This record suggests that Presidential races—primaries and general elections—are usually decided by major political forces that transcend the details of the campaign. In 2016, Trump successfully tapped into nativism, nationalism, economic disenchantment, and alienation from organized politics—all phenomena which were (and are) deeply rooted in American society. In 2020, Biden tapped into an even more powerful force at the time: revulsion at Trump’s Presidency. The question facing DeSantis isn’t whether he gives interviews to Newsmax or CNN. It’s what big political force does he have at his back that could sweep him to victory?
At the start of this year, the answer appeared to be electability. Following DeSantis’s runaway reëlection in Florida, the argument was that he could appeal to a broad spectrum of Republicans who believed it was time to move on from Trump. Today, that voting demographic looks a good deal narrower. Since April, when the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, indicted Trump on charges related to paying off the adult-film performer Stormy Daniels, many Republican voters have rallied around him. Meanwhile, DeSantis has undermined the electability argument by running to the right of Trump on cultural issues, evidently in the belief that “anti-wokeism” is the big force that will propel him to the nomination. It’s too early to say for sure that this culture-war strategy is doomed—he’s still in second place, and the Iowa caucus is nearly six months away—but one thing is certain: it has propelled him into the political netherworld of encouraging anti-vaxxers and inciting bigotry…
It’s sometimes overlooked that, in 2016, Trump twinned his race-baiting and attacks on cultural élites with criticisms of C.E.O.s, corporations, and bankers who had shipped abroad American jobs, and of the politicians who had enabled them. Although debates continue about the relative importance of economic and cultural factors in Trump’s victory, his championing of economic nationalism and protectionism surely played a role in persuading large numbers of working-class Americans to vote for him. Democrats have been forced to respond. The Biden Administration has retained some of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods and has adopted an aggressive industrial policy aimed at rebuilding U.S. manufacturing.
In running as the ultimate culture warrior, meanwhile, DeSantis has largely absented himself from broader debates about the country’s future. Back in March, when he delivered his annual State of the State address, he did talk about Florida’s economic record, boasting, “We rank No. 1 in the nation for new business formations. We are No. 1 in economic growth among large states.” Surprisingly, these themes haven’t figured prominently in his campaign to date. And, going forward, according to the NBC News story, he’s going to be making even fewer references to Florida.
Reboot or no reboot, DeSantis appears to be all in on the culture war. So far, this hasn’t worked for him, and appearing at more Iowa diners seems unlikely to change things. Like the rest of the Republican candidates not named Trump, he’s left hoping for a divine or judicial intervention.
2) I’ve done some work with “moral reframing” that didn’t seem to work. But other social scientists keep finding positive results:
Economically progressive candidates—candidates who champion redistributive policies designed to reduce inequality—rarely win elections in the United States. Here, we propose that progressive candidates achieve greater support by framing their policy platforms in terms of values that resonate beyond their progressive base. In two experiments (total N = 4,138), including one preregistered experiment conducted on a nationally representative probability sample, we found that a presidential candidate who framed his progressive economic platform using values consistent with the “binding” moral foundations—e.g. patriotism, family, and respect for tradition—as opposed to values consistent with the “individualizing” foundations, e.g. equality and social justice, received significantly stronger support. This effect was driven by increased support among conservatives and, unexpectedly, moderates as well. By comparison, a manipulation of how progressive the candidate’s platform was had small and inconsistent effects. Despite the potential gains associated with binding framing, analyses using presidential candidates’ debate speeches reveal that appeals to binding values are least common among progressive candidates. These findings show, however, that the alignment between values and candidate support is malleable, suggesting economically progressive candidates can build broader coalitions by reframing the values they associate with their platforms.
3) This chart is something else. The American right is a global outlier on climate:
4) A quarter-century ago I read Song for the Blue Ocean and gave it to my mom to read, too. What I most remember about it was just what an amazing and under-appreciated creature the bluefin tuna is. And here’s the latest on the bluefin in the New Yorker.
By 2007, studies documented a collapsing bluefin population, and in 2008 the scientific arm of the iccat recommended that the allowable catch for bluefin be set at ten thousand metric tons. The iccat set it at thirty-two thousand metric tons. Almost an equal amount of illegal fishing could be expected, leading to a total that some estimated to be about a third of all the tuna to be found in the entire Atlantic.
Bluefin tuna are apex predators, at least if you leave humans out of the system. As we know from wolves and from sharks, apex predators are often keystone species. A tuna consumes eight to ten per cent of its weight in other species every day. “Without bluefin tuna, a phenomenon dubbed ‘trophic cascade’ would occur,” Pinchin writes. She cites a 2012 modelling simulation that saw the numbers of bluefin affecting the health of “swordfish, mackerel, Norway lobster, and bonito tuna”; damage to those populations affects the even smaller creatures such as “herring, squid . . . and phytoplankton,” and finally back to the true apex predator (humans), in increasing the likelihood of damage to coastal communities, which are already threatened owing to erosion, storm surges, and flooding.
In some sense, Pinchin’s book tells a story you might intuit: a species valuable both commercially and ecologically has been fished too much. The network of people and institutions meant to safeguard the fish, and the fishermen, and keep everything “in balance” are a jumble of well-meaning, corrupted by profit motive, corrupted by egotism, and plain unwieldy—all dwarfed, anyhow, by the broader forces of climate change.
5) Cathy Young with far and away the best and most nuanced take on Florida’s school curriculum on slavery.
Blogger Josh Marshall has also noted that the curriculum strongly emphasizes what he calls “other societies that practiced slavery and other places where slavery was arguably worse”—such as the existence of slavery and the slave trade in Africa before the European slave trade began, as well as slavery in the Caribbean islands (where labor was much harder and mortality rates were staggering) and in Central and South America. As Marshall notes, all of this is factual. Teaching these facts is valid; many young progressives raised on modern anti-racist activism seem to believe that slavery makes the United States uniquely evil, or that white people invented slavery. It’s important to put American slavery in global perspective (in which it is sometimes less and sometimes more inhumane than other forms of enslavement). But it’s also important to do so in a context that doesn’t lend itself to an “it wasn’t so bad” message. One could point out, for instance, that most other slave-owning cultures did not have the same hypocrisy problem, since they did not profess to believe that “all men are created equal” and that liberty is an unalienable right.
One may add that while the Florida curriculum wants to spread the blame for slavery, it doesn’t want to spread the credit for its abolition: the British abolitionist movement and its role in ending the slave trade rate no mention, and neither does the abolition of slavery in the British colonies thirty years before the American Civil War. (The only exception: two mentions of instances in which the British offered liberation to slaves in America as a strategy in military conflicts, in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.)
In other words, while this is not a curriculum that justifies or denies slavery or white supremacy, it is definitely one that tends to accentuate the positive in African American history, and more generally American goodness: abolition, the civil rights movement, the lives of free blacks, thriving and self-sufficient black communities, African-American heroes and cultural figures. Of course those are important things to learn; but such an approach can also result in a skewed rosy picture that reduces the oppression and atrocities to “bad stuff happened, but let’s look at how we got over it.” Yes, it’s pushback against a tendency on the left to treat racism and the legacy of slavery as America’s defining features; but it’s an overcorrection.
6) Okay, I didn’t actually want to read both of the essays this post summarizes, but it really does seem that some activists use the lack of a gender binary do claim there’s no sex binary, which seems kind of nuts.
7) Good stuff from deBoer on standardized testing. I especially appreciated it as I had just read Levitz’s piece (whom I almost always agree with) that misapplied this, “Let Me Repeat Myself: The SAT’s Predictive Power for College Grades is Systematically Underestimated Because of Range Restriction”
Why do raw reported SAT-college GPA correlations look low? The fundamental problem is that correlations gathered at any given college can only include students who go to that college. Students who went to better or worse colleges aren’t in your data, and students who didn’t go to college at all aren’t in anyone’s data. This is absolutely basic range restriction stuff. Here’s a crude graphic representation of the possibilities for SAT scores and college GPA.
Think about it for a minute. Pearson correlations compare continuous variables to other continuous variables, but for the sake of conceptual ease, think in terms of these quadrants. Data points where a student has a high SAT score and gets good college grades make the correlation higher, as do data points where a student has a bad SAT score and gets bad college grades. Data points where a student has a high SAT score and gets bad college grades make the correlation lower, as do data points where a student has a bad SAT score and gets good college grades. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the kinds of students who have a bad SAT score and will get bad college grades didn’t get into your college in the first place! An entire quadrant of data that would help the correlation is thus excluded. And, at some schools, the obverse is happening – students who have high SAT scores and the ability and temperament to get good college grades went to a better school and thus aren’t in your sample. Since most kids are average, many college students will have a mixture of strengths, some better at tests like the SAT but worse at grades, some the opposite. Which means that most colleges are going to have more of the kids who are stronger in one or the other. But this tells us nothing about how strong the actual correlation is. (Berkson’s paradox, folks!) Meanwhile at the most elite schools where the average admitee has something like a 1550, there are ceiling effects.
8) Pretty interesting from National Geographic, “Why curly hair was an evolutionary advantage”
A research article by Lasisi and her Penn State colleagues, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes their measurements of how hair regulates scalp temperature in direct sunlight, using different wigs on a “thermal mannequin.”
The mannequin, heated to the average body temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit, was placed in a climate-controlled chamber within a wind tunnel that enabled scientists to study the amount of heat transferred between its skin and the surrounding environment.
Three wigs were made from black human hair sourced from China—one straight, one moderately curly, and one tightly curled—so that the researchers could observe how different hair textures affected heat gain and loss on the scalp. They also calculated heat loss at different windspeeds, after wetting the wigs to simulate sweating.
The researchers then made a model of heat loss under different conditions and studied it under the typical conditions in equatorial Africa where early hominins are thought to have evolved.
They learned that all types of hair gave some protection from the sun, but tightly curled hair gave the best protection and minimized the need to sweat—a significant finding, says Lasisi.
“Scalp hair is… a possible passive mechanism that saves us from the physiological cost of sweating,” she says. “Sweating isn’t free—you’re losing water and electrolytes. And for our hominin ancestors that could have been important.”
9) This is great (also, you really should subscribe to Brian Klaas— always so good), “The Funhouse Mirror of Trumpistan: A new poll surveyed experts on a variety of claims about Trump’s criminality. Then, they asked Republican voters the same questions. The results give a glimpse of a warped bizarro world reality.”
There are several interesting findings here.
First, nearly 95% of experts believe that Trump committed a crime in the federal documents case. Political scientists are least convinced by the Stormy Daniels hush money case, but even in that instance, more than 70 percent of experts surveyed say they believe, based on the available evidence, that Trump committed a criminal offense.
The allegations related to trying to overturn the 2020 election and inspiring January 6th lie somewhere in the middle, with around 80 percent agreeing that Trump’s actions involved criminal behavior. Very few experts — around 10 percent — believe that Biden committed a crime in mishandling classified documents.
Second, Republican views are inverted from those of experts. In the first wave, less than 10 percent of GOP voters said that Trump had committed any crimes, and those numbers were largely similar in the second wave—with one exception. Now, around a quarter of Republicans acknowledge that Trump likely committed a crime in the federal documents case, a significant rise from the last round of the survey.
Unsurprisingly, the numbers are totally flipped for Biden: nearly 70 percent of Republicans think Biden committed a crime. (As a reminder, there is an enormous difference between these two documents cases).
The juxtaposition is even starker when it comes to questions about punishments for alleged criminality, as shown in the next graphic. In case you can’t see it with the fine print, the left bar in each color corresponds to support for “no crime or no punishment”; the middle is for “probation or a fine” and the right is support for Trump serving prison time for his alleged crimes.
A large majority of experts believe that Trump should serve prison time for three of the four major sets of allegations against him: the documents case, his attempts to subvert the 2020 election based on his lies, and for charges related to January 6th. Interestingly, there’s some substantial daylight between Democrats and experts on the hush money question, with a majority of Democrats favoring prison time for everything, while the majority of experts believe it would be justified in just three of the four cases, but not the hush money one.
Yet again, the Republican numbers are the outliers, with overwhelming majorities favoring no penalty whatsoever for any of the cases. None. Zip. Nada…
So, there’s a plausible objection here: what if the survey is just capturing partisanship rather than expert viewpoints? Maybe these are subjective opinions and it’s to be expected that the left-skewed field of experts align more closely with Democratic attitudes. That’s a fair question. But we can quickly deal with it by examining questions that relate to objective facts, which is what the clever boffins at Brightline Watch did next.
Lo and behold, for each question about objective statements, the experts got the facts right, while Republicans got them wrong. This isn’t a normative or partisan statement about whether Republican voters are good or bad, but rather a presentation of empirical evidence that Republican voters are badly misinformed about basic facts surrounding Trump’s alleged criminality.
For each of the four statements they surveyed, there are mountains of ironclad, publicly available evidence that these things happened. And yet, Republicans continue to exist in the funhouse mirror version of reality, in which allegations about Trump are either dismissed as lies…or they’re just never exposed to the damning facts of the case, cocooned as many are in a Fox News information bubble.
Astonishingly, only 52% of Republican voters surveyed indicated that they believed that Trump ever brought classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, even though Trump himself admits doing so.
10) Damn I hate so much the idea that prosecuting someone who gave drugs to a friend who overdosed as a murderer! Maia Szalavitz:
But the recent history of mandatory drug sentencing — nationally and in New York — holds crucial lessons for those who want to end today’s crisis of illegally manufactured fentanyl.
Already, some 30 states and the federal government allow for the prosecution of street fentanyl suppliers as murderers. And at least five require a mandatory life sentence. During the 2023 legislative season alone, fentanyl-related crime bills were introduced in 46 states. In Tennessee, for example, when three teenage girls overdosed in a high school parking lot this May, the 17-year-old sole survivor was charged with her classmates’ murder.
Parental fury is understandable. But the history of tough drug laws shows that they have never significantly reduced the drug supply, or lowered addiction rates or overdose deaths. In fact, drug busts may increase overdose risk while saddling addicted people with criminal records that lower their odds of recovery by making them less employable.
Our history of enacting — and then reforming — harsh mandatory drug sentencing legislation illustrates its failure…
Law enforcement simply can’t stop addiction. Confirming earlier data, a 2018 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that states with more drug arrests and incarceration don’t have less drug use. Indeed, the United States, with the highest rate of incarceration in the world, still has the world’s highest rates of illegal drug use, along with the highest rates of illegal-drug-related death and disability.
The pain of parents who have lost children to overdose is crushing. But doubling down on counterproductive policies is not the answer. We know what happens when we sentence dealers on a par with murderers — mass incarceration of Black and brown people, and unaltered and ongoing widespread availability of drugs and death.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the Rockefeller drug laws. The worst way to recognize that grim marker would be by continuing to impose more and tougher mandatory sentencing laws.
11) Excellent from Jesse Wegman, “How to Know When a Prosecution Is Political”
First, what is the case about? Is there straightforward evidence of criminal behavior by a politician? Have people who are not powerful politicians been prosecuted in the past for similar behavior?
Second, what are top law-enforcement officials saying? Is the president respecting due process, or is he demanding investigations or prosecutions of specific people? Is he keeping his distance from the case, or is he publicly attacking prosecutors, judges and jurors? Is the attorney general staying quiet, or is he offering public opinions on the guilt of the accused?
Third, is the Justice Department following its internal procedures and guidelines for walling off political interference? Most of these guidelines arose in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, during which President Richard Nixon ordered the department to go after his political enemies and later obstructed the investigation into his own behavior. Until recently, the guidelines were observed by presidents and attorneys general of both parties.
Finally, how have other institutions responded? Did judges and juries follow proper procedure in the case, and did they agree that the defendant was guilty? Did an agency’s inspector general find any wrongdoing by investigators or prosecutors?
None of these factors are decisive by themselves. An investigation might take a novel legal approach; an honest case may still lose in court. But considering them together makes it easier to identify when law enforcement has been weaponized for political ends.
12) Sorry, but really sounds like Biden’s dog has to go. I’m sure it’s tough living in the White House, but this is a completely unacceptable level of aggression, “Bidens’ Dog Has Bitten Several Secret Service Agents, Emails Show: One agent went to the hospital after being bitten by the Bidens’ German shepherd, Commander, in a series of at least 10 incidents of “aggressive behavior.””
13) Really interesting stuff from Yglesias, “New evidence that we’re solving more murders”
The big thing you see is that even though the clearance rate plunged between 1970 and 2000, the convict-to-victim ratio soared. Over the next 10 years it fell slightly, but remained much higher than it had been back in the good old days.
Their basic conclusion is that contrary to the impression given by the falling clearance rate, the odds of being held accountable for a murder seem to have gone up. The “response %” lines are showing what share of the national population and what share of homicides are in the survey. There’s a big leap in coverage between 1970 and 1991, so you might think the rising accountability ratio is some kind of statistical artifact. But the 19-state consistent sample covers about half the nation’s murders and shows the same trend. It’s a pretty miscellaneous collection of states — California, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, and West Virginia — so the sample seems unbiased.
Again, ideally, someone would be tracking convictions in a more precise way. But given the data available, I think it’s convincing: the falling clearance rate almost certainly reflects a higher standard for arresting someone, not a falling likelihood of being held accountable.
14) I would be really surprised if any content producers successfully sue AI models, “The Generative AI Battle Has a Fundamental Flaw: Writers and artists want compensation from AI firms that they claim have trained their models on copyrighted works. But their legal fights miss the bigger issues.”
At the core of these cases, explains Sag, is the same general theory: that LLMs “copied” authors’ protected works. Yet, as Sag explained in testimony to a US Senate subcommittee hearing earlier this month, models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 do not “copy” work in the traditional sense. Digest would be a more appropriate verb—digesting training data to carry out their function: predicting the best next word in a sequence. “Rather than thinking of an LLM as copying the training data like a scribe in a monastery,” Sag said in his Senate testimony, “it makes more sense to think of it as learning from the training data like a student.”
This is pertinent to fair use, the part of US copyright law that generally protects the unlicensed use of copyrighted works for things like scholarship and research. Because if the analogy is correct, then what’s going on here is akin to how a search engine builds its index—and there’s a long history of Google using exactly this argument to defend its business model against claims of theft. In 2006 the company defeated a suit from Perfect 10, an adult entertainment site, for providing hyperlinks and thumbnails of subscriber-only porn in its search results. In 2013 it convinced a New York court that scanning millions of books, and making snippets of them available online, constituted fair use. “In my view, Google Books provides significant public benefits,” US circuit judge Denny Chin wrote in his ruling. In 2014, a judge found in favor of HathiTrust Digital Library, a spinoff of Google Books, in a similar case.
Sag reckons that defendants in similar generative AI lawsuits will use a similar augment: Yes, data goes in, but what comes out is something quite different. Therefore, while it might seem commonsensical that a human reading and a machine “reading” are inherently different activities, it’s not clear the courts will see it that way. And there’s another question mark lingering over whether a machine can make a derivative work at all, says Daniel Gervais, a professor of intellectual property and AI law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee: The US Copyright Office maintains that only humans can produce “works.”
15) Ugh! “Toxin-secreting hammerhead worms are invading the D.C. area. How to stop them.: The snake-like worms contain a potent neurotoxin and can grow more than 22 inches long.”
The hammerhead worm (Bipalium) is an invasive flatworm from Asia, probably spreading to many new locations through the exportation of exotic plants. A handful of sightings have been reported across the Washington area recently. According to the iNaturalist app, Arlington has 43 instances of the worms, D.C. has 16, Virginia has 248 and Maryland has 91 over the past 15 years.
Research shows the genus has spread across the world, especially along the East Coast of the United States. Computer models show the Eastern United States will continue to be a suitable environment for the worms, as the climate warms.
The good news is that the worm isn’t a threat to humans unless ingested or handled, biologist Amber Stokes said.
“Yes, they are poisonous, but they are so small that you would have to actually eat many of them to have any ill effects. I feel pretty doubtful that most people are interested in eating them,” Stokes, a professor at California State University at Bakersfield, said in an email.
Experts said handling them can cause issues like skin irritation. Additionally, like many flatworms, they can carry parasitic nematodes. They can also be dangerous to pets if ingested. But the worms are sensitive to light and don’t usually appear when the sun is out, leaving most of the day worm-free for people and many pets.
16) This is totally nuts and an extreme and absurd threat to academic freedom. An utter embarrassment for Texas A&M, “Texas A&M suspended professor accused of criticizing Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in lecture: The professor, an expert on the opioids crisis, was placed on paid administrative leave and investigated, raising questions about the extent of political interference in higher education, particularly in health-related matters.”
17) Really enjoyed this from deBoer in Persuasion. “Humans Suck at Seeing Into the Future: Breathless predictions about nuclear power put today’s AI “revolution” into perspective.” He’s not saying AI won’t change everything, but we should at least have some skepticism and humility in making these claims. And uses early optimism about nuclear power as a really interesting example:
I can anticipate an objection to my analogy here: nuclear power requires a tremendous amount of physical infrastructure to deploy, while AI requires far less; nuclear power (thankfully) involves a great deal of regulation and permitting, while AI development at present requires none. Therefore, an AI takeover is more likely than a nuclear-powered future was in the 20th century.
I would respond by saying that, first, I think this line of reasoning underestimates just how vast the infrastructure powering AI really is, as these systems require massive amounts of computing power and thus large networks of server farms, which are expensive to build and run. But more to the point, I think this mindset misunderstands the point: the argument is not “nuclear power was likely and didn’t happen, so AI dominance is less likely.” The argument is “history is full of arbitrary turns and random occurrences, causality chokepoints, and chaos injections, and thus we should be far more humble about our predictions about the future.” AI looks inevitable right now. So have many things that haven’t happened.
Someday, people are going to look back at us and laugh, just as we look back and mock those 1950s futurists who predicted a nuclear power plant in every home by the end of the century. There is absolutely no prediction about AI that can be made with the same confidence as the prediction that people in the future—the near future—are going to look back in astonishment at how wrong our futurism was. The most reliable human prediction is that we will go on making bad predictions. The only reason we refuse to grapple with that certainty is because, frankly, our tendency to get lost in hubris is extraordinary. And that’s the greatest impediment we have to putting artificial intelligence and its consequences into their proper context, not bad media incentives or technological ignorance or our relentless drive to tell exciting stories, but the weight of our own egos.
18) “The Retrievals” podcast is the best Serial season in a while. Really compelling.
19) This was the talk of the internet much of the week. You should just read it. Gift link, “Study of Elite College Admissions Data Suggests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qualification”
We know that abortion really did matter. We know that Democrats did particularly well in the most important races. That is a lot. Nate Cohn, though, with a nice summary of recent reports that take a really deep dive with excellent data into the 2022 midterms:
The Catalist report suggested it was the turnout, finding that Democrats won “with electorates in these contests looking more like the 2020 and 2018 electorates than a typical midterm.” Pew also pointed to turnout, but with a different interpretation, writing that Republicans won control of the House “largely on the strength of higher turnout,” and found that disproportionate numbers of Biden voters and Democrats from 2018 stayed home.
You might imagine ways to square the two claims, but neither report offers a clear way to reconcile these competing stories. Catalist, a Democratic data firm, doesn’t mention a word on the partisan makeup of the electorate, despite possessing the data to do so. The Pew report, meanwhile, is framed around explaining how Republicans won the House popular vote by three points — an important outcome, but one overshadowed by the Democratic hold in the Senate and the razor-thin Republican House majority.
Fortunately, our data at The New York Times can help piece together what remains of the puzzle. Over the last few years via Times/Siena College polls, we’ve interviewed tens of thousands of voters nationwide and in the crucial battleground states and districts. This data can be linked to voter registration files — the backbone of both the Catalist and Pew reports — that show exactly who voted and who did not (though not whom they voted for, of course), including in the states and districts that decided the midterm election.
The findings suggest that the turnout was mostly typical of a midterm election and helped Republicans nationwide, but there are good reasons to doubt whether it was as helpful to the party out of power as it had been in previous midterms…
Looking at the data more carefully, the source of this disparity is mostly among Democrats. The registered Democrats who stayed home in 2022 were disproportionately likely to be those who sometimes vote Republican. The Democrats who turned out, on the other hand, were especially loyal Democrats who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020. This is partly because of education — midterm voters are more highly educated — but the survey data suggests that this Democratic advantage ran a lot deeper.
It’s worth being cautious about this finding. The 10-point G.O.P. turnout advantage cited earlier is essentially a fact. The possibility that the practical turnout advantage for Republican candidates might have been only a third of that or less is an estimate based on fallible survey data. It’s also dependent on accurately surveying a group of people — nonvoters — who are very difficult for pollsters to measure.
But the Times and Pew data tell a very similar story, despite very different methodologies, and the accurate topline results of the pre-election surveys add additional harmony. The possibility of some kind of hidden underlying Democratic advantage in motivation is also consistent with other data points on 2022, like Democrats’ astonishing success in ultra-low-turnout special elections…
The 2022 midterm election was not a simple election decided by a national electorate. It was unusually heterogenous, with Republicans enjoying a “red wave” in states like Florida or New York while other states, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, could be argued to have ridden a “blue wave.”
As we’ll see, nowhere near all of the difference between these states can be attributed to turnout. But part of the difference was the disparate turnout, with Republicans enjoying a far larger turnout advantage than they did nationwide in states like Florida, while Democrats did better than they did nationwide in states like Pennsylvania. And since our estimates suggest that the Republican turnout advantage nationwide was fairly modest — more modest than the party registration figures suggest — the estimates also show that neither party enjoyed a significant turnout advantage in many battleground states where Democrats turned in above-average performances.
In Northern battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Ohio, Biden and Trump voters turned out at nearly identical rates, according to our estimates.
In contrast, Trump voters were likelier to turn out than Biden voters by around 10 percentage points or more in states like Florida and New York. In practice, this meant that the Florida electorate most likely voted for Mr. Trump by double digits, even though he carried the state by just three points in 2020…
For all the talk about turnout, this is what distinguished the 2022 midterms from any other in recent memory. Looking back over 15 years, the party out of power has typically won independent voters by an average margin of 14 points, as a crucial segment of voters either has soured on the president or has acted as a check against the excesses of the party in power.
This did not happen in 2022. Every major study — the exit polls, the AP/VoteCast study, the Pew study published this week — showed Democrats narrowly won self-identified independent voters, despite an unfavorable national political environment and an older, whiter group of independent voters. A post-election analysis of Times/Siena surveys adjusted to match the final vote count and the validated electorate show the same thing. It took the Democratic resilience among swing voters together with the Democratic resilience in turnout, especially in the Northern battlegrounds, to nearly allow Democrats to hold the U.S. House.
In many crucial states, Democratic candidates for Senate and governor often outright excelled among swing voters, plainly winning over a sliver of voters who probably backed Mr. Trump for president in 2020 and certainly supported Republican candidates for U.S. House in 2022. This was most pronounced in the states where Republicans nominated stop-the-steal candidates or where the abortion issue was prominent, like Michigan.
The truth is the media can, at times, really overplay “swing voters.” And be utter clueless when it comes to “independents” who are actually partisan leaners with a strong party preference. But, even if a pretty modest-sized bloc, in an electorate as closely divided as ours, swing voters really matter and they sure seem to have in 2022.
Really enjoyed this post from Ethan Mollick, “On holding back the strange AI tide”
Here’s his concluding section, focusing on higher education:
Holding back the tide in education
Almost every assignment, at every level, can be done, at least in part, by AI. Whatever prejudices you have about the quality of AI work as a teacher based on what you saw least semester, they are probably now wrong. AI can do high-quality work. It can do math. It makes far fewer obvious mistakes. And it is capable of working with vast amounts of data.
As a demonstration, I pasted in my entire last book into Claude 2 and gave the following instructions, without any additional information:
I have to do three things with this:
Write a short book report on the book
Write an essay explaining some plusses and minuses of the book
Write about how to apply the book to my own idea of a startup that makes it easy to order gum delivered to my house
Do all that [emphases in original]
And it did. There were few issues or hallucinations I could find, and the materials generally showed the higher order thinking that AI was not capable of simulating just a few months ago.
Given this challenge, many teachers want to turn back the clock: blue book exams. Handwritten essays. Oral exams. These aren’t bad ideas as temporary fixes, but they are only stopgap measure while we decide what comes next in education. There is a reason we did not do most of these approaches before AI came along.
But AI is far from a negative in education. We are very close to the long-term dream of tutoring at scale, and many other advances promise to make the lives of teachers easier, while improving outcomes for students and parents. Next, we need to articulate a vision for what radically changed education could look like. We need to think about how to incorporate AI into how we teach, and how our students learn. There is tremendous opportunity here to democratize access to education and reach out to all students, of all ability levels, but we can’t just keep doing what we always did and hope things won’t change. [emphasis mine]
Rising strange tides
The only bad way to react to AI is to pretend it doesn’t change anything.
We have considerable agency about how to use AI in our work, schools, and societies, but we need to start with the presumption that we are facing genuine, and widespread, disruption across many fields. The scientists and engineers designing AI, as capable as they are, have no particular expertise on how AI can best be used, or even how and when it should be used. We get to make those decisions. But we have to recognize that the AI tide is rising, and that the time to decide what that means is now.
Yep. We are very much in a liminal space right now. I’m pretty confident AI will have substantially changed higher education by 5 years from now, but just what that looks like is hard to know. What’s certain is that major change is coming.
The NYT had a great piece on how much being reallyrich helps with college admissions. And a terrific summary and look at related issues from David Leonhardt:
This morning, a team of economists released a detailed study of elite college enrollment. It’s based on admissions records that several colleges made available as well as tax returns that tracked students after college. The findings likely apply to many elite colleges, including the Ivy League, Duke, Stanford, Swarthmore and Williams. And the implications are particularly relevant when many colleges are revamping admissions policies in response to the Supreme Court’s rejection of affirmative action.
The findings have also helped me understand both how my interlocutors have been right and how they have been wrong.
The new study, by Raj Chetty and David Deming of Harvard and John Friedman of Brown, demonstrates that the country’s most qualified high school students are indeed disproportionately affluent.
About 7 percent of the country’s very top students come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution. These students tend to have scored at least 1500 on the SAT (or 35 on the ACT), received top marks on Advanced Placement tests, earned almost all A’s in their high school classes, and often excelled in science fairs or other competitions.
Perhaps the most surprising pattern involves so-called legacy students, those who attend the same college that their parents did. At the elite colleges that the researchers studied, legacy students had stronger academic qualifications on average than nonlegacy students. Similarly, graduates of private high schools had stronger academic records on average than graduates of public high schools or Catholic schools.
These stellar academic backgrounds predict later success. Highly qualified affluent students tend to excel in college and afterward — which indicates that the professors and university officials who’ve reached out to me over the years have a point.
Yet they are also overlooking an important part of the story: Most of these colleges do not admit only the hyper-qualified affluent students; they also admit many other high-income students.
As I mentioned above, 7 percent of the country’s very best high school students come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution. But what proportion of students at elite colleges comes from the top 1 percent of the income distribution? Much more: 16 percent. [emphases mine]
This combination of facts is a tricky one to grasp. Affluent students are overrepresented among the nation’s best high school students — but the colleges are nonetheless admitting a larger number of affluent students than if the decisions were based on academics alone. The biggest boost goes to the wealthiest students:
Source: Opportunity Insights | Data is from at least three of the top 12 colleges with available records. | By The New York Times
Private school polish
The results from Chetty, Deming and Friedman point to three main explanations:
Legacy is a major advantage. These colleges are inundated with strong applications. When admissions offices are making close calls among students with similar transcripts, legacy status acts as a trump card. About half of legacy students at these colleges would not be there without the admissions boost they receive.
A similar advantage applies to the graduates of private schools (not including religious schools). Schools like Andover, Brentwood and Dalton do such a good job of selling their students — through teacher recommendations, essay editing and other help — that colleges admit them more often than academic merit would dictate. Many college admissions officers think they can see through this polish, but they don’t.
Recruited athletes are admitted with much lower academic standards — and are disproportionately affluent. It’s not just true of the obvious teams, like golf, squash, fencing and sailing. In today’s era of expensive youth sports, most teams skew wealthy. If colleges changed their approach to sports, they could admit more middle-class and poor athletes (or nonathletes) with stronger academic credentials.
Source: Opportunity Insights | By The New York Times
The bottom line
Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former Obama administration official who has seen the study’s results, has a helpful way of making sense of them. At some point, there really would be a trade-off between equity and excellence. But elite colleges aren’t anywhere near that point, Furman said. They are admitting many more affluent students than their qualifications justify.
Chetty put it this way: “The key point is that we don’t need to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the poor. We just need to take the thumb that we — perhaps inadvertently — have on the scale in favor of the rich.”
The latest Planet Money newsletter also looks at the Chetty study and it’s implications:
As previously mentioned, the economists find that wealthy children, even when they have comparable SAT and ACT scores to less affluent kids, are much more likely to get into these elite schools. A student from the richest one percent of American families (from families earning over $611,000 per year) is twice as likely to attend an elite private college as a middle-class student (from a family earning between $83,000-$116,000 per year) with the same academic credentials. The economists find this disparity can only be found at elite private colleges: they find no such advantage for rich kids at America’s flagship public universities, like UC Berkeley or the University of Michigan.
“I think implicitly what we’re finding in the data is that — whether intentionally or not — we currently have a system that appears to have affirmative action for kids from the richest families, the top one percent in particular, which gives them a substantial leg up in admissions relative to other kids,” Chetty says.
Most notably, I’m pleased to see that Chetty himself favors the approach I’ve been advocating (though, I’ve focused more on “concentrated poverty” than lack of social mobility, but these are obviously highly correlated)
As for concerns that diversity at these schools is about to plummet because of the end of race-conscious affirmative action, Chetty has some ideas to promote both racial and socioeconomic diversity that may survive judicial scrutiny.
It would be an admission process that would take into account “kids who come from neighborhoods that have particularly low levels of upward mobility and use that as a measure of adversity,” Chetty says. This would not be explicitly focused on race itself, but it would pick up “the adversity in childhood environments that is correlated with race.”
Call it zip code-based affirmative action. After all, if you grow up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood and manage to score a 1500 on the SATs, you’ve jumped over a much higher hurdle than your silver-spoon-fed competition.
1) Pseudonymous substacker History Boomer on the fact that the recent Supreme Court decisions were… reasonable:
Progressives ignore that Asians were at the heart of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The plaintiffs were arguing that Asian students had been discriminated against in admissions. Not one of the many memes I saw on my Facebook timeline mentioned Asian people. Zero. To not ever mention Asians seems, well, kinda racist…
That I disagree with apocalyptic takes on Facebook is not shocking. People get to have different views. Maybe I’m wrong about mine. What bums me out is the seeming unanimity of my tribe, with no hint that there may be other ways to view these cases. Agree with us or you’re supporting bigots.
This one-sidedness is common everywhere, perhaps even more so on the right, with Trump partisans ignoring any evidence against their hero and denouncing the Court when it refused to overturn the 2020 election.
Of course, I’m not really alone. America is quite divided on all the Supreme Court’s rulings. A majority supported the affirmative action ruling, but the country is almost evenly split on loan forgiveness and denying a wedding website. Unanimity only exists if you’re listening to an echo chamber.
The Supreme Court ended its term with a flurry of important decisions that covered a lot of important ground. How did it do? There are some clunkers on the list, but overall I think their performance was better than most liberals give credit for.
Affirmative action: A poorly argued decision that relies on a time limit invented out of whole cloth. Nonetheless, its effect is modest and the end result was most likely both inevitable and popular.
Watersheds. The worst of the recent decisions. Discards the plain text of Congress in favor of a tortured rule that mostly reflects personal pique.
Gerrymandering. A surprising but correct decision that racial gerrymandering remains illegal under the Voting Rights Act.
Native American adoptions. Correctly concluded that Congress has the right to give preference to tribal families in adoption decisions involving native children.
Gay marriage. This one is hard. The decision to allow public businesses to discriminate against couples who want to celebrate gay marriages is unpalatable, but there’s a genuine free speech issue here that’s entirely distinct from mere conduct. I’m not so sure the Court got this wrong.
Student loans. A very close call that hinges on arguably equivocal text. I think the Court might have ended up barely on the correct side of this, but I’m not entirely sure.
Independent state legislature. An easy and clearly correct decision against right-wing nutbaggery. Of course state legislatures are “bound by the provisions of the very documents that give them life.”
Border arrests. Another easy and correct decision. Arrest priorities at the border are plainly a federal prerogative.
Section 230. The Court was correct in refusing to get involved in a dispute over Section 230 oversight of internet platforms. The law is both clear and necessary, and it’s up to Congress to change it if it desires.
Out of nine major decisions, I’d say the ending score is five correct; two close calls; one wrong but modestly so; and one plainly wrong. That’s . . . not bad, all things considered.
3) This is good, “A Handy Guide to the Republican Definition of a Crime”
Crime: State and local crimes, if they happen in an urban area or in states run by Democrats.
“There is a brutal crime wave gripping Democrat-run New York City,” the Republican National Committee wrote last year. “And it’s not just New York. In 2021, violent crime spiked across the country, with 14 major Democrat-run cities setting new record highs for homicide.” (In fact, the crime rate went up in the city during the pandemic, as it did almost everywhere, but it has already begun to recede, and remains far lower than its peak in the 1990s. New York continues to be one of the safest big cities in the United States.)
Crime is so bad in many cities, Republican state leaders say, that they have been forced to try to remove local prosecutors who are letting it happen. Some of these moves, however, are entirely political; a New York Times investigation found no connection between the policies of a prosecutor removed by Mr. DeSantis and the local crime rate.
Not a crime: Any crime that happens in rural areas or in states run by Republicans.
Between 2000 and 2021, the per capita murder rate in states that voted for Donald Trump was 23 percent higher than in states that voted for Joe Biden, according to one major study. The gap is growing, and it is visible even in the rural areas of Trump states…
Crime: What they imagine Hunter Biden did.
The Republican fantasy, being actively pursued by the House Oversight Committee, is that Hunter Biden and his father, President Biden, engaged in “influence peddling” by cashing in on the family name through foreign business deals. Republicans have yet to discover a single piece of evidence proving this theory, but they appear to have no doubt it really happened.
Not a crime: What Hunter Biden will actually plead guilty to.
Specifically: two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes on time. Because tax crimes are not real crimes to Republicans, the charges are thus proof of a sweetheart deal to let the president’s son off easy, when they would prefer he be charged with bribery and other forms of corruption. Mr. Trump said the plea amounted to a “traffic ticket.” The government also charged Mr. Biden with a handgun-related crime (though it said it would not prosecute this charge); gun-purchasing crimes are also not considered real crimes.
Despite a long-standing expert consensus about the importance of cognitive ability for life outcomes, contrary views continue to proliferate in scholarly and popular literature. This divergence of beliefs presents an obstacle for evidence-based policymaking and decision-making in a variety of settings. One commonly held idea is that greater cognitive ability does not matter or is actually harmful beyond a certain point (sometimes stated as > 100 or 120 IQ points). We empirically tested these notions using data from four longitudinal, representative cohort studies comprising 48,558 participants in the United States and United Kingdom from 1957 to the present. We found that ability measured in youth has a positive association with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life. Most effects were characterized by a moderate to strong linear trend or a practically null effect (mean R2 range = .002–.256). Nearly all nonlinear effects were practically insignificant in magnitude (mean incremental R2 = .001) or were not replicated across cohorts or survey waves. We found no support for any downside to higher ability and no evidence for a threshold beyond which greater scores cease to be beneficial. Thus, greater cognitive ability is generally advantageous—and virtually never detrimental.
5) American health care was already bad enough before Wall Street realized they could be far more zealous and systematic about extracting profits from sick people. “Financiers bought up anesthesia practices, then raised prices” Read and be be sad and angry– gift link.
6) The best explanation of the FODMAP diet I’ve come across. Far as I can tell, I don’t have any FODMAP issues:
When Tamara Duker Freuman learned about the low-FODMAP diet just over a decade ago, she started using it with her patients who were suffering from irritable bowel syndrome. It was “a game changer,” the registered dietitian said.
In one review of studies published in 2020, for instance, researchers estimated that around 52 to 86 percent of patients with I.B.S. who followed the diet had significant improvements in symptoms like bloating, pain and diarrhea.
But the diet — which temporarily eliminates foods that are high in certain types of carbohydrates known to cause I.B.S. symptoms — isn’t appropriate for everyone, experts say. Here’s how it works, and how to tell if it’s right for you.
7) I do love picking up Tennessee fireworks on my short forays in the state between my in-laws and grandmother-in-law. A Planet Money article on them and the changing fireworks industry:
An Exploding Market
by Julia Ritchey, Darian Woods, and Greg Rosalsky
In the early 1970s, the market for fireworks was heavily regulated in many states. But not so much in Tennessee.
Back then, Glenda Tinnin and her husband ran a souvenir shop and restaurant alongside a highway in the state. Their business was doing pretty well, but then an even more sparkling opportunity lit up their entrepreneurial ambitions.
“My son, who was 12 at the time, started selling fireworks out on the front porch, and he was doing better business than we were,” Tinnin says. So they decided their roadside business should blast off in a new direction.
Glenda and her husband began selling fireworks at their store. And they put a big hand-painted sign on their storefront: Hee Haw Fireworks, which was emblazoned in red capital letters.
Today, 49 years later, Hee Haw Fireworks has rows and rows of explosives filling their store. “We have the Death Shell, Nishiki, Excalibur,” Tinnin says. There’s also one called “One Bad Mother” and “One Bad Mother In Law” and — our personal favorite — the Mother Of All Bombs, or M.O.A.B. “All the good brand names we carry.”
Since Glenda began selling fireworks, the market for them has changed a lot. The changes really picked up the pace after 1972, when Congress set up the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Fireworks, with their history of maiming people, were one of the agency’s first targets.
Jay Zagorsky, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, says the CPSC has worked to make a whole bunch of changes to fireworks over the years.
“One, they made sure for a rocket shooting off, that the bases were stronger and longer, so that the rockets didn’t tip over, and then you had a rocket shooting along the ground at spectators,” Zagorsky says. “The second thing that they did is they made sure fuses were consistent. Because oftentimes — before [the CPSC] came along — you could light a fuse and you had no idea if it was gonna blow off in a couple of seconds or it was gonna take a long time, causing some people to walk over going, ‘Hmm, is this a dud?’ And then it would blow up in their face.”
Zagorsky says the agency also made sure fireworks contained no prohibited chemicals, including lead. Before these regulations were imposed, fireworks would “explode in a spectacular color, but basically rain down poisonous chemicals,” he says. The agency also helped the industry standardize fireworks. “And that meant, basically, your cherry bombs and your firecrackers all had the same amount of kaboom.”
Tinnin says these regulations changed the products they got in their store. “And we were glad of that because it made it safer,” she says…
With this explosion in firework sales, you might also expect there to be an explosion in injuries from fireworks.
The American Pyrotechnics Association claims that has not been the case. “During this period of unprecedented growth, fireworks injuries have declined dramatically due to industry safety education efforts and the ever improving quality of its products,” the organization says in a release. “Over the most recent decade, this downward injury trend continues even as an increasing number of states & municipalities have relaxed their consumer fireworks laws — in fact the injury rate was almost 70% lower in 2022 compared to 2000.” But Zagorsky says injuries have, in fact, been creeping up in recent years. One study found that emergency room visits due to injuries attributed to fireworks increased from 5727 in 2008 to 7699 in 2017 — a 34% increase. The scholars found that most of the victims were male and — surprise, surprise — the vast majority of these accidents happened in July.
Likewise, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission found that, between 2006 and 2021, there was a 25% increase in fireworks injuries. Last year, the agency recently announced, there were 10,200 injuries from fireworks and 11 deaths. The agency calculates that 73% of these accidents “occurred during the one month surrounding the July 4th holiday.”
“We base our reports on data from emergency rooms around the country, and what we’re seeing is that the number of deaths and injuries associated with fireworks remains high,” says a spokesperson from the agency.
Julie Heckman, the executive director of the American Pyrotechnics Association, counters that “the CPSC and other groups don’t consider the extreme increase in consumption.” Once you consider that many more people are using fireworks these days, she argues, “the fireworks-related injury rate is the lowest ever recorded.”
“In 1990, for every 2 million kilos of fireworks, we had one injury,” Zagorsky says. “Today for every 2 million kilos, we have 0.2 injuries. So, basically, injuries over the last 30 years with fireworks — after adjusting for the explosive growth in fireworks — has fallen by a factor of five.”
8) This Science article– which picked up a ton of headlines, was just so damn misleading! “Worldwide survey kills the myth of ‘Man the Hunter’ Women hunt in vast majority of foraging societies, upending old stereotypes”
Call me crazy, but I thought the stereotype was that men did the vast majority of hunting in these societies. That’s true! Only by creating a strawman stereotype that women never hunted is the stereotype busted.
9) A powerful infographic-based article on just how little of college admissions is actually based on affirmative action. Gift link as you really should see it.
10) This Washington Post article about the decades-long friendship of Martina Navratilova and Chris Everett and the struggles they’ve both recently had with cancer was fantastic.
This whole “greedflation” thing – the insistence by some commentators that the real cause of recent inflation is corporate greed rather than other factors – has struck me from the very beginning as a matter of people talking past each other, usually opportunistically from the “trying to advance a given political agenda” angle or the “neoliberals demonstrate their partisan allegiances through being perpetually-sneering shithead” angle. The conversation trundles on. Here’sNew York’s Eric Levitz, who is among the critics of the concept of greedflation and the people who have advanced it like Robert Reich or David Sirota. Writes Levitz,
the crude greedflation argument has no satisfying explanation for why prices rose when they did, relies overwhelmingly on a correlation that does not imply causation, ignores copious evidence that a mismatch between supply and demand has been the primary cause of inflation, and cannot account for the fact that price growth has persisted in 2023 even as corporate profit margins declined.
So, to show my cards – I think the “crude greedflation argument” that Levitz describes is indeed a little muddled, for reasons he and Matt Bruenig have laid out. In another sense, I think both sides are talking past each other, ultimately, and what’s at issue are really language games. (I hate to say that because I went through a graduate education in the humanities and had to suffer through people constantly saying “isn’t this whole thing just a language game?”) And, much more importantly, I think this argument is ultimately a lot of shadowboxing around what are the actual issues of substance here, which is whether the market economy can deliver outcomes that are consonant with justice and whether corporations can be forces for good. On those questions, I’m firmly with team anti-greedflation – the answer to both questions is no. I just don’t think greedflation is the right frame to make that argument; the structural forces Reich and others identify as the culprits for inflation have simply been parts of our economy for far too long to have explanatory power over this moment.
However, while I don’t think Levitz or Bruenig or others are wrong in saying that the greedflation view is misleading, there’s a different version of “corporate profits cause inflation” that I think is essentially indisputable. It’s indeed true to point out that corporations were always greedy, during the past decade-plus of remarkably low inflation, and that the supply constraints imposed by Covid and a comically fragile supply chain really did provoke inflation. But I do think there’s a simple sense in which the corporate profits-inflation narrative is true.
12) Biotech is where it’s at. “A One-Time Shot for Type 2 Diabetes? A Biotech Company Is On It: Fractyl Health is developing a gene therapy alternative to drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy to control blood sugar and body weight without repeated injections.”
THERE’S A MAJOR downside to semaglutide, the drug originally developed for diabetes and now prescribedfor weight loss under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy: People often stop taking their medication. But what if the drug only needed to be given once to have lasting benefits?
That’s the idea behind Fractyl Health’s treatment for type 2 diabetes—which could also be used for weight control. The Lexington, Massachusetts-based biotech company is in the early stages of developing a one-time gene therapy intended to lower blood sugar and body weight using the same mechanism as semaglutide. “You have this problem where you need to stay on therapy for efficacy,” says Harith Rajagopalan, a cardiologist by training and CEO and cofounder of Fractyl Health. “That’s the Achilles heel.”
Ozempic and Wegovy, which are both taken as weekly injections, mimic a human hormone called GLP-1, which is released in the gut in response to eating. One job of GLP-1 is to cue the pancreas to make insulin, which regulates blood sugar. In type 2 diabetes, the pancreas either doesn’t produce enough insulin or it resists insulin. This causes blood sugar to build up, which over time can cause permanent damage to the eyes, nerves, kidneys, and blood vessels.
GLP-1 also interacts with the parts of the brain involved in appetite and signals a feeling of fullness. This is how semaglutide leads to weight loss: People taking the drug tend to have fewer cravings and eat less.
But the drugs are expensive and can come with side effects like nausea, diarrhea, and constipation—factors that cause some people to stop treatment. Others may accidentally miss a dose, or simply go off the drugs once they reach their weight-loss goals. But when these treatments stop, blood sugar levels rise, appetite returns, and often so do the pounds.
Rajagopalan hopes to prevent this with a one-and-done treatment that would last for years. The company wants to deliver an artificial gene to the pancreas that continuously produces the GLP-1 hormone so there’s no need for weekly injections. The approach, called gene therapy, uses inactivated viruses to carry a therapeutic gene to pancreatic cells. (Viruses are used because of their natural ability to deliver genetic material to cells.)
13) Quite enjoyed this interview on the complexities of government, free speech, and social media.
14) I’m pretty sure I’m more obsessed with weather forecasts (if not weather itself) than anyone I know. I take pride in trying to extrapolate the best actual forecast from the 4 weather apps on my phone (based on the forecast plus my past experience with the particular app and the type of weather). In fact, the very unsettled/uncertain pattern of thunderstorms when I was at the beach a couple of weeks ago really drove me crazy. Impossible to predict even over very short time horizons. Anyway, I loved this Planet Money newsletter on the improvements in weather forecasting:
Weather forecasts have come a long way since the 1930s. Back then, to make forecasts, meteorologists “relied on the 16th-century thermometer, the 17th-century mercurial barometer, and the medieval weather vane,” writes the historian William Manchester. Newfangled airplanes were becoming more important in helping to make forecasts, but forecasters were still heavily reliant on random ships in the sea to inform them about weather patterns, like the track of hurricanes.
Today, forecasters are equipped with a stunning array of technology to make weather predictions. Doppler radar towers detect precipitation and wind patterns. Radiosondes, attached to weather balloons, float through the upper stratosphere, gathering data on temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind speed and direction. Automated surface-observing systems provide real-time data about conditions on land. Satellites circle the earth, beaming in valuable imagery and data. And supercomputers and advanced statistical models aggregate all this data and help forecasters put together a vivid picture of what’s going to happen to our weather in the future…
Weather forecasts have come a long way since the 1930s. Back then, to make forecasts, meteorologists “relied on the 16th-century thermometer, the 17th-century mercurial barometer, and the medieval weather vane,” writes the historian William Manchester. Newfangled airplanes were becoming more important in helping to make forecasts, but forecasters were still heavily reliant on random ships in the sea to inform them about weather patterns, like the track of hurricanes.
Today, forecasters are equipped with a stunning array of technology to make weather predictions. Doppler radar towers detect precipitation and wind patterns. Radiosondes, attached to weather balloons, float through the upper stratosphere, gathering data on temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind speed and direction. Automated surface-observing systems provide real-time data about conditions on land. Satellites circle the earth, beaming in valuable imagery and data. And supercomputers and advanced statistical models aggregate all this data and help forecasters put together a vivid picture of what’s going to happen to our weather in the future.
Equipped with all this technology, meteorologists have been making stunning progress:
Today, a five-day weather forecast is as accurate as a one-day forecast was back in 1980.
The two-day forecast for heavy rainfall is now as good as the same-day forecast was back in the mid-1990s.
Flawed predictions about the path of hurricanes are about half as likely as they were just a few decades ago.
Back in 1990, forecasters could only provide a relatively accurate prediction of weather seven days in advance. Now they can make relatively accurate forecasts ten days in advance.
They may be one of the many things we take for granted in the modern world, but more accurate weather forecasts — and our ability to access them anytime on our smartphones — have tremendous value for our economy. They help farmers make decisions about crops. They help construction crews make decisions about building. They help the tourism industry predict tourist flows. They help countless people take precautions for the future, literally saving lives.
15) Somehow, I was pretty much completely unaware of the 2019 Paul Rudd clone dramedy “Living with Yourself” till I discovered it on Netflix last week. Loved it. So good.
Vacation is over and I’m back at it. With the backlog of interesting links, I definitely needed the GPT assist. Based on last time’s errors, I further refined my prompt– we’ll see how it goes.
Well, damn, it went so crappy I’m just doing this the hard way!
1) This is really good in Politico, “A New Constitutional Crisis on the Horizon: A recent Supreme Court decision underscores the fragility of our system of government.”
The Supreme Court weighed in recently with a ruling that scrambled the typical ideological alliances. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett voted together to uphold Proposition 12 because the law applied equally to in-state and out-of-state pork producers and these sorts of nondiscriminatory state laws should be upheld since Congress could pass a law setting a national standard at any point. Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson were on the other side, arguing that the court should consider the broad economic effect this law — and others like it — will have on commerce between the states. Ultimately there were five separate opinions in support of the law, with various justices joining parts of each.
It’s a landmark case that offered the court its first opportunity to address a new type of political polarization, as ambitious governors from states like California and Florida increasingly seek to use the clout of their large, virtually single-party states to win plaudits from their partisan constituencies — with major consequences for the rest of us. The court’s decision means politics is only going to further infect our economic lives; it could even help unravel the delicate balance of federalism that’s central to American governance. Yet it’s hard to fault the court or even the governors. The justices are interpreting the law as they see it; the governors are responding to the natural political incentives. The real blame lies with an idle Congress that is supposed to referee these types of fights between states.
The court’s fractured majority didn’t answer how it would rule on the types of laws that are almost certainly coming next. As Kavanaugh raised in a separate opinion, if California can dictate how pigs are raised in Iowa, can “a state law prohibit the retail sale of goods from producers that do not pay for employees’ birth control or abortions (or alternatively, that do pay for employees’ birth control or abortions)?”
2) I was honestly surprised that “65” was such a bad movie. In large part, because Adam Driver generally doesn’t make bad movies. I read a whole bunch of reasons the movie bombed, but I just couldn’t believe it had such an awful screenplay.
3) This was interesting. I think Kat Rosenfeld is right about overdoing it with “boundaries.” Also, a huge generation gap in the comments. I literally cannot imagine any man I know my age responding as the original writer or many commenters did:
The 25 year-old man who chastised his live-in girlfriend and gave her the silent treatment for “overstepping her boundaries” after she woke him up with a blowjob: does he even exist?
Many men have weighed in on this point, some of them quiet passionately! Good for them. Personally, my position is more of the who-knows-who-cares variety — although I could also muster some enthusiasm for “let’s hope not”, if only for the girlfriend’s sake.
But: boundaries. These are interesting! Not the specifics thereof (again, I do not care what you personally prefer not to do in your bedroom, I wish you nothing but joy in the not-doing of it), but conceptually, as something people are increasingly very concerned about, and very vocal, often to the exclusion of all else.
I think this is a natural if unintended consequence of consent discourse, which has fueled a mass cultural consensus that harm avoidance is now the foremost principle of sexual encounters. It’s not that I can’t envision any sexual scenario in which boundary talk is a good thing. If you’re into BDSM, or going poly after 25 years of marriage, or if your partner has a kink that you are willing to indulge but only to a very specific point, and discussing boundaries is going to make the difference between talking dirty about the thing as versus being, say, literally shat upon — then yes, for god’s sake, have the talk. If the stakes are genuinely high and the risks to your health and/or your relationship genuinely serious, precautions should be taken.
The rest of the time, though? I’m just not convinced that this is the best way to go about it, this paradigm in which the idea of articulating what you want, sex-wise, takes a backseat to the anxiety-fueled laundry list of all the things you don’t want. Things you are afraid will happen. Things that, if they do happen, will (you have been reliably informed) render you damaged and traumatized for the rest of your days. The more people think and talk about sex exclusively in terms of boundaries, the more dangerous it seems, and the less it seems even remotely possible that it might also, at some point, be… y’know, fun?
4) Yet more evidence for the power of moderate levels of exercise and significantly diminishing returns. Jeremy Faust, “Weekend warriors vs. daily gym rats: cardiovascular benefits are similar, new study finds.”
Now there’s evidence to support that the frequency/pattern of your exercise does not matter. You can exercise every day or you can do so less frequently but for longer (“weekend warriors”). What matters is the total time and that you exercise at all (more on this below). What matters is that you get your heart rate up a few times per week. If you don’t have time for a daily workout, you can just pile on the minutes on the weekend (and my daily routine is fine too). Participants who exercised moderately or vigorously as little as 2 hours per week had lower rates of atrial fibrillation (a heart rhythm which can be dangerous), heart attacks, heart failure, and strokes. The study followed nearly 90,000 volunteers (with an average age of just north of 60) for around 6 years, on average.
A few interesting points that caught my eye.
This study got published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association because all of the volunteers wore wrist bands that tracked their activity. The “Fitbit” approach to medical and health research is having its day, now that enough time has passed since they became inexpensive and omnipresent that longer-term studies are now being analyzed. In the past, researchers had to ask volunteers to keep track of their habits—and that led to mixedresults. Now volunteers consent to being tracked in real time.
The rate of bad outcomes was always better for people who exercised compared to those who were inactive. At the most extreme, 7%-9% of inactive people had any of the bad cardiovascular events compared to 5%-6% of those who reached moderate or vigorous effort levels. But the return on investment for moderately or vigorously exercising 6-7 hours per week instead of 2-4 hours per week really was not apparent in this study. The authors kind of buried this finding—especially on the lower end. It surprised me that people who reached moderate to vigorous levels of effort for just under 2 hours per week basically got all of the cardiovascular benefit. Does that mean that 2 hours is enough to get the cardiovascular upsides? Or does that mean that people who made any time for exercise during their week are already a healthier group than those who are inactive. If it’s the latter, the whole study falls apart. So here’s my lingering question: how little moderate or vigorous exercise can one do and still get the measured health benefits?
5) Scott Alexander summarizes “privilege laundering” and this is so good:
We could think of “the best college” as a self-fulfilling prophecy; for whatever reason, one college has gotten a reputation as the one whose signal is most valuable. Everyone naturally tries to get in there; if they fail, they go to the college with the next-best reputation, and so on. The system is stable; the “best” college will keep its reputation (since it gets the best students) and the best students will always want to go to the best college. If, as Matt’s son suggests, all the Ivies started accepting the worst students instead, an Ivy degree would soon become a signal that you’re bad, and employers would stop respecting it.
I heard a fascinating variation of this hypothesis from Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House: elite colleges are machines for laundering privilege.
That is: Harvard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented people, and 25% rich/powerful people. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart people get to network with elites, which is the first step to becoming elite themselves. And the rich people get mixed in so thoroughly with a pool of smart/talented people that everyone assumes they must be smart/talented themselves. After all, they have a degree from Harvard!
The most blatant form of this obfuscation: suppose you own a very successful family business. You can leave your son your fortune, you can leave him the business, you can leave him your mansion, but you can’t (directly) leave him an aura of having deserved all these things. What you can do is make a $10 million donation to Harvard in exchange for them accepting your son. Your son gets a Harvard degree, a universally-recognized sign of being a highly meritorious person. Then when you leave him the business, everyone will agree he deserves it. Who said anything about nepotism? Leaving a Harvard graduate in control of your business is an excellent decision!
This happens a little, but I think it mostly isn’t this obvious. More often the transactions are for abstract goods: prestige, associations, favors. The Maharaja of Whereverstan sends his daughter to Harvard so that she appears meritorious. In exchange, Harvard gets the credibility boost of being the place the Maharaja of Whereverstan sent his daughter. And Harvard’s other students get the advantage of networking with the Princess Of Whereverstan. Twenty years later, when one of them is an oil executive and Whereverstan is handing out oil contracts, she puts in a word with her old college buddy the Princess and gets the deal. It’s obvious what the oil executive has gotten out of this, but what does the Princess get? I think she gets the right to say she went to Harvard, an honor which is known to go mostly to the meritorious.
People ask why Harvard admissions can still be bribed or influenced by the rich or well-connected. This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all. The answer is: otherwise the scheme wouldn’t work. The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree. “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments; “dirty privilege” means the kids of various old-money aristocrats, foreign potentates, and ordinary super-rich people. Colleges mix them together, with advantages for both groups.
6) I thought it interesting that NYT commenters hated these “adversity scores” for Medical students. But I’d quite happily have a physician with a lower MCAT and lower GPA who had overcome more to get to medical school. And I definitely think this more personalized approach is the way to go.
For the head of admissions at a medical school, Dr. Mark Henderson is pretty blunt when sizing up the profession.
“Mostly rich kids get to go to medical school,” he said.
In his role at the medical school at the University of California, Davis, Dr. Henderson has tried to change that, developing an unorthodox tool to evaluate applicants: the socioeconomic disadvantage scale, or S.E.D.
The scale rates every applicant from zero to 99, taking into account their life circumstances, such as family income and parental education. Admissions decisions are based on that score, combined with the usual portfolio of grades, test scores, recommendations, essays and interviews.
The disadvantage scale has helped turn U.C. Davis into one of the most diverse medical schools in the country — notable in a state that voted in 1996 to ban affirmative action.
7) Chait, “Non-white Moderates Are Real Democrats — Not GOP Pawns Suggesting otherwise is simply denial.”
The recent Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action once again highlighted an uncomfortable reality that a minority group (in this case, Asian Americans) mostly opposes a position held by the progressive movement and the Democratic Party. The response from the left was to depict Asian Americans — who, polls show, oppose the use of racial preferences in college admissions to increase diversity — as dupes or tools being used by white conservatives to attack other vulnerable minorities.
“The promise of proximity to whiteness and power has radicalized some Asian Americans on the right,” noted an NPR story that approvingly cited scholars who instructed that the conservative litigants “pitted Asian Americans against Black and Latino communities.” A Vox piece complained that, once again, “Asian Americans are cited by white conservatives to put down other minorities.”
But the reality is that most Asian Americans oppose racial preferences in education — by a 15-point margin, according to a Pew poll from last month — for perfectly cogent reasons that have nothing to do with white conservative manipulation. Because Asian American students tend to perform at very high levels, they earn far more positions at elite universities than their share of the population would suggest; plans to create a diverse or socially representative student body therefore come at their expense. The progressive impulse to blend meritocratic admissions measures with diversity goals, not only at the university level but also in many public magnet schools, has put a large group of Asian Americans in direct conflict with Democrats.
This is hardly a unique episode. The party’s most restive constituencies are increasingly racial minorities: African Americans and Latinos as well as Asian Americans. These constituencies remain heavily, even overwhelmingly Democratic but disproportionately compose the party’s moderate wing, which is why Republicans are beginning to eat into their margins.
Yet Democrats have had an exceedingly difficult time recognizing and acting upon this challenge. One reason is that acknowledging a Democratic constituency’s authentic disagreements with the party’s agenda implies the need for compromise, something progressives — or ideologues of any stripe — are loath to do.
8) Bruni, “Stifling discussion of the president’s flaws is a big mistake”
If you travel in predominantly Democratic circles and want to have a really trying day, write or publicly say something unflattering but true about President Biden, a lament legible or audible beyond people who can be safely depended on to vote for him. Then brace for the furies.
Observe that it’s one thing — a noble, beautiful thing — for him to give steadfast support and unconditional love to his profoundly troubled son, but that it’s another for that son to attend a state dinner days after he had cut a deal with federal prosecutors on tax and gun charges. Many of your liberal acquaintances will shush and shame you: Speak no ill of Joe Biden! That’s an unaffordable luxury. You’re playing into his MAGA adversaries’ hands.
Note that Biden seems less physically peppy and verbally precise than in years past and suggest that it might be best, for him and for continued Democratic control of the White House, if he let Democrats choose a different 2024 nominee. You’ll be likened to an anchor for Fox News. You’ll be chided for age discrimination. Never mind that you’re examining his behavior, not the year on his birth certificate. You’re being counterproductive.
You’ll be asked: What do Hunter Biden and diminished vim matter next to the menace of Donald Trump and a Republican Party in his lawless, nihilistic thrall? That’s a fair question — to a point. But past that point, it’s dishonest and dangerous.
Dishonest because it’s often leveled at critics of Biden who have lavished, oh, 100 times as many words on Trump’s epic moral corruption as on Biden’s blind spots and missteps, creating zero impression of any equivalence.
Dangerous because it suggests that Americans can’t be trusted to behold politicians in their full complexity — and reality in all its messiness — and distinguish unideal from unconscionable, scattered flaws from through-and-through fraudulence. I don’t see how that’s consonant with the exaltation and preservation of democracy, in which it exhibits scant trust.
It also plays into the portrait of Democrats as elitists who decide what people should and shouldn’t be exposed to — what they can and can’t handle. How’s that a winning look?
I believe that a victory by Trump in 2024 would be devastating beyond measure for the United States. I believe that a victory by any Republican who has indulged, parroted or promoted Trump’s fictions and assaults on democratic norms would also be a disaster. His abettors have shown their colors and disqualified themselves. And I’ve said that — and will continue to say that — repeatedly…
And I believe that there’s more than ample room in all the above to talk about whether Biden is the strongest of the possible Democratic contenders to take on Trump, Ron DeSantis or whomever — although that particular conversation may soon be moot, given the ever-shrinking amount of time for those contenders to put together campaigns and for Democratic voters to assess them.
Likewise, it’s possible — no, necessary — to have nuanced conversations about Biden’s and his administration’s mix of virtues and vices. If a big part of the horror of Trump is his estrangement from and perversion of truth, how is the proper or even strategic response to gild or cloak truth and declare it subservient to a desired political end?
9) I love this– “yo” as a gender neutral pronoun. E.g., “yo gave me the ball.” Now that’s something I can get behind.
10) I’ve long been lecturing to my students on how Craigslist killed local newspapers. And now here’s social science actually making the case:
How does competition from online platforms affect the organization, performance, and editorial choices of newspapers? What are the implications of these changes for the information voters are exposed to and for their political choices? We study these questions using the staggered introduction of Craigslist — the world’s largest online platform for classified advertising — across US counties between 1995 and 2009. This setting allows us to separate the effect of competition for classified advertising from other changes brought about by the Internet, and to compare newspapers that relied more or less heavily on classified ads ex ante. We find that, following the entry of Craigslist, local newspapers reliant on classified ads experienced a significant decline in the number of management and newsroom staff, including in the number of editors covering politics. These organizational changes led to a reduction in news coverage of politics and resulted in a decline in newspaper readership, particularly among readers with high political interest. Finally, we document that reduced exposure to local political news was associated with an increase in partisan voting and increased entry and success of ideologically extreme candidates in congressional elections.
11) Of course the answer to this is “yes.” Succession… no. Two and a half men… you bet. “Could AI help script a sitcom? Some striking writers fear so.”
12) This was a really, really sobering piece on how mines are very much stymying Ukraine’s offensive. Well worth a read. Gift link.
13) This was good, “What happens when an academic discipline becomes a tribal moral community?”
14) I’m a huge Daniel Radcliffe fan and loved this NYT interview with him. Loved him ever since he was such a good sport with this wickedly funny and self-effacing appearing on Extras.
15) Good stuff here, “The Gravitational Pull of Supervising Kids All the Time: When so many people think hovering is what good parents do, how do you stop?”
And yet, the vigilant style of American parenting has become not only a norm, but an expectation that can be difficult to defy. In reporting this story, I heard from parents who said that other adults had threatened to call Child Protective Services when they didn’t hold their 3-year-old’s hand as they crossed the street, warned them that their 5- and 7-year-old kids had drifted a little too far from them at a playground, or scolded them for letting their teenage kids walk to school on their own. This social discomfort with childhood independence has become a barrier to it. “I often find myself worrying more about what other people think than I do about my children’s safety,” Rollins told me. “If my children’s safety was the sole thing guiding me, I would probably let them do a lot more.”
This is a common apprehension, Brussoni told me. Parents she speaks with tend to cite three main concerns about giving their children more freedom: cars, kidnapping, and what other people will think or do in response. That creates a vicious cycle: Now that helicopter parenting has become the standard, how does anyone stop?
16) Super-cool white paint that makes buildings way cooler won’t save us from climate change, but a ton of modest technological advancements in aggregate could make a big difference.
Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, didn’t set out to make it into the Guinness World Records when he began trying to make a new type of paint. He had a loftier goal: to cool down buildings without torching the Earth.
In 2020, Dr. Ruan and his team unveiled their creation: a type of white paint that can act as a reflector, bouncing 95 percent of the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface, up through the atmosphere and into deep space. A few months later, they announced an even more potent formulation that increased sunlight reflection to 98 percent.
The paint’s properties are almost superheroic. It can make surfaces as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ambient air temperatures at midday, and up to 19 degrees cooler at night, reducing temperatures inside buildings and decreasing air-conditioning needs by as much as 40 percent. It is cool to the touch, even under a blazing sun, Dr. Ruan said. Unlike air-conditioners, the paint doesn’t need any energy to work, and it doesn’t warm the outside air.
17) Should your tween have a smartphone? Probably not. Am I a bad parent? Probably yes.
18) We’re having a lot of trouble these days getting enough military recruits.
19) I’m with Martina, “Megan Rapinoe and Martina Navratilova Spar Over Trans Women in Sports”
Rapinoe told the magazine that Navratilova, ESPN anchor Sage Steele, and comedian Dave Chappelle were partly to blame for the rise in transphobia in the U.S.
“Dave Chappelle making jokes about trans people directly leads to violence, whether it’s verbal or otherwise, against trans people,” Rapinoe told Time. “When Martina or Sage or whoever are talking about this, people aren’t hearing it just in the context of elite sports. They’re saying, ‘The rest of my life, this is how I’m going to treat trans people.’”
Navratilova wrote one word in response.
“Yikes,” Navratilova posted to social media with a CNN article about Rapinoe’s comments.
For the record, I enjoy Dave Chapelle and I’m pretty sure I have never treated any trans people I’ve encountered with anything but the decency I try and treat everybody with. But, hey… violence!
20) This is really cool with great visuals, so, you should check it out, “What extreme heat does to the human body: Climate change is making parts of the world too hot and humid to survive”
When it comes to heat, the human body is remarkably resilient — it’s the humidity that makes it harder to cool down. And humidity, driven in part by climate change, is increasing.
A measurement of the combination of heat and humidity is called a “wet-bulb temperature,” which is determined by wrapping a completelywet wick around the bulb of a thermometer. Scientists are using this metric to figure out which regions of the world may become too dangerous for humans.
A term we rarely hear about, the wet-bulb temperature reflects not only heat, but also how much water is in the air. The higher that numberis, the harder it is for sweat to evaporate and for bodies to cool down.
At a certain threshold of heat and humidity, “it’s no longer possible to be able to sweat fast enough to prevent overheating,” said Radley Horton, a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Scientists have found that Mexico and Central America, the Persian Gulf, India, Pakistan and Southeast Asia are all careening toward this threshold before the end of the century.
I loved this headline from Gallup, “Belief in Five Spiritual Entities Edges Down to New Lows” Spiritual entities?
The key graph:
Also noteworthy, at least some of the rise in religious “none of the aboves” must still believe in God.
There wasn’t all that much surprising in the demographic breakdown, but I was interested to see that the biggest college/non-college difference was belief in angels. Also interesting to me that heaven/angels and hell/devil track so closely. Personally, I find heaven/hell far more plausible than angels/devils.
And here’s my BingGPT illustration:
“A painting of an old and weary God sitting on a throne, surrounded by empty seats and fading symbols of different religions, with a title that says “God is not dead, but he is declining”. The painting should be in the style of 17th century Dutch art”
So, in exciting professional news for me, the coolest research I’ve ever been a part of just got published, “Counter-stereotypical messaging and partisan cues: Moving the needle on vaccines in a polarized United States” in Science Advances. And I was so fortunate to work with a group of absolutely amazing scholars, who left me in awe. Here’s the abstract:
This paper reports results from a large-scale randomized controlled trial assessing whether counter-stereotypical messaging and partisan cues can induce people to get COVID-19 vaccines. The study used a 27-s video compilation of Donald Trump’s comments about the vaccine from Fox News interviews and presented the video to millions of U.S. YouTube users through a $100,000 advertising campaign in October 2021. Results indicate that the number of vaccines increased in the average treated county by 103 (with a one-tailed P value of 0.097). Based on this average treatment effect and totaling across our 1014 treated counties, the total estimated effect was 104,036 vaccines.
It’s been a long time since October 2021 to finally see this published. We got written up in Medpage Today, which was cool, as this is a publication I never knew about before Covid, but have since come to quite appreciate. They printed my take on my frustration on not being able to use our findings to do more (we really hoped to do a booster campaign as well, but, in the end, nobody was willing to partner with us, quite clearly due to Trump)
Co-author Bradley Larsen, PhD, of Washington University in St. Louis and the National Bureau of Economic Research, told MedPage Today that the ad spending went far, averaging one vaccine per dollar in advertising.
“This is something we can use in practice to try to overcome political polarization and attack social problems,” he said.
Co-author Steven Greene, PhD, of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, added that although there was resistance to using Trump as a messenger, their results showed the PSA worked and laid the groundwork for future research exploring counter-stereotypical public health messaging.
“The public health community is a very liberal community and is a community that is very skeptical and distrustful of Donald Trump,” he told MedPage Today. “There was just such resistance … to using Donald Trump as the messenger.”
I also did a nice Q&A with the good folks here at NCSU:
TA: Can you explain the study design to me?
Greene: We used our video as an ad on YouTube. Importantly, the first six seconds of the ad, which nobody can skip, literally say “Donald Trump is urging all Americans to receive the COVID-19 vaccine” and then Trump’s voice: “I would… I would recommend it” as part of a local Fox affiliate news broadcast. That ad is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INH-CmCgIYs.
We selected approximately 2,000 counties from around the country that had relatively low vaccine uptake and then ran the YouTube ad in a randomly-selected half of those counties. Using official government vaccine reporting, we could then track the amount of vaccinations in counties that saw the ad (our “experimental group”) versus counties that didn’t see the ad (our “control group”).
TA: What did you find?
Greene: We found that counties that saw the YouTube ads had notably higher levels of vaccination during the period our ad campaign was running, according to CDC data. Our best estimates suggest that each county in our treatment group had roughly 100 more vaccinations than they otherwise would have. Across 1,000 counties, that’s over 100,000 vaccinations. Notably, compared to many other public health interventions, this appeared to be an extraordinary cost-effective means to achieve more vaccinations…
TA: What do you think the take-away message is here for public health and health communication?
Greene: We argue for the importance of embracing “counter-stereotypical messengers.” One does not think of Donald Trump as the obvious choice for a pro-vaccine message, which presumably makes him all the more effective as a messenger. Additionally, a lot of public health messaging likes to avoid politics and partisan conflict, but we argue that where partisanship is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution.
But incorporating political partisanship into public health messaging can pose some significant challenges. Based on our preliminary results, we had a number of discussions with social media companies and pharmaceutical companies about scaling up our approach and working on a campaign using Donald Trump to promote boosters (something that he publicly did). Unfortunately, with Donald Trump as the messenger, these organizations proved very hesitant to work with us on expanding this approach. Where politics is part of the problem, people need to not shy away from politics as being part of the solution.
[Given my recent propensities, I wanted BingGPT to create an original image for this post, but alas, “No, I’m not allowed to create any image that includes Donald Trump, regardless of the tone or context. This is one of my rules that I cannot change. I hope you understand.😊” so this is a still from our ad, which you can watch here]
I was telling my family yesterday about Maya Bodnick’s guest Slow Boring post about how good ChatGPT does when graded by Harvard Professors in social science classes (good!! A’s and B’s) and I then mentioned that I thought the vast majority of my colleagues were entirely unprepared for the role AI could play in student writing this upcoming semester. A few recent conversations with colleagues and… hell, yeah, they are unprepared! I’ve put a lot of thought into it and I’m still quite concerned. My rising HS senior son suggested that with the current balance between technology and professor cluelessness, this coming semester might well be “the easiest ever semester to be a college student.” He’s probably not wrong.
Anyway, read Bodnick’s piece (free public post). Here’s her takeaways section:
What does this mean?
I think artificial intelligence will completely upend how we teach the humanities and social sciences.
Before ChatGPT, the vast majority of college students I know often consulted Google for help with their essays, but the internet hasn’t been all that useful for true high-level plagiarism because you simply can’t find good answers to complex, specific, creative, or personal prompts. For example, the internet would not be very helpful in answering the Conflict Resolution prompt, which was very specific (the assignment was a page long) and personal (it requires students to write about an experience in their life).
In the era of internet cheating, students would have to put some work into finding material online and splice it together to match the prompt, almost certainly intermixed with some of their own writing. And they’d have to create their own citations. Also, the risk of getting caught is huge. Most students are deterred from copy-and-pasting online material for fear that plagiarism detectors or their instructors will catch them.
Now, ChatGPT has solved these problems and made cheating on take-home essays easier than ever. ChatGPT can answer any prompt specifically. It’s not always perfect, but I’ve found that accuracy has improved enormously from ChatGPT-3.5 to ChatGPT-4 and will only get better as OpenAI keeps innovating. ChatGPT can generate a full answer that requires little editing or sourcing work from the student, and it’s improving at citations. ChatGPT can even respond to creative, personal prompts.
Finally, students don’t have to worry nearly as much about getting caught using ChatGPT. AI detectors are still very flawed and have not been widely rolled out by U.S. colleges and universities. And while ChatGPT might sometimes copy another intellectual’s ideas in a way that might make a professor suspicious of plagiarism, more often it generates the type of fairly unoriginal synthesis writing that’s rewarded in non-advanced university classes. It’s worth noting that ChatGPT doesn’t write the same thing every time when given the same prompt, and over time ChatGPT will almost certainly get even better at creating a writing tone that feels personal and unique; it’s possible ChatGPT might even learn each person’s writing style and adapt its responses to fit that style.
ChatGPT has made cheating so simple — and for now, so hard to catch — that I expect many students will use it when writing essays. Currently about 60% of college students admit to cheating in some form, and last year 30% used ChatGPT for schoolwork. That was only in the first year of the model’s launch to the public. As it improves and develops a reputation for high-quality writing, this usage will increase.
Next year, if college students are willing to use ChatGPT-4, they should be able to get passing grades on all of their essays with almost no work. In other words, ChatGPT-4 will eliminate Ds and Fs in the humanities and social sciences. And that’s only eight months after its release to the public — the technology is rapidly improving. In May, OpenAI released an updated model (GPT-4) which has a training data set 571 times the size of the original model. Nobody can predict the future, but if AI continues to improve at even a fraction of this breakneck pace, I wouldn’t be surprised if soon enough ChatGPT could ace every social science and humanities class in college.
I believe this puts us on a path to a complete commodification of the liberal arts education. Right now, ChatGPT enables students to pass college classes — and eventually, it’ll help them excel — without learning, developing critical thinking skills, or working hard. The tool risks intellectually impoverishing the next generation of Americans.
Even before reading this, I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing assignments for the upcoming semester. They are going to have to change. Here’s a few recent tweets on the matter (including the fun I’ve had playing with another AI, Claude)
I ask my students to write a letter to a Congress member about a contemporary issue of debate. At least on some issues, Claude will only help the liberal students (and it won't write it for anybody). pic.twitter.com/wj8Gl37Qa6
The letter to Congress is assignment is gone. Way too easy for LLM’s now. I’ve got a draft assignment I’m working on that really focuses on applying course material, but also researching a topic, that, at least for the moment, the AI’s are struggling to do a good job. I’ll report back.
And to end this, BingGPT and I created an image for “easiest college semester ever”
Honestly, I think the place where far-left ideology and “wokism” has done the most real-world damage is in Schools of Education and educational policy leaders throughout the country. The latest example is Cambridge, MA eliminating Algebra in middle school in the interests of equity. Noah Smith explains just how profoundly stupid and harmful this is:
The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts recently removed algebra and all advanced math from its junior high schools, on similar “equity” grounds.
It is difficult to find words to describe how bad this idea is without descending into abject rudeness. The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware. More fundamentally, though, it runs counter to the whole reason that public schools exist in the first place.
The idea behind universal public education is that all children — or almost all, making allowance for those with severe learning disabilities — are fundamentally educable. It is the idea that there is some set of subjects — reading, writing, basic mathematics, etc. — that essentially all children can learn, if sufficient resources are invested in teaching them.
Before public education — one of the key crusades of the original Progressive movement — only private actors invested resources in educating children. Families taught their kids skills, rich families hired tutors, companies trained their workers, churches provided some classes, etc. But it was a threadbare, uneven patchwork. Worse, it was highly unequal — if you weren’t born to a family with lots of time and/or money to spare, you didn’t get nearly as much education. This led to inequality throughout society, as well as the preservation of intergenerational wealth. Furthermore, it wasted much of society’s productive potential, because the unlucky kids weren’t learning as many useful skills as they could have been.
Universal public education was a way to attack all of these problems at once. By investing state resources in childhood education, it not only boosted human capital and economic growth, it eroded inequality of birth and circumstance. Teachers, hired by the state, provided some of what poor kids’ families couldn’t provide. Everyone except for a very few fringe ideologues now agrees that this model was a success; public education is pretty much universally believed to be a key input into economic development, and plenty of research supports that notion that it fosters intergenerational mobility as well. It is not a perfect equalizer and never will be, but it is one of the more important equalizers that exist in our society.
When you ban or discourage the teaching of a subject like algebra in junior high schools, what you are doing is withdrawing state resources from public education. There is a thing you could be teaching kids how to do, but instead you are refusing to teach it. In what way is refusing to use state resources to teach children an important skill “progressive”? How would this further the goal of equity? …
Now imagine what will happen if we ban kids from learning algebra in public junior high schools. The kids who have the most family resources — the rich kids, the kids with educated parents, etc. — will be able to use those resources to compensate for the retreat of the state. Either their parents will teach them algebra at home, or hire tutors, or even withdraw them to private schools. Meanwhile, the kids without family resources will be out of luck; since the state was the only actor who could have taught them algebra in junior high, there’s now simply no one to teach them. The rich kids will learn algebra and the poor kids will not.
That will not be an equitable outcome.
Taken to its logical extreme, the idea of restricting what can be taught in public schools — for whatever reason — leads us back to the pre-public-school era. It leads us to a world of private schools and home schooling. That’s not an era we should seek to return to. Nor am I being hyperbolic; Cambridge’s restriction of junior high algebra is effectively a small step toward that bygone era, since kids with resources will just learn algebra from their parents or be pulled out into private schools…
How did we end up in a world where “progressive” places like California and Cambridge, Massachusetts believe in teaching children less math via the public school system, while a city in Texas believes in and invests in its disadvantaged kids? What combination of performativity, laziness, and tacit disbelief in human potential made the degradation of public education a “progressive” cause célèbre? I cannot answer this question; all I know is that the “teach less math” approach will work against the cause of equity, while also weakening the human capital of the American workforce in the process.
We created public schools for a reason, and that reason still makes sense. Teach the kids math. They can learn.
Eric Levitz takes a look at a number of theories, none of which are entirely convincing:
Since Biden took office in January 2021, the economy has been steadily replacing the jobs it lost during the pandemic. This recovery has necessarily brought more lower-wage workers back into the labor force. It is hard to say exactly what percentage of the apparent decline in real wages this composition effect accounts for. But if we use the month before the pandemic started as a baseline — since, in February 2020, the unemployment rate (and thus composition of the labor force) was similar to today — then the real wage picture looks very different: Even after accounting for inflation, the real hourly wage in the U.S. is now nearly 2 percent higher than it was before the pandemic.
A less than 2 percent advance in real wages over more than two years isn’t fabulous. But it nevertheless means that, using one plausible measure, American workers actually have higher living standards now than they did before the pandemic, when their assessments of the economy were historically positive. Shortly before COVID, a CNN poll found voters viewing the economy more favorably than they had in nearly 20 years. Today, Americans are earning higher real wages than they did then. And consumer sentiment is, nevertheless, lower than it has been during 92 percent of the months since 1978.
So, the unpopularity of both Biden and his economy are stranger than I’d previously allowed…
So, if most Americans have objectively seen an increase in living standards since the pandemic and subjectively feel satisfied with both their economic and nonmaterial circumstances, why are they so dissatisfied with their president and his economic record?
One possibility is that, after enjoying largely stable prices for decades, Americans simply have little tolerance for inflation. Sure, their wages may have grown faster than prices since February 2020. But voters might be inclined to attribute their income gains to their own efforts, while blaming rising prices on the government’s mismanagement. They still have not adjusted psychologically to the jump in their grocery bills, and are irked each time they see the receipt and remember what things used to cost when Donald Trump was still president.
Another, related possibility, is that the American middle class resents many aspects of a tight labor market. For households earning the median wage or above, falling income inequality might be experienced as a loss in relative social status. More concretely, as wages have risen at the bottom of the labor market and competition for low-wage workers among employers has intensified, it may be harder to get “good help” these days, whether in the form of affordable housecleaners, child-care workers, or timely restaurant service.
That said, neither of these explanations do a great job of accounting for the fact that a supermajority of Americans express satisfaction with their personal economic circumstances. By contrast, a disconnect between perceptions of one’s own material wellbeing, and perceptions of the economy writ large, could be explained by media dynamics.
Certainly, right-wing media in the United States has vast reach and influence. The mainstream media, meanwhile, has a well-documented negativity bias, which has generated years of stories about a hypothetical recession, whose start date is forever being postponed.
Another theory is that voters are simply put off by Biden’s extraordinarily advanced age and are inclined to believe that an 80-year-old president is probably mismanaging the economy in some way…
This is far from an exhaustive list of potential explanations. I’m personally inclined to think that the answer is some combination of the public’s (perhaps, irrationally intense) antipathy for inflation and media dynamics. Regardless, widespread disapproval of both Biden and the economy is much weirder than a cursory look at real-wage data would lead one to believe.
Put me in the “media dynamics” category. Margaret Sullivan on the issue:
Meanwhile, Biden’s approval ratings remain low — around 43 percent. And one media narrative that is extremely easy to find is that many Democrats and independents believe he shouldn’t run again.
Why does this happen? I see three reasons:
The press has a well-known negativity bias. Journalists prefer stories filled with conflict, finding them more compelling and more likely to generate clicks. Biden’s strong economic record doesn’t fit the bill. Isn’t it much more fun to deal with the red meat of culture wars, or whether Biden has a fiery temper?
Journalists, in general, may not always have the economic knowledge or patience to delve into the policy details of “Bidenomics.” In the American Prospect, Harold Meyerson slammed the “piss-poor job that most of the media have done in reporting — or even understanding — his economic programs.” These include Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic aid package which, he writes, “stands as the most effective anti-recessionary policy in American history.”
My own theory, which I floated in the Washington Post at the beginning of the Biden administration: The mainstream press is freaked out by the fact that many journalists share Biden’s basic values of decency, respect for the rule of law and a predilection for human rights. But they don’t want to be seen as “in the tank” for this administration, so they twist themselves into knots to find the negative.
I think the other part of this, which I recall writing about back at 2022 midterm time, is that there’s a lot of “soft” Biden disapproval out there from (young) lefty Democrats who are frustrated by Biden’s relative moderation and not really inclined to give him credit for much.
Regardless, it really is a bit of a political puzzle why Biden’s approval should be stuck in the low 40’s in a time clearly characterized by peace and prosperity.
I had a great conversation yesterday with a longtime NC political reporter and she remarked that it was interesting that while Republicans were pushing all these “values” issues, the longstanding conservative Christian opposition to gambling had completely eroded in North Carolina. This led to an interesting conversation on the nature of what it means to be a “conservative Christian” or “Evangelical Christian” these days, where I have been very influenced by Ryan Burge. I got off the phone and literally the first tweet I saw was Burge’s latest post on the issue and it’s really good stuff (emphases in original)
For a lot of people who try and portray themselves as military veterans the goal is gain all the benefits and accolades of having served without any of the real sacrifices that go along with that service.
I think the same thing that is happening with religion, too. I am seeing this more and more in the data. People like the *idea* of religion, without the actual trappings of said religion. They are the kind of folks that talk about concepts like biblical values without every stepping foot inside a church. They want (primarily) Christian values to be protected, but they don’t actually want to spend much time understanding the theology around the values.
For them, religion has become a social and cultural marker – not a spiritual one. It’s basically become another cudgel in the culture war. So, when the debate heats up over issues of sexuality, gender, or abortion these are the kind of folks who will post memes on Facebook that include references to scripture verses, despite the fact that they themselves never read the Bible…
But notice what’s happened to the overall religious attendance of evangelicals in the last decade or so? They don’t attend nearly as much as they used to. Now, 27% of self-identified evangelicals attend services less than once year. That’s double the rate of 2008. At the same time, the share who attend weekly services has how dropped below 50%. Note also that those who attend more than once per week has declined 11 percentage points since 2008.
It’s evangelicalism without the religion part…
For Democrats, religious importance dropped at twice the rate as religious attendance.
For Republicans, religious attendance dropped faster than religious importance.
See what’s happening here? Democrats are moving away from the *idea* of religion faster than they are moving away from actual religion. For Republicans, it’s the opposite. They are moving away from religious attendance faster than they are moving away from the *idea* of religion.
Again, it’s about religion as a cultural marker. Not necessarily a theological pursuit that someone engages in…
What American religion has become is primarily all the harmful aspects of religion and very little of the democracy building activities that we very desperately need. It’s been reduced to a weapon that is wielded in the culture war debates without any training in it’s proper use.
That’s why religion has become so polarized – because the type of religion that most Americans see now has been stripped bare of all the best parts. And all we are left with is the division, the hate, and the vitriol. The pews are emptying because they aren’t full.
Quasi-relatedly, Drum with a post about how people inflate their church attendance:
Here’s an interesting little tidbit about religion in America. Devin Pope of the University of Chicago has been tracking church attendance using cell phone data that tells us whether you’re really in church, and his results are remarkably consistent:
Week in and week out, there are roughly 25 million Americans at church each Sunday. Note that this is not the number who attend church every single week. It may be different people each week who make up the 25 million. So how does this compare to the number who say they attend church?
People lie a lot about church attendance! A quarter of Americans say they attend church weekly, but in reality fewer than 3% of them do. That’s about 8 million regular weekly churchgoers.
I imagine lying about actual church attendance is especially prominent among those for whom “Christian” is a cultural totem, rather than a meaningful value system.
Fully Myelinated 
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