking about this.

I think most people would say, Oh that’s, like, deterrence or incapacitation. But when I look at the Chicago Police Department, for instance, the average Chicago cop makes about three arrests—not per week, not per month—per year. Three arrests per year.

Demsas: Wow.

Ludwig: So it’s, like, not a gigantic arrest machine that is generating all of this massive deterrence. What are police doing? Well, one of the things that they might be doing is helping interrupt these 10-minute windows. It’s something preventive, right? And I think that is a potentially important part of it.

And the thing that I would add to this, as well, is that sociologists believe that one of the most important determinants of a neighborhood’s violent-crime rate is what they call “collective efficacy”—this is research from the 1990s—the willingness of neighborhood residents to sort of step in and do something when there’s some sort of problem in the neighborhood. And I think that also is very consistent with this kind of behavioral-economics view of the gun-violence problem and what to do about it.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: the problem with focusing on the “root causes” of gun violence.

[Break]

Demsas: Someone listening to this will say, How is this different from the root causes analysis that you kind of critiqued? Right?

Because there’s a really great quote that you have in your book, which is that we “treat gun violence as something that will get better once we fix everything else that’s wrong with society.” And I think that’s a frustration that a lot of people have, is that they are sympathetic to the idea that if we invested more in education, or if we invested more in social-welfare programs and UBI (universal basic income), expanded health care, that there would be reduced crime in 20 years, in 30 years.

But that doesn’t really respond to the specific concern of, Tomorrow when I walk to school, am I going to get shot? Can you help distinguish between your analysis and that root cause analysis?

Ludwig: What I hear in Chicago is something that you hear in lots of cities around the United States, is like, Gun violence is just a symptom of poverty, and we’re never going to solve the gun-violence problem until we solve the poverty problem.

And let us all hope that’s not true, because, as you know even better than I do, we’ve been working really hard for decades to try and solve the poverty problem in the United States, and it’s proven to be very difficult. I think the key optimistic observation or suggestion that we get from this behavioral-economics perspective on the gun-violence problem is: We can make massive changes in the gun-violence problem by changing parts of the social environment that are much easier to change than poverty and segregation and all of these other super big, super important social problems.

If I could wave a wand and I could end poverty and segregation in Chicago, believe me—I’d be the first person to wave that wand. And so I’m not arguing against any of the policies trying to do that. They’re super important. It’s more like, What else can we do on top of that to really start to make a meaningful difference on the gun-violence problem?

And I can’t wave a wand and end poverty in Chicago, but what I can do is: I can make it easier to have commercial development in Greater Grand Crossing than we currently have here on the South Side of Chicago. I can strategically deploy money to turn a bunch of vacant lots that are littered with empty broken beer and tequila bottles and turn that into a little pocket park that people are willing to be in. I can put money into things like block clubs. I can do some version of what the University of Chicago does, like put unarmed private security guards on some key corners to make sure that there’s an eye on the street because of that. So there’s a bunch of pragmatic things that you can do that can really make a difference that sort of complement these other efforts to address these really big root causes.

And maybe the one other thing I would just add: You might look at that sort of strategy and say, To some people, that’s going to feel unsatisfying that it is addressing a symptom, not the underlying cause. Like, we’re leaving the root causes there, and we’re just treating the symptom of the root causes. But I actually think what that concern or that perspective misses is that the causal arrow runs in both directions between gun violence and root causes, if that makes sense.

And you can sort of see a lot of these communities are in vicious cycles right now, where it’s like: You’ve got a lot of gun violence. People and businesses leave—fewer eyes on the street, fewer community resources to build the kind of public infrastructure that helps address this problem, even more gun violence, even more people leaving. There are lots and lots of neighborhoods, lots and lots of cities that are trapped in that sort of vicious cycle.

But if you can get the gun-violence problem under control. I think you can see that you can turn those vicious cycles into virtuous cycles. I think of gun violence, you know, not as a symptom of some deeper thing but in many ways as the social problem for cities that sits upstream of so many of the other social problems that cities are trying to wrestle with.

Demsas: To give your model in layman’s terms: Gun violence and shootings happen because there’s a large availability of guns and because people are not interrupted in pulling those guns out in the midst of a heated moment. So as you point out in your book, the vast majority of shootings are happening in the course of an argument—not in a premeditated sense but in [the sense] that someone bumps you on the sidewalk, or they insult you, or something like that—and that violence, that shooting happens because there’s no one to step in and say, Hey. Let’s calm things down. Is that kind of the overview that you’re giving us?

Ludwig: Yeah. The highest-level version of this is: All of our policies have conceived of gun violence as a problem of System 2 slow thinking, when I think it’s, actually, mostly a problem of System 1 fast thinking.

And so for starters, we just need a big reorientation to understand differently what the problem actually is to be solved. And once you have that reorientation—once you sort of think of gun violence as a problem of not bad people unafraid of the criminal-justice system, not people in bad economic circumstances stealing to feed their families, but normal people making bad decisions in fraught, difficult, 10-minute windows—one thing that you start to do then is start to think about, How do I change the social environment so there are more people, more eyes on the street to sort of step in and interrupt? And the other thing that you start to think more seriously about is, like, How do I focus my social policies more on helping people understand their own minds better and anticipate what they’re going to do in these difficult 10-minute windows?

And one of the ways that we can do that is through a very different type of social program than we’ve typically thought of in the U.S.—these behavioral-economics-informed programs like Youth Guidance’s Becoming a Man or Heartland Alliance’s READI program or YAP and Brightpoints’ Choose to Change program. These are all things that we’ve subjected to randomized controlled trials in Chicago.

And what they basically are doing is: They’re helping people understand that they’ve got fast thinking as well as slow thinking and recognize that their fast thinking can get themselves into trouble in these fraught moments, and helping them anticipate that and sort of better navigate those 10-minute windows. And you can see in randomized experiments that that reduces risk of violence involvement by, depending on the study and the time period, like, 30 to 50 to 60 percent. How you scale that, I think, is the frontier scientific and policy challenge, but at least now we can sort of see the direction that we’ve got to go.

And the other thing I would just add is: I think this behavioral-economics perspective also helps us understand why education is so important for solving the violence problem, but not in the way that people have historically thought. Most people would say, Yeah, of course, education is so central to solving the crime problem, because education improves people’s earnings’ prospects, and blah, blah, blah.

And it’s true that education is hugely important for people’s earnings prospects, and education is good for making better citizens. It is good for lots and lots of reasons. But the other thing that the data tell us education does is: It helps people learn to be more slow thinking and skeptical of their own minds in high-stakes moments. That turns out to be sort of a key byproduct of everything that schools ask people to do.

And I think of education as, like, in many ways, the most important sort of crime-prevention, gun-violence prevention tool that we have. I think things like rote learning are not what we want either for educational purposes or from the perspective of making schooling as sort of crime preventive as possible. And so I think there are other ways of reimagining what school does, which would be good for making school sort of more helpful for a world in which things like problem-solving are increasingly important for economic outcomes, but also super valuable for making education more helpful in addressing the gun-violence problem.

Demsas: You alluded to this a couple of times now, but it’s interesting that there’s one way to interpret your result as just, as like, We need to put a bunch more cops on the street, and those can be the eyes on the street. And that is kind of consistent with the literature we explored in the Jen Doleac episode around why increasing numbers of police officers can reduce crime, and violent crime, in particular. And the other avenue—I mean, these are complementary—is that there needs to be more attention on how to improve people’s System 1 thinking. And the Becoming a Man program, which I think is now really popular, is a great example of that.

But scaling these sorts of things is really, really difficult, as you mentioned. Are you indifferent between these two policy avenues, like an increased number of police officers, versus investing in programs that improve people’s ability to understand their own System 1, System 2 thinking? Or is it that you really want people to do one of those over the other? And in which case, it does seem very difficult to scale Becoming a Man and other programs. We have not been able to do that, despite years and years of positive coverage of that program.

Ludwig: For starters, I would say, we should be pushing on every possible front to solve this problem. It’s a huge humanitarian problem, one of the key drivers of Black-white life expectancy disparities in the United States, hugely important for the future of our cities that are the key economic engine for the whole country. So I wouldn’t say, like, Let’s do this or this. If we have multiple things that could be helpful, I’d say, Let’s push on every front.

On the eyes-on-the-street stuff, I would say, There’s tons of scalable stuff there, and it’s not just hiring more cops. So you can hire more cops in cities that like cops. You can put unarmed security guards on the street. You can fund community-violence-intervention nonprofit groups. You can clean up vacant lots and turn them into parks. You can improve street lighting. You can change zoning laws and permitting rules and whatever to make it easier to have stores interspersed with residential in a neighborhood. Tons of different things there that you could do, depending on the local political environment in your city, all of which are super scalable, all of which would be super helpful, all of which would increase the chances that there’s some sort of prosocial adult around who can sort of step in and de-escalate something.

On top of that, I think then there’d be huge value in trying to figure out how to scale the social programs that also help people better understand their own sort of thinking. And I think one of the most exciting visions for the future here comes from artificial intelligence, weirdly. My University of Chicago colleague Oeindrila Dube did a fascinating study with Sandy Jo MacArthur, who used to be at LAPD for many years, and my friend Anuj Shah, at Princeton.

They basically did Becoming a Man for cops. And what was so interesting about it is: Becoming a Man works with teenagers in middle school and high school. And it’s, like, an adult working with these kids, and that’s super hard to scale, because the program counselor is expensive, and they vary in skill, and How do you hire enough people? and everything that makes a social program hard to scale.

But the Becoming a Man for cops—what they did is they had this artificial-intelligence-driven force simulator thing, where they give cops feedback to see when their System 1, their fast thinking, is leading them to an unhelpful response, through a bunch of simulation exercises that the AI can do. And you look at the randomized control data, and it seems to have remarkably helpful impacts.

And I think the thing that’s so exciting about that is: Thinking about AI as a human-capital development tool lets you see, Oh I see. Once you’ve got the software, the marginal cost for rerunning software is super low. And the great thing about software is that it basically runs the same way over and over again. So we might be looking at a future where AI can be a super valuable way to enhance human capacity in ways that include addressing one of the most important social problems facing cities, which is gun violence.

Demsas: We’ve gotten a little bit into this, but trying to compare all three theories that are kind of existing out there: When we’re thinking about the root causes theory, that leads us to believe that we should invest a ton in antipoverty measures and expand healthcare, job-training opportunities, UBI, whatever. And then the wickedness theory kind of indicates that we should just try to root out and incarcerate bad people for as long as possible to prevent them from doing crime. Your theory, the “unforgiving places” theory—what do you want policy makers to take from that?

Ludwig: The first thing I want policy makers to take from this is to recognize that the gun-violence problem itself is different from what we think. Again, it’s not a problem of System 2 deliberate, slow thinking, people responding to incentives. Gun violence is mostly driven by System 1, reactive, fast thinking. That’s the most important thing.

From there, I would say we need to do two types of things. We need to change those aspects of the social environment that reduce the risk that conflict escalates. And related to that is, too, just in the safety net, is whatever your position on the Second Amendment, I think this is also why guns out in public are particularly worrisome. If people want to have 500 guns in their basement locked up, that’s one thing. But when people are taking guns out on the street, that’s the thing that makes interpersonal conflict on the South Side of Chicago so much more dangerous than interpersonal conflict in the south side of London or whatever. So people around to deconflict conflict when it happens, and anything that we can do to get guns off the street would be super helpful.

And then I think policies that help people, you know, both K–12 education and things like, you know, Becoming a Man to try and help people better anticipate and navigate those 10-minute windows. And that’s a policy agenda that really doesn’t make much sense under either the conventional wisdom of the left or right, right now. Those things aren’t about changing people’s incentives, so it’s like, Why in the world would they possibly work? But I think they’re really central to making huge progress on the problem. And I think if you look at the experiences of L.A. and New York over the last 30 years, they validate that view, or they’re certainly very consistent with that view, at least.

Demsas: Jens, always our last and final question: What is an idea that you once thought was great and ended up being only good on paper?

Ludwig: Great—so we launched a big research project with the superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools a couple of years ago. The huge priority of this superintendent was truancy. So Chicago used to have something like 150 truancy officers for its 600 schools in 1991, and with budget cuts, they got rid of all of them. And then you look at the data and, like, there are tons of kids who are missing three or four weeks of school a year.

And so you look at that, and the superintendent is like, This surely is a key reason that kids are not doing well in school. So Jon Guryan and I launched this big research project with CPS, and we worked really hard to try and figure out how to get kids to come to school more often, without the punitive whatever of truancy officers. With a bunch of partners, we managed to figure out a way to get kids to come back to school more often. And then we look at the data, and we see it does not boost their learning at all.

Demsas: Oh wow.

Ludwig: So weird, so counterintuitive. You would think, If you don’t go to school, you can’t learn. It’s super intuitive. And yet, you get kids to come to school more often, and they don’t learn.

Demsas: Wait. What’s going on? Doesn’t that kind of conflict with a lot of ed-policy research?

Ludwig: Yeah. So super weird, right? And so it was only very recently that Jon and I were looking at data right after the pandemic, and what you can see in the data is, for instance, if you look at eighth graders in Chicago, the average eighth grader in Chicago academically is like a sixth grader. And something like a third-ish of Chicago eighth graders academically are, like, closer to fourth graders.

Demsas: Wow.

Ludwig: And the eighth-grade teachers—their feet are being held to the fire to teach eighth-grade content. And so then you ask yourself, Why is it the case that sending a kid who, academically, is at the fourth-grade level to school to be taught eighth-grade content doesn’t improve their learning? Like, to ask the question is to answer it.

Demsas: So it’s like, basically, the kids who are missing a bunch of school are more likely to be the kids who are way behind in school. And so they’re going to benefit less from being in school.

Ludwig: Exactly.

Demsas: Oh wow. That’s a very depressing answer.

Ludwig: Yeah, we were confusing, you know, What is a cause, and what is effect? And so it seemed good on paper. Now we realize that there’s a very different underlying problem that we’re working hard to fix. But that’s my depressing answer to leave you with.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was fantastic.

Ludwig: Thanks so much for having me on. It was great.

[Music]

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

To Rebuild Los Angeles, Fix Zoning

2025-01-31T11:06:54-05:00

Day to day, most people can safely ignore that New Zealand rests along the boundary between the Indo-Australian and Pacific tectonic plates. But nature has a way of asserting itself. At 12:51 p.m. on February 22, 2011, the city of Christchurch was rocked by the aftershock of an earthquake that had struck more than five months earlier. Nearly 200 people died in this tragedy; some 70,000 were displaced.

According to the Insurance Council of New Zealand, at more than $31 billion, this was the “biggest insured event” in the nation’s history. Ten thousand homes needed to be rebuilt and another 3,500 demolished. As a result of this sharp decrease in housing supply, the cost of shelter spiked. In the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake, New Zealand activated emergency authority to require local governments in the metro area to rezone land for housing, and the city proper was forced to allow denser townhouses as well. According to a 2021 report to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the rezoning was described as “releasing decades of land in one go.”

The Christchurch City Council estimated that 41 percent of the housing growth from 2010 to 2018 was a result of legalizing denser housing in the city. More ambitious changes followed elsewhere, most notably in the nation’s largest city, Auckland, which was pressured to allow—and fast-track—lots of new housing. A number of economic studies have subsequently shown that these reforms increased the supply of new houses while moderating prices: According to one study, rents would have been 28 percent higher without such reforms. The policy was a success, yet New Zealand still struggles to provide sufficient housing, and residents spend 30 percent more of their income on housing than the OECD average. Even with smart policies, it can take years, if not decades, to fully address a shortage.

New Zealand shares many similarities to the United States. It’s a car-dependent, heavily suburbanized country; more than 80 percent of the nation’s homes are detached, single-family homes—20 percentage points more than in America. And today, America’s second-largest city is facing its own natural disaster, and a set of choices for how to rebuild.

There are few places in the U.S. with a tougher housing market than Los Angeles, meaning there are few places where the destruction of several thousand homes would be harder to bear. By one estimate, Los Angeles County is 500,000 affordable homes short of having sufficient housing for its residents; an appalling homelessness crisis has resulted. Now, on top of this, one estimate predicts that the Los Angeles fires have consumed up to $275 billion in total damages and economic losses. According to Redfin, 6,354 homes have been destroyed or damaged, resulting in significant downstream consequences. “A rental listed for $16,000 per month got bid up to $30,000,” one agent recounted.

[Read: How well-intentioned policies fueled L.A.’s fires]

In the coming months and years, the Los Angeles housing market, already extremely tight, will feel the strain of displaced homeowners and renters looking for a way to stay in the region as their neighborhoods undergo the long process of rebuilding. And it is a long process—just look at the state of Hawaii, where just three of the 2,000 homes destroyed by the 2023 wildfires have been rebuilt, Reason reported last week. The interminable pace is due in large part to the local and state governments’ failure to shape the regulatory environment to encourage housing production.

At least in California, policy makers are showing some signs of life: California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order waiving some of the red tape that holds up housing production, such as the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). But Newsom’s order applies only to properties that burned down or were substantially damaged, and it prevents new housing from exceeding 10 percent of the original structure’s footprint and height. This means, in most cases, that only a single-family house like the one that existed previously can be built.

“I’m glad the governor and the mayor have issued executive orders to try to make it easier for people to get quick permits,” California State Senator Scott Wiener, a leading housing advocate, told me. “But I think it’s really important not to force homeowners to automatically rebuild the same way as before.”

Wiener and others, such as newly minted Representative Laura Friedman, whose district covers parts of Los Angeles, have argued that exempting infill housing from CEQA—not just rebuilding what was there before—is a crucial part of the solution. In a phone call last week, Friedman told me of a friend who’d lost her Pacific Palisades home of 50 years to the ongoing fires. But, Friedman went on, the family doesn’t necessarily need to replicate their old home. “She and her family are devastated,” Friedman told me, “but she told me that at her age, she prefers to now move into a condo in a place where she’s not going to be worried every night about another fire.”

The persistent threat of future wildfires means that California’s challenge is not just to rebuild what was lost, but also to build much more housing in areas less prone to wildfires to begin with. It sounds remarkably elementary: If you don’t want people to live in places that are likely to burn down, you have to build in places that aren’t likely to burn down.

[Read: How Los Angeles must rebuild]

Los Angeles has tried this. Days after being sworn into office in December 2022, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed a directive to ensure that housing developments where all the units are affordable would get their permits within 60 days rather than languishing for months or even years, bypassing some of the onerous requirements and regulations that usually accompany multifamily housing. This change spurred production of apartments affordable to people making less than $100,000. After a little more than a year, developers submitted plans for more than 13,770 affordable units—nearly as many as the city approved in 2020, 2021, and 2022 combined, CalMatters reported last year. Some studio units are expected to go for as little as $1,800, a remarkable coup for unsubsidized new construction in expensive Los Angeles.

It’s exactly the type of policy that would weaken incentives to build farther out into wildfire-prone territory. In fact, the program was so successful that Bass has been backpedaling on it ever since. As the story often goes, the triumph of the program meant that a lot of new buildings were allowed, sometimes in neighborhoods where at least a few residents opposed new development and complained to their local officials. Soon enough, the policy reversals began. Bass exempted areas with single-family homes from accessing the streamlined affordable-housing permits (which make up 74 percent of the city’s residential land) and then layered on a series of requirements that turned the policy from “remarkable” to “status quo,” one economist remarked.

Andrew Slocum, a developer who has affordable-housing projects approved under this program, told me he is frustrated by the rollbacks and his sense that political leadership isn’t taking the housing crisis seriously enough. Slocum recently sent an email to the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety as well as to Bass’s office arguing that the city is illegally holding up housing projects contra state law. This is not an isolated complaint. Last fall, a county judge ruled that L.A. had violated state and local law when it blocked 360 affordable apartments near single-family homes. Los Angeles is not the first California city to be accused of flouting state requirements to permit housing more quickly: Malibu, Berkeley, Huntington Beach, and other localities have all come under scrutiny.

I reached out to Bass’s office and the L.A. Department of Building for comment, and the mayor’s spokesperson Zach Seidl replied in an email, “Since taking office Mayor Bass has executed a comprehensive strategy to confront housing unaffordability in Los Angeles.”

Seidl also told me that L.A. permits more Accessory Dwelling Units “than anywhere else in California.” This is unsurprising. Los Angeles is the second-biggest city in the nation and is almost three times as large as the next-biggest city in California. Last year, the Los Angeles Times looked at ADUs permitted per 1,000 housing units and found that L.A. barely cracked the top 10 of cities in Los Angeles County.

[Read: The truth about NIMBYs]

This is the trap California has set for itself. In order to prevent costly damages from wildfires and further residential incursions into fire-prone areas, you have to provide more housing in dense urban corridors. But in order to satisfy NIMBY gadflies and antidevelopment members of the Democratic coalition, you have to make it difficult to build new housing basically everywhere.

Los Angeles and even California are not alone in trying to balance these concerns. And in most contexts, it’s easier to fold to short-term political pressure that prevents new construction. But the math is quickly changing. In acceding to critics, policy makers might think they are satisfying their residents’ desire for stability and maintaining the neighborhood character of these communities. But by hell or high water—quite literally—change is coming anyway.

Why States Took a Gamble on Sports Betting

2025-01-28T06:00:00-05:00

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Addiction comes in many forms and a lot of them are perfectly legal.

Daily, I fight the urge to scroll—for hours—on various social-media apps, yet I can go months without drinking alcohol and not even think about it.

The question of whether to ban harmful behaviors or substances is one laden with competing priorities: How intrusive is the government intervention? How harmful is the substance? Would banning it even work to curb the behavior? What about the economic impact of a ban? What sorts of revenues can be gained from taxation instead?

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the journalist Danny Funt, who has been reporting for years on a behavior that’s come under much scrutiny lately: sports betting. Renewed debate over bans on sports betting erupted into public view nearly seven years ago in a pivotal Supreme Court case. The decision opened the door to a variety of new state legalization schemes and the outcomes have been mixed, at best. Although states may have stumbled onto a new source of revenue (albeit weaker than some were expecting), it has come at a cost to gamblers’ financial and mental health. The results have turned even vocal proponents into skeptics.

“I interviewed Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts who signed the bill legalizing bookmaking there in 2022, and then a few months later became president of the NCAA and has become a really vocal champion for limiting the amount of betting on college sports, particularly in light of the brutal harassment that college athletes and coaches get whenever their performance costs someone a bet,” Funt recalled. “It’s honestly horrifying, the sort of stuff they see on social media and in real life. And he has said point-blank, ‘I wish, in hindsight, this had stayed in Las Vegas.’”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: The Super Bowl is coming up, and so today we’re talking about the most important part of sports: gambling.

In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting that spurred four years of nonstop ads enticing me and you and everyone I know to spend all our discretionary income on FanDuel or DraftKings. At the time, advocates believed that the revenue streams that could come from sports betting were too good to pass up. After the Great Recession, states were cash-strapped and hungry for new sources of money.

States have unevenly legalized, meaning in some places, you can log onto your phone to place a bet, and in others, you might still need to go to a physical location. The Court left open other pathways for the federal government to curb or ban sports betting, and as many of the negative impacts of gambling have metastasized, more policy makers are questioning whether legalization is worth the revenue.

My name is Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic. And this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is Danny Funt, a journalist who has tracked the rise of sports betting for The Washington Post and is now working on a wide-ranging book on the topic.

[Music]

Demsas: Danny, welcome to the show.

Danny Funt: Thank you for having me.

Demsas: So I have actually never bet on sports. I grew up in a Christian household—I am Christian—and it’s just not a thing that my parents ever allowed. We couldn’t even make dollar bets at home. Like, it was just not allowed. And I feel like I knew later on that I had kind of an addictive personality. So I was like, I’m not going to do this. I’m just never going to get into betting or gambling. Have you bet on sports? Is this something that you do?

Funt: Oh yeah. I’m trying to be more honest about that. I used to be like, Well, if you were a restaurant reporter, you’d have to eat out. You’d sort of be obligated to see what the culinary scene is like. So I do the same with sports betting. But truthfully, I was betting on sports long before I ever wrote about it.

I will say that the more you learn about how significant the house’s upper hand is, it definitely gets in the back of your head, and I do a lot less now just knowing I don’t stand a chance.

Demsas: How significant is it?

Funt: It depends on what you’re betting. The standard is actually pretty low. They’ll win $5 for every $100 you bet. But nowadays, that’s getting jacked up. So you might have heard of things like parlays. The parlay hold percentage, which is like the house revenue or the house edge, can be as high as 20 percent. So you’re getting beat pretty bad if you bet a lot of parlays.

Demsas: So sports betting, I feel like, I really did not hear a lot about, other than just when the World Cup is on, and your friend might bet you 20 bucks about the outcome or something like that. And now I feel like it’s everywhere. I feel like I’m seeing ads everywhere. I feel like every time I look over on the Metro, like, there’s some 17-year-old guy on DraftKings—well, let’s hope he’s 19, not 17. But it feels like it came out of nowhere. What happened?

Funt: It really did. That’s really what got my attention: It just felt like, overnight this went from something that we had all been taught was this existential threat to sports, that the professional leagues and the NCAA would never support—there were basically a century’s worth of scandals involving gambling that motivated that concern—and then, suddenly, there was a Supreme Court decision in 2018 that struck down a federal ban on bookmaking outside of Nevada.

And that really was a starting gun for all of these states to say, Hey. This is a way we can raise money and cash in on this opportunity. And it was incredible how night and day it was, where what I described as this existential evil was suddenly repackaged as this wholesome way of enjoying sports that every sports fan ought to consider.

Demsas: So take us back to 1992, where that federal ban was enacted. It’s called the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. What led to that effort? Who was pushing for it, and why did they think it was necessary?

Funt: Yeah, I was surprised to learn that it was the professional sports leagues, mainly the NFL, that went to Congress and said, Hey—we need this. So a lot of states back then were facing severe budget deficits. You know, it’s the tail end of the Reagan era; there’s a lot of resistance to tax hikes.

And naturally, when you need to raise money, but you don’t want to raise taxes, states will look at gambling. And there was sort of a groundswell of loosening the laws around tribal casinos and state lotteries. And a lot of states began looking at, basically, a version of state-sanctioned sports betting, where a state lottery is giving people the chance to wager on sporting events.

And the sports league said, We hate this idea. We’ve allowed it in Nevada because it’s been there forever, but we don’t want this to be the way that our fans engage with our product.

Demsas: Why? Why were they opposed?

Funt: For one, the 1919 Chicago White Sox scandal, where, famously, the team rigged the World Series in cahoots with gamblers—that is front and center still. Pete Rose had just been banned for life for betting on baseball as a player and as a coach. Really every decade, if you look back in the history books, there’s a major scandal involving college sports or professional sports or whatever. Beyond that, they just thought, We like the idea of fans liking the games for the games’ sake, and if they’re looking at it through this cynical gambling lens, it’ll kind of cheapen their relationship with sports and diminish our product.

Demsas: That’s very altruistic, right? I mean, I would imagine these sports leagues are just like, What can make us money? You know what I mean?

Funt: Definitely. At the same time, that does make them a lot of money. Think of all the jerseys and pennants and other merch that people buy because they’re lifelong sports fans. It fuels a lot of irrational, obsessive behavior. And then again, so does gambling.

So you can understand why it was very tempting, over time, for the leagues to flip-flop and come around on that. But the Senate and the House held these really robust hearings to evaluate the threat of gambling, the benefit that state-sanctioned gambling might pose. And it was just so striking, to me, that they laid it all out on the table in the early ’90s, and then fast-forward: 25 years later, there was really none of that. It was just, Okay, let’s cash in.

Demsas: So Nevada, you mentioned, has always been exempt from PASPA. What has been their experience?

Funt: Around the ’50s, when casinos were taking off in Nevada, sports betting was sort of an amenity, kind of like an all-you-can-eat buffet, you know? It’s just one more thing to draw people in so that they go to the table games and the slot machines that really make money. So in a lot of ways, sports betting was an afterthought.

And yet, many of us thought, If we ever wanted to bet legally on sports, that’s the place to do it. So people would schedule March Madness trips to bet on college basketball, or they’d go during the Super Bowl to bet on that. So it was a pretty big draw, but it was also very marginal in terms of the bottom line for Nevada gambling operators.

But gambling on sports still existed well beyond Nevada in the U.S., because there’s this thriving black market. And one of the big arguments for legalization, just like with cannabis, was, People are going to find a way to do it, so let’s bring it above board, tax it, implement consumer protections. And at least that was a pretty convincing argument in favor.

Demsas: You mentioned the Supreme Court decision, Murphy v. NCAA. That’s the Supreme Court decision that basically strikes down this federal ban. What was the legal argument at issue there? Why did the Supreme Court find that the federal government cannot ban sports betting?

Funt: So crucially, they very explicitly said they can ban sports betting—they had just gone about doing it with a defective bill. So naturally, Supreme Court decisions tend to get oversimplified in the public conscience, but this one is so crucial because sports betting’s advocates took the decision and said, Aha! The Supreme Court has given the green light for sports betting or okayed sports betting.

Really, the case turned on a fairly obscure Tenth Amendment concept about states’ rights. And sports betting was the focus, but it was also kind of beside the point. So New Jersey said that what the federal government has done, in essence, is said, We want to ban sports betting, but we don’t want to regulate it. So we’re going to commandeer the states to do the federal government’s bidding. If they had legalized sports betting before 1992, that’s grandfathered in; it can remain on the books. If they hadn’t, they’re prohibited from changing their mind and legalizing it.

So this argument before the Court wasn’t, Should the federal government be allowed to ban sports betting? It was, Should they be able to tell the states that if they have an existing law, they can’t change it? And, you know, it sounds like the most thrilling Supreme Court oral argument. It was actually pretty dry because it’s so obscure in that way. But the effect was to overturn this ban that had been on the books for a quarter century.

Demsas: What was the state interest in legalization? This is Murphy v. NCAA. That’s Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat. Why was he so hell-bent on taking this on?

Funt: The funny thing is: It was really Chris Christie, his predecessor, who was hell-bent on taking it on, and it really annoys Christie, who views bringing sports betting to New Jersey as one of his crowning achievements. It pains him to this day that the title of that case was updated to reflect Murphy because he took office before the decision came out.

But they had this long-standing economy, mainly in Atlantic City, that was really struggling. They looked at Nevada and were quite envious that sports betting brings people to the state around these major sporting events, year after year, and they said this would be a way to revitalize Atlantic City.

So the argument they brought to the Court wasn’t, Let’s have online sports betting across the country. It was, Let’s have in-person sports betting in these casinos in Atlantic City to jumpstart this ailing economy. As you can imagine, after that, all these states said, Hey—we also could use a lot of tax revenue and jumpstart our economies. Especially during COVID, when so many states were facing pretty dire budget deficits, they said, This is a fairly easy way to snap our fingers and have access to this influx of cash.

And that tends to happen a lot with gambling—is you’re facing some sort of economic or state budgetary issue, and this is a quick fix. So once New Jersey did it, and Delaware and Pennsylvania and a number of other early adopters, there was this ripple effect, where states look to their neighbors and say, Hey—they’re making money off this. We feel like chumps because we’re not. Let’s get on board. And the bandwagon really got off and running.

Demsas: So one thing that’s interesting is that—I’m confused why there’s been such a big focus or why sports betting has been so central to this story, when it feels like all types of online gambling are legal in lots of places now. So can you help me understand why that’s been so front and center?

Funt: I mean there’s so many video games or phone-based apps where it’s like, Hey—do you want to buy some tokens with real money? And then you’re playing with tokens, and then you convert the tokens back to real money, so it’s very sly.

There’s this whole phenomenon of what are branded as sweepstakes, where it’s essentially a loophole to allow people of all ages to risk money on sports, but it’s not called gambling. And you might remember: There’s a long history of things finding loopholes to offer gambling by a different name, most notably the whole daily-fantasy-sports boom that paved the way for sports betting.

So you’re right. It is part of a wider phenomenon. It’s interesting that true online casino gambling, like slots and roulette and poker, was predicted to follow from legal sports gambling. That was what a lot of these companies were banking on. And although about a half dozen states have legalized it, it hasn’t caught on quite as quickly as some of their investors’ hopes, and we could get into that.

Demsas: Yeah, why not?

Funt: The main reason is that the brick-and-mortar casinos think it’ll cannibalize their business, that if people can bet on those games on their phones, they’re not going to bother to make the trek to a retail casino to do the same thing. So I still think that’s going to be in the headlines a lot in the coming years, as states look for more ways to bring in tax revenue.

But to your question about why sports betting seems so dominant, part of it is just: The advertising is unbelievable. These companies are spending billions of dollars every year to get it in front of potential customers in as many ways as possible. As you were saying, you see it on the train. Same here in North Carolina. Billboards, signs downtown—everywhere you look there’s an appeal to get you to start betting on sports, not to mention all the TV ads. So the marketing is just overwhelming.

And then beyond that, it is startling, in that this was seen as something that was done in the shadows, and now it’s so mainstream and really being rammed down people’s throats in a way that a lot of people are quite concerned about.

Demsas: So what is the landscape now, right? Like, after Murphy, states had to pass their own legalization schemes. Right now, D.C. and 27 states allow online sports gambling, and there’s some regional concentration here that I thought was interesting—basically, the entire Northeast and the mid-Atlantic, as well as the Midwest. But lots of the South hasn’t. The Pacific Northwest hasn’t. California and Texas haven’t. What kind of explains this regional variation?

Funt: I think in the Northeast, state lotteries are so deeply rooted. Massachusetts, for example, has the highest-grossing state lottery per capita. So I think it’s easier to transition people into a new form of gambling. In a lot of parts of the country, like California and Texas, tribal interests are so powerful—they’re resisting anything that would threaten their business. In parts of the South, there’s a strong conservative Christian aversion to gambling still, although I think that’s dissipated a lot from one of the main reasons why the country didn’t adopt more gambling sooner. So yeah, it’s a lot of cultural and political reasons.

Demsas: One story of yours really kind of shows how haphazard the legalization process has been. Can you tell us about the Abunai gambler in D.C.?

Funt: Yes, so as you mentioned, D.C. is one of the places that legalized sports betting. Like many places, they did it quite hurriedly and sort of made things up as they go. And one interesting decision the D.C. government made was to have a city-sponsored sports-betting operation, as opposed to letting these companies like FanDuel and DraftKings run the show. So you could bet through those companies at stadiums and arenas, but if you are out and about on your phone or at a lot of these betting terminals in cafés and restaurants and bars, you are betting with a city-sponsored sportsbook called Gambet[DC].

And these terminals—they sort of look like ATM machines. They popped up all over the place, including at this tiny poke shop called Abunai. And one of the interesting things about betting terminals that professional gamblers were quick to pick up on is: Unlike if you’re going to a brick-and-mortar sportsbook, where you give your ID and they pay close attention to who it is betting, you bet anonymously through these terminals. So if you’ve sort of cracked the code and figured out an edge, you can bet anonymously, basically limitlessly, through these terminals and make a killing.

And this one guy found deficiencies in the odds in this poorly run city-sponsored sportsbook. It’s kind of incredible how bad the odds were compared to the rest of the market. Like, it didn’t take a genius to pick off vulnerable games to bet on. So he just finds a list of places in the city that have these betting terminals. Abunai was the first alphabetically on the list. So he says, Okay, great. They have a nice owner and staff, who didn’t mind him basically turning it into his home office.

And day after day, he would just dump cash in this machine and bet as much as he could—so much so that it swung the entire city’s betting numbers so that an overwhelming amount of money was being bet through this one store. He was winning so much that the entire city-run sportsbook was net negative for an entire month, which is unheard of. We all know the house always wins. D.C.’s sportsbook was run so poorly the house lost, in a month.

Demsas: How does that happen? Like, what is going on there?

Funt: So basically, sports-betting odds are often like efficient markets. So just like it’s really hard to beat the stock market, it’s really hard to beat who’s gonna win, you know, a football game or a basketball game, over the long haul, because, basically, the world’s collective wisdom is informing the spreads and the odds on these games.

But the people who are running Gambet[DC], this D.C. sportsbook, were very slow to update the odds. Sometimes, they would just have errors in how they input the information, so they just clearly have the equivalent of a typo in inputting the odds. Just not a lot of oversight. Even though it’s a pretty airtight business, you still need a lot of smart people running it and automation to manage it.

So this guy just picked off all these bad lines and bad odds. And statistically, he gained the upper hand, because if Gambet[DC]’s odds are way out of sync with the rest of the market, chances are the rest of the market’s right.

Demsas: So you literally just have to look at what the market is telling you, what the odds are in other places, and then just go sit down at Abunai Poke and just say like, All right, looking at my phone, what’s going on, on DraftKings or whatever, and then just do that.

Funt: Precisely. He was betting on sports that he didn’t follow at all. He had no expert insights into them. It was just, A respected sportsbook has the odds at this number. Gambet[DC]’s are off in this way. I’m gonna err on the side of the respected sportsbook and bet against Gambet[DC]. And it was hugely profitable, at least as long as he got away with it.

Demsas: Do you know how much money he made?

Funt: Yes, so thanks to some public records that were turned over, only over the course of three months, he profited more than $400,000—pretty unheard of, even for an incredibly successful bettor. That rate of return is just remarkable.

Demsas: Wow. So I went down a rabbit hole, when I was researching for this episode, about American history on sports gambling. And I did not know the role of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy—the OG Bobby Kennedy—his crusade against sports gambling. And learning that, kind of in the middle of the 20th century—you touch on this a little bit, but—that the real focus on outlawing sports gambling was about combating organized-crime syndicates.

Bobby Kennedy wrote an article in The Atlantic in April 1962 about this issue. And just quoting from it:

As I sit down today to write this article, a business executive with an industrial firm on the Eastern seaboard is telephoning a bookmaker to place a fifty-dollar bet on a horse race; a factory worker in a Midwestern town is standing at a lunch counter filling out a basketball parlay card on which he will wager two dollars; a housewife in a West Coast suburb is handing a dime to a policy writer who operates a newsstand as a front near the supermarket where she shops.

These people, and millions like them who follow similar routines every day, see nothing wrong in what they are doing. Many of them can afford the luxury of this type of gambling. They look upon it simply as taking a chance.

He continues:

But they are taking a chance which the nation and its economy cannot afford. They are pouring dimes and dollars day by day into a vast stream of cash which finances most illegal underworld activities. The housewife, the factory worker, and the businessman will tell you that they are against such things as narcotics, bootlegging, prostitution, gang murders, the corruption of public officials and police, and the bribery of college athletes. And yet this is where their money goes.

So I did not have a sense that this was a big part of the modern conversation around sports gambling. Is this kind of resolved, or are we still worried about gambling, kind of, going to these underworld activities?

Funt: Yeah, first of all, it’s a great article you turned up. I’m excited to find it myself and read it. That was definitely one of the arguments for legalizing sports betting around 2018, after that Supreme Court decision, because a huge amount of money was being bet through offshore sportsbooks that operated illegally online, taking tens of billions of dollars in wagers from Americans. And there was some evidence that the criminal syndicates that were operating those sportsbooks did a bunch of other criminal activity.

So just as RFK was saying, you’re, in effect, patronizing those sorts of criminal activities. That’s not always the case. Some of them were just Americans who were bookmakers in the U.S. and got tired of getting arrested, so they went to Latin America and set up websites where they could take bets. It wasn’t quite as sinister as that. But at least as the argument went, it was a real boogeyman, that you’re funding criminal organizations, and, Why not fund taxed, legitimate companies by making this legal? So yes, that was definitely a significant argument.

And I think as far as that kind of conscious capitalism goes, well, the sportsbooks that operate today definitely aren’t, you know, also selling drugs and prostitution and all those things. There definitely is some hand-wringing among people of, Does gambling exploit vulnerable people? Do we know that this is making problem gambling more prevalent? And by betting safely, are you still, in effect, funding companies that take advantage of people? So it’s not quite as potent as the argument RFK laid out, but it’s definitely still relevant.

Demsas: And what has the impact been on legalization? Has legalization reduced off-book gambling. Can we even really measure that?

Funt: So you’re right. It’s impossible to know exactly how much gambling is going on under the table. It always has been. I think some of the estimates were inflated to make the argument seem more convincing, but it by no means has eliminated it or even put the dent in it that a lot of the advocates for legalization promised.

Again, in 1992, they looked at all these different types of cause-and-effect things to think about, and one of them was: If you legalize an illegal activity, do you snuff out the black market, or do you just grow the pool of people doing it and, in fact, actually convert some people who might not have been doing it, who are then going to look to the black market, for a variety of reasons? So when it comes to sports betting, yes—there are definitely those offshore, illegal sportsbooks that are hurting because of this.

But there are also people who took up sports betting because they saw ads everywhere and all these generous new-customer offers and started legally, and then they said, Hey. There’s a bunch of different reasons why betting illegally might be advantageous. Maybe I don’t want it showing up on my bank statement. Maybe I don’t want my winnings taxed. Maybe I want to be able to bet much more illegally than you’re able to do so legally, if I’m a winning bettor. So yeah, in some respects, it’s put the offshore business on the ropes, and in other respects, it’s sort of created a funnel of new customers for them.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: what’s gained and what’s lost in states where online sports betting is legal.

[Break]

Demsas: I want to delve into the welfare harms of people who are engaging in sports gambling. But before I do that, I think because of your articles and a lot of other arguments being made and research coming out, there’s a growing narrative about the potential mistake that this was in legalizing gambling. But I think that can be helpful to go back and think in the minds of states who were interested in legalizing gambling. What was going on with them? Like, how much money are they actually making off of this? And what sorts of things is it going to?

Funt: Yeah, that was definitely the No. 1 argument, was, Hey. Let’s just bring in more revenue without taxing people—always, you know, a strong selling point for at least some people.

So whether tax revenue has exceeded or failed to meet expectations varies state by state. In total, since that Supreme Court decision and all these states started legalizing, a little more than $7 billion has been raised in taxes from sports betting for state governments. It’s important to note that $2.6 billion of that has gone to New York State alone, the largest legal sports-betting state, which also has the largest tax rate, so they’re just getting an epic windfall compared to the rest of the country.

Many states simply send the money to their general fund. Some states, like Colorado, specifically earmarked it—in Colorado’s case, for water-conservation issues. But you know, tax revenue is definitely a worthwhile thing to look at, but it’s not the whole picture. I think it’s appropriate to look at a more holistic view of, Sure, states are generating this money, but it’s not like loose change they’re finding in their couch cushions. This is coming from somewhere. It’s coming from their constituents.

We know gambling is, in many respects, kind of a regressive tax in that it, you know, pulls money from a lot of vulnerable people, as opposed to a more progressive tax that proportionately takes from people who can afford to lose. And that’s why some states, like Washington State, have been much more restrictive in the way that, yes, they’ve legalized sports betting, but you can only do it on the grounds at tribal reservations. So their idea was, Let’s give a boost to tribal economies, but we don’t want to depend on revenue from gambling to fund our state’s growing needs. We’d rather do that through progressive taxes, more sustainable, healthier for our society, something that definitely not all states have taken into account.

Demsas: I have seen a lot of that research around the regressivity of these sorts of tax revenues, but I was surprised with sports betting. And there was a Pew poll looking at the demographics of people who engage in sports betting. And they don’t really find any significant differences in educational attainment or household income. They see that men are more likely than women to say they have bet on sports, and adults under the age of 50 (when compared to those over 50), and Black Americans and Hispanic adults are more likely than white and Asian American adults. But I’m surprised that there’s not more of a difference in household income here.

Funt: You’re right. In some respects, I think sports bettors skew a little bit more middle class and well-educated, compared to other forms of gambling. But when we think about the regressivity of it or just whether it’s the healthiest way for society to generate money, it’s not just that the poor are the ones doing the gambling. It’s also—think about that people with gambling problems are, in many respects, these companies’ best customers. They’re losing such a disproportionate amount of money, compared to the rest of the clientele.

Are we comfortable generating money on the backs of people who just find this ruinous, in a lot of ways beyond financially? So that, I think, should give people pause. But you’re right—for a lot of cultural reasons, the people who bet on sports tend to be much more middle class than the people who, say, do scratch-offs or play the lottery.

Demsas: So I want to now turn to all of the harms that have now become evident over the past several years. Can you walk us through the financial impacts of gambling? What are we finding about the legalization of sports gambling on the impact on households’ financial well-being?

Funt: Yes. So last year, I’d say two of the most-buzzed-about studies that came out on that topic—one of them found a direct correlation between states that had legalized sports betting and a demonstrable impact on credit scores and other measures of financial health. A similar study, also last year, found that household savings go down in places where sports betting is legal. So you are seeing a demonstrable impact on people’s financial well-being as a result of the availability of sports betting.

Part of what I find, honestly, quite frustrating about the way this has played out in the U.S. is it’s been treated like this experiment where, We’re entering an uncharted territory. We’ll see how it goes. We’ll discover things. Like, Does this hurt people financially, or does this create a public-health problem that we didn’t anticipate? There’s a whole bunch of countries that are far ahead of the U.S. in terms of legalizing, and there’s a vast body of research that looks at the consequences. This didn’t have to be this shot in the dark for the U.S. We could have looked at Europe and Australia and Latin America and Asia and a lot of other places that are farther along and have had to reconcile the consequences of making gambling so accessible.

So in the U.K., for example, where online gambling was legalized in 2005, one study recently found that Brits lose about £5.5 billion every year betting online, which results in lost economic activity of £1.3 billion. The government estimates conservatively that gambling-related health consequences cost the population more than a billion pounds every year. And again, the people who did that study said: If you actually look at the second- and third-degree consequences, on a mental-health level and all the family trauma that it causes, it’s probably much bigger than a billion pounds, but we can safely say that.

So yes, again, the evidence is starting to trickle out in the U.S., but it’s been there overseas, and I think it’s pretty irresponsible that the states that were establishing regulations didn’t heed those warnings before getting this off and running.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I want to underscore this. I can imagine someone going like, All right, someone is going to, you know, buy some bad fast food out there rather than cook, or they might gamble on some sports. These are all just consumption, and they’re different levels of bad, but is it really that big of a deal?

You know, one of the studies you referenced, a Northwestern University study by Scott Baker and his co-authors—they’re finding that it’s not just displacing other gambling and consumption. People are falling into debt over this. So for every dollar spent on betting, households are putting a dollar less into investment accounts. You’re more at risk of overdrafting your bank account, maxing out credit cards.

And these effects are strongest among households that are already kind of financially precarious. Charles Lehman actually wrote a great article about this for us in The Atlantic. And this is not a situation, I think, where it’s, you know, We’re just getting money reallocated from other places. People are experiencing a lot more debt delinquency over this.

The other study that you referenced, the economist Brett Hollenbeck at UCLA and his co-authors also find, similarly, that the increase of the risk that a household goes bankrupt [goes up] by 25 to 30 percent. I mean, these are really big numbers that we’re seeing here. And can you just walk us through this kind of gambling addiction? Is this a situation where it’s a very small number of people who are getting addicted, and that’s what’s driving these stats? Or are large shares of Americans experiencing financial precarity here? What do you think?

Funt: Right. So the rate of problem gambling is definitely increasing. So for a long time, it was perceived that about 1 to 2 percent of the population is prone to problem gambling. In states that have had legal sports betting and other legal online gambling for a while, they’re seeing that rate closer to 6 or even 8 percent, and it’s even higher among young men, who are often the target audience for sports betting.

But I think it’s important to look beyond problem gambling. Even though those numbers are quite alarming, it can sort of make it seem like a marginal issue. Like, As long as I’m not in that sliver of the population, I’m good. I think that those sorts of consequences that you were describing go beyond people who have diagnosable problems.

So I find quite striking or even alarming the explosion of gambling among college students. And there was a survey recently that found that one in five college students who bet on sports dips into their tuition funds to fund their betting. So obviously, fewer than 20 percent of college students have gambling problems, but you’re still seeing people affect themselves financially because of their betting. So it’s a vast problem, and it’s an under-researched area.

It’s also something that is a developing story. So you’re not going to get a full picture out the gates. Gambling disorder, unlike some addictions where you might experience something once and become hooked on it—that can happen with gambling, but—it’s often a progressive disorder, so it can take several years or even longer to develop a problem. So if you think about it, we’re really in the early innings of this. And that sort of data and that sort of picture of how this is affecting society as a whole is still going to be emerging in the coming years.

Demsas: And, I mean, you talked a little about the mental-health impacts of gambling addiction here, but there was a paper that came out recently—it’s actually what spurred me to want to do this episode with you—about domestic violence. Can you talk to us about what that found?

Funt: Yes, it’s one of those things that’s terrible but, honestly, not totally surprising—that, again, you can see a correlation between the states that have legalized sports betting and those that haven’t, and when people lose bets, they’re more prone to commit acts of domestic violence.

There’s, similarly, a correlation, in that same respect, where sports betting is legal and higher rates of binge drinking. So you can think about it either fueling or just coinciding with a lot of other problematic activity. And it’s why, to really take stock of what this means for society, you’ve got to look at the bigger picture, not just some of these raw numbers that are thrown in our faces all the time.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I think that most people have probably heard there’s an older study that’s not about sports betting, but it’s just about, you know, an NFL home team’s upset loss can cause a 10 percent increase in the rate of at-home violence. This is a famous David Card study.

And the thing that I think is really interesting about the Card-Dahl study is that when we’re talking about upset losses—these are, like, unexpected losses, when the home team was predicted to win, and then they lose—you would think, Oh well, maybe in the states where there was an upset win, when the home team was predicted to lose and they actually win, maybe you see a decline in domestic violence, but that doesn’t happen. There’s basically an asymmetry here—

Funt: Oh gosh.

Demsas: —in the gain-loss utility function. So it’s like: You’re actually just gonna get more domestic violence. You’re not gonna even it out or something like that. And that, I think, becomes a really big problem when you are thinking about this paternalism issue here, because I can imagine people hearing this episode are just like, Yeah, this sounds really bad, but do I think the government should be in charge of banning something just because people are making bad decisions?

The downstream effects here are what I think are really convincing. You know, no one consents to having domestic violence happen to them, obviously, ever. But that that might increase as a result of someone else choosing to bet on sports seems, you know, even beyond the pale.

Funt: Yeah, absolutely. I think this debate often gets reduced to, Should this be outlawed, or should it be legal with hardly any restrictions? And I think it oversimplifies the argument, and it—we’re really past that. I don’t know how many states that have legalized it are going to go ahead and say, This was a mistake. Let’s outlaw it.

But there’s such a spectrum within that dichotomy, of: Should there be restrictions on advertising? Should there be restrictions on the enticements for customers? Should we require affordability checks to make sure people are betting at least vaguely within their means? All these different regulations that ought to be debated instead of, Should we ban this? which, of course—you’re right—is going to get a bad reaction from a lot of people who don’t like the government overstepping in the decisions we make.

I think consumer protections were the main argument for legalization. So whether we’re living up to that promise and delivering actual protections that protect the people who were betting illegally, and now we’ve said this is a safer way to do things—that, I hope, is where the conversation goes.

Demsas: I actually was surprised. I was trying to look up what people actually want to happen with legalization here, and I was shocked. Only 8 percent of people—there’s a Pew poll about this—only 8 percent of people thought it was good for the country that sports betting was legal. And 34 percent said it was a bad thing. The rest said they thought it was neither good nor bad. I would not have expected that. Is that what you find when you’re reporting, that people are saying that they think it’s bad that we’re allowing this?

Funt: Yeah, I try not to put too much stock in the anecdotal. Even though I’ve interviewed so many hundreds of people for my work, I’d rather rely on an academic who’s doing a proper study.

That said, yeah, I find it interesting, not only how many average people feel that way, but how many professional bettors, who you’d think would be the biggest evangelists for legalization and defending the way they make their livelihood—a lot of them are some of the most vocal about, This has gotten out of control. It’s crazy that there aren’t more guardrails to protect ordinary people.

I even hear plenty of people who work in the industry say, States and even perhaps the federal government could be doing more to protect customers. So it’s not just casual people who see all the ads and say, Gee, this has run amok. It’s people who are right in the middle of it who feel that way.

Demsas: So you mentioned that other countries have had experiences with this as well. Are there regulations you would copy from other places that maybe can improve our situation?

Funt: Yeah, and I try not to be, you know, a public-policy advocate as a reporter, but I will just say things that a lot of people, whether they’re health experts or player-safety advocates, are encouraging to at least be debated.

So one of them is: Countries that have banned advertisements that use expressions like free or risk-free or no sweat or bonus deceptively—so they’re basically making it sound like a can’t-lose proposition, when either you can lose the money you’re betting on the bonus, this offer, or you might get a little money through the bonus, but you’re obviously going to lose money over time—some countries have tried to weed that out.

There have been a lot of countries that have restricted when and how you can advertise, to try to minimize the number of young people that are seeing gambling ads day after day. So they might say you can’t advertise during sporting events or during certain hours of the day when kids are more likely to be watching TV.

Affordability checks are a polarizing one because that does tend to feel quite paternalistic, but in a lot of the places that have imposed those, the thresholds are sky-high. They’re not telling you, You should spend your money here or there. They’re saying, If someone’s spending hundreds of thousands of dollars within a day of signing up, maybe you ought to check in and see if they can afford to be doing that—things that are a lot more palatable than you might think when you hear a phrase like affordability check.

So there’s so many different reforms. Another one that is getting a lot of buzz at the federal level is this idea of a national self-exclusion list. So one thing that’s quite helpful for people with problems is they say, I’d like to cut myself off from gambling, to remove that temptation. But currently, let’s say I live in New Jersey—I can do that in New Jersey, but if I drive 15 minutes into New York or Pennsylvania, that exclusion doesn’t apply in those states. So it’s enormously tempting to do that. It might make sense to have a national self-exclusion list. So operators that are functioning across state lines have to honor exclusion, no matter where you are.

Things like that, again, it’s not about, Should we outlaw this? or, Should we backpedal on the decision to legalize? There’s this whole host of consumer protections that might be worth considering.

Demsas: Yeah, one thing I’d heard talked about is also not allowing people to make bets with credit cards, such that you have to have the money, so you can’t run up these large bills that you literally cannot pay back. And it seems like something about allowing it everywhere you are is a problem, right?

There’s a level to which I don’t know that we’re putting the genie back in the bottle on online betting, but the idea that you can pull out your phone at any point when you’re stressed out, that you don’t have to go somewhere, seems like a problem. And maybe creating some sort of temporal bounds, like maybe you can’t do it on college campuses or something like that—you can’t do it in schools in general, or you can’t do it at bars or something—you know, that might create some backlash here, but it indicates that, you know, there are ways to reduce the problem here.

Funt: You’re right that you have to use geolocation when you use these apps so that they can tell that you’re in a legal betting state, and it’s extraordinarily precise and effective. So if you’re in D.C. and you go into a federal building, suddenly your sports-betting app no longer works. It literally, like, works if I’m in a yard within the okay zone versus the not-okay zone. It’ll pick up on that.

There’s a state delegate in Maryland named Pam Queen, who’s also a professor at Morgan State University, who had the idea of: We could use this to either ban sports betting on college campuses or do something even more modest, like ban it in classrooms or in underage dorms or dorms during certain hours. The possibilities, as you were saying, are limitless, and it doesn’t have to be as severe as, you know, You can’t bet at a stadium or at a bar. It could be things that I think most people would agree sound appropriate, like, You shouldn’t bet in a freshman dorm or, you know, during class.

So yeah, that is a really potent tool that hasn’t caught on anywhere, but I think she and other people are going to be pushing for that.

Demsas: I then also want to ask you about your experiences interviewing legislators. So there are a lot of legislators who are involved in this effort, a lot of governors who have signed bills to allow sports betting or to allow online betting in their states. Have you talked to anyone who’s exhibited any kind of concern with how things have gone?

Funt: Buyer’s remorse, in some cases. Most notably, I’d say: I interviewed Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts who signed the bill legalizing bookmaking there in 2022 and then a few months later became president of the NCAA and has become a really vocal champion for limiting the amount of betting on college sports, particularly in light of the brutal harassment that college athletes and coaches get whenever their performance costs someone a bet.

It’s honestly horrifying, the sort of stuff they see on social media and in real life. And he has said point-blank, I wish, in hindsight, this had stayed in Las Vegas. As you were saying, it’s pretty commonsense that if you can bet from literally anywhere at any time of day, that’s gonna be quite a different situation than if you have to go to a casino, or even go to Las Vegas, in order to bet—or hunt down a bookie and find ways to bet through crypto or other sort of sketchy things that a lot of people are uncomfortable doing.

The idea that you can swipe to deposit money on your phone and then tap a couple of times and bet limitless amounts at any time of day is such a game changer. He was saying, We didn’t really process what a difference that would make, and I wish we had. So yes, he’s maybe the most forthcoming about that, but there are a lot of lawmakers who are seeing the fallout, in a lot of different respects, and saying, Maybe we need to re-regulate, as a lot of the rest of the world has decided is appropriate.

Demsas: Well, Danny, always our last and final question. This has been an episode chock-full of ideas that were good on paper. But what is an idea that you had that you thought was good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Funt: All right, so I was living in New York after college. I had a tiny balcony. I went and bought seeds to grow. I think it was, like, cucumbers and basil. And I was getting breakfast with my buddy Brian, and I was like, Dude, you will not believe how cheap these seeds are. We could totally grow vegetables and herbs and whatever else and sell it, and the margins would be crazy, and we’d make a killing. And he was like, So your business idea is farming? And I was like, Touché, Brian. You’re right. This is maybe not the most groundbreaking business idea. So he set me straight on that one.

Demsas: Oh my gosh, you didn’t live out—I actually, so my first house when I moved out of college was this group house, and we had the idea to farm some vegetables for the house, and it was successful in that we had some kale and sweet potatoes. But I have never in my life been like, I am never getting my food from my own labor. Like, this is just never happening again.

Funt: Oh, yeah.

Demsas: It’s a lot of work, and I feel like it caused so much strife in our household, too, because people were like, Who’s gonna harvest? What do we do with all this, like, extra kale now that no one wants to eat, because we have 20,000 bushels of kale. And you’re just, like, giving it away. But I’m glad that you did not actually have to execute your good on paper idea. You just figured it out beforehand.

Funt: I liked it, the basil I grew, but it wasn’t scalable. Brian was right.

Demsas: Danny, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Funt: My pleasure. Thanks again for having me.

[Music]

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Maybe We Do Need DOGE

2025-01-21T06:00:00-05:00

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

In politics, compromising with one’s ideological opponents is like walking a tightrope while both your allies and foes jeer at you. Democrats, now the out-group facing a Republican trifecta, will have to decide when to fight nominations, laws, and executive orders and when to step into that circus ring.

Jennifer Pahlka, a former Obama administration official and an author of a new report on government reform, kicked up a storm some weeks ago when she encouraged Democrats to work with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

“We do need to talk about government reform, and while I’m sorry the conditions are quite a bit less than ideal, I think it’s time we admitted they were always going to be. Democrats did not do this work,” Pahlka wrote.

Pahlka was in part responding to arguments by people like Leah Greenberg, a co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive group Indivisible, who scolded Democrats for promising to work with DOGE: “Democrats should be planning to fight these corrupt plutocrats, not offering to work with them.”

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I explore whether liberals can actually find any common ground with DOGE and whether Pahlka’s focus on what she calls “state capacity” actually explains government dysfunction. (This episode was recorded earlier this month and references Vivek Ramaswamy’s involvement with DOGE, before it was reported that he would no longer be a part of it.)

“It’s an uncomfortable position to be in because it’s not like I have a crystal ball to know what Musk and Ramaswamy are going to do. And I may disagree with some of what they do, or maybe a lot of what they do, but they’ve really kind of moved the Overton window and the conversation about this inefficiency, the sludge. And I think that’s valuable, frankly, and I want Democrats to kind of get in the game of that reduction,” Pahlka tells me.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: While 75 percent of Democrats tell Pew that they prefer a bigger government providing more services, fewer than a quarter of Republicans say the same. This divide is a persistent feature of modern American politics and can make it seem like government-reform efforts—like civil-service reform and getting rid of costly, inefficient regulations—are the purview of the Republican Party.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy certainly think so. They aim to cut $2 trillion from the roughly $6 trillion federal budget under the banner of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. This could be a nearly impossible feat, seeing as discretionary spending by the federal government was only $1.7 trillion in 2023. Perhaps realizing this conundrum, Musk and Ramaswamy have negotiated against themselves and revised the number to $1 trillion or $500 billion. We’ll see.

[Music]

Demsas: I’m a bit tired of how reasonable-sounding concerns around government efficiency and effectiveness get shoehorned into a witch hunt for government waste. There are serious problems with how the federal government’s processes and regulations harm economic growth and the effectiveness of important social-welfare programs. I’m skeptical that focusing on budget cuts does much to change that, but I’m also frustrated that it seems the only political actors talking about this seriously are on the right.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

My guest today is Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and founder of Code for America. She worked in the Obama administration as deputy chief technology officer, and her recent book, Recoding America, argues that the federal government is hobbled by its inability to implement its stated priorities.

Jennifer has a message to people across the political spectrum: If you want government to work, you need to reform it. In that vein, she’s much more optimistic than I on the potential for good-government types to work with DOGE and the Trump administration.

Demsas: Jen, welcome to the show.

Jennifer Pahlka: Thanks so much for having me.

Demsas: I am so excited to have this conversation. I feel like me and you—our work has been in conversation for years now, and we’ve been at some of the same conferences and things. So I’m really excited to dive in.

Pahlka: Me too.

Demsas: So you’re someone who has worked in government and now works trying to make government better. Give us the liberal case for government reform.

Pahlka: Well, I feel like liberals talk about government reform. I’m not sure they necessarily need to be sold on it so much. I think the kind of reform that we need today is a little bit of a hard pill for liberals to swallow, because we need government to sort of be faster, a little bit less process oriented and more outcome oriented. And there has been a pattern, I think, of liberals being very fond of process, of additional rules and regulations, for all the right reasons.

And with great success, right? I mean, the environmental movement really cleaned the air and our water, and that was through regulations. The civil service went from being a place where you would get a job because you were someone’s friend or you’d given money to a campaign, to a professional place. And those are all rules and regulations that have made government better and fairer and made our country better.

But we’re kind of at a point where there have been so many of them, and they’ve stacked on top of each other so much that we’re just moving very slowly. And so the kind of reform I’m talking about now does involve some things like maybe reducing, especially, regulation on government itself—reducing procedures and moving a little faster. And that is the part that liberals need to be convinced about, let’s say.

Demsas: You have a new report out with the Niskanen Center called “The How We Need Now: A Capacity Agenda for 2025 and Beyond.” What’s the main takeaway? What are you trying to solve here?

Pahlka: We’re really trying to help people understand that when you think about government reform, it just seems so big and impossible. So we’re trying to break it down and say, Actually, there are specific things that you could do if you want a government—and this could be, you know, we wrote it for federal government, but you could use it for state or local government as well—if you want government to be able to do what it says it’s going to do, to achieve its policy goals.

And so those things come in four buckets, you know—four pillars. The first thing is: You need to be able to hire the right people and fire the wrong ones. The second is: You have to reduce the procedural bloat. We’ve also talked about that as reducing the administrative burden on public servants—in addition to on the public, but we’re really talking about on public servants—so that you get more public servants focused on outcomes and less on process and compliance. The third thing is: You need to invest in digital and data infrastructure to enable all of this. And there’s a bunch the federal government could be doing at the start of the Trump administration to do that, including getting the United States Digital Service funded again and the Technology Modernization Fund funded again.

And then last, and the one I’m most interested in, is that we need to close the loop between policy and implementation. And what I mean by that is: Right now it functions as this sort of waterfall process, where you have a law, and then maybe it gets handed off to an agency to write regs, and then, you know, into the implementation phase. And it doesn’t ever sort of circle back and say, Is this working? What are we learning? What needs to be adjusted?

And especially in the era of Loper Bright, this decision from the Supreme Court that’s really going to change how the executive-branch agencies relate to Congress, we have kind of an opportunity to rethink that relationship. And I think we should rethink it along the lines of creating feedback loops that let us adjust along the way so that we actually get the outcomes that the laws and policies that we pass intend.

Demsas: I think you’re right when you talk in the abstract. Like, most people, liberal or conservative, would say, Yeah, you know, red tape is bad, and the government should definitely update technology, and, you know, it’d be good if we had a government that worked efficiently. And then when you get into the actual policy prescriptions and the trade-offs, things become more controversial, particularly when you’re talking about civil-service reform and regulatory reform.

So one of the third rails has long been hiring and firing. I want you to talk to us a little bit about what’s broken in that space and how you would change it, and I’d also like you to talk to us about the story of Jack Cable.

Pahlka: Oh, gosh. Jack, yeah. Well, first of all, what’s not broken? So, you know, we had the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which established these Merit System Principles. They are very good. If you read them, you are very likely to agree with them. They talk about integrity and fairness and, you know, promoting people on the basis of merit. They’re called the Merit System Principles. And I think they are a strong foundation for our civil-service system.

The problem is that (A) that was 1978, and so we’ve had many years now for those things to be operationalized with a lot more ornaments that have been attached to them, right? It’s not just those principles. It’s the regulation and the guidance and the operating manuals and the processes and the forms that have derived from those that have really, I think at this point, kind of perverted their intent.

So for instance, we say we’re going to hire on the basis of merit. We also say we’re going to hire in a way that’s nonbiased. Well, what happens is that you have HR managers who kind of control the process of selecting a candidate. What they do—I’ll give you sort of the very specifics of how this works in 90 percent of cases. This is not the accepted services, and it’s not political appointees, but open-to-the-public, competitive jobs. They get, like, a big pool of resumes, and they have to down select. The first down select they do is by looking for exact matches between the language on the resume or cover letter and what’s in the job description.

Demsas: So if you copy-paste the job description into your resume, that’s, like, points?

Pahlka: Yes, and I have a friend of mine who’s in my book—I actually originally interviewed her about this. I didn’t put that in the book. But she was looking at a resume that had not just been copied and pasted, but copied and pasted and not reformatted. Like, that part was in a different font.

Demsas: Oh my god.

Pahlka: Like, the same font, right? And she points this out to the HR manager, and they’re like, Yeah, that means that this person’s the most qualified, because it’s the exact same language. And she’s like, This person is clearly unqualified because they didn’t even know to reformat. And this is not an outlier. Like, this happens a lot.

So first they’re looking for these exact matches. And then they take everybody who was really close in language—and also, by the way, who has something called a government resume, which is different from a private-sector resume, and you have to know that somehow, magically, before you apply. Then from that pool, they send everyone a self-assessment questionnaire, and everybody who marks themselves as master, and I literally mean master—I think that’s the top rating in a lot of these—they make the next down select, so they move on to the next pool.

Demsas: Wait—so if you just say that I’m a master at this, like, without any double-checking, you just get to move forward?

Pahlka: I mean, somebody could send me a self-assessment saying, Are you a master programmer in Python? And I would just be like, Yes, and I would move into that pool. Nobody checks it. It’s actually worse—not just that no one checks it; it’s that the HR people will tell you that subject-matter experts (SMEs) are not allowed to be in that part of the process.

I mean, there are processes that do include them, and I can get to that, but you can’t have SMEs look at these resumes and exert their judgment, because they may introduce bias into the process. Now, again, I think the idea of keeping bias out is something I agree with, and I’m going to assume you agree with, and most people agree with. But that’s not actually keeping bias out, right? That’s what I mean about sort of a perversion of the intent.

But anyway, so you have this now smaller pool of people who are great at cutting and pasting and great at, you know, self-aggrandizement—or really what it is, is they just know what to do. They know how to play the game. And then from that list, you apply veterans’ preference. In other words, any veterans in that pool float to the top, and that’s the “cert,” which is just the name for the list the HR manager gives to the hiring manager. That’s the cert that the hiring manager is supposed to choose from. So this is not consistent, to me, in my mind, with Merit System Principles of fairness, and not bias, and certainly not merit.

And so what you are looking at when you see that kind of behavior is a system that’s designed to be completely defensible from the critique of your judgment, because you have exercised no judgment at all. And I understand why people defend them and do these processes to be defensible, but I think, in the end, they come up actually indefensible.

So I learned about this process, in part, through a young man named Jack Cable. I was on the Defense Innovation Board at the time, and he won the Hack the [Air Force] contest. So all these security researchers from around the country come together, and, you know, they’re looking at bugs and security bugs and Pentagon software. This young man wins the whole contest. He’s the best out of the group.

And of course, you know, the people at the Defense Digital Service and other parts of the Department of Defense say, Great. We need this guy on our team. He applies with a resume that lists his programming languages and the frameworks that he is expert in, and he is cut in the first batch because he did not cut and paste. And the people reviewing his resume see this sort of gobbledygook of programming languages—they’re not technical people. They’re not even sort of supposed to know what those are, and so he gets cut.

And it’s not just that—then the Pentagon folks intervene and try to get him hired something like 10 different times. He does eventually get hired, but even with these interventions from people in power, and sort of as it escalated with increasing levels of power in the Pentagon, this very talented security researcher continues to get cut from the process before hiring managers ever see his resume.

Demsas: Wow.

Pahlka: Oh, and one more thing: He’s told by the HR people along the way—he’s quite young—they say, Go work at Best Buy selling TVs for a year, and then you’ll be qualified for this job.

Demsas: Wow. And I feel like in that time period—obviously, this is an exceptional case where a lot of people took effort to try to get him hired. But, you know, private-sector processes are much faster than this. And what’s most likely to happen is you get all of these top performers going into the private sector.

Pahlka: Oh absolutely. And I mean, it’s just a testament to his commitment that he stuck through it. And that young man has actually stayed in government. It’s amazing. He’s done some really wonderful work.

Demsas: So there’s that part of the government reform that you talk about, which is about hiring and firing. I mean, obviously, we only touched on it a little bit. But the other part of it that you focus on a lot is around regulatory reform. And one of the laws that you’ve pointed out is the Paperwork Reduction Act. Can you walk us through how that act hobbles government?

Pahlka: Yes. I will say, we’ve had some good progress on PRA, and I should also mention that we’ve had some good progress on that assessment problem. The [Fair] Chance to Compete Act passed both houses of Congress, and it actually directs agencies to stop using those self-assessments.

I have high hopes for it, but I also will say: There was an executive order saying that under Trump. Biden renewed that executive order. And it hasn’t really gotten the agencies to change their practices yet. So there is an implementation issue, I think, and we’re going to really have to watch if the [Fair] Chance to Compete Act does what we hope it does.

Demsas: Wait—if both Trump and Biden issued the executive orders, why aren’t the agencies doing it?

Pahlka: It’s very hard to change the practices of agencies, even under direct order.

Demsas: Yeah. Mechanistically, though, what’s going on? Are there people who are just refusing to change? Or, like, what’s happening?

Pahlka: Well, it wasn’t in statute. I don’t think there was a timeline or a deadline for it. I think if you really read the language and translate it into, you know, what’s practical, it’s sort of more encouragement. I mean, it does direct them, but there’s sort of very little teeth in it.

Government moves slowly. HR people move particularly slowly. I mean, until you fix some other problems—like how detailed it is, how many rules you have to comply with in order to use a subject-matter expert in that process—it actually is, like, enormous amounts of time to run a hiring process using real assessments.

Demsas: So tell us about the Paperwork Reduction Act. What is it doing, and how is it preventing government from acting quickly and nimbly?

Pahlka: So there’s sort of the general level of it, which is just: It’s a lot of work to comply with. So imagine you’re charged with implementing the CHIPS and Science Act, for instance, and you want to stand up a form to allow companies to express their initial interest or even apply. You want to know early on what kinds of projects might companies, you know, bring to the Department of Commerce, to apply for funding under CHIPS.

Well, you can design the form. There’s going to be a lot of process and a lot of stakeholders that want to look at it. You don’t get to write something up and throw it up on the internet. But once you’ve done all that work for your internal agency stakeholders and sometimes cross-agency stakeholders, then your form, because it’s an information collection, is subject to review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the White House.

And so you’ve got to sort of do all this pretty heavyweight documentation of your form and why you’re asking these particular questions, and you submit it to them. And because that process needs review by people—there’s only so many people in OIRA, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—and because the process requires two separate times that you post it to the Federal Register, get comments from the public, respond to those comments, then potentially do a revision, then post it again, get comments, respond to those comments. And those time periods are designated in statute—I think it’s 30 days the first one and 60 days the second one—like, right there, that’s at least a month, but more because you have to do all the lead-up and then follow-up.

The average time to get through—or actually, I think it’s the minimum time to get through—a standard PRA review is nine months. And that’s just to get one form up. And it can be longer. Now, there is a fast-track process. If you get a fast-tracked application, that runs out in six months. So in six months, you’ll have to do it all over again. When you’re supposed to have moved on to the next phase of your project, you’re kind of going back to zero.

And there’s certainly value in a centralized office knowing all the things that agencies are asking the public, or companies, or anybody who would be filling out a form. And there’s absolutely value in knowing, like, Oh we have this data here. Maybe we shouldn’t be asking for it. Maybe we can get it from another agency. That would be, like, the best use of this kind of centralized function. But we have let this become quite a heavyweight process that really slows agencies down.

Demsas: You’ve outlined quite a few things in your public research and writing around how you think government—both whether we’re talking about Congress but also the executive branch—should reform in order to make things more efficient. You know, some of these things are just common-sense requirements to make hiring practices align with things that people think are good, like merit.

But most people who are talking about this, I think, are often on the right. And increasingly, I think this conversation is being brought up by people like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are heading the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, for President-Elect Donald Trump.

You wrote, recently, a piece for your Substack called “Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight,” where you said that you support Democrats, like Congressman Ro Khanna, for pledging to work with DOGE. Why is that?

Pahlka: Well, I did say that until we know more about what they’re going to do, I think we should take an open stance. It’s very hard to know what they’re going to do. But ultimately, I said that because, as much as I may disagree with the policy goals of the administration that Musk and Ramaswamy are serving, there is so much work that needs to be done to subtract from government instead of constantly adding to it, to make it easier to get stuff done in government. I mean, people talk about regulation always as, you know, we’re regulating companies so they can’t, you know, pollute a stream. That’s wonderful.

There’s also enormous regulation on government itself, like the Paperwork Reduction Act, or like these hiring practices that really keep us from being able to serve the public in the way that we need to. And so it’s an uncomfortable position to be in because it’s not like I have any crystal ball to know what Musk and Ramaswamy are going to do. And I may disagree with some of what they do, or maybe a lot of what they do, but they’ve really kind of moved the Overton window and the conversation about this inefficiency, the sludge.

And I think that’s valuable, frankly, and I want Democrats to kind of get in the game of that reduction. And I think that if some of what they do is the wrong thing to do, but they shake government up in a way and maybe even pull some stuff out, we may be able to build back things that are kind of right-sized, the right-size procedures—not no procedure, not no process, but maybe not the heavyweight process that we have today.

Demsas: The thing I hear you saying here is, sort of, what I hear from people who have given up on their own side doing the right thing. And this is, I guess, reflected in the end of your piece, where you write, “We can wish that the government efficiency agenda were in the hands of someone else, but let’s not pretend that change was going to come from Democrats if they’d only had another term, and let’s not delude ourselves that change was ever going to happen politely, neatly, carefully.”

So, I mean, part of what it sounds like you’re saying is, Yeah, nobody wants this version of government efficiency, but there’s no other way it’s going to happen. Why is that the case? Like, why do you think the Democrats have been so unwilling to engage on this issue? I mean, you’re a Democrat. You worked in a Democratic administration, and you’ve talked to many other Democrats who have very similar views to you. Why is this such a third rail for them?

Pahlka: I’m not sure I know the exact answer to that. I think if you want to look at the Biden administration, in particular, you know—they went in with a big set of policy goals, and they actually achieved a lot of them. The four big bills are legislative accomplishments, significant legislative accomplishments. So they went for the what, but they neglected the how. And I think in their minds, it’s like, You’re going to do one or the other.

I think they should have paid equal attention to the how, to cleaning out the pipes so that the what could get through them faster. And that speed has clearly been a real problem. I mean, we’re writing now about the amount of money that could be clawed back because it didn’t get through those pipes, so really, really reducing Biden’s legacy. The frustration of not having that many electric-car chargers that were promised under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—all that stuff is due to this lack of focus on the how, and I don’t think it was a binary choice. I think Biden’s team could have said, We’re going to spend as much energy on the how as we are on the what.

But I do think there’s something about the way the Democrats, of course, want to be thoughtful and considered and hear all voices. And if you are thoughtful and considered and hear all voices, you tend to add policy and procedure and ways of looping everybody in. And that, actually, you know, adds instead of subtracts. Just naturally that’s sort of what happens. And in some ways, the destruction from which you can hopefully rebuild kind of needs to be done by somebody who kind of doesn’t care about that, in a certain way.

Demsas: I wonder, though, because it feels that, you know, two different theories of government reform—I worry about being [them] conflated, right?

So let’s take the DOGE theory, the Vivek-Elon theory. They presuppose that there are all these bureaucrats that are not really needed and all of these wasteful programs. And in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, they essentially have this idea that the executive branch has wildly overstepped its small-d democratic authority by being allowed to interpret laws that Congress passes as they’re implementing them.

And if that’s your theory of government reform—if your theory of government reform is that there’s just all these people who are dead weight, who are clogging up the process—then their answer, which is “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” is reasonable.

But as I understand it, your theory of government reform is very different. It’s that you need a capable and nimble executive branch in order to deliver on priorities like—I don’t know—providing health care to poor children. But in order to do that, you actually need a highly competent, well-paid, expensive labor pool and a good deal of it.

And so to me, it feels like, while both of these things can call themselves government-efficiency complaints—while they’re both motivated by a concern about the costs put on both private actors, individual citizens, and other government entities—they’re actually, fundamentally, two different political projects. So how do you see these things working together?

Pahlka: I agree. I have a very different view of it, and there’s some part of me that just thinks that if Elon and Vivek come in and spend any amount of time, if they don’t just get bored or frustrated and wander off, they’re gonna learn this. And they may have a different set of values, but I think it’s hard to miss it when you get into government that there are a lot of incredibly smart, talented, creative, dedicated people doing really amazing work. And you just fall in love with them once you actually get in the door. It’s from a distance that they look like, you know, these unaccountable, lazy bureaucrats. Up close, they’re pretty impressive.

But I think where I would put a little nuance on what you just said is that I do think we need this incredible workforce. And I think we’ve done a bad job of balancing between what I, in my very fancy language, call “go energy” and “stop energy.” So you have more people doing various forms of compliance and safeguards than you have the people trying to build something and get it out the door. And somebody I worked with at one point said, It’s like we’ve got six people building this product and at least 60 people telling us all the things we can’t do.

Now, those people who are saying, You can’t do that, are not dumb. They are not lazy. I mean, there are, of course, a few bad apples in government, and we can talk about that. I’m not saying everyone’s perfect. But you have people who, in fact, are—because they’re good, and because they really know the law, and because they really feel like it is their job to protect the public using this law, policy, and regulation—are very zealous in telling builders what they can’t do. And you have the very well-intentioned stop energy that overwhelms the people who have sort of go-energy jobs.

And I’m a little biased because I work with people a lot who do technology. They’re doing things like trying to get that form up, you know, trying to make sure that veterans can get their benefits. They are focused on, Can we get this application up so they can apply? Can we get the check to them? Can we get them their health care? Like, the actual outcome.

And a lot of people’s job isn’t to focus on the outcome but to make sure that all these things have been complied with, and they can do their job very well, and it slows the people who are outcome focused down. And it’s not their job, necessarily, to—you know, they’re not supposed to do their job less well. It is the job of leadership, of [the Office of Personnel Management], of the White House, of Congress, to look around and say, Why do we have so many people saying no, no, no? Oh because we put all these rules in place, and we’ve developed a culture of risk aversion that means we’re really, really focused on making sure nobody breaks any rules, at the expense of getting the job done. Leadership needs to balance the workforce between go energy and stop energy, and really take a hard look, if you’re going to add a regulation, you’re going to add a rule, Okay, what is the cost of adding that to the actual outcome that the American public expects?

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: Jen and I hash out the difference between political will and what she calls state capacity.

[Break]

Demsas: One phrase that you use a lot, and this is included in your recent report with the Niskanen Center, is state capacity. Can you define that for us?

Pahlka: Well, I didn’t even know the term until after my book came out and people were like, This is a state-capacity book. But I have since learned it’s an academic term that simply means the ability of a government—at any level and any government—to achieve its policy goals. So it is essentially, like I said, the how to the what.

Demsas: Yeah, this is a term that I think I first heard in the development-economics, development-political-science space. And it’s most commonly used to talk about the ability for these developing nations to effectuate their political priorities.

So for instance, like: Can a country collect taxes? Can it maintain the monopoly on the use of violence? These are core questions of state capacity because if you can’t collect taxes, you can’t run programs, you can’t have a police force that enforces laws. Like, there’s very little you can do on top of that, right? You can’t run a CHIPS program if you can’t do those things to begin with.

Why does this sort of idea—and how does this sort of idea—apply in the American context, where we have the ability to collect taxes? We have, relative to the rest of the world, like, a high degree of monopoly on the use of legitimate force. It’s contained within the state. What is the purpose of applying this term here?

Pahlka: Well, I mean, since you brought up applying taxes, the individual master file at the IRS, which holds all of the data about tax returns from individuals and families since the ’60s, is written in assembly code. There are vanishingly few people in the world who know what that code looks like. And it’s pretty robust. It’s lasted a long time. But, like, you’re going to run out of the human understanding of how that thing works, and you’re going to have a crisis at some point.

That’s not a crisis now, but we also don’t collect a lot of taxes. We have a serious unenforcement policy. We’re leaving a lot of money on the table because we have not empowered the IRS to be very successful. So we’re certainly not like a third-world state or an emerging state in that regard. But we are kind of going backwards in some areas.

And there’s a million examples of this, but I think that it is sort of shocking to people that state capacity is now a big concern for the United States, when it used to be that we only thought about it in relation to the countries that we would fund through the World Bank, or whatever. But national defense is a really great example of this. I mean, we keep spending more and more money, and it is not at all clear that we are getting more deterrence or more security. In fact, my thesis there is that we’re just spending too much money, not because—we shouldn’t cut spending because we want to be less secure.

But go talk to anybody in the Department of Defense. Pretty much everyone will tell you, like, unless there’s some shock to the system, we’re not going to change how we do stuff. And the way we do stuff takes decades, and we have to be able to move faster because, you know, we’re spending, I think it’s, like—what are we up to—almost a trillion dollars on national defense. And yet we seem to get less secure every year because the more money you put in a system like that, the more people double down on these very heavyweight ways of operating that are not what we need today.

Demsas: So I want to push you here a bit because this is a place—I’ve brought up to other people: I feel like the application of state capacity sometimes doesn’t feel like it fits well, and that, sometimes, what’s actually happening is that this is just a question of political will. It’s not that the government can’t accomplish what it tries to do. It’s that it actually has competing priorities, and there are trade-offs it’s unwilling to make.

One place where people have talked a lot about regulation that is holding government back is the National Environmental Policy Act. This is a piece of legislation from the 1970s that requires that the government study the environmental impact of its major actions. And it’s often talked about that it takes years to compile an environmental-impact statement, so it can take years and years in order to get a permit for, you know, a big energy project.

But something interesting happened, and this is a stat that was surfaced by Brian Potter in his Substack, “Construction Physics.” I’m reading from it: In 2009, after the Great Recession and Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, there were “over 190,000 projects, totaling $300 billion worth of stimulus funds, [that] were required to have NEPA reviews before the projects could begin. After the passage of [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act], categorical exclusions were completed at a rate of more than 400 per day, and 670 environmental impact statements were completed over the next 7 months.”

So essentially, these EISs, the environmental-impact statements that often take years to complete, all of a sudden are being completed over the course of a few weeks—670 over the course of seven months is just astronomical compared to what we usually see.

And this is an example where nothing changed about the state capacity. They didn’t change anything about the legal environment. They didn’t change anything about the number of people working in government and whether they were more qualified. The HR processes didn’t change in this time period.

What happened is that the federal government was like, We’re in an emergency space. We need to get a bunch of stimulus dollars out the door, because we’re in a free-fall recession, and we’re worried about mass unemployment. And then, all of a sudden, all of these things that seemed like state-capacity issues, that seemed like these big constraints on government, actually just disappeared, because everyone wanted them to happen.

So is it the case that the government can’t do what it wants? Or is it that there’s a lot of competing priorities, and in times of nonemergency, we’re actually not aligned on what government wants to do?

Pahlka: Well, I mean, I think COVID is another good example of when government just does it, right? Or Josh Shapiro’s getting I-95 open again. I can’t disagree with you on that. Absolutely. I will say, I remember that too, and we just looked into it, and it’s not exactly apples to apples there, so I’d just like to put a little bit of an asterisk on it.

But I think your point is valid, but it does, then, beg the question, right? So we only have 47 electric-vehicle chargers out of the money that came out of the, you know, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. I guess it was also a bill that funded the BEAD Program for broadband-internet access, and we have zero connections from that.

Are you saying, then, that Democrats didn’t want to see those things implemented? Because I do think it is a matter of will. But we are seeing places where the political will seems to be there, but it seems to sort of stop after the law is passed.

I think I’ve also shared this with you before, but, like, I got into this through working with cities and states on benefits delivery, and we were looking at SNAP uptake. And I was in California, and it was just shocking to me that California, which had a ton of money and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on IT systems for people to apply for SNAP online, had the second-lowest rate of participation in the program in the entire country. Only Wyoming was worse than California.

Is that a political-will problem? It’s, like, a really blue state, very pro-welfare. But it kind of couldn’t get out of its own way. It so overscoped these systems that it took about almost an hour to apply online. You couldn’t do it on a mobile phone. It’s just all these ways in which they created a system which is hard to use. But it’s really clear to me that they didn’t intend to do that. They just had too much process in the way and less of a focus on the outcome.

So I do think it’s a political will, but it has to be political will to follow the thing all the way through to the outcome, to care as much about the implementation as you do about the legislative win or the money that you put into it. We’re really good at money and rules, and those things do not necessarily translate to the outcomes that we promised people. So that will has to move.

Demsas: Yeah. But I think what I’m saying is: I think this may be a case of revealed preferences, right? Like you asked me, Does this mean that Democrats didn’t really care about getting broadband out? And I don’t want to make that kind of a strong claim. I think if they could push a button, and there was rural broadband for every single person in rural America, they would have pushed the button.

But the question government asks, and government policies ask, which you’ve written about extensively, is not just: Hey—do you wish this thing existed? It’s, When you’re forced to make trade-offs between whether to push out broadband or make it easier for contractors that are different from the ones you usually go to to get access to this program, which do you choose between? If you’re going to choose between actually getting out broadband and following the most onerous environmental regulations that exist, which thing are you choosing?

And over and over again, you see, as you mentioned before, liberals choosing this process, choosing this kind of way of delaying implementation in order not to follow some shoddy or quicker, maybe more error-prone system. And in doing so, they end up not getting to the outcomes. And to me, I feel like that actually is a situation where we’re seeing what Democrats actually want, which is really clear when you look at infrastructure projects.

I mean, this is what I think is the story of California high-speed rail, where you talked to so many people, where I bet a lot of people would love for there to be high-speed rail between San Francisco and L.A. I don’t think they’re lying about wanting that to exist. But when you talk to people who are working in that program or who are working trying to implement it, and you say, Okay, well, you need to not let every single local government fleece this project for whatever priority they have on the ground, and no one wants to do that. So I’m left with the conclusion that yes, they want high-speed rail but not if it means angering a single person within the Democratic Party.

Pahlka: I completely agree with that. It’s a little bit what I was saying about, like, you kind of need a big disruptor, someone who doesn’t care, to get stuff done sometimes. I wish it weren’t Elon, necessarily. But if you’ve created a system in which you have to make everybody happy, eventually people will be so frustrated they’ll let somebody, you know, give the job to somebody who doesn’t care if he makes anybody happy.

Demsas: One of the objections I hear sometimes from liberals about making government more efficient is that all of these layers of procedure are to protect and prevent against authoritarian impulses. So yes, it’s frustrating and annoying that we have to follow all of these rules, and that there are all these government watchdogs that might sue if you don’t cross your t’s and dot your i’s. And that is annoying when you’re trying to get good policy done. But when you have someone like Donald Trump, for instance, get elected, you’ll be really happy that all of these procedures and layers of government exist. How do you respond to that?

Pahlka: Well, they’re not wrong, of course. And we just talked about trade-offs. This is exactly a trade-off conversation. The reality is that I believe that our lack of results and the slowness of government played a part, maybe not be the leading part, in driving people towards wanting someone who claims, I alone can fix it, right? Who claims to be able to bust through all that red tape.

Now, in reality, did he bust through a lot of red tape in his first administration? Well, he claimed to roll back a lot of regulations, but his team really didn’t do that much on that front. But it is a trade-off you make. I am not extreme on either end, but I do think we need a middle ground where we are looking at where safeguards and processes and procedures and the ability to sue are kind of right-sized, where there are some protections.

But where we are right now is: The extra-extra-large version of protections, which has slowed us down enough that it has driven this force in our society for, like, none, which is the pendulum swinging. I just wish the pendulum would settle a little bit in the middle. But that’s a trade-off we need to make. And we have to, as you say, piss some people off in order to get that, because you’re gonna have to say no to some people to get the job done.

Demsas: I feel like the analogy I’ve used a lot is to the filibuster—

Pahlka: Yes.

Demsas: —which I think that a lot of liberals were worried about when this was being debated more openly. If you get rid of the filibuster, that means Republicans will be able to pass their policies as well.

And I think the thing that’s interesting about this is, one, it’s the question of democracy—like, small-d democracy. Do you want the government to be able to do things such that the public can actually evaluate them? Versus someone who gets into office, and they can’t actually enact a bunch of their priorities. So it’s actually quite unclear what signal you’re supposed to be sending as a voter.

But also secondly, I think there’s, like, an asymmetry here, where if you are a small-c conservative, versus a lower-l liberal, you have different sorts of desires from government. Like, there are a lot more active policies that are trying to be passed by people who are liberal, who are progressive. And so there’s kind of an asymmetry of what gets constrained in that kind of a paradigm.

And so I think that it’s hard because you look at the looming potential changes in a Trump administration, and you think, like, Well, it’s really good that there are all these different ways of constraining this. But in the long run, there’s just this larger question here about whether it’s democratic at all to have that happen. Like, if people are electing an executive, how exactly are we supposed to evaluate that work if after four years, so many of the policies that they promised, whether they’re harmful or whether they’re good, don’t actually get passed?

Pahlka: It’s such a hard question. And yeah, I kind of want to stand on—as uncomfortable as this is—if you think state capacity is important to the country, you kind of have to be okay with people who you, let’s softly say, don’t agree with having it. But we’re in this sort of thermostatic nature of elections right now, and I have no crystal ball, but if the Democrats were to get the White House back in four years or even take back Congress in two years, you really don’t want them to be dealing with this huge incapacity once again, or at least I don’t. And that’s just a tough pill to swallow, but I think it’s one we have to swallow, again in the sense of making trade-offs. I agree—it’s much like the filibuster.

You could also say the Administrative Procedures Act is a lot like the filibuster. It needs to be reformed for all the reasons you mentioned when you talked about NEPA to be able to get these, you know, big infrastructure projects built, because it creates such a huge surface area for attack by minority interests. And if you were to do that today, you would really empower Trump to do a lot of what he couldn’t do last time, and that’s really problematic.

But the reality is it’s not going to get repealed today. Like, if you started working on that now, maybe it would happen at the end of the administration and benefit the Democrats. Now, I know that’s sort of like a Pollyannaish view of it, but at the end of the day, it kind of just does need to get reformed if we’re going to be able to govern at all.

And you used the word democracy, right? If we have the system in which we vote for elected officials, and then they go through that messy political process to say—well, let’s use the example of housing, right—to say, This area needs more housing. We’re going to build more housing, and then a bunch of people who have an interest in having that housing not be built can stop it, is that democracy? We have thwarted the will of what the democratic process actually came up with.

Demsas: Well, Jen, always our last and final question: What is an idea that you had that you thought was good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Pahlka: I love this question. You asked it of a guest a couple of episodes ago who answered, “small plates,” which just made me laugh so hard. And now I’m just not ever going to order a small plate at a restaurant again. So I’m just co-signing that.

But I guess my more original answer would be: When I started working with local governments, I really had this sense that more data was better. It was kind of shocking. Sometimes you’d go in there, and you were just like, You’re not making decisions based on data. How awful. We need more. We need more. And then over time, I realized there’s a human aspect to this that we neglect. So there became this whole trend of doing data dashboards for local governments. And then, like, no one looks at them really. They were sort of a lot of work for, in some cases, not much return, depending on the human and cultural and, you know, organizational infrastructure into which they were inserted.

But I also really saw, when I was working on the unemployment-insurance crisis during the pandemic, the ways that a lot of leaders see data as a grade that they’re getting, not a compass that they can use to steer the ship where they need to go. And I really changed my view on, like, what kinds of data are good in, like, a governing context, in a performance-management context, and really now sort of see it as good only if it’s introduced in the right ways and if the people who are supposed to be using it as a compass actually are empowered and encouraged to do that.

[Music]

Demsas: Well, Jen, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Pahlka: Thank you so much, Jerusalem. This was fun.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

The Scientist vs. the Machine

2025-01-14T06:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: After this episode aired, MIT issued a statement raising concerns about the integrity of Aidan Toner-Rodgers's working paper “Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation,” and recommending that the paper be withdrawn. The open-access research repository arXiv, where the paper was originally posted, has removed it from its archive, citing “concerns about the validity of the data and incomplete Institutional Review Board requirements.” The Atlantic reached out to Toner-Rodgers for comment but has so far not received a response.

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People have long worried about robots automating the jobs of truck drivers and restaurant servers. After all, from the invention of the cotton gin to the washing machine, we’re used to an economy where technology transforms low-wage, physically arduous work.

But the past few years have shown that highly educated white-collar workers should be the ones bracing for artificial intelligence to fundamentally transform their—I should probably say our—professions. The angst this has spurred from all corners of white-collar America has been intense, and not without merit. AI has the potential to take over much of our creative life, and the risks to humanity are well documented.

The discourse around AI has focused so squarely on the terrifying risks and potential job losses that I’ve noticed there’s been very little discussion around why so many people are working so hard to create this doom monster in the first place.

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I’m joined by someone researching what happens when AI enters a workplace. Aidan Toner-Rodgers is a Ph.D. student of economics at MIT and has a working paper out on what happened to scientific discovery (and the jobs of scientists) when an R&D lab at a U.S. firm introduced artificial intelligence to aid in the discovery of new materials.

Materials science is an area of research where we can see the direct applications of scientific innovation. Materials scientists were the ones who developed graphene, thus transforming “numerous products ranging from batteries to desalination filters” and photovoltaic structures that “have enhanced solar panel efficiency, driving down the steep decline in renewable energy costs,” Toner-Rodgers writes. There are also countless more applications in fields such as medicine and industrial manufacturing.

New discoveries in this field have the potential to transform human life, making us happier, healthier, and richer. And when scientists at this company were required to integrate an AI assistant in generating new ideas, they became more productive, discovering 44 percent more materials.

“I think a big takeaway from economic-growth models is that in the long run, really, productivity is the key driver of improvements in living standards and in health,” Toner-Rodgers argued when we spoke. “So I think all the big improvements in living standards we’ve seen over the last 250 years or so really are driven fundamentally by improvements in productivity. And those come, really, from advances in science and innovation driving new technologies.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: What is the point of artificial intelligence? Why, when there is so much concern about the potential consequences, are we hurtling towards a technology that could be a mass job killer? Why, when we face so many competing energy and land-use needs, are we devoting ever more resources to data centers for AI?

There are good reasons to worry about its negative consequences, and the media has a bias toward negativity. As a result, we don’t tend to explore these questions.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

Today’s episode is about one of the best applications of AI: helping push the boundaries of science forward to make life better for billions of people. This isn’t a Pollyannaish conversation that skates past concerns with AI, but I do want to spend some time investigating the ways that this technology could improve our lives before we get into the business of complicating it.

In some ways, this conversation isn’t just about AI. It’s about technological progress and the trade-offs that come with it. Are the productivity benefits of AI worth all the downstream consequences? How can we know?

My guest today is Aidan Toner-Rodgers. He’s a Ph.D. student in economics at MIT with a fascinating new working paper that shows what happens when scientists are required to begin using AI in their work.

Aidan, welcome to the show!

Aidan Toner-Rodgers: Thanks so much for having me.

Demsas: You have a really great paper that I’m interested in talking to you about, but first I want us to sort of set the stage here a bit about productivity. So productivity is something that economists talk about a lot, and I think it can be ephemeral to people about why it’s so important.

So why do economists care about productivity?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, so I think a big takeaway from economic-growth models is that in the long run, really, productivity is the key driver of improvements in living standards and in health. So I think all the big improvements in living standards we’ve seen over the last, like, 250 years or so really are driven fundamentally by improvements in productivity.

And those come, really, from advances in science and innovation driving new technologies. So when economists think about what are the most important drivers of living standards, it really is kind of coming back to productivity.

Demsas: Yeah, and I think that sometimes it’s useful to think about ways in which society gets better, right?

Like, most increases in inputs—so if you increase labor, it means you have less leisure time. And if you increase investments in capital, that means you’re lowering your current consumption. So you’re moving away from buying things that you may want in order to invest in the future, and if you’re increasing material inputs, that reduces natural resources.

So the idea is: How can we get more efficient? And one stat that I like to point to is that “productivity increases have enabled the U.S. business sector to produce nine times more goods and services since 1947 with a [pretty] small increase in hours worked.” So we’re just getting a lot more stuff without having to kill ourselves working to get it. And that can be, you know, just clothes and things like that, but that can also be services. Like now, because it’s really easy to produce a T-shirt, you need less people making T-shirts, and they can teach yoga or do other things. And so I think that’s really important to set the stage here.

But I want to ask you, because your paper is about AI, about this bet that I wonder which side you take on. There’s this bet—I don’t know if you’ve heard about it. It’s between Robert Gordon and Erik Brynjolfsson. Have you heard about this bet?

Toner-Rodgers: I don’t think so, actually.

Demsas: Okay, yeah. It’s basically a $400 bet to GiveWell, so I don’t know if it really has the impact of me making people put their money where their mouth is.

But Robert Gordon is an economist. He’s kind of a longtime skeptic of digital technology’s ability to match the impact of things like electricity or the internal combustion engine. And his argument, basically, is just that he doesn’t expect AI to have a significant impact on productivity. And he argues that because, you know—he points at things like how the U.S. stock of robots has doubled in the past decade, but you haven’t seen this massive revolution in production, productivity growth, and manufacturing. And he also says that AI is really nothing new. You know, we’ve had human customer-service representatives replaced by digital systems without much to show for it. And then he also says things like a lot of economic activity that is relevant to people’s lives, like home construction, isn’t really going to be impacted by AI.

So it’s one side of the debate. It’s kind of more pessimistic on AI. And the other is kind of represented by Erik Brynjolfsson—he’s more of a techno-optimist—and he argues that recent breakthroughs in machine learning will boost productivity in places like biotech, medicine, energy, finance, but it’ll take a few years to show up in the official statistics, because organizations need time to adjust.

Again, they’re only betting $400, so I don’t know if they’re putting their money where their mouth is, but whose side do you kind of take in this debate?

Toner-Rodgers I mean, I think I’m probably more on Erik’s side. So Robert Gordon’s research, I think, has done a great job showing that over the past 40 years or so there’s been this big stagnation, kind of, in innovation in the physical world.

But I think something I’m really excited about in AI is that all these advances in digital technologies, computing power, and algorithms maybe can now, finally, have this impact kind of back to physical infrastructure and physical things in the world. So I think, actually, materials science is a great example of this, where we have these kinds of new AI algorithms that can maybe come up with new important materials that can then be used in physical things.

Because I think a lot of the advances in information technology so far haven’t had big productivity improvements, because they were kind of confined just to the digital world, but now maybe we can use these breakthroughs to actually create new things in the world. And I do think the point—that there’s a lot of constraints to building things, and a lot of the barriers to productivity growth are not, like, we don’t know how to do things, but there’s just big either regulatory or other barriers to building things in the world—is very important.

And I think that’s why the people who are super optimistic about AI’s impact—I think I’m a bit more pessimistic than them because of these kind of bottlenecks in the world. But I’m very excited about things—like biomedicine, drug discovery, or materials science—where we can maybe create new actual things with AI.

Demsas: So materials science, I think, is the place where your research really is focused. So can you just set the stage for us? What type of company were you looking at, and what kind of work are the employees doing?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, so the setting of my paper is the R & D lab of a large U.S. firm which focuses on materials discovery. So this involves coming up with new materials that are then incorporated into products. And so this lab focuses on applications in areas like health care, optics, or industrial manufacturing.

And so the scientists in this lab, many hold Ph.D.s or other advanced degrees in areas like chemical engineering or materials science or physics. And what they’re doing is trying to come up with materials that have useful properties and then incorporate these into products that are then going to be sold to consumers or other firms.

Demsas: And help us set—what do you mean by materials? Like, what are we trying to find here?

Toner-Rodgers: So in some sense, everything in every product uses materials in important ways. Like, one estimate I have in the paper: Someone was kind of looking at all-new technologies and products—How important were new materials to these?—and he found that two-thirds of new technologies really relied on some advance in discovering or manufacturing at scale some new material. So this could be anything from the glass in your iPhone, to the metals in semiconductors, to different kinds of methods for drug delivery. So this is like a lot of the technologies in the world really are relying on new materials.

Demsas: Yeah. I mean, you note in your paper that materials science is kind of the unsung hero of technological progress. And when you start to think about it, it really just adds up. Like, basically every single thing that you could care about, it ends up boiling down to specific materials that you want to find—so whether it’s computing or it’s biomedical innovation, like you said, but also just stuff that we’ve been surprised by recently, like the lowering costs of solar panels. Like, new photovoltaic structures being found is helping drive down the cost of those renewables.

So all these different things—and I think it’s funny, because, I mean, we are an increasingly service-sector-based economy. So I think that we’re kind of abstracted away from some of the materials’ impact on our lives, because we just don’t really see it in our day-to-day. But it’s just as important. I think the pandemic really showed this one when we were missing semiconductor chips.

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, maybe an economics way to put this is that materials science is very central in the innovation network. So there’s been some papers looking at which other fields rely on research from materials science. And it’s really one that’s very central in this network, where things like biomedicine to manufacturing are really relying on new discoveries in materials science. And so kind of focusing on this is a key driver of growth in a lot of areas.

Demsas: And so the scientists in this firm—can you just walk us through what they’re actually doing? Like, what is the process of their work? And then we can get into how AI changed it.

Toner-Rodgers: Sure. So a lot of what they’re doing is basically coming up with ideas, designs for new materials. And then because materials discovery is very hard, many, many of these materials don’t end up having the properties that they hope they do or don’t yield a viable, stable compound. So a lot of what they’re doing is doing tests either in silico tests—like doing simulations—or actually kind of making these materials and testing their properties to see which ones are actually going to be helpful and can later be incorporated into products.

So their time is split. Maybe, like, 40 percent or so is on this initial idea-generation phase, and then the rest is testing these things and seeing which materials are actually viable.

Demsas: When I was reading your paper, I analogized it to coming up with recipes in a kitchen. And you can have a test kitchen or something like that, where basically, if your goal is to come up with a bunch of new recipes for food or for baking or whatever, you may come up with some on paper, and then you’re like, Okay, well, I have to pick which one is potentially going to be a really good recipe, and then you would, you know, test it. And probably you don’t do a simulation. You probably just go make the donut or whatever it is. Is that kind of a good analogy for this?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, I think it is, and also just in the sense that we know a lot about the ingredients or sets of elements and their bonds, and we know a lot about that at a small scale, but it becomes very hard to predict what a material’s property will be as these materials become bigger and more complicated. And so even though we know a lot in some small sense, actually prediction gets pretty hard.

Demsas: So AI gets introduced at this company because they want to figure out if that can help their scientists be more productive at coming up with new materials. At what point in the process is AI coming in? What is it actually doing? How does it change the scientists’ jobs?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, so AI’s role is really in this initial idea-generation phase. And so how it works is that scientists are going to input to the tool some set of desired properties that they want a material to possess. So in this setting, this is really driven by commercial application because this is a corporate R & D lab. So they want to come up with something that’s going to be used in a product. And then they’re going to input these desired properties to the AI tool, which is then going to generate a large set of suggested compounds that are predicted by the AI to possess these properties.

And so before, scientists would have been coming up with these material designs themselves. And now this part is automated by the tool.

Jerusalem Demsas: So it’s like, Now I’m having an AI tool give me a bunch of potential donut recipes instead of me coming up with them myself.

Toner-Rodgers: Exactly. And I think it’s important to note that this whole prediction process is very hard. And so even though I’m going to find pretty large improvements from the AI tool on average, many, many of its suggestions are just not that good and either aren’t going to yield a stable compound or aren’t going to actually have the other properties that you wanted to begin with.

Demsas: Yeah. And so before we get into your results, which are really shocking to me actually, it’s kind of cool—the company set up a natural experiment, basically, for you. Can you walk us through what they did and how they randomized researchers?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah. So I think the lab had just a lot of uncertainty going in about whether this tool was going to be actually helpful. Like, you could have thought, Maybe it’s going to generate a lot of stuff, and it’s all bad, or it’s going to kind of slow people down as they have to sort through all these AI suggestions.

So I think they just had a lot of questions about: Is this tool going to work, and are we going to get actually helpful compounds? So what they did, instead of just rolling it out all at once, was to do three waves of adoption where they randomly assigned teams of scientists to waves. And so this allows me, as a researcher, to look at treated and not-yet-treated scientists and identify the effects of the tool.

Demsas: And did they control for different things? Like, did they control for, you know, what types of research they were working on or how many years of experience they had?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, so there’s a lot of balance between waves because of the randomization on what exactly these scientists are working on, which types of technologies and materials, as well as just the team composition in terms of their areas of expertise and tenure in the lab and so on.

Demsas: So now I want to turn to the results. What did you find?

Toner-Rodgers: So my first result is just looking, on average, at how this tool impacted both the discovery of new materials as well as downstream innovation in terms of patent filings and product prototypes. So I find that researchers with access to the AI tool discover 44 percent more materials, and then this results in a 39 percent increase in patent filings and then a 17 percent rise in downstream product innovation, which I measure using the creation of new product prototypes that incorporate those materials.

Demsas: These are, like, massive numbers.

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, I think they’re pretty big. And also, I think it’s helpful to kind of step back and look at the underlying rate of productivity growth in terms of the output of these researchers. So I look back at the last five years before the tool was introduced, and output per researcher had actually declined over this period. So these are huge numbers relative to the baseline rate of improvement.

Demsas: So it’s interesting—well, I guess first: How? Like, why are people becoming more productive here?

Toner-Rodgers: I think there’s two things. So one is just that the tool is pretty good at coming up with new compounds. So being able to train a model on a huge set of existing compounds is able to give a lot of good suggestions.

And then second: Not having to do that compound design part of the process themselves frees scientists to spend more time on those second two categories, kind of deciding which materials to test and then actually going and testing their properties.

Demsas: It’s interesting when I was looking at your results because you’re able to kind of look at, you know, one month after, four months after the adoption of this new AI tool, how it changes things. Things look kind of grim in the short run, right? Like, four months after AI adoption, the number of new materials actually drops. And it’s not until eight months after that you see a significant increase in new materials. And that’s around when you see the patent filings increase. And it’s not until 20 months after that you actually see it show up in product prototypes.

And, you know, part of the problem of trying to figure out if new technology like AI is having a big impact is that it might take a while to show up in statistics. Is that why you think maybe we’re not seeing a massive jump in productivity right now in the U.S., despite the rollout of a ton of new machine-learning tools?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, I think that’s partly true. Like, you definitely need some forms of organizational adaptation or people learning to actually utilize these tools well. So part of why there’s this lag in the results is just that materials discovery takes a while. So it takes a little bit to actually go and kind of synthesize these compounds and then go and find their properties.

But another thing I find is that in the first couple months after the tool’s introduction, scientists are very bad, across the board, at determining which of the AI suggestions are good and which are bad. And this is part of the reason we don’t see effects right away.

Demsas: So it’s like your job has changed significantly, and you just need time to adjust to that.

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, totally.

Demsas: So I want to ask you about material quality, though, because what you’re measuring, largely, is the number of materials made. But has the quality of the materials improved or declined, and how would we know?

Toner-Rodgers: So I think that’s a key concern when you’re doing these things, is we don’t only care about how many new discoveries we’re getting, but what they are. So a very nice thing about my setting and materials science, in general, is that there’s direct measures of quality in terms of the properties of these compounds. And in particular, at the beginning of the discovery phase, scientists define a set of target properties that they want materials to possess.

And so I can compare those target properties to the measured properties of materials that are actually created. And so when I do this, I find that, in fact, quality increases in the treatment group, which is showing that we’re not actually having this compromised quality as a result of faster discovery.

Demsas: So there’s this joke that I was looking up, and apparently Wikipedia tells me it’s attributed to this character from Muslim folklore called Nasreddin, but I could not independently verify this. Most people have probably heard some version of this. It goes: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for his keys under a streetlight, and he tries to help him find it. They look for it for a bit of time, and then he’s like, Are you sure you dropped them here? And the drunk guy is like, No, I lost them in a park somewhere else. The policeman is kind of incredulous; he’s like, Why are you looking for them here? And the drunk guy goes, This is where the light is.

And this has been, you know, referred to by a lot of researchers as the streetlight effect, right? So it’s a phenomenon that people tend to work where the light is or like easiest problems, even if those aren’t the ones that are actually likely to bear the most fruit. Do you think that AI helps us avoid the streetlight effect or it exacerbates the problem?

Toner-Rodgers: So I think talking to people before this project, I would have guessed that it would exacerbate the problem. And the reason is that the tool is trained on a huge set of existing compounds. So you might expect that the things it suggests are going to be just very similar to what we already know. So you might think that because of that, the streetlight effect is going to get worse. We’re not going to come up with the best things but rather just things that look very similar to what we already know.

And I think, surprisingly to me, I find that, in my setting, this is not the case. And so to do that, I measure novelty at each stage of R & D. So first I look at the novelty of the new materials themselves. And to do that, I look at their chemical structures—so the sets of atoms in a material, as well as how they’re arranged geometrically. And I can compare this to existing compounds and see, like, Are we creating things that look very similar to existing materials, or are they very novel?

So on this measure, AI decreases average material similarity by 0.4 standard deviation. So these things are becoming more novel. And it also increases the share of materials that are highly distinct—which I define as being in the bottom quartile of the similarity distribution—by four percentage points. So it seems like, both on average and in terms of coming up with highly distinct things, we’re getting more.

Demsas: This is kind of surprising to me, right? There’s a paper by some researchers at NYU and Tel Aviv University called “The Impact of Large Language Models on Open-Source Innovation,” and they sort of raised this question about whether AI has asymmetric impact on outside-the-box thinking and inside-the-box thinking. And you know, the thing is that most AI systems are evaluated on tasks with well-defined solutions, rather than open-ended exploration. And, you know, models are predicting the most likely next response. Like, what’s happening with ChatGPT is it’s just predicting what the next word is going to be. Or that’s what most of these systems are trying to do. And they’re trained on this corpus of existing stuff, and it’s not like they’re independent minds.

And so they kind of theorize that, you know, AI might be good at finding answers to questions that have right answers or ones where there’s clearly defined evaluation metrics. But can it really push the bounds of human understanding, and does our reliance on it really reduce innovation in the long term? So I mean, this seems to be a really big problem in the field of AI, and I wonder: How confident are you that your findings are really pushing against this? Or is it kind of like, maybe in the short term, there’s some low-hanging fruit that looks really novel, and in the long term, you’re not really going to have that?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, so I think one drawback of the measurements I have is that I can see that, on average, novelty increases, but what I can’t see is whether the likelihood of coming up with really truly revolutionary discoveries has changed. And so if you think of science as being driven, really, by these far-right-tail breakthroughs, you’re just not going to see much of these in your data. This has been an issue highlighted by Michael Nielsen in some essays that I like a lot.

And so one kind of thing you might be worried about is, Well, we got, on average, more novel things, but maybe these very revolutionary discoveries have a lower probability of being discovered by the AI, and that in the long term this is not a good trade-off. And because you’re just never going to see very many of these right-tail discoveries in your data, you just can’t say much about this using these types of methods.

Demsas: I mean, how confident, then, are you that we can even test whether this is happening?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, I think one answer is that we’ll just need some time to see, like, do these new materials open up new avenues for research? Like, are there other materials that are going to be built on these new ideas that the AI generated? But one thing I’d say is just that I think a lot of people would have said beforehand that, even on average, I expect novelty to go down. And the fact that it went up, I think, does push back somewhat against the view that these things are going to be bad for novelty.

Demsas: And then I guess, kind of on this question of generalizability to other fields, like, materials science is a place, of course, where you can measure productivity pretty cleanly. Like, you can see what the compounds are. You can see what people are trying to look for. A lot of fields, even in science, are not like this. They’re not super easy to measure what exactly you’re trying to find, and innovations can have spurts and stops for long periods of time, even if a lot of work is happening. So I guess, do you expect AI to be as helpful in fields that look a lot less like materials science?

Toner-Rodgers: So I think in the short run, I would say probably not, right? I think there’s areas where it does look a lot like this, like things like drug discovery, but then there’s a lot of areas where it doesn’t look like this at all. I would say, I think kind of fundamentally, this comes down to how much of science is about prediction versus maybe coming up with new theories or something like that. And I think maybe I’ve been surprised over the last several years how many parts of science, at least in part, can have big impacts from AI, right?

So we see in things like math, where maybe it really feels like it’s not a prediction problem at all, like doing a proof, but we see things like large language models and other more specialized tools really being able to make progress in these areas. And I think they’re not at the frontier of research by any means, but I think we’ve seen huge improvements.

So this is absolutely an open question how much these tools can generalize to other fields and come up with new discoveries more broadly. But I would say that betting against deep learning has not had a great track record in recent years.

Demsas: Yeah, fair.

[Music]

After the break: AI doesn’t benefit everyone equally, even when we’re talking about brilliant scientists.

[Break]

Demsas: I want to ask you about the distributional impacts. I think this is probably the most pessimistic, concerning part of your paper. You find that the bottom third of researchers see minimal gains to productivity, while the top 10 percent have their productivity increase by 81 percent. Can you talk through how you’re measuring the sort of productivity of these researchers and this finding, in particular?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah. So first I kind of just look at scientists’ discoveries in the two years before the tool was introduced. And there’s a fair amount of heterogeneity across scientists and their rate of discovery. And I do some tests showing that these are kind of correlated over time, so it’s not like some scientists are just particularly lucky. And, instead, there do seem to be these kinds of persistent productivity differences across scientists. And then I just look at each decile of initial productivity: How much do those scientists’ output change once the tool is introduced? And we see these just massive gains at the high end. And at the low end, on average, they do see some improvement, maybe 10 percent or so, but nowhere near as much as the kind of initially high-productivity scientists.

Demsas: Why? Like, at what stage are the low-productivity scientists getting caught up? Because, you know, if this tool is just giving them a bunch of potential recipes for new materials, are they just worse at selecting which ones to test, or what’s happening?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, so I think the key mechanism that I identify in the paper is that it’s really this ability to discern between the AI suggestions that are going to be actually yielding a compound that’s helpful versus not. So I think just the vast majority of AI suggestions are bad. They’re not going to yield a stable compound, or it’s not going to have desirable properties. And so because actually synthesizing and testing these things is very costly, being able to determine the good from the bad is very important in this setting. And I find that it’s exactly these initially high-performing scientists that are good at doing this. And so the lower-performing scientists spend a lot of time testing false positives, while these high-ability ones are able to kind of pick out the good suggestions and see their productivity improve a lot.

Demsas: But lower-performing scientists aren’t getting worse at their jobs, right? They’re just not really helped by the tool.

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, that’s true. But I think it’s worth saying that it’s not like they’re not using the tool. So it really is that their research process changed a lot, but because their discernment is not great, it ended up being kind of a similar productivity level to before.

Demsas: And were you able to observe this inequality over time? Was it stagnant? Did it widen? Did it decrease? Was there learning that you were able to see happen with less-productive researchers?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah. So I think something very interesting is, like, if I look in the first five months after the tool was introduced, across the productivity distribution, scientists are pretty bad at this discernment. So all of them are kind of doing something that looks like testing at random. They’re not really able to pick out the best AI suggestions. But as we look further on, scientists in the top quartile of initial productivity do seem to start being able to prioritize the best ones, while scientists in the bottom quartile show basically no improvement at all. And so I think this is pretty striking. And there’s just something about these scientists that’s allowing some to learn and some to see no improvement.

Demsas: And how long were you able to observe this for? Like, is it possible that maybe they just needed more time?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, so I think I see, like, two years of post-treatment observations. So in that time, I don’t see improvement. I think it’s possible either they need more time, or maybe they need some sort of training to be able to learn to do this better. So I think one question: Is this something fundamental about these scientists that’s not allowing them to do this? Or is there some form of either training or different kind of hiring characteristics the firm could look at to identify scientists that are good at this task?

Demsas: So were you surprised by this finding? After reading your paper, our CEO here at The Atlantic, Nicholas Thompson—he pointed out that in studies of call centers, the opposite is often true. For instance, the guy we mentioned earlier, Erik Brynjolfsson, who’s kind of a techno-optimist, and two of his co-authors recently put out a working paper that looks at over 5,000 customer-service agents and found that AI increased worker productivity. And they’re measuring that as issues resolved per hour. And it increases their productivity by 14 percent, with less-experienced and lower-skilled workers improving the speed and quality of their output, while the most experienced and the highest skilled saw only small gains. So I guess, looking at the field, in general, is it strange that you’re seeing the biggest impact happening with the most-skilled people? Should we expect the opposite?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, so I think a lot of the early results on AI have found that result that you just mentioned, where the productivity kind of compresses, and it’s these lower-performing people that benefit the most. And I think in that call-center paper, for example, I think one thing that’s going on is just that the top performers are already maybe nearly as good as you’re going to get at being a call-center person. Like, there’s kind of just a cap on how good you can do in this job.

Demsas: You can’t resolve an issue every second. You actually have to have a conversation.

Toner-Rodgers: Right. You kind of have to do it. And they’re maybe close to the productivity frontier in that setting. So that’s one thing.

And I think in materials science, this is just not the case at all. Like, this is just super hard, and these are very expert scientists struggling to come up with things, is one thing. And then I think the second thing is that in the call-center setting, AI is going to give you some suggestions of what to say to your customer. And it’s probably not that hard to kind of evaluate whether that suggestion is good or bad. Like, you kind of read the text and, like, All right, I’m gonna say this.

And in materials science, that’s also not the case—where, like, you’re getting some new compound. It’s very hard to tell if this thing is good or bad. Many, many of them are bad. And so this kind of judgment step, where you’re deciding whether to trust the suggestion or not, is very important. And I think in a lot of the settings where we’ve seen productivity compression, this step is just not there at all, and you can kind of out-of-the-box use the AI suggestion.

Demsas: So do you think a good heuristic is if AI is being applied to a job where there’s a right way to do things that we kind of basically know how to do, or there’s very little sort of experimentation or imagination or creativity necessary to do that job, that you will see the lower-skilled, the less-experienced people gain the most? And then when it’s the opposite, when a lot of creativity is needed, high-skilled people are going to get the most out of AI?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, I think that sounds true to me. And I think maybe one way I’d put it is it’s something about the variation and the quality of the AI’s output that’s very important. So even in materials science, I’m not sure that, say, in three years or something, the AI could just be incredibly good and, like, 90 percent of its suggestions are awesome, and you’re not going to see this effect where this judgment step is very important.

So I think it really depends on the quality of the AI output relative to your goal. And if there’s a lot of variation, and it’s hard to tell the good suggestions from the bad, that seems to be the type of setting where we’re seeing the top performers benefit the most.

Demsas: And I assume that with this tool at this company, like, when they come up with successful materials, they’re feeding that information back into the model. Did you observe that the tool was getting better at providing more high-quality suggestions over time?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, so they’re definitely doing that. There’s definitely some reinforcement learning with the actual tests. Like, I think over this period, I don’t see huge results like that. I think, relative to the amount of data it was trained on initially and the previous test results that went into the first version of the model, it’s just not that much data. But I think as these things are adopted at scale, we could absolutely see something like that.

Demsas: If that sort of reinforcement learning happens, do you think that that increases the likelihood that AI kind of pushes us down the same sorts of paths? Like, so you get kind of path dependent because you’re basically telling the model, Oh, good job. You did really good on these things, and then it becomes trained to sort of do those sorts of things over and over, and it gets less creative over time?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, I think that is definitely a concern. And I think something that people are thinking about is maybe there’s ways to reward novel output, per se. Because I think in these settings, one thing that’s helpful with novel output, even if it’s not actually a good compound, is that you learn about new areas of the design space. And even getting a result that’s very novel and not good is pretty helpful information. So I think rewarding the model for novelty, per se, is maybe one kind of avenue for fixing that problem.

Demsas: So this paper and this field, in general, kind of reminds me of some of the findings in the remote-work space. We had Natalia Emanuel from the New York Fed on the show, actually on our very first, inaugural episode. And you know, we talked about her research on remote work, and one finding that she has is that more-senior people are more productive or have higher gains of productivity when they’re able to go remote, because they stop having to mentor young people, and that is a drain on their productivity in person. They’re having someone younger than you kind of ask you questions, interrupt your day and, like—I’m not saying they hate the job—but that takes away from your ability to just work and not have to focus on other things.

And I wonder if AI becoming the sort of “bouncing off” buddy of scientists, rather than, like, you’re turning to your less-productive lab partner and just kind of tossing out ideas or talking. Instead, you’re sort of engaging with this AI tool, and that’s what you’re using to sort of figure out new methods and materials. Does that change science to become less collaborative with human peers, and does that have those knock-on harms, where maybe these most-productive scientists are getting better, but the less-productive scientists aren’t able to actually get the learning necessary to improve their own productivity?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, I think that’s super interesting. And I think a general question about these results are, like: What does this look like in the longer term?

I think something that might absolutely be true is: These people who are very good at judgment might have gotten good at judgment by designing the materials themselves in the past, and this is kind of where you got that expertise. But going forward, if the AI is just used, maybe new scientists that enter the firm never get that experience and maybe never have the ability to get the judgment. And so that’s one reason you could see different effects in the long run.

In terms of the specific question of collaboration, I think that’s something super interesting. I don’t have, really, evidence on that in the paper, because I don’t see good data on how much scientists are communicating with each other. But something I’m very interested in is: We have some scientists that are good at judgment. Like, could they teach whatever that skill is to the people who are worse? And I think one way to get at this, which I haven’t done yet, is: If you have a teammate who’s very good at this task, do you somehow learn, over time, from them? And I think that would be very interesting to look at.

Demsas: And you mentioned, like, how does someone become a high-productivity scientist, and that requires you doing this on your own, potentially. And I wonder—companies, whether they will have the incentive at all to invest in this long-term training when there are these sorts of short- and even medium-run, huge benefits they could get. I mean, you’re talking about massive increases in patents and new technologies they’re able to operationalize and commercialize, even. And if that’s the case, even if everyone knows that there’s this long-term cost to science and to scientists, who is actually incentivized to make sure this training happens until we’re already kind of in a bad place where a lot of technology has stagnated?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Like, there’s kind of a collective-action problem where you don’t want to be the one that’s doing all the training in the short run while all your competitors are, like, coming out with all these amazing materials and products.

Demsas: And then poaching all your people.

Toner-Rodgers: Exactly. I think that’s definitely a concern. But also more generally, I do kind of have some confidence that organizations are going to be able to adapt to these tools and find out new ways to either train scientists for these things, kind of as they’re using them, or be able to, in the selection process for new employees, find predictors of being good at that this new task. Because, in some sense, what we’re saying is that these new technologies are changing the skills required to make scientific discoveries, and I think we’ve seen a long history of technological progress that’s done exactly that—like, changed the returns to different skills—and firms have adjusted to that.

Demsas: What I want to ask you about next is about the survey you did about the scientists’ job satisfaction. Can you tell us about that survey?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah. So the goal of the survey was just to see both how scientists use the tool and then whether they liked it—how did this impact their job satisfaction?

And so after the whole experiment was completed, I just conducted a survey of all the lab scientists. About half answered. And one thing I found is that, basically across the board, scientists were fairly unhappy with the changes in the content of their work brought on by AI. So what they say is that they found a lot of enjoyment from this process of coming up with ideas for compounds themselves, and when this was automated, their job became a lot less enjoyable. So they say, like, My job became less creative, and some of the key skills that I’d built over time, I’m no longer getting to use.

And I think one thing that’s very striking is this is true both for the scientists that saw huge productivity improvements from AI, as well as the lower performers. And so we really see that it’s not as much dependent on productivity. I also ask, kind of, Well, you’re also getting more productive. Does this somehow somewhat offset your dissatisfaction with the tasks you’re doing at work? And it does somewhat. But overall, I find that 82 percent of scientists report a kind of net reduction in job satisfaction.

Demsas: I mean, that’s kind of depressing, right? Obviously, if you’re told, like, Oh, your work is having a big impact on the world and maybe making life better for people who are sick or who need renewable energy, or whatever it is, that can feel good. But if your day-to-day just sucks, you can imagine there’s gonna be some attrition, right?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, absolutely. Because yeah—one thing sometimes people say when they hear this result is, like, Well, scientific discovery is very important. Maybe these new materials are gonna be used by millions of people. Why do we really care about these scientists and how much they’re enjoying their job? But I really think it could have important implications for who chooses to go into these fields and the overall kind of direction of scientific progress. So I think it’s very important to think about these questions of well-being at the subjective, individual level for that reason.

Demsas: I feel like it’s really difficult for me to kind of weigh out what actually happens in the long term here, because I could imagine that the types of scientists who went into these fields were selected for people who really, really enjoyed the creativity aspect of figuring out new materials. Whether or not they’re productive at doing that, like, that’s just the kind of thing you’re selecting for.

And I would analogize it to someone who’s really excited about coming up with new recipes. And I’m someone who likes—I don’t like coming up with new recipes, but some of my favorite recipes are ones where I saw a New York Times Cooking recipe, and then I change some things about it. And as I’ve cooked it a bunch of times, I’ve tweaked some things, and I’ve come up with something that’s sort of my own, sort of already existing. And I can imagine there are a lot of people like that and that the skill of discernment does not necessarily correlate with the skill of loving to be creative.

So you could see shifts happening in the field, right, where the types of people who go into materials science change, and these scientists go do something else where they’re able to be more creative. And you mentioned that a lot of them are thinking about taking on new skills. How do you think that all kind of shakes out?

Toner-Rodgers: This really maybe comes back to the question of training. So I think a lot of these people’s complaints were like, Look—I built up all this expertise for one thing, and now I don’t get to do that thing anymore. And you could think that now if we start training people for this slightly different task, which also requires a lot of expertise, of judgment, that that also is fulfilling. And whether that’s true in the long run, I think I’m not sure.

So one analogy that someone said to me is, like, Well, you’re a Ph.D. student. Imagine if, instead of writing papers, you just did referee reports all the time.

Demsas: Yeah. And sorry—can you explain what a referee report is?

Toner-Rodgers: It’s like you’re looking at someone else’s research and saying, like, It’s good, or, It has these problems.

And that doesn’t sound awesome. Like, it definitely takes a lot of expertise to do a referee report, but it’s not why you got into this—like, you do want to come up with ideas. And so I think I’m very uncertain how this is going to all shake out. I do think that part of it really was, like, I got trained to do a thing, and now I don’t get to do it anymore. And I think that part will go away somewhat, but whether this is just fundamentally a worse job, I think it definitely could be.

Demsas: It’s interesting, the way in which we kind of have always thought of automation as disrupting the jobs of people with less-well-compensated skills—so, like, manufacturing jobs, or, you know, now your job is shifting a lot if you’re someone who works at a restaurant. Now robots are doing some of that work. And you know, there’s just been this kind of pejorative, like, Learn to code! sort of response to some of those people.

And it’s interesting to see that, like, a lot of generative AI is actually really impacting the fields of higher-income individuals, like people who are working in heavily writing fields or like legal fields and now, also, science fields. And it does, really, I think, raise this question of just: Will society be as tolerant of disruptions in those spaces as it has been in disruptions in spaces where workers have had less kind of political and social power?

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think there really is something different about these technologies where they’re creating novel output based on patterns in their training data, whereas before, like, from industrial robots to computers, it really was about automating routine tasks. And now for the first time, we’re automating the creative tasks. And I think how people feel about this and how we react might look very different.

Demsas: Yeah. I came across this quote from the chief AI officer at Western University, Mark Daley. It’s a blog post. He’s commenting on your paper. He writes, “Because AI isn’t just augmenting human creativity—it’s replacing it. The study found that artificial intelligence now handles 57 percent of ‘idea generation’ tasks, traditionally the most intellectually rewarding part of scientific work. Instead of dreaming up new possibilities, scientists may find themselves relegated to testing AI’s ideas in the lab, reduced to what one might grimly call highly educated lab technicians.”

I don’t know if there’s a survey of scientists or whatever, but I wonder here if you see that there’s a kind of a growing pessimism as a result of findings like this and just, like, the experiences many people are having with AI where they do feel like, Hey, the good part of life—I don’t want AI or robots or technology to be taking away the fun, creative stuff like writing or art or whatever. I want them to take away the drudgery the way that, like, laundry machines took away drudgery or dishwashers took away drudgery. I don’t know how you think about that as a shift in how the discourse is happening on this issue.

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah. I think that’s interesting. And I also think, when I talk to scientists, for example, materials scientists that work on actually building the computational tools, like, they’re super excited about this stuff because they’re coming up with ideas for the tool itself and, like, going and testing it and all these things.

Something in this setting is like: This was a tool that was kind of imposed on these people, not something they kind of created themself. And I think that’s maybe something we’ll see, where the people that are actually having input and creating the new technologies themselves might find, like, they’re very happy with the output, even though these tasks are being automated. Whereas people in this setting, where the tool kind of just came in and changed their job a lot, maybe see kind of big decreases in enjoyment.

Demsas: Well, Aidan, always our last and final question: What is an idea that you thought was good at the time but ended up only being good on paper?

Toner-Rodgers: So I went to undergrad in Minnesota. And for background, I’m from California. So the first winter I was there, me and a couple of friends decided it’d be a great idea to go ice fishing.

Demsas: Okay.

Toner-Rodgers: And so we drive up to this lake. And literally three steps out on the ice, I step on a crack and fall through into this frozen lake. So ice fishing for Californians is good on paper.

Demsas: This is like the scene in Little Women where, like, Amy falls into the lake or whatever. What happened? Was it actually dangerous, or did you just immediately pull yourself out?

Toner-Rodgers: Luckily, we weren’t far from civilization. Like, we were near the car, so we ran back to the car.

Demsas: Oh my God.

Toner-Rodgers: And that was the end of my ice-fishing career.

Demsas: I’m glad you learned this early in your Minnesota life and did not get too adventurous. Well, Aidan, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Toner-Rodgers: Yeah, it was great. Thanks so much.

[Music]

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

The Truth About NIMBYs

2025-01-07T06:00:00-05:00

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“What about my property values?” It’s the question local elected officials have heard from their constituents countless times.

Whether it’s a debate over a new energy project, park redevelopment, or new housing construction, local governments can seem almost singularly obsessed with how proposals will impact home values.

The ubiquity of this concern has led many people to believe that property values are the primary way people decide whether they are in favor or opposed to new housing construction in their area. If an apartment building is going to harm your home’s resale value, the thinking goes, you’ll be against it.

But lots of people oppose new housing even when it’s in their financial self-interest.

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the political scientist David Broockman about the limits of using self-interest as a lens for understanding people’s opposition to new development. His research, with the scholars Chris Elmendorf and Josh Kalla, points to symbolic-politics theory, a framework that de-emphasizes personal impacts and financial self-interest and instead looks at how people feel about symbols such as cities, developers, and affordable housing.

“I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong, that financial self-interest matters some or personal impacts might matter some,” Broockman explains. “But we also know if we just think about any other political issues—so think about taxes, think about abortion—yes, self-interest, personal impacts are some of that. But there’s plenty of anti-abortion women. There’s plenty of rich people that vote to raise their taxes. Ideology, tastes—that’s a lot of the story too about why people have the views that they have.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: Why do people get so upset when someone proposes an apartment building or some other new development near where they live?

The prevailing theory is that it’s mostly about property values. Homeowners are worried that a high-rise or renters or, quote, “the type of people who live in multifamily housing” can lower the resale value of their house. And in a country where for most middle-class people, their primary residence is their primary wealth-building tool, anything that threatens your home value is suspect.

But is that the real reason for NIMBYism?

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

My guest today is David Broockman. He’s a political scientist at UC Berkeley whose new paper with Chris Elmendorf and Josh Kalla questions the roots of NIMBYism.

David and his co-authors reason that if NIMBYism is about protecting property values, then renters should be less NIMBY than homeowners. But they find that when they ask people about new development or building more housing, the opinions of homeowners are, essentially, the same as their renter counterparts.

David and his co-authors offer a different theory: Support and opposition for new housing is largely predicated on how you feel about cities to begin with. Regardless of whether your property values are at stake, someone who lives in a city probably likes cities and, thus, is more likely to support new housing or denser development.

This is a really fascinating conversation that zooms out to untangle the nature of political beliefs, and it dovetails with a lot of the reporting I’ve been doing over the years on this very question.

David, welcome to the show.

David Broockman: Thanks so much for having me.

Demsas: So why aren’t you a NIMBY?

Broockman: (Laughs.) That’s a great question. And, you know, if you look in the research we have so far in political science trying to understand NIMBYism, I actually sort of should be a NIMBY. So I own a home in San Francisco. And if you think about right now, there’s this big push to upzone cities, like, as a San Francisco homeowner, I should be a super NIMBY.

Obviously, I’m here to talk about my academic work, but as a person, I am definitely not a NIMBY. I would like to see more housing in my neighborhood. And so part of what we’re trying to do in this paper is come up with a theory of people like me and a lot of other people who don’t quite fit the boxes that we’d expect, in terms of what they think about housing politics, based on whether they’re a homeowner or not and whether or not development’s happening near them.

Demsas: I think it’s funny. Because I thought about this question, too, for myself, because, obviously, there are these macro explanations you can do. You can think about why you are the way you are, based on where you grew up, or who your parents are, or socioeconomic status you had as a kid, or the school, or whatever you had, and your own personal reasons.

And it’s very easy to just have the very individualized reasons like, Well, I read an Ed Glaeser paper when I was, you know, 17 years old, and so that’s why I’m not a NIMBY. But that doesn’t really explain things on a macro level. So the conventional wisdom about NIMBYism, or why people oppose new housing in their communities, I think of that as being popularized by Bill Fischel’s homevoter hypothesis.

Broockman: Yes.

Demsas: Can you lay that out for us?

Broockman: Yeah, there’s a few versions of it, actually. I think the original is, actually, a little more nuanced. It’s about, kind of, risk and how homeowners might want to basically not have a lot of change in their community, because they’re uncertain about the impact on their home value.

But I think the basic version of it that’s gotten popularized, which is a little more simple than the original, is just the idea that if you’re a homeowner—just like, say, a taxi driver at the time of the introduction of Uber—you have this kind of scarce good, so be it a home or a taxi medallion, and you don’t want a lot of competition to come in.

So if there’s more supply of homes, just like if there’s more supply of taxi medallions, the thought is, Hey. We’re part of this home-ownership cartel. If there’s more supply of homes, then the prices are going to go down. That’s going to devalue my asset. So I’m going to be against that. And that’s the kind of financial-self-interest explanation for NIMBYism, or this kind of popularized version of the homevoter hypothesis that’s out there more generally.

Demsas: Well, give us the complicated version. It’s a wonky show. What’s Fischel’s version?

Broockman: Yeah, I think it’s, in some ways, a little bit been lost to the sands of time in terms of how it’s been popularized. I think, if anything, the explanation that I think has gotten a lot more attention—and that I think is actually, in my view, much better empirically supported—is a little bit less about financial-self-interest.

Because if you just look at a lot of the empirical research, the empirical evidence for this financial-self-interest explanation, I think there’s some for it; there’s some against it. I would say it’s kind of uneven, to be honest. I think NIMBYism—and I think there’s a reason we kind of use that term—is the explanation that’s out there that I do think there’s a lot to, although I think it’s incomplete, and that’s just the idea that there’s these negative externalities, hyperlocal negative externalities of new-home building. That’s everything from the construction noise, traffic, impacts on views—things like that.

And so, you know, I think there’s a lot of evidence for that. For example, there’s a really nice paper by one of our former UC Berkeley students, Alexander Sahn, who’s now a professor at UNC, where he shows, in some really cool data work he did at the S.F. Planning Commission, that if you merge the data from the S.F. Planning Commission and all these public hearings where people say, Hi. I’m so and so. I’m here to oppose this new housing, or, I’m here to support this new housing—if you merge that with a voter file to figure out where people actually live and where this new housing is being proposed, people are way more likely to show up to oppose housing if that new housing is proposed to be built near their home and near where they live. And so I think we have a lot of evidence for that and a lot more evidence for it that that’s a lot of the story in terms of opposition to new housing.

And part of what we’re trying to do in this paper is say, There’s definitely some merit to that, but it’s not the whole story. As we talked about at the top, someone like me, I should be at the S.F. Planning Commission. It’s, actually—the planning commission is only a few blocks from my house. I should be going there all the time to oppose all the new construction in my neighborhood, as a homeowner, but that is far from what I’ve been doing.

Demsas: So what first made you skeptical that this explanation could really explain NIMBYism? Because, you know, it’s funny—I’ve been asked, you know, What’s something you have changed your mind about? And my answer for, like, the last year or so has been, you know, I used to really over-index on the idea that people oppose new housing because of their property values.

And a big part of what changed my mind on that was: (A) When you do a bunch of reporting and you talk to people, they’re often using the word property values as, like, a shorthand for things that they think are good or things that they think are bad. So like, Things will lower my property values if I don’t like them, you know what I mean? Even whether or not that’s actually true, that’s how they kind of talk about it. It’s a language we give people to oppose new housing in many ways.

But what kind of started you thinking that maybe this wasn’t really fully explanatory?

Broockman: Yeah, absolutely. So a few personal experiences actually, as well as just my academic training and being a political science Ph.D. So I come from this kind of school of thought and public opinion where my basic explanation with any new political issue that comes onto the scene—one of my kind of first frameworks that I use to think about, Okay, you know, who might support and oppose this? is a framework called “symbolic-politics theory.” This theory was originally popularized by David Sears and his colleagues a long time ago, where basically, back in the ’70s, they’re trying to understand how people think about issues like busing or how they vote in presidential elections.

Demsas: You mean busing for integrating schools?

Broockman: Yes, exactly. You know, back then, a lot of the basic explanations people would come to those kinds of questions with really assumed it’s all about kind of financial self-interest or kind of personal impacts on people, just like we think about with housing. And just like in those cases, I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong that financial self-interest matters some, or personal impacts might matter some.

But we also know, if we just think about any other political issues—so think about taxes; think about abortion—yes, self-interest, personal impacts are some of that. But there’s plenty of anti-abortion women. There’s plenty of rich people that vote to raise their taxes. Ideology, tastes—that’s a lot of the story, too, about why people have the views that they have. And so I’ve had a lot of personal experiences over the years paying attention to this housing issue that have made me realize: You know what? Maybe housing is just kind of like any other issue, where self-interest and personal impacts are some of the story but, actually, not the whole story.

One of those personal anecdotes: I was talking with a member of my family—as I mentioned, I have a condo in San Francisco, where I live—and this member of my family and I were talking about moving to this condo and how I wish there was more housing like this. I was talking to them about it, and they just said, You know, I just don’t understand how you can live like that. You know, You don’t have a yard. You know, you can’t walk out onto green grass right from your front door. And they, eventually, at some point said not just, I don’t think you should live like that, but they said, People shouldn’t live like that.

And I realized, Well, wait a minute. To some extent, you know, the people who choose to go live in the suburbs, they obviously have revealed through that choice, to the extent they can—on average, the people who choose to live in the suburbs are revealing that’s the kind of low-density living that they like. Whereas me, choosing to live in a condo in San Francisco, I’m revealing I have a taste for this like high-density living—where for me, living in the suburbs is like my version of a nightmare.

So I realized in that conversation, Okay, people clearly have these tastes, but they’re kind of externalizing those into their views about public policy and thinking, Okay, it’s not just that I think, for example, cities good. Like, as someone like me who loves living in a dense city, it seems that then affects my preferences about what public policy should allow. Just like people who live in suburbs, they’re thinking, Hmm, like, that’s not the kind of living I want. That’s not what the government should be encouraging.

Demsas: So it’s not like I think that anyone can have, you know—I like an iPhone that’s pink, but I don’t care if other people have green. It’s like, I think people should have phones or shouldn’t have phones. You know what I mean?

Broockman: Yeah, exactly. And so that’s one of the basic arguments we’re trying to make in this paper, is that people have varying tastes for denser housing development. And so when we’re thinking about NIMBYism, we shouldn’t just think about, Well, I don’t want more housing near me.

This started to become really relevant in California, where I live, because the state legislature started to do a lot to try to encourage building more housing across the state, and some of those bills specifically targeted cities. So for example, in California, the legislature passed this bill a few years ago, A.B. 2011, which basically upzoned vast swaths of the state, basically commercial corridors in cities. So there’s a bunch of new development—well, not a bunch—some new development in San Francisco that’s being proposed now using this new law.

And one of the interesting things about it is that if you look at who voted for that law and who some of the strongest supporters were, a lot of them were the legislators and the people who represent or live in the areas most affected. And that’s, like, really counter to what you’d expect from this idea of NIMBYism.

And we see that in our daily data as well. So we actually asked a survey question on one of the surveys we did, where we asked people, Do you think cities should have to allow five-story apartment buildings to be built along major streets and in commercial areas? And if you came in with the view that financial self-interest and NIMBYism explained things, again, people like me should be the most opposed to that. As a homeowner in a big city, I’m going to get the double-whammy negative impact of more new construction near me and new density and all that NIMBYism stuff, as well as maybe my property value would go down.

But actually, when we break things out by whether people live in cities or not, and it’s only people in cities this law would affect, as well as people who are owners versus renters, it’s actually owners in cities who are the most supportive. And that seems to be because the people who choose to own in cities have revealed through their behavior that they really like cities, and they have a taste for density.

And so to your point, when you ask those people, Well, do you think the government should do things to make more of the stuff that you like—namely, cities and density? people say, Yeah, let’s do it. Clearly, I like that.

Demsas: So that’s what your paper starts off with, right? You start off kind of trying to separate out the ways in which owners versus renters think about new housing. And like you say, the really surprising finding is that people who own their homes inside cities are the most likely to support new housing being built in these very kinds of neighborhoods. So I want to ask you about this finding and stress test it from a couple different perspectives.

First, I have a question around how we can even think about this, the way that new housing impacts property values, right? Because it really depends on how development occurs, what happens to your property values. So one thing that people have talked about a lot is that, you know, let’s say you have a single-family home, and it’s in this nice neighborhood. You can sell it for a pretty penny if you have a nice single-family home in San Francisco, but you could probably sell it for a lot more money if you’re now able to build a five-story apartment building on it, right? So isn’t it possible that a lot of people do view it in their financial self-interest to have their homes upzoned?

Broockman: Yeah, this is one of the, I think, funny things about kind of the details of these self-interest theories. And I think it’s part of why, you know, some of these theories can be a little bit difficult to pin down, because it really depends on how you pin down self-interest, right?

So, you know, even to broaden that out, you know, one more: We don’t want to necessarily argue here, Oh, people are being stupid or doing things not in their self-interest, in the sense that if I think about me as someone who has a taste for denser housing near me, I would say, you know, you could imagine a way of thinking about it, which is, Well, I guess it’s in my self-interest that I have this taste for more-dense housing near me. And so yeah, I’m gonna vote to elect politicians or for California ballot measures, which we love out here, to try to get more of the stuff that I like around me, because that’s what I want.

And I agree that, in this case, this is one of the reasons that, to your question, self-interest theory can be a little bit hard to pin down because it really depends on how you define it. And I don’t think even economists all agree about, Okay, A.B. 2011 in California—what is going to be the long-run impact of that policy on homeowners’ home values or financial interests? And you can think about all kinds of second-order consequences, like, Okay, well, maybe property-tax revenue will go up, and so that will put less pressure. And so there’s just so many possible mechanisms there.

And so I think from our perspective, our view is to say, Well, okay, that kind of stuff could be part of what’s going on in people’s heads. But at the same time, just such a powerful predictor of people’s answer to that question is just one simple question, which is, Do you like big cities? And the people who say, I like big cities, they’re like, Yes, we should build more housing in cities. And the people who say, I don’t like big cities, say they don’t.

So we want to be really clear in this paper: We’re not trying to argue that self-interest is not part of the story or that NIMBYism, especially, is not part of the story, but just that those probably leave something out. So there could be something to that—and maybe a lot to it.

There’s also this other thing, which is just: Some people like density on its own terms. They reveal that through their behavior. And it’s those people, when you ask them survey questions like where they think about policies like, Should we have more density? say, Yeah, I like that. Let’s do more of it.

Demsas: So if people who live in dense places like density, why isn’t it just really easy to upzone Manhattan?

Broockman: Yeah, that’s a great question. So this goes a little bit beyond our paper, but I’ll give you my kind of personal view of it, having had a bit of a front-row seat, having lived in San Francisco for over a decade now, kind of how things play out here.

I think it’s a funny irony where, basically, what you see is: People in cities tend to support a lot of new housing. There was, for example, a recent poll done by the folks at GrowSF here recently, ahead of our mayoral election, where they asked about a bunch of the different mayoral candidates’ housing platforms. And upzoning the city is incredibly popular. You look at in their poll questions about building skyscrapers near BART stations, having even five-to-eight-story buildings citywide, like, more people support that than oppose it. And that’s, I think, quite different from, I think, what you’d expect to see in something like a suburb.

My sense is that—and this is a little bit beyond our paper, but—there’s some other work on this. Especially, there’s a really nice recent paper by one of our Ph.D. students, Anna Weissman, as well as Asya Magazinnik and Michael Hankinson, where they have a kind of theory of this that I think has a lot of merit to it. Which is to say: It’s kind of more about interest groups, that in a place like San Francisco, for example, if a developer is going to go build housing, and they get all the approvals, especially before the rise in interest rates, that could be very profitable.

And so, basically, a bunch of interest groups show up. That’s, frankly, the city wanting fees. That’s unions wanting labor requirements. That’s environmentalists wanting labor standards. That’s affordable-housing activists wanting affordable housing. That’s all the toppings on Ezra Klein’s proverbial everything bagel that show up and say, Hey. There’s going to be this new development. There’s a lot of profit to be made. We want to capture some of that value.

And so that’s, in my sense, a part of what’s happening in places like San Francisco. Some of the barrier is NIMBYism—that, yes, the people in the immediate vicinity will kind of show up to give negative comments about new housing, but that a lot of the story is that those folks are in coalition with this set of groups who want to capture value from new housing and that kind of gum up the works.

Demsas: So basically, while people who live in very dense areas—whether we’re talking about Manhattan or, you know, San Francisco—generally, the people are clearly showing that they’re fine with there being tall buildings and some level of density. Interest groups are kind of interceding that process and kind of gumming up the democratic feedback loop.

Broockman: Yeah, I think that’s right. And, for example, in San Francisco, if you look at our recent citywide elections, almost always in our state assembly elections, our state senate elections, our mayoral elections, you almost always have a pro-housing candidate. You even have candidates who formerly, when they were representing neighborhoods, were kind of a little more on the NIMBY side. And then when they run for citywide office, they become super YIMBY in their rhetoric.

And I think that’s very consistent with this kind of theory that when people are thinking their immediate neighborhood, they get to be a little more conflicted about development. But when they think about these broad policies—like, Should we have more housing everywhere?—then they become a lot more supportive. And interest groups, I think, are a lot of the part of the story of how it is that when there’s these kinds of, you know, particular fights in front of the S.F. Planning Commission that the average person is not paying attention to, those interest groups can show up in force to try to block those proposals.

Demsas: So getting back to your paper, this finding you have about city homeowners are more likely than even city renters to be pro-housing in these communities—if it’s just about being willing to live in a city, why would homeowners versus renters be more likely to be more pro housing? Why don’t you just kind of see that divide between city dwellers and suburbanites?

Broockman: Yeah. So, you know, we’re not 100 percent sure. But my hypothesis for this—so in particular, I think what you’re asking about is that what we see is that if you look among people who live in cities, within cities, the owners are even more pro-upzoning than renters. And my guess for what explains that finding is simply that it’s just a stronger signal if you choose to make the choice to actually own in a city versus rent.

So you see this on both ends where, on people who don’t live in cities, the owners are more opposed than the renters among people who don’t live in cities—of upzoning cities. So my guess is it’s just, like, you see the owners being better sorted, because if you’re choosing to live somewhere kind of quasi-permanently, that’s just a stronger signal than Hey. I’m gonna rent here for a year or something like that.

Demsas: I guess it could also be, though I’m not sure how this squares with your finding about the suburbs there—it could also be that if you’re a renter, there are just fewer renter opportunities in suburbs, in general. And so you’re kind of forced to be allocated more-dense locations. And so you can’t sort as well as you could if you were just willing to own or able to own.

Broockman: Yeah, exactly. Definitely could be possible too.

Demsas: So I want to draw another tension. Because you’re really laying a lot on this idea that people’s affinity for big cities makes them more likely to support more housing. But you also, even in this conversation, have cited research that shows that people who live near a proposed project are more likely to give negative comments. That’s that Alexander Sahn research. So how do you kind of square the circle here? Like, people are both more likely to support if they live in dense locations, but also, if they’re in those dense locations and someone proposes a project, they’re more likely to oppose it.

Broockman: Yeah, I think it’s just: Both are true, and they’re not mutually exclusive. And we actually have the—we did a little reanalysis of some of the data from Alexander Sahn’s paper on this. So he, as I mentioned, has this really cool data where he geocoded all of these people who commented at the S.F. Planning Commission and showed there’s this really powerful relationship where people who live closer to a proposed project are more likely to show up and oppose it.

So one of the things that we find is that if you look in that same data—so we replicate his finding. You know, it’s very clearly there. We also just code the density of the block where they live, and we show that that also predicts things. So if you want to predict, basically—if you go to, for example, a random census block in San Francisco and then pick a random housing development, one very powerful predictor is: If that census block is closer to the development, you’re going to get more negative comments. But also, if that census block is itself denser, you’re going to get more positive comments.

So imagine, for example, you have a five-story building going up somewhere in San Francisco, and, on one side of the building, you have a kind of single-family neighborhood, and on the other side, you have a kind of denser neighborhood, somewhere at the kind of boundary of density, so to speak. Our basic finding is you’re going to get—obviously, the people who live near there are going to comment more, but, disproportionately, the negative comments are going to come from people who live at the same distance but live in a less-dense area versus the people who live in kind of the denser area nearby.

Demsas: Cool. So both of those forces are working on people, and how it nets out is, like, a question of how much density and also how many people live very close to that project.

Broockman: Yeah, exactly. As one anecdote on this: As I mentioned, I live in a condo building in San Francisco. There’s actually been a ton of new development proposed near our building. We have a very active WhatsApp thread in our building. You know, people love to complain about different things happening in the neighborhood. Basically, not a peep about any new housing development at all. You know, 14-story buildings, eight-story buildings—you know, no one thinks to complain at all, because there’s already a bunch of eight-story buildings near us, right? And so clearly, by choosing to live in this building we live in, everyone’s revealed that this is not the kind of thing that bothers them.

Demsas: So, you know, we talked a little bit about the symbolic politics that you ascribe to, and a big part of your paper are the symbols that turn people off to new housing. What sorts of symbols are turning people off to new housing? What kinds of things are we talking about here?

Broockman: Yeah. So the other reason we wrote this paper is that, you know, I think so much of the thinking about housing politics is really in this, like, what I’d call the S.F. Planning Commission sort of paradigm. So I’ve been to the S.F. Planning Commission to give comments about new housing, so I’ve experienced this. It’s important.

But the fact is that so much of the action right now in housing policy is not about planning commissions or city councils making discretionary decisions about particular proposed developments. There’s this whole vast area of other housing policy that I would argue is actually way more important in terms of outcomes. So that includes upzoning that we’ve been talking about, but a bunch of other things too: impact fees, below-market-rate housing mandates, permit streamlining, environmental reviews—all this other stuff that matters a lot.

And the basic idea of our paper, and where I think symbolic-politics theory really shines, is to say, Okay, let’s imagine a policy like below-market-rate housing mandates. So what that says is, for example, a policy might say, Oh, if you’re going to build a new market-rate building, then X percent—say 20 percent—of the units in that building have to be deed restricted, affordable housing that are going to be sold at below market rates.

Our basic thought is to say, Okay, let’s imagine a policy like that, or all the other many other policies that aren’t about specific proposed developments that state legislatures and cities are making. How are people going to reason about those? One view you could have is that, well, people are going to then think through, All right, well, what’s the impact for my self-interest?

And as we were talking about, that’s actually really hard to do—even for a social scientist to say, like, what is actually in someone’s self-interest, let alone an average voter who doesn’t have the incentive, frankly, to think through all that. And so symbolic-politics theory says, Well, what they’re going to do is, basically, rather than think through all that, think about the symbols that the kind of policy makes salient.

So imagine a policy like below-market-rate housing mandates that say, Okay, we’re going to force developers to build housing for low-income people. The basic idea of symbolic-politics theory is that when people are thinking about a question like that, they’re going to, in their head, think about just the much simpler question of, Well, do I like the group that this policy seems good for? Or do I like the group that this policy seems bad for?

So in below-market-rate housing mandates, on a superficial level, it’s like, Well, this seems bad for developers. You’re going to make them do stuff. And this seems good for poor people because you’re going to try to build housing for them. And so you’d expect to see that people who kind of don’t like developers as much and care more about low-income people or have more pro-redistributive preferences would say, Yeah, okay. That sounds good to me. And so that’s the basic idea of symbolic-politics theory, and we walk through just a ton of examples of a ton of different housing policies that look like this.

Demsas: And sorry—before you get into that, I wanted to ask: One of the themes of our show is sort of this question of how democracy actually functions. Like, how do voters understand what’s going on around them? How do they apportion blame? How do they engage the political process? And I feel like I can make arguments in either direction here. What you’re describing with symbolic-politics theory, does that indicate to you that voters are sophisticated or unsophisticated?

Broockman: Yeah, there’s a whole debate in our discipline about like, Oh, are voters rational? Sort of like, Are voters stupid? Are they competent? I find those debates, to be honest, a little bit overwrought.

Demsas: (Laughs.) Why?

Broockman: My view on this is that, you know, if you think about a question like this, voters don’t have the incentive to carefully think through all of these policy questions.

So for example, there’s a political campaign—so we just, for example, had a big election in San Francisco. One of the big things that the kind of less-pro-housing coalition in San Francisco politics likes to talk about is they say, Well, all of this upzoning is just allowing luxury condos. Why are they doing that? And I think part of why they’re doing it and why they use that rhetoric—and we actually have an experiment in our paper inspired by this—is that, you know, voters kind of know housing is a problem. The average voter doesn’t have the incentive to do a bunch of research and read a bunch of Ed Glaeser papers. Like, you know, freaks like you and me love to do that, but the average person doesn’t have the incentive to do that, because, individually speaking, whether they come up with the right answer on housing policy is not going to affect the outcome. So they don’t really have an incentive to figure it out.

But they hear this rhetoric like, Well, this politician supports building more luxury condos. And so I think people, even if on some level, if they thought about it, they would be able to come to a kind of more thoroughly reasoned view. I think, in typical politics, they just don’t have the incentive to do that, and so they’re going to rely on these heuristics where they kind of make a mental shortcut to say, Well, okay, luxury housing—you know, all right. Well, that seems like it’s good for rich people.

And so one of the things we show in our paper is: When we ask people a survey question about whether local governments should have to allow five-story buildings to be built in different areas, if we describe that building as a five-story apartment building versus a five-story luxury apartment building, people who feel fine about rich people don’t really care, but people really don’t like rich people have a very strong reaction to that and become 18 points less supportive, which is a huge effect. So all of a sudden, people who are like, Yeah, you know, apartment buildings? Fine. And then you say, Wait. But it’s a luxury. They say, Oh no, I don’t like that. Let’s not do this.

It’s funny: I presented that finding at an economics conference, and you know, this gets to your question. The economists are sort of flabbergasted by this.

Demsas: (Laughs.) Of course they were.

Broockman: Because they say, Wait a minute. And it’s a good point that if you look at just the revealed preferences in terms of where people choose to live, like, people seem like they like living near rich people. And yet, when you ask people, like, Well, should we allow for more luxury condos?—so presumably, a building that, on average, more rich people would live in—the people who have that negative affect towards rich people say, You know what? I don’t think we should do that.

And so for me, that’s how I think this kind of plays out is: You have elections where people are hearing a lot of different rhetoric. They don’t have an incentive to think through things very much. And so politicians on both sides have to worry about not just all the details of, like, What effect will this policy actually have? but when this policy is summarized in three or five words for people on a campaign mailer or in a TV ad or in a radio interview, How is the average person going to think about this?

And so if you support a policy that can be framed as, Well, this is going to allow luxury condos, well, in a liberal place where people have negative attitudes towards rich people, that could really depress support for that policy or the politicians supporting it.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: the symbols that divide YIMBYs from NIMBYs.

[Break]

Demsas: I interrupted you before, but what are some of these symbols in your paper that you look at that you find to be really explanatory or have massive effects on people’s support?

Broockman: So this paper is co-authored with Josh Kalla at Yale and Chris Elmendorf at UC Davis. So we basically work together to compile a bunch of these different policies. And again, there’s just so many that are relevant to housing.

So I’ll just give you a couple more examples. So one that we lead out with, which I think is really fun, was inspired by an anecdote from someone in California who was doing some focus groups on housing. And the anecdote they told us is that in focus groups, people will say, Yeah. Housing sounds good. We probably need more of that. And then at some point, someone will bring up, Yeah. But housing’s built by developers. And then supposedly, people in the focus group say, Oh, yeah. Maybe it’s not such a good idea if developers are going to get involved.

And so we are able to replicate that anecdote experimentally, where we do this very subtle manipulation where we ask people: Would you support or oppose allowing new apartment buildings to be built in your neighborhood, or would you support or oppose allowing developers to build new apartment buildings in your neighborhood? So same question. We’re just either using the passive voice or making clear, yeah, developers build apartments. And the people who don’t like developers, when we remind them developers build new housing, become less supportive of new housing.

Then we go into a bunch of policies that are kind of more detailed than that. So I’ll give you a few examples. One is a really important policy here in California, precisely because of all this discretion allowing local NIMBYs to show up and block housing, is what we call “by-right permitting”—so basically where, if a project is legal under the existing zoning and rules, it can go ahead, and there’s not some additional discretionary review.

And so one of the experiments we do is: We ask people, essentially, whether they support a state law that would require by-right permitting. So we describe this as, Should some group that submits a housing proposal be able to build apartments that comply with the clear and specific rules the government made in advance, or, Should, basically, the government always be able to reject a proposed apartment development? And what we randomize is whether or not we say that the person submitting the project is a quote, “small, local home builder,” or a quote, “big real-estate developer.” What you find is that—

Demsas: Two guesses.

Broockman: Yes. (Laughs.) What we find is that there actually are a lot of people that have perfectly warm feelings towards developers. And they don’t have—

Demsas: Really? Do you have the percentage? Like, how many people are fine with developers?

Broockman: Yeah, so I don’t have the percentage offhand, but in our graphs, you can see—and obviously, podcasts are a great medium for expressing graphs—but in our graphs, you can see that there is a decent amount of data up on the top end. We ask these feeling thermometers, where we ask people just, How much do you like or dislike this group? So big cities, developers, whatever else.

People on the top end who say they really like developers, they basically don’t care. Some of them are still opposed to the by-right permitting. Many of them are, actually. But whether or not it’s developers or small, local home builders doing it—they don’t care. But for the people who dislike developers more, this manipulation has a really, really big effect. And so it looks like about a 30-point drop in support among those people.

And I think this is part of, for me—and, I think, bringing the symbolic-politics theory to this housing debate—it almost feels like it’s a lens through which you can kind of understand so much of the dysfunction that, in my view, happens in housing politics. Where you get—for example, in California, and in San Francisco, we have a lot of debates about whether there should be things like owner-occupancy requirements in order to redevelop a home for more housing, which would mean like, you know, an owner of a home would have to pay out of their own pocket to redevelop their home into more housing, instead of selling it to an investor or a developer who can go raise private capital to do that.

And why do you see patterns like that? I think, in part, because, well, if people don’t like developers, and they like the idea of, like, Oh, the small, local homeowner, then you can get these distortions in public policy.

Demsas: I wonder if there’s—I’ve written about this in my own work, which is just sort of the way that symbols are developed generationally, and I think you get into this in your paper a little bit. You have an aside about Boomers.

And for me, I think it’s pretty clear that, you know, when I did this story in Minneapolis, and I was looking at people who were opposing Minneapolis’s attempt to legalize a lot more housing across the city—I mean, famously, they were the first city to end single-family-only zoning. And you find this group of environmentalists, and these folks are, you know—they moved to the city when no one else wanted to be there. Like, they’re people who were like, You know, we’re real enviros. Like, we care about the city. We care about, you know, being green, etcetera. And for them, though, like, their affect towards developers, their affect towards this kind of profit making in the housing space was, like, just immovable, even if they agreed with so many of the premises of trying to build more affordable housing.

And it’s funny. Like, when you have a lot of individual, one-on-one conversations with people about their support or opposition to housing, we really find pretty quickly that it’s not about a question of, like, reasoning someone to your position. Like, it is very much like they have these preconceptions that are either—I didn’t have this language before, but you’re right that they are attached to these specific symbols.

So can you tell me a little bit about the generational warfare angle and what you find in your own paper that supports that?

Broockman: Yeah. So two things I want to mention on this.

First is: One of the other findings we have that I think ties to some of what you’ve written about, what people talk about in this area, is this really big push against the idea of kind of Wall Street ownership of single-family homes. And so we have some evidence on this, where we find that people who hate Wall Street are much more supportive of allowing landlords to redevelop properties than Wall Street investors. So there’s a bunch of people that if you hate Wall Street, you’re like, Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, Wall Street shouldn’t be able to show up and demolish a unit and build an apartment building there. But oh, the landlords should be able to.

And this ties to your question because one of the things I was looking at—it might seem really natural now that, like, Oh, well, of course. Everyone hates Wall Street, but I was actually looking at some historical public-opinion data. And if you look back 20 or 30 years ago, views towards big banks—like, pre-financial crisis, especially pre-savings-and-loan [scandal], even further back—were actually a lot more positive. And so I think it might be part of why we see this big push against Wall Street ownership, is right now our Millennial generation, who is—

Demsas: Scarred.

Broockman: Yeah, we have this really negative affect towards Wall Street, and so that creates opportunities for politicians to show up and say, Oh, well, if you really hate Wall Street, and you really care about housing, guess what? I can put those two things together for you and come up with this policy that, you know, it sounds like it’s going to do something and plays on your kind of preexisting negative affect.

But yeah, the big finding in our paper on this, which I think is suggestive. I don’t want to put too much weight on it, but I do think it’s really interesting. So we came to this because, in some other data I was looking at for another project. actually, I noticed that views on housing are, actually, just incredibly correlated with age, and more correlated than I have seen for almost any other political issue, just like the relationship between all these kinds of questions about upzoning and age is incredibly strong.

And there could be a lot of reasons for that, right? Like, I think one might be like, Our Millennial generation—we’re having a harder time affording homes, so we want, you know, more new housing, and the Boomers, you know, in our mental stereotype are all, like, enjoying their five-bedroom, empty-nesting mansions, right? That could be some of it, that self-interest part. But I think that we have some suggestive evidence that tastes are actually part of it too.

So in particular, this symbolic-politics theory—a lot of it is about the idea that people are judging these public policies based on symbols: Wall Street; developers; small, local home builders; luxury apartment buildings and the people who are gonna live in them; etcetera. But also, the other part of symbolic-politics theory is the idea that where that affect comes from originally tends to be crystallized in what we call people’s formative years. So that’s basically around the time you’re turning 18, like, in your late adolescence, early adulthood.

There’s a lot of fun evidence on this in social science and other topics, right? Like, if you ask people, What’s your favorite song? When were the best movies made? like, people always mention and will say, like, Oh wait. Things were best when I was a late teen, basically. And political views are like that, too. And there’s a lot of great papers on this more generally that, like, what’s happening that time you’re voting for the first time when you’re kind of becoming an eligible voter, you know, you’re becoming a human being—like, that has a really big impact on you.

And so we have some suggestive evidence that that is part of why the Boomer generation is so opposed to housing as well. So if you think about the Baby Boomers—those folks, when they were going through their formative years in the ’70s, that was when cities were just, like, a total basket case. Like, I was talking to my dad about this and saying, So okay, you know, when you were 20 years old or 22 years old, when you were graduating college, were you or any of your friends—was it your dream to move to a big city? And he said to me, You’d have to be out of your mind to want to do that then. Right?

Because it’s not like now, when we think about, you know, San Francisco or New York or L.A. I think our generation has this connotation of those cities as places where there’s lots of amenities. There’s economic opportunity. There’s culture happening there. Back then, when the Baby Boomers were going through their formative years, cities—that was the time of high crime in cities, all the recent redevelopment, etcetera.

And one of the fun patterns we find to support that this could be part of what’s going on is that now, if you look in current survey data, if you ask people, Are you interested in living in a city? young people are way more likely to say that than older people. And I think we all take that for granted, of like, Oh, of course. Like, the pattern is like: When you’re young, you want to live in a city, and then you get old, and you know, your back starts hurting, and you move to the suburbs.

But actually, we found this old public-opinion data from the 1970s and ’80s where they asked the same survey question. And if you look then, the relationship between age and interest in living in a city is actually exactly the opposite. So when the Baby Boomers were young, they actually were also the least interested in living in cities. And actually, older people back then—so this is people born in the 1910s, 1920s—they were actually the most interested in living in cities. And think back to that generation. They’re coming of age, right, in, like—

Demsas: That’s pre-automobile. That’s—

Broockman: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And so these kinds of, you know, sorting out how much is what we call cohort—of, like, when you were born versus age versus, etcetera—is always a little tricky. So I don’t want to put too much on this, but I do think that’s kind of one more kind pattern we find that is consistent with what you’d expect from symbolic-politics theory, that when people are thinking about things like cities and densities, part of what Boomers are thinking about is, I think, all these negative associations that they had that were kind of baked in when they were in their late teens, early 20s. Whereas for Millennials and, you know, people going through that socialization process now, this kind of symbolism is very different.

Demsas: I mean, one thing on this that you can even notice in the way that suburban development is happening now, I mean, developers will say that, you know, Millennials’ tastes for suburban development are even different than their parents’ tastes. So, you know, new suburban developments often have things like a cute little main street with a coffee shop and, like, a little mixed use, so you’ll have some apartments above that. Even if you have, like, single-family homes that people want to live in, like that’s very different from what Boomers were demanding and like, you know, other generations with these sort of cul de sacs. Or sorry—culs de sac. That’s a classic mistake.

So I think that’s really funny about how, you know—I guess it’s kind of a positive story you could tell here. Millennials—it’s a very big generation. Not to be very, you know, morbid about this, but obviously, like, Boomers are gonna die, and then Millennials will make up the larger part of the voting block and the tastemakers for how new homes will be built and developed. So it seems like a possible situation, where the people who wanted cities to look a certain way, they got that when it was their time. And maybe things will change now that tastes are changing and people are changing.

Broockman: Yeah, I think it’s very possible. Obviously, we don’t know that for sure. Hopefully, our peer reviewers, you know, don’t make us wait 30 years to see what happens when Millennials get old before they let us publish our paper. But yeah, that’s based on everything we know about how people’s tastes change or, often more likely, don’t change over time. I’d expect that we’ll see that.

Demsas: So I want to broaden out a little bit into some of the policy implications of your work. And I just want to ask, how has your paper, or I guess the work you’ve done that is written about in your paper, shifted the sorts of advice you might give to pro-housing advocates?

Broockman: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, first of all, I’ll say that I think there’s this whole subset of discourse, which is like, Oh, what YIMBYs should be doing is X, Y, Z. And I’ll note at the beginning that, objectively speaking, the YIMBY movement has been one of the most successful political movements of the last couple of decades. So I don’t want to come off like a scold, like, Ah, YIMBYs are doing it all wrong, because clearly, like, they’re doing something right.

Demsas: That’s the role of professors, right? You’re supposed to scold everyone else.

Broockman: Yeah. So in the spirit of helpful thoughts, maybe, I’d say a couple of things. One is that, clearly, what you see, I think, in a lot of cities is that there’s a lot of cynical attempts to brand more pro-housing policies in a negative light by saying things like, Oh, right—as we talked about—this is going to help Wall Street. It’s going to help developers, basically trying to find all these disliked symbols, or in a liberal place like San Francisco, rich people, even though people here are objectively mostly really rich. And so you see that attempt, and I think there could be a little more, especially in policy design, effort among YIMBYs to think about ways to harness some of those same forces.

So for example, if people love the idea of affordable housing, right, that’s a great moniker, but not everyone necessarily knows what it means. YIMBYs might think about, Well, how can we basically use that moniker to define it more generously? For example, why not define affordable housing as saying housing that’s cheaper than the typical housing in the neighborhood? That’s affordable housing. We’re going to build more affordable housing.

Or for example, people really hate government fees. They hate red tape. And so one of the things we find, for example, is that if you look at our survey question about reducing fees—so this is, again, one of the many other policies really relevant to understanding development but that isn’t about specific development—support for capping fees that cities charge on developers is actually really high in our survey. And interestingly, like, all of people’s preferences about whether or not they want more housing to be built seems basically, totally unrelated to that.

What seems really related is just how people feel about taxes. So if you say, Hey. Should we cap this tax? people are like, Yeah, lower taxes is good. And so people who don’t like taxes, which is most people, are really supportive of that, even if they’re like, Oh, I don’t want more housing. But we should definitely cap those fees and taxes because government fees and taxes are bad.

Demsas: So another controversial implication of your paper, and I think you actually spelled this out quite clearly, is that it’s so much work to try to get low-density suburbs to accept denser housing that pro-housing advocates should just stop focusing so much energy on trying to get them to accept more housing and really just focus your energy on the lower-hanging fruit of making places that are already dense more dense. That’s a pretty controversial argument, I think.

Broockman: Yeah. So this is where, in our paper, I think for the YIMBYs listening to this, they can say, Those NIMBYs—here’s this political psychology theory of why they have these weird views. But I think, in the same way, you can use this framework to understand YIMBYs, as well, in a couple ways, right? One is that YIMBYs, on average, like the idea of denser development, and so that’s part of why YIMBYs, I think, like the idea of, say, upzoning and things that build more housing. It’s that, Hey. It’s going to build the kind of neighborhoods that I like and I want to live in.

But I think the other thing is that I think we’ve seen a lot of YIMBY enthusiasm for the idea of saying things like, Hey. We’re going to end single-family zoning. We’re going to go after the suburbs. And I think part of that might be a kind of symbolic idea of, Hey. We’re going to right this historical wrong. This is going to attack, kind of, historical racism. This is going to go after single-family zoning—the ultimate expression of this thing we don’t like: the suburbs.

And clearly, my view in the economics literature, the public-policy rationale for that is very strong. I think, politically speaking, it’s worth bearing in mind, though, that that’s a much tougher path because the people who live in suburbs have revealed through their behavior that they, on average, have less of a taste for density. And so politically, just all else equal, it’s gonna be harder to put more density near the people who have revealed to you through their behavior they don’t like density than near the people like my condo building and the people who live in it who have revealed through their behavior they’re okay with more density.

So I think this is a really challenging issue because there are real equity questions about where we put new housing. But I do think watching the debate in places like California, there’s a real push towards what we’ve got to put, like, almost all the new housing in these historically exclusionary neighborhoods. And as much as, you know, with my political preferences, that sounds great to me, I think there has to be just a real careful balancing of just, like, all the other toppings on the everything bagel of things that sound great. Like, of course, who’s against the idea of the workers developing the housing getting higher wages? Who’s against cities getting more revenue?

I think of this idea of we’ve got to put new housing out there in the exclusionary suburbs as just kind of one more thing that gets added onto requirements for new housing development—Hey. It’s got to be in X, Y, Z area, not in, you know, near or close to already-dense areas. That’s going to make it more difficult. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, per se, but I think housing advocates just have to be aware that, politically speaking, I would guess all else equal, less housing is going to get built if you stipulate it has to be in an area where it’s politically less popular to do it.

Demsas: I think there’s a point well taken about wanting to make sure you’re passing policies that are actually effective. If you end single-family zoning, but you build two townhomes as a result, how many people have you really helped, even if on the book, single-family zoning is over?

But I think, you know, part of my hesitation about this point that you’re making here is (A) the impact of helping lower- and middle-income people move to suburbs with good schools is just massive. I mean, this is the “moving to opportunity” literature from Harvard’s Opportunity Insights lab and, you know, showing that you have these massive impacts on kids’ futures, their future earnings, their likelihood to go to jail—all these different things—when they’re able to move to these suburbs. And, you know, it’s a massive, massive benefit to society, and it’s a huge harm when we don’t allow for more affordable, you know, denser housing to be there.

I mean, you know, in my own life, I lived in a townhome of inclusionary zoning development in an exclusionary suburb, and that’s why I went to the schools I went to. And so—not to make it all about, you know, making sure I can do whatever I want—but that’s why I think it’s important. But then I also think that on the political side, what you’re pointing out is that there’s this virtuous cycle of being in favor of more housing if you’re okay with density.

And I wonder if you need to be able to break the vicious cycle in some sense, right? Not saying we have to put 15-story apartment buildings in every suburb in America. But this idea of sort of gentle density of kind of introducing this to people, acclimating them to it, I think is a way of changing these symbols, as well, and making it possible for people to not just have to have new housing, new density stuffed down their throats but changing that symbol from, Oh, I think of all density as being crowded, loud, low-income people who are ruining my neighborhood—like, really classist views about who’s going to live there, views about how it’s going to destroy your neighborhood character—to, like, Oh, actually, you know, now that I’m walking around Nashville, I can’t really tell what’s a quadplex and what’s a single-family home, because they largely look kind of the same.

And so I wonder how you kind of think about that angle.

Broockman: Yeah, I think, you know, in this paper, we don’t come out with a strong stance on this. I think more than it is to just kind of raise a flag that this has to be thought through carefully. Because I do think there’s a lot of just unbridled enthusiasm for the idea that, like, Well, of course. If we’re going to build more housing, like, it’s got to be that we upzone, go deep into single-family neighborhoods in the suburbs, right this historical wrong.

And it’s not that we—you know, the paper doesn’t say, like, Of course, we shouldn’t do that. I think it’s more like, Well, we need to do kind of a careful weighing of the costs and benefits here. And for me, it is a bit reminiscent of some of how the supporters of below-market-rate housing mandates talk about that policy, where they say, Hey If you look at the small number of people who live in, for example, San Francisco in below-market-rate developments, the impacts on them are, you know, undoubtedly hugely positive, right?

There’s homes in San Francisco that if they were market rate would sell for $1.5 million that people are living in and, you know, paid a quarter of that for. And so, clearly, that’s a huge benefit to that one family. The challenge, I think, is there’s some nice research being done on this by a bunch of different folks, including the Terner Center, where they show that those below-market-rate housing mandates—when you have those mandates, because it makes new market-rate construction more expensive, every one of those new units that you build as a result of that policy comes at the expense of many more market-rate units that you don’t build.

And so there are these just really tricky and unfortunate trade-offs. And I think where if you’re gonna, for example, require more affordable housing, that means you’re gonna get way less housing overall. And I think that’s the fear I have that I don’t think is overriding, but I just think needs to be weighed when it comes to this kind of, like, gentle-density idea.

So I think also, if you just do the math on, first of all, the economic feasibility of a lot of this idea of gentle density, like, it’s in many parts of the country just not economically feasible to take a single-family home and redo it so that there’s two kitchens, the box of the building stays the same size, and you have two families living in it. And I think there’s this idea there that we can kind of have this gentle density throughout the suburbs that people won’t notice, they’ll be okay with, and it’s going to build a lot of housing. And in some cases, that might be true. I just think there needs to be, like, a real careful weighing of the costs and benefits and awareness that the political costs that you’re going to be able to do less of that in the suburbs, likely, than you would be able to in denser areas has to be part of that calculus.

Demsas: Weighing trade-offs is a great place to end. So our last question: What is something that you originally thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Broockman: Yeah. So as I was chatting about doing this episode with my co-authors, Chris Elmendorf said something that I’ll give him credit for, but I was like, Yeah, that’s totally right, which is: I think, being a social scientist, you know, coming into this, I always thought, you know, there’s an old famous quote, Politicians are weather vanes. They just go wherever the wind blows. Advocates—it’s their job to, you know, make the wind blow, basically.

And one of the things that, I think in my experience, and certainly seeing kind of other academics work on policy, especially in California, frankly, is that I’ve been shocked at the extent to which legislators actually do care about evidence that social science, the things happening in, like, Berkeley’s economics department, for example. Like, I see that being reflected in really impacting state policy to an extent that like, Hey. Legislators really do care about, and policy makers care about what the evidence says, much more than I thought.

On the flip side, I think I’ve seen advocacy groups care a lot less about what the evidence says than I expected going in. So I think the idea I thought was good on paper was, Hey. Legislators, you know—they’re just single-minded seekers of reelection, but you can work with these advocates to do smart policy. And I think, over time I’ve realized, yeah, sometimes it’s the legislators who care a lot more about the evidence than the advocacy groups do.

Demsas: Well, thanks so much, David. Thanks for coming on the show.

Broockman: Thanks so much. It was really fun.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

The Case for Finding Common Ground With RFK

2024-12-31T06:00:00-05:00

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Democrats need to build a bigger tent to be competitive. But building a bigger political tent means compromising—and that compromise usually means making someone inside your tent angry.

Take, for instance, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, who surprised many and angered some by announcing that he was “excited” by the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Asking people to hold off on mocking or disagreeing with RFK Jr., Polis pointed to issues like pharmaceutical reform, nutrition policy, and the use of pesticides. After facing backlash, Polis clarified that he was pro-vaccines, but it left me thinking: What might it look like to open the Democratic tent to vaccine-skeptical Americans, of which there are a growing number?

Today’s episode of Good on Paper is with Dr. Rachael Bedard, a practicing physician who writes publicly about her work, including a recent op-ed arguing RFK Jr.’s critics need to acknowledge the “seeds of truth” to some of his critiques and sit with the fact that many Americans are skeptical of our public-health institutions.

“The pandemic provided this entrée into politics for a kind of person where the combination of sort of the fear of the moment and the trauma of the moment and this sense that people’s bodily autonomy was being violated in some ways by government incursion,” Bedard argues. “There are people who reacted really badly to that, and it changed the dynamics of this conversation.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and has argued that vaccines cause autism. His nomination to run the Department of Health and Human Services has spurred opposition from some physician groups and Nobel laureates in various scientific fields.

So it was surprising to come across a New York Times essay by a pro-vaccine, left-leaning physician arguing that instead of spending “four years simply fighting his agenda” opponents should seek to find common ground with RFK Jr.

The author of that piece, Dr. Rachael Bedard, is not just your run-of-the-mill doctor. She’s one with experience treating patients of very diverse backgrounds. The first time I learned about her work was when she wrote an essay about being a physician on Rikers Island during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bedard’s argument is not just one about the political necessity of compromising with people you disagree with. It’s also a warning that, in their zeal to oppose RFK Jr.’s false claims about vaccine safety, opponents risk dismissing and alienating people who have a healthy skepticism of Big Pharma, overmedicalization, and just a generalized distrust of the medical system.

[Music]

My name is Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

Today’s episode is rooted in Rachael’s own experiences as a doctor, and it contains some controversial advice for public-health officials and political activists worried about RFK Jr.’s rise.

Rachael, welcome to the show!

Rachael Bedard: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Demsas: I am so excited to have this conversation because you are an actual doctor, so I don’t just get to rant with someone who doesn’t have real, lived experience.

Bedard: I am an actual doctor.

Demsas: (Laughs.) So I think most college-educated liberal people have a sort of knee-jerk reaction to RFK Jr. and his arguments about everything from vaccines to fluoride, and sort of his orientation towards science and public health. And I think that reaction is a combination of fear and dismissiveness. I mean, you’re a doctor who’s worked with a variety of populations, and, you know, you’re supportive of vaccines and public health, and yet you wrote an article that I think might surprise some people.

In the Times, you wrote about how people should react to RFK at HHS, and you wrote that you think that there’s common ground between people like yourself—medical researchers and scientists and clinicians—and Kennedy. So what are those areas of common ground?

Bedard: There are a few assumptions in what you said, which I do think is sort of the conventional wisdom around this topic, that might be wrong or deserve to be unpacked. One of them is the idea that most liberals have this knee-jerk reaction to Kennedy.

And what I think is really important to recognize is: Really until the pandemic, a lot of what Kennedy talks about—the idea that government and Big Pharma are in cahoots with one another, and that we’re overprescribing medications to ourselves, especially to our kids; the idea that we’re poisoning the environment with toxins; the idea that food companies are tempting kids with high-sugar, high-fructose, dyed products that then are contributing to a childhood-obesity epidemic—all of those things, I think, coded as liberal critiques of the medical establishment until very recently.

The other thing is the really specific sort of point of dissent between liberals and conservatives in this conversation now, which is around vaccines. Until the pandemic, who did you think of as being sort of anti-vaccine?

Demsas: The crunchy mom who sends her kids to Montessori.

Bedard: Right. And specifically, what color is that mom? That mom’s white—so high-socioeconomic-status, white women who had anxieties about not putting poisons into their children’s body, who didn’t feel themselves to be vulnerable to infectious diseases and didn’t see themselves as sort of responsible to the commons to protect others.

What’s really interesting is that Kennedy was on the same team as those folks until fairly recently. And then what happened in the pandemic is: The pandemic provided this entrée into politics, I think, for a kind of person where the combination of sort of the fear of the moment and the trauma of the moment and this sense that people’s bodily autonomy was being violated in some ways by government incursion—whether or not that’s valid, whether it’s valid to say being told you had to wear a mask in the airport was some kind of huge violation of your civil rights—there are people who reacted really badly to that, and it changed the dynamics of this conversation so that there was this flip.

So instead of being sort of the crunchy mom, it’s now very bro-coded, I think, to be an RFK guy, right? But it’s all the same kind of body-purity politics. So the first thing I would just say is: RFK is who he’s always been, in some ways. And what’s changed a lot is the partisanship of who agrees with him.

Demsas: I think what I would ask you then is: How do you think about how liberals should now engage with this, given that it used to be there was this small fraction of, like, white moms who are kind of preventing their kids from getting some, if not all, childhood vaccines. And now it’s, like, this broader skepticism of public health in general. So what’s your argument then to how Democrats should respond to an RFK?

Bedard: There are sort of two levels in thinking about how you answer that. First of all, there’s a really important distinction to be made between public health and medicine, right? Public health is the creation of policy and intervention meant to apply to groups of people or universally across a population in the interest of the many. Medicine is the practice of helping people improve their own health that’s practiced individually with the patient in front of you.

What we should be doing at the public-health level is not the same thing as what I think we should be doing at the doctor level, necessarily. But some of what best practice looks like at the doctor level ought to be adopted at the public-health level.

Demsas: Can you talk about that more specifically? Like, what does that look like?

Bedard: Yeah, so vaccine mandates work. They’re really important. They’re the only thing that has been shown to work to get meaningful vaccine uptake in a population.

Without them—so for example, the flu vaccine, right? The flu vaccine is not mandated for adults. Forty-four percent of American adults got the flu vaccine last year. That’s not enough to achieve herd immunity, right? We don’t mandate it, because we’ve decided that it’s not worth the hassle.

So we’re pretty choosy about what we mandate. But the things that we choose to mandate, we mandate because we think they’re really contagious, and the consequences of infection are high. And mandates are the only things that help ensure that enough people acquire immunity to something that you’re going to diminish the population burden of that infection, right?

So I don’t think the Democrats should be doing anything different at the mandate level. And that’s a place where I really differ from, say, Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, who’s been tweeting in support of RFK with this kind of, like, bizarre zeal and who I think has sort of overstepped where he maybe wants to be. I think he wants to sort of express some understanding of where the folks of Colorado are, where there’s a really growing, pervasive anti-vax sentiment. That’s actually not—it’s bad public policy. It’s a recipe for disease outbreak.

But in communicating with individual patients about vaccines, you don’t tell them that they have to get it, or they can’t come and see you again. That’s not a persuasive way to interact with people, right? At the individual level, when I’m talking to patients, I engage in shared decision making about this. And that starts with offering people the intervention but then really listening to their reactions to it and listening to their fears around it.

Demsas: What sorts of things do you hear when people say they’re scared about getting a vaccine? Is this mostly COVID or other sorts of things?

Bedard: Well, I take care of adults and not kids, right? So I don’t hear people talk about autism and then the MMR vaccine, for example. I talk to adults about the flu vaccine, the COVID vaccine. It’s different, vaccine to vaccine.

So overall, I think one of the things is that people have had the experience themselves of getting the vaccine and then feeling crappy for the next 24 to 48 hours. And they don’t want to do that. The most pervasive thing you hear is, The flu vaccine makes me sick.

Demsas: Yeah. And that’s real. It does make you feel sick.

Bedard: And it’s real. And so one of the most important things to do is to say, Yeah, you’re going to feel bad. We expect that. That’s normal. And if you don’t want to take it today, because you have to go, you know, do something tomorrow, that’s okay. You can do it at your next visit. It’s really, really important with folks to do expectation setting, and then it’s also very, very important to not play down their own experiences or the information that they’re bringing to you.

There’s a great piece that was written by a guy that I work with now, Sudhakar Nuti, who wrote about the phenomena of lay epidemiology. Lay epidemiology is, like, the sort of informal information gathering that people do around how the people in their community and in their lives experience a vaccine. So if you have a brother who got the flu vaccine and got Guillain-Barré syndrome afterwards—

Demsas: And can you say what that is?

Bedard: Yeah, totally. It is a known, very rare complication where—it’s a neurologic complication, but it’s pretty serious, where—people experience sort of temporary paralysis.

Demsas: Wow. That’s bad.

Bedard: It’s bad. It’s a bad thing to have happen. It’s very rare. If it happens, you never get the flu shot again. But if your brother got it or your friend got it, then your sense of danger and your ability to sort of evaluate your personal risk changes a lot.

So people make this decision a lot because of the lay epidemiology in their lives, which is, What have they heard about it? What do they know about it? And around some things, like the COVID vaccine, there was tons of either real or sort of misinformation reporting about people who got the vaccine and then got sick afterwards, had consequences afterwards, right?

The sort of—people thought that Damar Hamlin, the football player, when his heart stopped on the field, right? They attributed that to having received the COVID vaccine. That’s not what did that. But there was all of this fear around myocarditis—inflammation of the heart—especially in teenage boys.

Demsas: But it’s funny. I don’t view the—at least from my perspective, and I’m not a public-health researcher. I don’t view, like, the orientation of public-health institutions as having been like, We’re going to give everyone the information, so they can make the decision for themselves. I view it much more as, like, I’m going to tell you it’s safe because I’ve done the calculation but refuse to explain to you what safe means.

So I do think that in some cases it’s maybe both. It’s like, Yes, you need to engage with that emotional side, but also just say, like—I mean, my own personal experience with this is: I remember when I was trying to get an IUD for the first time, and I went to a women’s health clinic. And I just said, like, Hey. I’ve heard some stuff about birth control and cancer risk. Like, I was young. I didn’t know anything, and I just, like, read something online, and I was just asking for some support.

This is, like, a women’s-health clinic. It’s a place where, you know, you’re supposed to—it felt very progressive and open. And the doctor just kind of looked at me and was just, like, No, that’s fine. Don’t worry about that. And that didn’t make me feel safer. That didn’t make me feel like—

Bedard: Totally.

Demsas: I got the IUD, but I was also just, like, It’s not really clear to me that I feel like you’ve listened to me. I didn’t go back there when the IUD didn’t work. I ended up, like, you know—I went on the pill instead and never went back to that. You know what I mean? So it’s all these things where I’m not really clear, you know?

Bedard: Well, so the thing that I would say about that, Jerusalem, is that’s really—what you’re talking about is an experience that’s really specific to who you are. Right? So you’re a “facts maxer.” You want the info.

Demsas: I’ve never heard that before in my life. (Laughs.)

Bedard: You want the information, right? And you’re a person who spends a lot of your day digesting and synthesizing huge amounts of information—primary research a lot, right? It’s your preferred way of understanding things, is getting lots and lots of facts and reading lots of different interpretations, and then making your own judgment about it.

So if you were my patient, and you expressed hesitancy about getting the IUD, the thing that—and I should say, you know, the reason. I have a really different orientation than lots of doctors, and that’s because my training is actually in palliative care, right? And palliative care is caring for people with serious illness or people who have life-limiting disease. And it’s very much attuned to and preoccupied with not just physical suffering but also existential distress. And because you are working with people who are sick in ways where the sort of calculus about what’s important changes a little bit, we do a lot of shared decision making. And I am trained in sitting with people and trying to decide what’s important to them, and given the options and sort of the constraints of reality, what can we do to meet their goals, right?

So that’s to say that my approach with you, if you were to ask me about getting an IUD and expressed hesitation, would be to delve deeper about, What are your concerns? Where did you read that? Where did you hear it? Do you know anybody in your life for whom that’s been an issue? Try to get really to the bottom of the thing that’s worrying you, and then also try to say, Well, what would make you feel better about it? And what would help you make this decision?

And then, for you, I think it’s probably true that the right thing for us to do would be to turn the computer screen towards you and look it up together, right? And then talk that through.

Demsas: I mean, I agree with you. I am now going to use “facts maxer” as part of my bio.

But I don’t know. I feel like I hear a lot from other people who I think maybe spend less time on econ working-paper sites—I hear a lot from them that they’re like, I just want the facts. I want someone to give me the facts. And I think that I’ve seen a lot of the same stuff that you have about, like, people have a difficult time hearing odds. I mean, I don’t think I’m particularly great at this. Like, one in 1,000 and one in 10,000—like, do you emotionally understand the differences between those numbers? Or does it just seem small but, like, there? Like, I know a thousand people, you know. Like, That’s a person.

And do you hear that the same way when you hear, like, There’s a one-in-a-thousand risk you have cancer, versus, There’s a one-in-a-thousand risk that you’ve just won $1,000? Like, do you understand those things in the same way? So I think all those things are true, but do you think that when people are saying, I want more information, they’re not actually asking for that?

Bedard: I think you have to—this is what I’m saying about, sort of: It’s different to be a doctor with a person in front of you, where I think the task is to try to explore that. Is this a person who genuinely needs more information? It would be clarifying to Jerusalem Demsas if I said to her, Actually, that study has been disproven by this subsequent study. That might be something that for you would be reassuring.

Demsas: That would work.

Bedard: It would do it, right? But I will give you the example of the patients that I took care of on Rikers. So I was a doctor on Rikers for six years. I worked in the jail system. I was there during COVID. The public-health agency that I worked for, that provided health care in the jail system, worked very hard to advocate for our patients—for people who are incarcerated on Rikers—to be among the early groups of folks who would receive the vaccine in 2021.

Demsas: I mean, the outbreaks in jails were astronomical.

Bedard: There was a period where Rikers had the highest prevalence rate in the country, at the very beginning. Jails have the worst possible conditions for airborne viral spread. So it made lots of sense to advocate for this. And also, it really felt like this important equity issue that we were saying, like, Look—these people’s lives matter, and their risk is incredibly high, and they should be prioritized.

New York City also, relatively early on in the vaccination rollout to incentivize people to get the vaccine, was offering people $100 if they got their shot. That was true in the community. We advocated hard to have something commensurate offered to people in jail—that if you accepted the vaccine, like any other New Yorker, you would be compensated with some money put into your commissary account. I don’t think it was $100. I can’t remember exactly what it was.

I walked around the jails offering vaccination to folks with one of our head nurses and one of our head physician’s assistants, both excellent communicators and people who had really great trust with our patients. And we would approach guys and say, Do you want to get the vaccine? And they would say, Hell no. And then we’d say, No, it’s really important. We would give them our spiel. And we would say, And we’ll put—whatever it was—$50 into your commissary. And almost to a man, the guys said, Now I’m definitely not getting it. The government’s never paid me to put anything in my body before.

Demsas: (Laughs.) Wow.

Bedard: And that wasn’t a situation where if I had said, No, no. Let me explain to you why this is happening. No, no. Let’s explore the facts around RNA vaccine safety, that was going to change hearts and minds, right?

That was a situation where I was encountering a resistance that was born from entirely different experience than the experience you’re describing, and with entirely different concerns. It was a low-trust environment. To respond to that, often I would joke back and be like, Well, then you should take it the first time that they do, right? And, like—

Demsas: Did that work?

Bedard: Sometimes. You know, mostly what worked was, like, sparring with dudes in a jokey way, in a way that helped them feel grounded in the idea that I, or my colleagues, were not going to try to hurt them. So in other words, their resistance was born out of low trust, and the right strategy was to try to increase trust between us and the folks we were trying to help.

And that’s just to say that there are lots of different reasons that people are vaccine hesitant. Vaccine hesitancy is not the same thing as being anti-vax, and most people are not strongly anti-vaccine. Most people who are in this RFK universe are vaccine hesitant, which means that they’re in this state of sort of vulnerable ambivalence about it.

And what you want to do, as an individual doctor, is sit with someone and try to explore where that ambivalence comes from and then address the source of that ambivalence. That’s really hard to do at the public-health level, right? It’s very different to do that at the policy level. At the policy level, mandates work. And so what you want to do is sort of, I think, have the mandate in place but think about how your communication makes it easier for people to live with those mandates and accept those mandates and feel aligned with them.

Demsas: So you brought us back to RFK and to mandates. And another part of your op-ed is that—and I don’t want this to just be about vaccines—but you say that “there are seeds of truth to some of what Mr. Kennedy says.” And I want you to overview. I mean, you’ve mentioned the mandates here, and you’ve talked a little bit about kind of some of the nutrition stuff, but what are these seeds of truth that you think we should be seeing in what he’s talking about?

Bedard: You know, I think the concerns about the relationship between pharma and government and drug regulation are really valid. They’re concerns that any liberal doctor would tell you they agree with, up to a point.

So when I say that there’s seeds of truth, common ground—the common ground stops at some point, where it’s not like Anthony Fauci traveled to China in order to engineer the COVID vaccine himself or whatever. Like, that’s just absolutely not true. But the idea that there is too cozy a relationship between pharma, pharma-sponsored patient-advocacy groups, the FDA, and the committees that provide drug approvals, and then provider associations—like, that’s definitely true. And there are lots of recent examples of that.

There’s, you know, sort of famously: In 2021, there was a really controversial, high-profile case of approval for a drug for Alzheimer’s that had just been shown not to work, basically. And Alzheimer’s—very common disease, incredibly devastating to families. People are desperate to believe that there is something that they can do for folks. We don’t really have good treatments right now. This was the sort of treatment that had received a lot of hype in advance.

The data was just not supportive of the idea that it was effective. And, in fact, it did obviously cause harm in some small number of patients. It got pushed through the FDA approval process anyway, largely, in part, due to pressure from the Alzheimer’s Association, which was receiving money from the drug company. That is a perfect-storm setup for an RFK-type critique. And it’s true. And at the time, I wrote an op-ed criticizing that process. So that’s a place where he and I totally agree.

There is a lot of truth, I think, in questioning the balance in terms of how much we’re thinking about treating diseases versus preventing them. He talks a lot about prevention. He talks a lot about lifestyle. He talks a lot about working on things upstream before they develop into sort of full-blown organ failure, right? So tackling childhood obesity by changing the food environment and encouraging exercise—it’s pretty hard to disagree with that, right?

Whether that means that, you know, I am a huge booster of the GLP-1 drugs, of Ozempic and its brethren, RFK is not, right? And that’s a place of disagreement. But it’s not a place of disagreement because I think that his premise is necessarily wrong. I think it’s a different idea about what’s realistic in terms of addressing a current prevalent issue.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: How I learned to be skeptical of fluoride in children’s toothpaste.

[Break]

Demsas: I think my Oh my gosh—there’s a seed of truth in something he’s saying moment was when I was reading an article from the Atlantic by our fantastic science reporter Sarah Zhang about fluoride. And the article is titled Why I Buy German Toothpaste Now.

And it’s about how, you know, she buys German fluoride-free toothpaste for her daughter. And it’s because at very high levels, fluoride can lead to fluorosis, which is when your teeth become mottled or structurally weak, but also that high levels of fluoride have been linked to lower IQ in children. And toothpaste contains, you know, 1,000 times more fluoride than recommended in drinking water, and you know, young kids don’t spit that out reliably.

And she talked to a researcher recommended to her from the American Dental Association, which is obviously a pro-fluoride group. And she told her that she would also choose fluoride-free toothpaste for her children. I also learned from that article that Canada recommends holding off on fluoride for most kids under age 3.

And it’s just this moment of just realizing, like: I’m not saying that we should all listen to RFK, but I think it’s strange that that’s the only space where I’m hearing anyone question some of these things. And so then it raises this problem of, like, Oh, is this tamped down? But then, you know, it’s also a weird reaction for me to have that, because I just read this in an article in The Atlantic. So is it being tamped down at all?

So I wonder why you think that dynamic happens, where sometimes, you know, the public is talking about it? Like, these are people who are parts of the public-health establishment who are talking to journalists. Journalists are reporting that. They’re giving people facts. And yet, it feels like the only truth tellers are RFK Jr. and people on these bro podcasts. Like, what is that coming from?

Bedard: I think the operative word is question, right? It’s not necessarily that you feel definitively after reading Sarah’s article—that you understand, with total certainty, what the deal is with fluoride. What you took away from that article was, There’s more uncertainty around this intervention than I initially appreciated.

And what feels difficult is that to learn that, then subsequently makes you feel betrayed, right? That that uncertainty had never been introduced to you before and, in fact, that you had sort of felt, perhaps—I’m projecting, but I think this is probably true—sort of encouraged to assume that anybody questioning fluoride was coming from an anti-science place, was a crank, right? And then you think, I don’t want to be sort of blindly following things that there isn’t good evidence for.

It’s really, really hard for public health to effectively communicate around uncertainty. The pandemic was an incredible example of this. This has been discussed ad nauseam. Lots of mistakes were made, right? Initially, we didn’t appreciate that it was airborne, right? Initially—but even before that, we told people that they didn’t actually need to wear masks, and then we said, Actually, you need to wear a mask all the time, and you can never take your mask off, and you have to wear your mask even when you’re jogging in the park. Then we said, Don’t worry—you’ll get the vaccine, and nobody will get COVID after we have the vaccine. And then we vaccinated everyone, and the Delta wave happened, like, six weeks later.

The way that the public experiences that is as a series of reversals that feel like betrayals, I think. What I think we should do differently, regardless of whether it’s Kennedy or somebody else in charge, is communicate with the public differently about uncertainty—do different kinds of expectation setting.

Another good example is: At the beginning of the pandemic, when people went into what we’re calling lockdown—although lockdown was never really lockdown in the U.S., the way it was in some other places—initially, people sort of said, right, Go in for two weeks, and we’ll flatten the curve. Or, Go in for a couple of weeks, and we’ll flatten the curve.

And actually, we didn’t know what it was going to take, right? We didn’t know how long it was going to take to make a difference or to be safe. We didn’t totally really know what go inside had to mean. Did it mean that you couldn’t go outside at all? There were certainly people who did that. Did it mean that schools shouldn’t open for two years? Did it mean that once we sort of had enough epidemiologic data about average risk of serious illness in kids, we would make a different decision about schools?

There was very little transparency around that decision making. And essentially, there was very little transparency around the uncertainty around that decision making, right? There was a real feeling and sense that the public had to hear clear messaging: You have to wear a mask or it’s unsafe. But actually, everything is sort of a risk-benefit calculus, right? And once some of the things that people were initially told turned out not to be true, they experienced those reversals as a betrayal, and then they were pissed, and they didn’t trust anything going forward.

And that’s what I think sort of your fluoride experience is like a microcosm of, which is this sense of, like, I’ve been duped—and not because you’re convinced now that fluoride is, for sure, bad but more because you think, I thought this was settled matter, because you guys told me it was, and now I realize it’s not, and it makes me wonder what else I should be questioning.

Demsas: I think a lot of, you know, public-health folks have felt really attacked, maybe, post-COVID or even during a lot of the COVID experience. And one pushback I imagine that they would raise to our conversation, and to conversations like this happening everywhere, is that they actually do debate a lot the ethics and need for vaccine mandates all the time.

There’s one study I came across when researching for this episode in the Journal of Medical Ethics, and it was asking whether universities should mandate third-dose COVID-19 boosters. And they estimate that to prevent one hospitalization over a six-month period, you’d have to vaccinate between, roughly, 31,000 to 42,000 young adults. In order to do that, you’re getting a handful of adverse events and up to 5,000 adverse reactions that would “interfere with daily activities.” And as a result of that, they conclude that university booster mandates are unethical because they don’t take into account the low risk this group faces with Omicron, which was the wave at the time, and they’re just not proportionate, among other reasons.

And that’s the exact sort of balancing that I think that a lot of people feel like, I wish public health was like this. And I myself did not know that this was a way that bioethicists were interacting with this question. And so I guess part of that makes me feel like it’s a bit hopeless. Like, is this a problem of whether it’s social media? But also, just the way that you’re kind of describing the scientific iterative process reads as a series of betrayals rather than just, you know, a scientific iterative process, where you’re learning and changing your mind and updating. How optimistic are you that this balance is even possible?

Bedard: A few things. One thing is that I think what you’re describing there, in terms of the really painstaking decision-making process that goes into things like vaccine mandates—that’s the standard, right? And that’s how everything works, with the obvious caveat that in emergency situations where you’re dealing with a circumstance where there’s a ton of uncertainty and unsettled evidence, you have to make decisions anyway that are your best guess in the moment, right?

And so the pandemic, I think, was a little bit of an outlier situation—compared to, say, the way that we think about vaccine mandates for a childhood vaccination—where, in March of 2020, the U.S. government had to make a lot of decisions really quickly with imperfect information. And they had to do that without being able to do all of the modeling you just described, right?

And so, again, what I wish we had done differently then is been more transparent about that uncertainty and talked about how we would then potentially revise that decision making in the future as more information came out. So, This is what we’re saying you should do today based on what we know. As we learn more, this guidance may change. Here’s what we’ll tell you that will help you feel like that change makes sense. If we are wrong, there are potential consequences, and we might do something differently sooner than we’re saying, right? Like, you can sort of—there’s no character limit, right? You can say it all.

Demsas: You can only tweet your public-health pronouncements, and you can’t get premium. (Laughs.)

Bedard: Yeah. Exactly. There was and often is, I think, this sort of mistaken sense that the public needs to hear short, clear, decisive messaging, even when the circumstance that you’re in necessitates a totally different kind of communication. So that’s the caveat case, I think, is that there are lots of times when you don’t have that information that you just sort of described around—by the time Omicron came around, we had tons of information about what the real risk was to 22-year-olds, right? We didn’t have that at the beginning.

But for childhood vaccination, for example, we do have that information. The childhood vaccine schedule is something that has been created with a ton of thought and a ton of data, and a ton of thought and data that’s balancing lots of different considerations—not just safety and efficacy of the vaccines themselves, but information about how often people are willing to come to the doctor, right?

There was a really great piece written in 2009 by Danielle Ofri, who’s a doctor at Bellevue, here in New York. And 2009 was when the H1N1 swine flu outbreak happened. And she wrote this piece about what she calls the “emotional epidemiology of the H1N1 influenza vaccine.” Her patients—patients who generally did not accept the flu vaccine—when H1N1 first broke out began calling her office, being like, When is the vaccine going to be available? When is the vaccine going to be available? And she was surprised because they were generally folks who had not accepted the seasonal flu vaccine in the past.

It took a little while—and by a little while, I really mean months, not a year, right—for an H1N1 vaccine to become available to her patients. In those intervening months, many of those patients who initially had this sense of urgency lost it and, in fact, changed their minds and ultimately didn’t want the vaccine once it became available. And she talks about—I just want to read this quote that she has in here: “Emotional epidemiology does not remain static. As autumn rolled around,” which is when the vaccine became available, “I sensed a peeved expectation from my patients that this swine flu problem should have been solved already. The fact that it wasn’t ‘solved,’ that the medical profession seemed somehow to be dithering, created an uneasy void. Not knowing whether to succumb to panic or to indifference, patients instead grew suspicious. No amount of rational explanation—about the natural variety of influenza strains, about the simple issue of outbreak timing that necessitates a separate H1N1 vaccine—could allay this wariness.”

I think that this void that Ofri is identifying is really important. When you aren’t communicating consistently with the public in a way that makes the work that you’re doing transparent to them, the thinking that you’re doing transparent to them, and in a way that is in some ways responsive to their feelings, then it feels as though there is a void, and into that void people project all sorts of things and end up relying on information from other sources and changing their mind or deciding that they don’t trust you anymore.

Demsas: So I think it’s an interesting kind of tension, though. Because, you know, I wrote this article in 2022, and the headline was, “Is the FDA Too Cautious?” And part of what the article talks about is that the FDA is way too conservative when assessing clinical trials for therapies of, quote, “terminal illnesses with no existing therapies such as pancreatic cancer.” So these are areas where you would want the FDA to be overly willing to approve therapeutics, because the risk of death and disability are already high for the individual patients.

And there’s this anecdote from Henry Miller, a former FDA physician, that I’m going to read quickly. He says, “In the early 1980s, when I headed the team at the FDA that was reviewing the NDA [New Drug Application] for insulin … we were ready to recommend approval a mere four months after the application was submitted. With quintessential bureaucratic reasoning, my supervisor refused to sign off on the approval—even though he agreed that the data provided compelling evidence of the drug’s safety and effectiveness. ‘If anything goes wrong,’ he argued, ‘think how bad it will look that we approved the drug so quickly.’”

So earlier in our conversation, you mentioned the Alzheimer’s drug, which I think, universally, everyone was kind of condemning as being a situation where the FDA had rushed something through approvals, even though there was not good evidence that it was going to be beneficial for people who needed that drug.

And then when I wrote this article, there were a lot of people who were like, Yes, it’s so important. There were scientists, outside individuals, public-health researchers from the outside who were like, Yes, it’s really a problem that the FDA doesn’t behave this way. There’s tension that we have in this conversation that I can imagine is very frustrating for people in government, where they’re being told, Hey. Why won’t you approve these tests quickly? Even though you’re not sure that they’re good, why won’t you act with greater degree of concern for people who need something right now, rather than trying to get the perfect thing later?

And on their end, they’re saying, We need to increase trust. And trust means provide people things when they’re ready, provide people things when we can actually defend them clearly. And on the other hand, they’re being told and criticized for not doing that. And there’s, obviously, this dynamic here, where you get blamed for things that go wrong much more than you get blamed for things that you don’t do, because people often don’t see those sorts of things.

And so I guess I ask you: You’re, obviously, trying to get to a point where there’s a lot more of this democracy, openness, talking about these individual problems, but it seems to also open up a lot of these institutions to kind of daily critique about how they’re not actually getting things right on a day-to-day basis. Like, Well, yesterday you said this, and now you’re saying this. So I mean, how do you think about that problem?

Bedard: So the first thing I would say is: The science actually matters a lot here. So there are examples, like the one that you just gave, where there are things—there are discoveries, breakthroughs, drugs, whatever—where the evidence is just sort of incontrovertible right out the gate, right? Like, way before sort of a study’s expected end point, it’s very clear the benefit is there, and people are tolerating it well enough, and the condition is serious enough that we should try to expedite it.

Expedited approval really came to the fore during the AIDS crisis, when this was a huge issue, right—where AIDS patients, understandably, were like, We’re dying today, so it doesn’t make sense for us that you have to go through this bureaucratic approvals process. We’re willing to try therapies that are promising, that may not work, even that may have risks, now because—

Demsas: We’re dying.

Bedard: We’re dying. The natural course of our disease is such that we don’t have the time to wait for your process. That’s clearly reasonable, and Anthony Fauci, in response to those very complaints, adjusted the clinical-trials approval process to have a fast-track option. There’s compassionate-use-case approvals, where for diseases that are rapidly terminal, seriously debilitating, etcetera, the threshold to be able to let people try something that’s in development is much lower.

There’s also always the possibility of enrolling in clinical trials, right, as a way to try therapy. And that’s an example of sort of just—there’s both sort of a rigorous system around deciding whether or not somebody is eligible for something, but there are opportunities before something has been proven safe, or not 100 percent, to let people try it. The flip side is that there are lots of things that pharma is working on that don’t work that well, that are for problems that aren’t that debilitating, right, and where rushing approval for those things doesn’t make any sense, because the risk even of sort of minor adverse effects way outweighs the sort of tepid benefit that they might offer.

And so, to me, the challenge for the agency is less about whether they look good or bad, and more about trying to sort out those types of problems, right? When does it make sense for us to err on the side of being as conservative as possible in approving something? Versus, when does it make sense for us to err on the side of being as open to risk as possible because the alternative of continuing to live in an environment without treatment is so devastating to people?

The way that the FDA and other public-health agencies—the NIH, etcetera—have tried to get at this issue that you’re talking about is by having patients involved at sort of every step of the drug-approval process, the research process, etcetera, etcetera. That doesn’t work all that well, I don’t think, because there’s a little bit of an elite-capture problem there, which is that: Any patient who ends up sitting on the committee for drug approval stops actually being a representative of that patient population, knows too much, is sort of influenced by lots of other factors, etcetera, etcetera. And I don’t think just involving patients along the way really sort of solves the problem that you’re talking about, but it’s the way that the agencies try to do it now.

Demsas: So I can imagine that there are people who are very afraid of RFK’s ascent and, like, kind of the increase in skepticism around basic public-health measures that are listening to the conversation and just going, I feel like you’re just sane-washing. People who are serious trust the science people or public-health researchers, or if you’re serious about preventing long-term disability from COVID reinfections—I mean, if you really care about those things, then what you should do is just constantly sort of oppose that.

And so how do you think about the risk of sane-washing, instead of just going, like, Hey—we’re just saying we agree that sometimes Big Pharma is way too involved in the regulatory process. That doesn’t mean we think that X conspiracy theory is true. So like, what is the balance there? Who’s responsible for making it?

Bedard: So I’m a little bit different, I think, than lots of doctors because of my background and my practice experience. One thing is about being a palliative-care doctor. The other thing is that I have always worked with marginalized populations where there’s a high prevalence of substance-use issues. And because of that, I’m very sort of seeped in the harm-reduction approach to problems.

And I don’t think that advocacy from the public-health community or doctors is going to be what prevents RFK from getting through the Senate and being approved to become an HHS secretary. I think he’s gonna end up getting the job. And I also think—because of the sort of way that he is ensconced in Trump World and the fact that he comes with his own constituency that Trump sort of needs—in the outcome where, like, a couple brave senators stand up and decide that they’re not going to vote for him, I think he gets made health czar or something like that. Like, I don’t think he just goes away.

So part of the harm-reduction ethos is just about being real about what the challenges are. And to me, the fact that I don’t want RFK to be anywhere near in charge of the federal government’s health apparatus, it doesn’t make it not so. And my sort of principled opposition to that doesn’t feel like an intervention that has a lot of juice.

That’s really different, I will say, than I felt in 2016 with the first Trump administration, where I sort of felt like there was lots of reason to believe that resistance was the path. I don’t feel that way, and I don’t think we’re seeing that, generally, now, right? Like, we’re seeing a lot less sort of resistance stuff and a lot more trying to figure out how to make the reality of this situation less harmful.

I don’t think it’s sane-washing him to say, Look—if this guy’s gonna be in charge, what does it look like for us to recognize who he is and where he’s coming from, recognize that he has a growing movement of people behind him, who aren’t just going to go away because we yell at them? What does it look like to try to achieve something that doesn’t even have to be consensus but is understanding between us so that the entire sort of public-health apparatus doesn’t just get dismantled?

Demsas: That seems a perfect place to ask our last question, which is: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up only being good on paper?

Bedard: Okay, I have two answers to this.

Demsas: Okay.

Bedard: I thought about it a lot.

Demsas: Lots of “good on paper” problems in your life. (Laughs.)

Bedard: And they were, like—these are not necessarily good on paper just to me. I think that there are two things that I think. The first is the Manhattan Project.

Demsas: What?

Bedard: It’s hard for me to think of anything cooler in the world than taking the best scientists in the country—like, the best scientists from around the world, basically—and bringing them all to the desert and being like, Figure out the hardest scientific problem of the moment, and we’ll give you unlimited resources to do it. Unbelievably sexy proposition. Turned out really bad. You know what I mean?

If I think about the Manhattan Project still, I’m very seduced—maybe you’re not at all, but I’m very seduced by it. It’s also like: You think you’re beating the Germans. It feels really important.

Demsas: Yeah.

Bedard: The other thing that I was going to say is: small plates. (Laughs.)

Demsas: So Manhattan Project and small plates.

Bedard: Manhattan Project and small plates.

So I think one of the major millennial failures is the invention and then rollout of small plates to, like, every yuppie restaurant in every city in the country—which is like: You go. You sit down. There’s, like, this menu of items that are all very expensive and very tiny, and they’re supposed to be for sharing, but they’re not big enough to share.

And then the waiter comes and, like, does this whole explanation, like, Have you ever been here before? Let me explain to you how the menu works. Things at the top are small, and things at the bottom are bigger. And then the menu proceeds from, like, $18 for four anchovies to, like, eventually you get to, like, a whole fish. You know what I mean?

And, like, (1) it’s insane. Like, you can’t—

Demsas: The sharing part is the most annoying part, where there’s, like, three things, and there’s five people at the table, and so you’re cutting each one—

Bedard: Of course! If the concept is you should be sharing, so you can try lots of things, then everything has to be family style. It should be big, not small. Big plates is what you need!

Demsas: Big plates. Wow. This is very attractive to me as an Eritrean because our food is the biggest of plates. It is one big, shared plate. So you know what? Sure.

Bedard: That’s the right approach!

Demsas: Yeah. Not the tapas way—the Eritrean way.

Bedard: Tapas was never meant to be a meal. Tapas is, like, an hors d’oeuvre situation. It’s not supposed to be that, like, it’s 7 p.m., and I’m starving. I’m sitting down with another couple, and we’re, you know, gingerly ripping apart one piece of sourdough between us.

Demsas: You know what? You’ve convinced me. I’m going to launch a tirade against this next time I’m at a restaurant to a poor, unsuspecting waiter. Well, Rachael, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was fantastic.

Bedard: Thank you, Jerusalem.

[Music]

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Are Young Men Really Becoming More Sexist?

2024-12-24T06:00:00-05:00

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It’s conventional wisdom that young people will be more progressive than their forebears. But although young people can often be counted upon to be more comfortable with risk and radicalism, that doesn’t mean they will always express that through left-leaning politics.

Young men may have helped hand President-Elect Donald Trump his victory, fueling the narrative about a growing gender gap among young voters. But this is not just an American trend. In South Korea, young men have been radicalized against feminism, opening up a large gender gap; in Poland, gender emerged “as a significant factor … with young men showing a strong preference” for the far-right political alliance; and in Belgium, the anti-immigrant and separatist Vlaams Belang party received significantly more support from young men than young women.

Could the Gen Z political gender gap be an international phenomenon?

Today’s episode of Good on Paper is with Dr. Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at Kings College London who is writing a book on the root causes of gender inequality across the world. Originally published in June, this episode helps untangle some of the reasons young men may be feeling disaffected and reacting differently than young women to macroeconomic and political trends.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: Following the election, there have been many many arguments made about the growing gender gap between young men and young women. That women are more likely to vote for Democrats has been a consistent feature of my entire life, but this wasn’t always the case.

In the year 2000, the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris released a paper establishing “gender differences in electoral behavior.” Basically, they showed that women had become a liberal force in small-d democratic politics.

That was a notable finding, because in the postwar era, women were, on average, seen as a more conservative electoral factor. Norris and Inglehart looked at more than 60 countries around the world and found that, from the early ’80s through the mid-’90s, women had been moving to the left of men throughout advanced industrial societies. They conclude that “given the process of generational turnover this promises to have profound consequences for the future of the gender cleavage, moving women further left.”

[Music]

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

While we’re waiting for the sort of definitive data that can help researchers untangle exactly which men were more likely to vote for Donald Trump and why, I wanted to revisit one of my favorite conversations of the year, with Dr. Alice Evans. Alice is a senior lecturer at King’s College London, whose newsletter, The Great Gender Divergence, has followed research and her own personal travels across the world to understand the root causes of gender inequality.

Trying to understand why it is that relations between young men and women seem so fraught can help us begin to understand the downstream political consequences of these cultural shifts.

Here’s our conversation, originally published back in June.

[Music]

Alice, welcome to show.

Alice Evans: Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to talk to you because I think we corresponded for a long time, and this is a treat.

Demsas: Yes, yes. Twitter DM-to-podcast pipeline. I feel like that’s what we’re creating right here. So we’re here to talk about the divergence between young men and women’s political views, particularly on sexism. But before we get into that, I just want to ask you: What determines whether someone is sexist? What determines whether they hold sexist beliefs?

Evans: Wow, okay, big question. So, I think, generally, the entire of human history has been incredibly patriarchal. So to answer that question, I need to explain the origins of patriarchy. For thousands and thousands of years, our culture has vilified, blamed disobedient, naughty women. You know, they were witches. They were terrible people. A woman who was disobedient or who wasn’t a virgin was shamed and ostracized. So there is a long history. Sexism is nothing new. And actually over the 20th century, much of the world — Latin America, North America, Europe, and East Asia — have become rapidly more gender equal. So in terms of human history, the big story is the rise of gender equality in much of the world. But certainly sexism persists, and we do see in Europe, in South Korea, in China, in North America, young men expressing what we call hostile sexism. Now, it’s worth distinguishing between hostile sexism and benevolent sexism.

So let’s suppose I’m a patriarch in a conservative society, and I think Women are incompetent, and we don’t want to ruin their little heads, and they can’t take care of these things, so I’ll manage these things for the women who just don’t know any better. So that’s benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is a sense of resentment of women’s gains. So when we ask questions like, women’s rights are expanding at the expense of men, or women are getting these handouts, or men are the ones who are discriminated against. It’s a sense of resentment, the thing that feminism has gone too far, that women are getting all these perks, and so you know, every day as a woman, I wake up with a free fruit basket, right?

Demsas: Wait, I didn’t get mine this morning. I’ll have to check in.

Evans: Yeah, exactly. But this is a real, I think—so I’ve done interviews across the U. S., in Chicago and Stanford and in Montgomery, in California, in New Haven, in New York, in Toronto, in Poland, in Warsaw, in Krakow, in Barcelona, in London. And a lot of young men do feel this sense of resentment. And you can understand it. If you feel that life is hard, if you feel that you’re struggling to get ahead—so we know as college enrollment increases, it’s become really, really hard to make it into a top college place.

Demsas: Let’s step back for a second, This question, though, that I have is, you’re raising this question of young men feeling this resentment. Are young men becoming more sexist? Is that what you're seeing in the data?

Evans: I think it depends on how we phrase it. So, in terms of, yes, young men are much more likely to say, Yes, women could work, they can go out to clubs, they can do whatever they like, they can be totally free, and young men will support and vote for female leaders. So in terms of support for recognizing women’s capabilities, absolutely, younger generations tend to be much more gender equal, and that holds across the board. The only exceptions are places like North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia where there’s no difference between young men and their grandfathers. But in culturally liberal economically developed countries in the West and East, young men are more supportive. But, sorry, I should have been more clear, they do express this hostile sexism, so this sense of resentment that women’s rights are coming at men's expense. But that’s not all men, right? And so it’s only a small fraction of young men. You know, many young men are very, very progressive and they’ll vote for Hillary Clinton, et cetera.

Demsas: I just want to drill down into what exactly we’re talking about, right? Because I think most people know there’s a gender gap between men and women, and let’s start in the American context here. People know that with Trump—you have almost 60 percent of women are supporting Biden, while a majority of men back Trump.What’s actually happening here in the U. S. context that’s new, that’s interesting, that’s driving this conversation?

Evans: It’s difficult to know why people do stuff, so everything I say is speculative. What I’m trying to do is when I look at the data, I try to understand, you know, what are structural trends affecting one particular generation that distinct from other generations and why would it be happening in particular parts of the world and not others? So here are three big structural drivers that I’m not a hundred percent sure about, but I would suggest them as likely hypotheses. One is that men care about status. Everyone cares about status. Big examples of status goods include getting a great place at university, being able to afford a nice house, and also having a beautiful girlfriend. Those three things—good education because that matters for signaling for credentials; good place to live; and a pretty, pretty wife or girlfriend—those are your three status goods. Each of those three things has become much, much harder to get. So if we look, as university enrollment rises, as it has, it becomes much harder to get to the top, to get to the Ivy League, right? So only a small percentage of people will get to the top, but those getting to the Ivy League is so important for future networks. Meanwhile, those who don’t even have bachelor’s degrees will really struggle to get higher wages. So one is that men are struggling to get those top university places, which are important for jobs. Then on top of that, housing has become much more expensive. And the gap between wages and house prices has massively increased. Especially if you don’t have inherited wealth. So for the guy whose parents were not rich, it becomes so much harder to get onto the property ladder. So it’s especially hard for these young men to get status. Now, a third and really important factor is that it’s become harder to get girlfriends. So as societies become more culturally liberal, open minded, and tolerant, women are no longer shamed, derided, and ostracized for being single without a boyfriend. You know, in previous decades or centuries —

Demsas: I don’t know. Some women are, some women are.

Evans: Well, compare over time, over time, right? So this isn’t saying there’s zero stigma. It’s saying, Look at change over time. So in previous decades, a woman who was not married and didn’t have babies by the time she was 30 might be seen as a total loser and totally stigmatized. That’s true in South Korea, China, Japan, the U.S., and Europe. But as women are not facing that pressure and that ostracism, they can become financially independent. Women’s wages are approximating men’s. They can inherit parental wealth and buy their own property. So that means that women don’t necessarily need a man. So demand for male partners has plummeted because of that economic development and cultural liberalization. As a result, Pew data tells us that 39 percent of adult American men are currently unpartnered.

Demsas: So basically you have these three buckets here that you’re talking about. You’re saying that you see this divergence with young men in particular because young men, I guess, are concerned with status in a particular way, and that the economic circumstances of our moment in time here in the U.S. have made it more difficult because of home prices, because of diverging outcomes for people with a college degree versus those without. And then finally that because of women’s increased opportunities that they’re able to actually reject men that they feel like don’t give them either economic security or the love or respect. And in previous generations, they would have had to make do because they weren’t afforded that freedom in society. Is that kind of getting at what you’re—

Evans: Perfect. You’ve said it far better than me. For example, young women will say to me on dating apps, they just give up because these men are boring, right? So if a man is not charming, then what is he offering? A woman is looking for loving companionship, someone who’s fun, someone who’s nice to spend time with. But if the guy can’t offer that, then—so in turn, this is hurtful for men. Men aren’t these powerful patriarchs policing women. In fact, they’re guys with emotions who—and nobody wants to be ghosted, to be rejected, to feel unwanted. So if men go on these dating apps and they’re not getting any likes, and even if they speak to her when she doesn’t have the time of day, it just bruises and grates at your ego, your sense of worth. And so then, men may turn to podcasts or YouTube, and if you look at that manosphere, if you look at what people are talking about, it’s often dating. And so they’re often saying, Oh, women have become so greedy. They’re so materialistic. We see this vilification of women. So that kind of filter bubble, once you self-select into it, you become surrounded by this sense of righteous resentment and, oh, you know, It’s not your fault for lack of studying in schools, it’s women are getting all this positive discrimination. Women are getting all these benefits, you know, every, all these companies are hiring women because they feel they have to, because that’s woke nowadays. So if you hear all that kind of angry discourse, and the same goes in South Korea where I was earlier this year. There is a sexist, discriminatory law which mandates that men have to go into military conscription. And that’s terrible, it’s very abusive, it’s hierarchical, it’s unpleasant, lots of men commit suicide, and that is now increasingly used as a way of signaling that life is very unfair for men. And so men are facing a tough time, and then social media, which they’re self selecting into, can reinforce the legitimacy of that.

Demsas: So I’m glad you broadened this out of the U.S. context because I think that while you’ve told a story that I think is familiar to a lot of people hearing this podcast here in the U. S., this is not just happening here. There is this really interesting study by some Swedish political scientists where they look at 32,000 people across 27 countries in the EU, and they’re finding that young men are particularly likely to see advances in women’s rights as a threat to men’s opportunities, right? So similar to what you. And it’s interesting ‘cause it’s compared to older men, right? Like, the group that expresses most opposition to women’s rights are young men while women across all age cohorts show very low levels of opposition to women’s rights. And older men seem indistinguishable often in their peer groups to women their age. And young men really jump out there. And they offer a couple of explanations to that. They say that it’s about whether or not young men feel the institutions in their area are fair or discriminatory. And they say that if there is, you know, downturns in the economy, that that makes young men even more likely to express hostility, this sort of hostile sexism you’re talking about towards women. But why is that affecting young men differently than it’s affecting their older male counterparts?

Evans: Right, great question. And also I was just looking at work by Lisa Blaydes finding that young men in Qatar are most opposed to women in the workforce. And I think it could be this heightened sense of competition. So now, women are outpacing men in terms of education. So they’re a real threat in terms of competition for top jobs, which is also so important for housing. So I think that the competition, right? So if you care about status, if you care about getting to the top, the competition is fiercest now.

Demsas: But aren’t middle-aged men also in competition with women for jobs? You know, 25 doesn’t mean you stop having competition in the labor market. I mean, 30 year old men, 40 year old men, 50 year old men, all these men are still working.

Evans: Right, absolutely, but we now see so many more women who are educated and ready and eager to go into the workforce and aiming for those top jobs with high aspiration and also getting those very top jobs is very important in order to afford decent housing.

Demsas: Gotcha.

Evans: Right, so when people say, Oh, you know, Gen Z have it better than ever because they’ve got higher wages, what we need to think about is people care about status. So they care about their place in the pecking order.

Demsas: And so it’s like if you’re an older man living in an EU country, right? You may see young women now entering the labor force, but, on mass, they’re often not in direct competition for your job. So you feel maybe a benevolent sexism towards them, but you don’t feel this potential zero-sum mindset. And also, maybe you’ve already bought into the market, so you didn’t experience this runup in housing prices in the same way before you were able to buy a home. So that’s kind of what differentiates these groups?

Evans: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I totally agree. I think housing is really hitting young people. And if you look in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders did very well. And he was really campaigning, focusing on young people and their concerns about housing, right? So this is a major, major issue that young people just cannot—so many people in their 20s and even 30s in Europe are still sharing with roommates, right? So they just feel trapped. You’re still in this limbo. You can’t afford your own place. That hits people hard, especially as it then worsens their prospects in dating and marriage, right? So it’s harder to date. If you’re still living with roommates, you’ve got less to offer, so I just think it hits men multiple times, just feeling—no one wants to feel like a loser, right? So anything that makes you feel like you’re not doing so well. So if we see a rise in inequality, a rise in income inequality, a rise in housing inequality, that in turn affects your ability to date, especially as demand for men goes down.

Demsas: But what’s also happening in a lot of these countries, at least in the U.S. context, right, is that it’s not just that men are sort of reacting to these economic circumstances. It’s also that women are becoming more progressive over time. So is it an interaction between those things that’s maybe driving this gender divergence? Or how much of it is just that men are getting more conservative versus women are also getting more progressive?

Evans: Okay, excellent. I want to make two more points. One is that there’s been some nice research about women becoming more progressive. I think that might affect men’s conservatism in two ways. There’s nice research in Spain showing that after the 2018 Women’s March, then there was a rise in hostile sexism, which in turn led to more votes for the far-right party Vox. So that’s a sense of patriarchal backlash. Also, if we look at the data on men becoming more conservative in South Korea, it exactly precisely times #MeToo. So in South Korea—which is a society which idealizes collective harmony, but there’s also been a lot of spycams and sexual harassment and covert pornography—women organized in backlash. They organized for an end to impunity. Thousands and thousands of women marched and mobilized. But that triggered a lot of a reactionary movement of male solidarity, male hostile sexism. So in both Spain and South Korea, it’s women’s mobilization, women becoming more progressive and outwardly saying, We don’t want to tolerate this. We won’t tolerate this anymore. This led to hostile sexism, which in turn, many politicians have mobilized, have used and marshaled for their gains. So in Spain, the Vox party has often said, Well, you know, there are these cases of false accusations. In South Korea too, the president was actually elected on a wave of hostile sexism. He was campaigning to abolish the gender ministry. He was sort of an anti-feminist president.

Also, there’s very nice research by Jay Van Bavel and others, and they show that on social media, it tends to be the most extreme groups that are the most vocal. So if you imagine a distribution of people, people at the 5 percent of either end—the two poles—they’re the ones who shout the loudest. And so if you imagine there’s this very, very extremist feminist person shouting loudly, that person may then get parroted by the right wing media and say, Oh, this is what feminists think. And that can accentuate the backlash. So even though the vast majority of women are much more moderate, much more in the middle, the ones who shout the loudest may then trigger that backlash effect. The most extreme feminist views can trigger a backlash against feminism, even if most women really aren’t on board with those ideas, so I think there’s a social media effect.

Demsas: You’ve identified three large ways that these divides between young men and women are growing. You talk about this and a high-unemployment or low-growth trap, that young men might be feeling more viscerally than young women because of their expectations around status. You talk about—

Evans: Wait, wait, wait. Let me clarify. So in the U. S., you don’t have high unemployment, but you do have that status inequality.

Demsas: Yeah.

Evans: So that resembles—sorry, I should just clarify that. So it can work. As long as you’ve got inequality, then you’re going to have this sense of resentment. I really think it’s inevitable.

Demsas: No, I think that’s a great point because I was literally just going to ask you right then just, you know, U.S. has extremely low unemployment right now and you see varying amounts of economic cases across the EU and the world.

And you’re going from South Korea where you have also really great economic circumstances all the way to countries like Indonesia where things look very different. And so I think that that’s a really helpful corrective. But I want to zero in on these two other things that you were just talking about. But let’s just start with the social media bubbles, right? Because I find this interesting that, if you were to ask me before I’d looked into any of this, whether social media would make you have to hear from and interact with people more different than who you are versus people who are similar to you, I would’ve thought, Yeah, I can’t really control the next tweet that my algorithm shows me if I’m on Tumblr in high school and I’m looking through different blogs. I don’t really know the genders of people immediately when those things pop up on my page. So I feel like it would be a way of actually facilitating a ton of information across genders, right? But what you say is that social media actually allows for you to create these bubbles, and that it creates this feedback loop for people who are young women who are to become more liberal and young men to become more regressive. I mean, you use this term called manosphere earlier. Can you talk a little bit about what that is? What's actually happening there?

Evans: Yes, absolutely. But first, before we get to social media, I think it’s important to recognize that this is part of a broader process of culture where there are many kinds of filter bubbles. So as women have forged careers and become journalists, podcasters, writers, screenwriters, they have championed their ideals of empathy and tolerance and equality. And then on top of that, David Rozado shows that over the 2010s, media increasingly reported more attention to sexism, more attention to racism. So people are becoming more aware of the sense of unfairness and inequalities. On top of that, the social media companies, they want to keep their users hooked. And they do this by making their apps enjoyable and addictive, so they provide content that they think you will like, that your friends and peers also liked. They think that they show things similar to what you’ve already liked, and they also might show sensational content. But the more that they send you things similar to what you’ve already liked, then you become cocooned in this echo chamber of groupthink whereby everyone is agreeing with you. So even if there are these structural economic drivers that push men to become more attuned or sympathetic to Andrew Tate, we then get these echo chambers whereby that’s all you’re hearing.

Demsas: But when you describe the media environment, that’s just one way that people engage in social media, but when you’re thinking about your algorithm, like I said, aren’t there tons of ways then that social media has actually broken that? Because now, you go on your Twitter and yeah, your algorithm may push you more towards certain kinds of content, but it also opens you up to very different views. And the reason I’m asking this is because one of the biggest theories about how people break down prejudice is this thing called contact theory, where you come into contact with individuals of a group that you have prejudice against, and then as you see, Oh, this is just a person just like me, you end up breaking down a lot of your prejudices because they become beaten by reality. So why doesn’t that happen? Why don't you see that sort of interaction happening on social media?

Evans: I think that’s a theoretical possibility of the internet, but in reality, people are much more tribal. They gravitate towards things that they like, towards things that they already know, towards things that already make them feel comfortable. People are incredibly—they do so many things on trust, like, Oh, is this someone I know? Okay, I’ll trust them and listen to them. Is this person part of my group? And I think in America, particularly, you see that ideological polarization. If you’re told that, Oh, the Democrats support this, and you’re a Democrat, people tend to support it. So I think a lot of things are done on a very tribal, trusting basis, and although you and I might idealize a fantasy internet where people mix and mingle and learn from diversity, in truth, people tend to gravitate towards their group.

Demsas: Yeah, for me I diverge a little bit. I think that it’s maybe different for different folks. I mean, this is why, as you said earlier, while you do see young men sort of diverging, as expressing more sexist attitudes, that’s just a portion of young men, right? That’s, as you said, it’s not every single young man. And I would have to think that a lot of them are actually coming into contact with some of these conversations that are happening cross gender, cross ideology, whether it’s online or it’s in their school, in school or whatever it is.

Evans: Okay, excellent, so we know that young people spend a huge amount of their time on their phones—maybe five hours—and a lot of these YouTube shorts or TikToks are very, very short. They could be 30 seconds. They could be a minute. That’s not enough time to cultivate empathy, to understand someone’s particular predicament, why they made those choices and the difficulties of their life. So and then if it’s too short to build empathy, then you’re just going to stick with your priors. So, social psychologists talk about confirmation bias, that we tend to pay more attention to information that fits with our priors. So we seek out information that already fits with our priors, we ignore disconfirming evidence. So on social media where you’re getting all this short information, you’re just looking for things that are nice, that make you feel comfortable.

Demsas: But, you know, one question I actually had for me, that’s part of this is there’s this concept called group threat theory, right? Where you think about someone else as being the cause of your—some other group as being the cause of your misfortune. And identifying who that group is, though, is not just natural, right? That doesn’t happen out of the ether. Because, you know, young men could be experiencing this sort of status threat, they could see this widening inequality, and they don’t have to turn against women, right? They could say instead, Actually, the problem is, you know, Catholics, or, The problem is whatever, you know, people from Namibia, whatever it is. And then you can just create these groups. So it seems like a lot of your argumentation around this has been around looking at cultural entrepreneurs who weaponize these moments to point you at a group. Can you tell us, what’s a cultural entrepreneur? What are they doing?

Evans: So this has existed throughout history. You know, there was a Mamluk Sultan of Egypt called Barsbay. And after the price of bread went up, uh, he blamed it on the women. And he said it was women were responsible for creating public discord. And he banished them back to their homes. And so, you know, women were to blame for all these terrible things that have happened. So throughout history, if you have a vulnerable group that cannot protect itself, it might be blamed, you know, similarly in the count, in the struggle between Protestants and Catholics, then priests would vilify women and identify witches to prove their superior power to vanquish the devil. Right? So if there is this small isolated group that is less powerful, you can vilify them. And so we see that in regards, you know, xenophobia, Islamophobia in India, right? The BJP being anti-Muslim. We see it in every single society, but it’s just a cultural innovation, which group is going to be blamed. But I think—and so people like podcasters might vilify women as getting these handouts, or they might vilify Ukrainian refugees as getting these handouts in Poland, or it’s these migrants at the border that are causing all these sorts of problems. So it’s someone—rather than, you know, a financial entrepreneur is one who looks at the market and thinks, Hey, I’m going to exploit this opportunity and make some money, a cultural entrepreneur is someone who says, Hey, I’m seeing this sea of discontent. I’m going to rise up, build a following, and possibly make money, but also get social respect, etcetera.

Demsas: So these cultural entrepreneurs have a lot of power, right? It’s really contingent on who ends up being more persuasive, who ends up making either the best arguments or swaying the most people over onto their side because they’re charismatic. And one thing that’s been really interesting to me is it’s possible that men could feel like women are an asset, that the fact that they can work wage-paying jobs is an asset to them when there’s an economic downturn. Like, Great. It’s not just my brothers or my dad or my sons that can help me. Now my wife, my daughter, my sisters can help if there’s a problem, too. And I wonder if this also plays into why it’s younger men that are actually the ones that end up being more hostile towards women’s advancing rights because they’re less likely to be partnered already. So why isn’t it that you don’t see actually greater excitement that women can actually be helping bring in money in this context?

Evans: Okay, so that’s a great point, a plausible argument, but I think in previous generations, the younger, unpartnered men might still support this, be less likely to endorse hostile sexism. Maybe because they thought they were going to do better in the labor market. Now, I think an extra factor that’s happening right now that’s really important for explaining this, in terms of statistics: One, it is the women who are the major competition in employment because they’re super, super educated, often more educated than men. Two, these heterosexual men wanting girlfriends. So the people who are rejecting them, the people who they think are snubbing them are literally women. So I think there is a direct confrontation, so I think the idea of scapegoating and vilifying women is inevitable because of that competition of the sexes, so to speak. That said, there’s this nice draft by Thomas Piketty, the scholar of inequality, showing that richer, super educated men are much more likely to vote Democrat. So, when men can achieve these super high salaries, right, those men are super secure, so they don’t have that status competition. Now, I think that the point you made about relationships is really important and—

Demsas: Yeah, because I was just going to think, Is it just about dating? How much of this is just if you were partnered, then basically you don’t feel this way?

Evans: Yeah, I think that’s great. So there’s this very nice paper showing that fathers of daughters were less likely to interrupt Janet Yellen in her congressional hearings. So if you want the best for your daughter and you aspire for her to do well, and then you empathize with women’s concerns, and maybe you’re less of a dickhead, right, in public life. So I certainly see that can happening. But I still think if we look back at the historical record, there are plenty of cases where men might support their wives working, but still be pretty hostile in general. So we go back to the guilds in medieval Europe. A man and a wife might collaborate together. He might bequeath his estate to her, but European guilds that’s a proto-trade union, they might exclude women because they wanted to preserve and monopolize their benefits. The same goes for trade unions in the 19th and early 20th century—very, very sexist. So sadly, I don’t think—that doesn’t seem from the family, from the historical record, that just having a relationship will necessarily mean a benign attitude to women in general.

[Music]

Demsas: We’re going to take a quick break. More with Alice when we get back.

[Break]

Demsas: All this gets me thinking, you know, a lot of the explanations are, you know, they’re structural in that they would happen to like basically every generation of young men, obviously, social media is a bit different, but other than that, you would see this in the past, as well, and so my question for you is—we see right now that a lot of people are talking about this potential threat of the great gender divergence between women and young women and men in politics. And I wonder, would young men always have been relatively more zero-sum in their thinking with young women? Even in past generations, we just don’t have the data to compare.

Evans: Okay, so let me say three things. First of all, it’s now that we see this rise of men being unpartnered. So previously the Pew data was showing a far smaller fraction of men were unpartnered. So previously, when women were culturally compelled to marry, you know, when it was just a normal thing to get married and have babies before you are 30, then you’re going to have more demand for men. So the mediocre man was going to do okay with the ladies. So he wasn’t getting those constant rejections and ghosting which grates at the male ego. So today is very, very different in terms of men’s difficulty of getting, you know, all these things, all these things that I’m talking about, uh, are big structural changes, the difficulty of getting to a top university, the difficulty of getting a decent housing in cities, especially the difficulty of getting a pretty girlfriend or a girlfriend at all, all those things are much, much harder for, say, the median guy. The median guy is struggling to get status, and that’s happening now.

Demsas: So one of the things I think is interesting about this phenomenon is that you’re doing a lot of work that looks at what’s happening with young men and women’s attitudes, not just in the U.S. or the U.K., but you’re also looking across a bunch of contexts. So I want to go into a couple different countries to see how these trends are actually playing out given the cultural context that exists there. So, firstly, can you take us to Qatar? And I’m interested in Qatar because it’s a highly developed nation, right? This is not a poor country by any means. So tell us what’s going on there. Why do we see this sort of divergence between young men and women?

Evans: Yeah, this is super fascinating, right? I’ve never been to Qatar, so I am cautious here. But piecing together other materials that I’ve read about the existing published literature: One, I think it’s important to recognize it’s a hugely unequal society. So, even if everyone’s incomes are high, people still care about that place and their pecking order. Second, on social media, I think social media can even amplify people’s perceptions of inequality because the kind of stuff that goes viral—and this goes for both pretty women and successful men—are the superstars, right? So, it’s the beautiful, beautiful women who get thousands and thousands of likes and then trigger anxiety amongst other women. And similarly for men in Qatar, it’s the Sheikhs, the rulers, the crown princes who show off their Lamborghinis and Porsches that are worth several million dollars. And so this sense of, I want to be at the top—because being at the top of society brings status, it brings social respect, it brings prestige, it brings admiration. Other people admire you if you’re doing well compared to others. So, in Qatar, women are now super, super educated, the younger generation of women really want to work, and I think it’s possible that they present a challenge to young men. And what’s really, really fascinating is when I look at data on maths and reading, we see women in Qatar are far outpacing men. It’s not just that they’re more likely to be university educated, but their maths scores are off the board, off the chart. So the gender gap in terms of competence is astronomical.

Demsas: I wanted us to move to a different part of the world. I wanted to move us to Indonesia, and the reason I want to talk about Indonesia is, you know, I remember in 2010 when then-President Barack Obama went to Indonesia and hailed it as this example of a democratic, multi-ethnic, multi-racial society. Particularly at a time where he was trying to tamp down on xenophobia and anti-Muslim behavior or anti-Muslim attitudes in the West and in the U.S. after 2001 and the 9/11 attacks. And so, I was really interested because what ends up happening in the subsequent years is that Indonesia really turns against this example. And you end up seeing that a lot of people, democratically, are wanting actually many more illiberal things. And you actually see young men and young women increasingly pushing towards regressive values, particularly on gender. And so you wrote about this, and you wrote about this survey that the Indonesian government did in 2019. And I want to just talk about this a bit, because I think it speaks to how it’s not just men that reinforce patriarchal attitudes, so that women can have a role in enforcing those as well.

In this 2019 government survey of Indonesian women, they’re looking at 15- to 19-year-old girls, right? And they ask them, When is it justified for a husband to hit or beat his wife? They ask, Is it when she burns his food, when she argues with him, when she goes out without telling him, when she neglects his kids, when she refuses to have sex with him? They tallied up all of those things, and amongst 15- to 19-year-old girls, over 40 percent of them agreed with at least one of those as a justification for domestic violence. And then you look up the age groups, you look at 20 to 24, you look at 25 to 29, you look at 45 to 49, no one is above 40 percent. At 45 to 49, it’s actually only 27 percent agree with at least one of those things. What’s going on there? Why are young women in this context maybe turning against women's rights in contrast with their older peers?

Evans: I was actually listening to Barack Obama’s speech in Indonesia the other day. And he quoted the Indonesian national motto, which is like, Unity in diversity. And it's always had this big history of celebrating their diversity. But what we’ve seen over the past 20 years in Indonesia, and actually in many Muslim countries across the world, is many people increasingly embracing a very strict Salafist interpretation of Islam and adopting very strict ideas of gender segregation and female seclusion, and men and women keeping their distance from each other. And so many people are—so I think what’s caused that? One is: Saudi Arabia has become rich on the back of Western and global demand for oil, and that has enabled it to export these Salafist ideologies through investing in mosques, madrassas.

Demsas: And what’s a madrasa?

Evans: A madrasa is an Islamic school, so you learn about the Prophet, you learn about Sharia law, you also learn about gender segregation—the idea that a modest woman, a good woman, will stay away from men, and she will not laugh, chat, and socialize with them. And that sexes should keep their distance from each other. And one possible reason—even in urban areas, girls are more likely to go to these Islamic educational institutions—and one possibility is that, as men become more religious, they want religious wives. They want wives who will be obedient. In Islam, it says that a wife should obey her husband, 93 percent of Indonesian Muslims say that the wife should obey her husband. And so one: Saudi Arabia funding madrassas. Also: religious righteousness gives people, especially struggling people, a sense of self-worth by doing God’s work. By making these anti-blasphemy accusations, you’ve got moral dignity, you’ve got status, people care about status. And then, as people become more religious, political parties and campaign movements gain votes by courting these preferences. So across Indonesia, in many of the different regions, more schools and more political parties have made laws against blasphemy, mandated hijab laws. There’s been persecution of minorities, and we see this right up until government level and, you know, criminalization of blasphemy being strengthened. So when people say, Oh, it’s a terrible thing, the sexes coming apart. I would say that’s descriptively true, but it’s distinct to economically developed and culturally liberal countries. And when you say it’s a terrible thing, just consider the alternative: what’s happening in many other parts of the world where people think the same thing and sing from the same hymn sheet as they did in the past in the UK and the U.S.

Demsas: One last place I want to take us is a place you’ve mentioned a couple times: South Korea. And the reason I want to ask you about this is because South Korea has the distinction of seeing the lowest fertility rates in the world. Since 2013, they’ve been below everyone else, and right now they’re at 0.72 births per woman, which is really, really low. I wanted to ask if that’s the effect that we might expect to see, because South Korea is a place that’s a highly developed nation, a very rich nation, and at the same time, you see this massive divergence between young men and young women, and I’m wondering is that something that you would expect to see in other nations, if you see this persistence and divergence between young men and women?

Evans: I will say two things. First, on South Korea’s plummeting fertility, I think there are several drivers. First and foremost, the lowest fertility and the most likely to be childless is the poorest South Koreans. So, there’s a great paper by Michèle Tertilt and others, and they highlight the importance of status. And the idea is that South Koreans really care about education. They want their kids to do really well, to get into the top universities—we call them SKY—so they invest enormous amounts in their education, but the poor cannot keep up with the spending of the rich. So maybe you only have one kid, right? You can’t have two kids and educate them well, so that’s one thing, the status competition makes it more exhausting and laborious to have a kid. Secondly, certainly, I think it’s true that as there’s cultural liberalization and people are no longer socially punished if they don’t have a kid, then they can just do their own thing. They can do whatever they like. So for example, when I’m in Zambia or Uzbekistan, the first two questions people will say to me is, Are you married? Do you have kids? And the correct answer is always supposed to be yes, right? But no one in the U. S. will ask me that question. No one has introduced themselves to me saying, Hi, are you married? Do you have kids? No one says that. The way I’m received varies enormously. And so people’s priorities—when I go to conservative countries—people’s priorities, how they want to understand me as a person, first and foremost: Married and kids? Yes or no? So that’s the second mechanism: the less pressure to give birth and have children. And then thirdly, we do see in South Korea many young women saying, Hey, I just don’t want this. I don’t want to be in the same position of my mother who, for Lunar New Year, would have to be the dutiful daughter-in-law serving the husband’s family, doing all the cooking, and not being recognized and rewarded. So: staying single and not wanting to have kids. So for all those three reasons—status, competition, cultural liberalism, and the ideological polarization between young men and women—we might see a fall in fertility, but those three things seem structural and difficult to change. And so I think for those three reasons, you might expect fertility to continue to fall.

Demsas: Well, just so that we don’t leave everyone on the most depressing note possible, I’m wondering, you know, it seems like there’s a lot of malleability and the direction towards making society less gender egalitarian, but that should mean that you could also do the opposite, right? So, what can countries or people do about this? Like, in the 20th century, I imagine there were also a lot of cultural entrepreneurs—whether it’s on TV or the suffragettes or individuals who were, you know, just in daily life really pushing towards a more egalitarian culture. Is that what we need to see now, or are there other things that countries can do to ameliorate the backlash effects that young men are displaying?

Evans: Okay, great. So I maybe sound a little bit Marxian now. I think if you buy my hypothesis that part of this is all about status competition, then one possible mechanism is to reduce that status inequality. So for example, by radically increasing the supply of housing, it’s easier for men to be doing as well as their peers. Right, in both Europe and the US there are a lot of NIMBY restrictions on where you can build and that raises the price of housing. So if housing was cheaper and more affordable and more within reach of young people, then young people would be doing comparably. You wouldn’t have that massive status competition. I think also what’s really important is going back to your point about cultivating empathy and understanding different people’s concerns and perspectives, and that happens through meeting in person. It does not happen through these 30-second TikToks. And so in England, many schools have banned mobile phones. And I think that’s a way, and I think the upside of that is that people will be more present on their interaction with their peers in that classroom. And that’s clearly a collective action problem that Haidt has shown in his new book, you know, no parent wants—

Demsas: Jonathan Haidt.

Evans: Yeah, exactly. No parent wants to do it alone because then their kid is out of the loop. But if everyone is doing it—so I think getting people off their phones and into in-person interactions, you know, hanging out at parties. You know, when I was a teenager, I was always hosting these garage parties. My mother was always away at work and so I was always hosting these garage parties, and people coming over to my house to play Nintendo and, you know—

Demsas: Now, you’d get in trouble for leaving, like, tools hanging up around children.

Evans: I lived a naughty life. I lived in the English countryside, so we had a big treehouse and all sorts of naughty things going on. But anyway, less of my naughtiness, but yes, people interacting in person is really important, going back to the contact hypothesis and building empathy. And then we can also think about these algorithms. So if it’s the case that corporate algorithms are creating a skewed sense of what people see, and creating an unrealistic depiction of social life, then that’s something we could regulate, as we might regulate other areas. So I think those would be the three things for me: the reducing the status competition by boosting the supply of housing, encouraging empathy with more personal interactions by getting kids off their phones, and also thinking about how do you change the algorithm so that people don’t see this distorted sense of humanity, which is just making them think that other people are crazy, when actually, most people are pretty moderate and towards the middle.

Demsas: Well, you were really speaking my language when it comes to housing, so don’t—I have no objections there. Always our final question: What’s an idea that you felt was good on paper, but didn't pan out in real life?

Evans: Oh my god, so much of my life, so much of my life. I mean, how many Alice Evans stories do you want? I travel the world, so this is like everything I do. I can tell you stories from the Democratic Republic of Congo when things went awry, or I can tell you about me being punched in the face in Mexico.

Demsas: Let’s do punched in the face in Mexico. Let’s do that one.

Evans: [Laughs] So I was — this was last year — I was in Oaxaca, and it was going really well. I was going into these little villages and towns with my iPhone, and I was using Microsoft Translate, and I was having these fantastic conversations with indigenous people. It was tremendous. And everyone was super, super kind and wonderful. And then a guy, in the favela, tried to wrestle me for my phone. Now, the sensible thing would just be to hand over my phone, but I did not do that. For some reason, I decided to wrestle him. And so he kept grabbing at my phone and I did not let him have it. And then what happened is—this is a true story, true story—he threw me to the ground, my head slammed back down on the stone—

Demsas: Oh my God.

Evans: Yeah. True story. And then he got on top of me and punched me in the face, right smack between the eyes on my nose. And what I do is I kick back, double legs in his stomach, propelling him off two meters. Then what happens is he—shocked by this—he goes into his pocket, he grabs a large knife, and what I do? I do a Lara Croft roly poly, spinning off to the side. I then jump up, and then he wrestles me again with the knife. And so it's at this point that I think, I’m not going to out-fight a man with a knife who does not care at all about my welfare. So at this point, I hand over the phone, and I sprint, and I'm bleeding, and I'm covered in blood. Yeah, that is something that had not gone to plan. Getting punched in the face was not on the agenda.

Demsas: Not good on paper. I mean, it's just interesting. You said, you know, smartphones—I guess they really, really can cause large harms in society.

Evans: Yeah, we need to be careful about the smartphones and also the idiots that carry them.

[Music]

Demsas: Well, Alice Evans, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We're so excited to have you, and we hope to have you back soon.

Evans: Thank you. This has been a pleasure. You're very kind. Thank you.

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Or share it with two friends who you think might like it, as well.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas and we’ll see you next week.

[Music]

Demsas: Great.

Evans: We’re culture entrepreneuring right now

Demsas: We’re culture entrepreneuring right now! That’s the whole podcast.

Evans: (Laughs)