Drum had a nice chart today on the “lessons of Covid” as far as various interventions.
Unqualified “yes”! for better ventilation and Far-UVC lighting. And, what are we doing on these? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Frustrating. Especially since these are far less politicized than other than many other interventions.
Early in the pandemic I had been quite optimistic we could make some real progress on these as they are obviously so beneficial (and for all respiratory viruses), but too many people would rather stick with the showy pandemic theater of handwashing and surface cleaning than the largely invisible efforts that would actually make a big difference.
I’ve been meaning for a while to write a post about how one of Trump’s superpowers is the way people just hold him to ridiculously low standards. Statements and actions that would seemingly be career-ending for Trump just seem to end up in this bizarre “well, that’s Trump ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” kind of space from voters and the media. Today as I was thinking that’s it’s actually so pervasive and extreme that it reminds me of some of our deep-seated cognitive biases, like the fundamental attribution error,
The fundamental attribution error refers to an individual’s tendency to attribute another’s actions to their character or personality, while attributing their behavior to external situational factors outside of their control. In other words, you tend to cut yourself a break while holding others 100 percent accountable for their actions.
For instance, if you’ve ever chastised a “lazy employee” for being late to a meeting and then proceeded to make an excuse for being late yourself that same day, you’ve made the fundamental attribution error.
Obviously, not all of us are doing this with Trump, but it seems like as a political culture, the massive collective shrug of “well, that’s just Trump” is not all that dissimilar. And, for those of us who believe in principles like democracy, rule of law, accountability, and heck, not making all policy for rich cronies, frustrating as hell. Some recent examples.
Brian Klaas, “Trump Rants About Sharks, and Everyone Just Pretends It’s Normal: Par for the course. Trump is Trump. But imagine the response if Joe Biden had said it.”
Hours before meeting with his probation officer about his recent felony convictions, a leading candidate for U.S. president went on a bizarre rant about sharks.
Sharks, Donald Trump claimed, were attacking more frequently than usual (not true) and posed a newfound risk because boats were being required to use batteries (not true), which would cause them to sink because they were too heavy (really, really not true—the world’s heaviest cruise ship, the Icon of the Seas, managed to stay afloat because of the laws of physics despite weighing more than 550 million pounds).
Trump, undeterred by truth or science, invoked his intellectual credentials by mentioning his “relationship to MIT.” (Trump’s uncle was a professor at the university, pioneering rotational radiation therapy, which seems a somewhat tenuous connection for conferring shark- or battery-related expertise to his nephew.) If Trump had been able to ask his uncle about the risks of being electrocuted by a boat battery because, as Trump put it, “there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water,” perhaps the professor would have informed him that high-capacity batteries would rapidly discharge in seawater and pose minuscule risk to humans because the water conducts electricity far better than human bodies do.
Sharks appear to have troubled Trump’s mind for years. On July 4, 2013, Trump twice tweeted about them, saying, “Sorry folks, I’m just not a fan of sharks—and don’t worry, they will be around long after we are gone.” Two minutes later, he followed that nugget of wisdom with: “Sharks are last on my list—other than perhaps the losers and haters of the World!”
These deranged rants are tempting to laugh off. They’re par for the course. Trump is Trump. But Trump may also soon be the president of the United States. Imagine the response if Joe Biden had made the same rambling remarks, word for word. Consider this excerpt:
“I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery’s underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’ By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately. Do you notice that? A lot of shark … I watched some guys justifying it today: ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was.’ These people are crazy.”
Coming from Biden, that exact statement might have prompted calls from across the political spectrum for him to drop out of the race. From Trump, it was a blip that barely registered. I’ve previously called this dynamic “the banality of crazy”: Trump’s ludicrous statements are ignored precisely because they’re so routine—and routine occurrences don’t drive the news. They are the proverbial “dog bites man” stories that get ignored by the press. Except that even this truism breaks down when it comes to the asymmetry between coverage of Trump and Biden: Based on Google News tallies, the news story about Biden’s dog biting a Secret Service agent spurred far more press coverage than Trump saying that he would order shoplifters to be shot without a trial if he became president.
And Tom Nichols, “Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish”
Perhaps the greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled was convincing millions of people—and the American media—to treat his lapses into fantasies and gibberish as a normal, meaningful form of oratory. But Trump is not a normal person, and his speeches are not normal political events.
For too long, Trump has gotten away with pretending that his emotional issues are just part of some offbeat New York charm or an expression of his enthusiasm for public performance. But Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug, as if to say: Another day, another Trump rantabout sharks…
Nor was the Vegas monologue the first time: Trump for years has fallen off one verbal cliff after another, with barely a ripple in the national consciousness. I am not a psychiatrist, and I am not diagnosing Trump with anything. I am, however, a man who has lived on this Earth for more than 60 years, and I know someone who has serious emotional problems when I see them played out in front of me, over and over. The 45th president is a disturbed person. He cannot be trusted with any position of responsibility—and especially not with a nuclear arsenal of more than 1,500 weapons. One wrong move could lead to global incineration.
Why hasn’t there been more sustained and serious attention paid to Trump’s emotional state?
First, Trump’s target audience is used to him. Watch the silence that descends over the crowds at such moments; when Trump wanders off into the recesses of his own mind, they chit-chat or check their phones or look around, waiting for him to come back and offer them an applause line. For them, it’s all just part of the show…
Third, and perhaps most concerning in terms of public discussion, many people in the media have fallen under the spell of the Jedi hand-waves from Trump and his people that none of this is as disturbing and weird as it sounds. The refs have been worked: A significant segment of the media—and even the Democratic Party—has bought into a Republican narrative that asking whether Trump is mentally unstable is somehow biased and elitist, the kind of thing that could only occur to Beltway mandarins who don’t understand how the candidate talks to normal people.
Such objections are mendacious nonsense and represent a massive double standard. As Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post wrote today: “It is irresponsible to obsess over President Biden’s tendency to mangle a couple of words in a speech while Donald Trump is out there sounding detached from reality.”
Last week, Donald Trump blurted out at a meeting with congressional Republicans that he favors switching to a McKinley-style system in which the American government relies on tariffs for all of its revenue. This reminded of a larger point that I think is often forgotten: When Trump was President of the United States, he did a really terrible job.
In a funny way, his tendency to muse about policy ideas that don’t make any sense and reflect a total lack of comprehension of the issues relates to one of his political strengths. Most people don’t pay that much attention to politics and have relatively low levels of policy knowledge. Swing voters, meanwhile, tend to be below-average in their level of interest in politics and policy. So Trump, by being not just ignorant but willfully disinterested, comes across as more in touch with the electorate than a typical politician.
But in most cases, you would not hire someone for a job if he had no idea what he was talking about…
The whole time that Barack Obama was president, he was asking congressional Republicans to enact additional expansionary fiscal policy to boost the economy. They kept saying no, no, no, can’t do it because we care somuch about debt and deficits. And when Obama proposed a deal that combined short-term stimulus with long-term deficit reduction, they said no, no, no, we can’t do that, either. Then Trump becomes president, and Republicans turn on a dime, not only cutting taxes but agreeing to increase spending.
That’s the whole Donald Trump miracle economy. Paul Ryan and his colleagues deliberately sabotaged the recovery during Obama’s presidency, and stopped sabotaging once Trump took office. The results were totally fine (until Covid, at which point they weren’t) but there’s no evidence of any deep insights or policy efficacy that would lead you to expect strong out-of-sample performance. If we currently had a demand-constrained economy being sabotaged by Mike Johnson, that would be one thing. But it’s not the case. The best thing you can say about Trump is he didn’t wreck the status quo.
And I never even wrote a post about how if any other presidential candidate had his own vice president declare him unfit for the job this would be absolutely epic news. And, yet, I suspect you barely even remember when that happened. That’s insane. And, on a socio-political level, Fundamental Trump Error doesn’t seem that far off.
Fantastic photo gallery, “Winners of the GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2024”
Surfing the Wave. First Place, Birds. Gentoo penguin, Sea Lion Island, Falkland Islands. Gentoos are the fastest swimmers among penguins and agile enough to surf breaking waves. #
In the director Sergio Leone’s final movie, the 1984 crime epic Once Upon a Time in America, a group of Jewish gangsters in early-20th-century New York City goes from rags to riches and then to disaster. Along the way, they serve as muscle for the labor movement against cops and strikebreakers, which is fine with everyone except Jimmy O’Donnell, a rising and idealistic union organizer. O’Donnell—a small role played to perfection by the late Treat Williams—eventually comes to rely on the guns of the gangsters as he rises through the union ranks. But despite being up to his neck in the corruption around him, he keeps his distance from the thugs, who cynically nickname him “Jimmy Clean Hands.”
The Republican Party now has an entire subculture of Jimmy Clean Hands types, who claim to recognize that Trump is completely unfit for office and have said that they will not vote for him—yet will not vote to stop him.
Some Republicans have gone the full distance back to Trump, criticizing him but also now pledging to vote for him. Bill Barr comes to mind, as does Nikki Haley. Barr is a true believer, and Haley is a shallow opportunist, but both are pillars of courage next to Republicans such as Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, and John Bolton, the supposed guardians of the guardrails who have made the case against Trump but have also vowed not to vote for either Trump or Joe Biden. (Bolton has said that he will write in Dick Cheney.) Even former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a more moderate Republican now running for a Senate seat, has said that he will write in a “symbolic vote that states my dissatisfaction with where the party is.”
Arguments from onetime insiders such as Pence and former National Security Adviser Bolton are especially tinny, because they were “in the room” and know how dangerous Trump really is. Bolton even says so:On Tuesday night, he told MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle that a second Trump term would be a disaster, especially because it would be staffed by people who—as Bolton admits—would be vetted to ensure they would never try to emulate Pence’s last-minute defense of the Constitution over Trump. Bolton said that an Oval Office full of such loyalists would be “a very dangerous circumstance.”
2) This was good, “For Hamas, Everything Is Going According to Plan”
American and Israeli policy makers tend to ignore internal Palestinian politics, but to understand Hamas’s choice—to trade its stable and limited rule over Gaza for a state of “permanent war”—requires taking seriously the struggle for power among Palestinian factions. In the Palestinian nationalist movement, the Islamists of Hamas have always played second fiddle to the secular nationalists of Fatah and the two institutions they dominate—the Palestinian Authority, which governs the small, autonomous Palestinian areas in the West Bank, and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which speaks for the Palestinians on the world stage. Of these, the latter is the more significant, really the crown jewel of the Palestinian nationalist project since it was reconstituted after the Six-Day War in 1967…
Hamas was hoping to lure Israel into Gaza, where it would get stuck in the quicksand of reoccupation while fighting a long-term, albeit low-intensity, insurgency. Hamas would then wave its bloody shirt to Palestinians and the world, announcing itself as the legitimate national leadership, because it would be the one fighting Israeli occupation forces for control of Palestinian land on a daily basis in Gaza. Against its blood sacrifice, Hamas would cast the Palestinian Authority as the Vichy gendarmerie of the occupation in the West Bank, and the PLO as a humiliated dupe, waiting pointlessly at an empty negotiating table for peace and independence that never come.
The insurgency that Hamas hoped for has already begun. That’s why the Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, reportedly sent a message in February reassuring anxious Hamas leaders in Qatar and Lebanon that “we have the Israelis right where we want them.” Everything appears to be going according to plan. Why, then, would Hamas possibly be interested in Biden’s peace plan? It has even less motivation than Netanyahu.
The grim reality is that the only people left in the world who seem to want the war to continue into the indefinite future are also the only ones who could stop it: the Hamas leaders and Netanyahu. Biden deserves credit for trying, but he has almost no chance of success.
3) This is on a much larger level, but one thing people really don’t appreciate about generative AI is just how great it is when you feed it information to work off of, “Reduce AI Hallucinations With This Neat Software Trick”
4) This is huge in my job as a professor– both in communicating with students and as a scholar, “How to Take—And Give—Criticism Well”
5) Annie Lowrey basically explains all the major points she made in her conversation with Ezra earlier this week, “Americans Are Mad About All the Wrong Costs”
But the United States had a huge problem with prices even before this intense bout of inflation—and will continue to have a huge problem with prices going forward. The sharp increase in costs for small-ticket items that families buy on a day-to-day basis made prices far more salient for American households, but it is the big-ticket, fixed costs that have had the most deleterious impact on family finances over time. These are the costs that are truly sapping average Americans’ ambitions to get ahead, and they are not going down…
First, and by far worst, is housing. When the real-estate bubble collapsed during the George W. Bush administration, residential construction cratered and never fully recovered. We are building as many homes now as we were in 1959, though the population has doubled. And we are building a negligible number of homes in the superstar cities where wage and job growth have been strongest. The result is a catastrophic housing shortage and obscene prices, particularly for low-income renters. Indeed, rents have gone up 52 percent in the past decade, whereas prices in general have risen by 32 percent.
Second is the cost of health care. The United States spends 17 percent of its GDP on health services, nearly twice the OECD average, for no better outcomes. The prices are the problem. Insurance costs more here. Prescription drugs cost more here. (Insulin, a century-old drug, costs nine times as much in the United States as it does in our peer countries; Ozempic is five to 11 times pricier.) Surgeries cost more here. Emergency-room visits cost more here. Administrative costs are absurd here. Aggregate health spending has flattened out since the Obama years, allowing for stronger wage growth. But the country has amped up out-of-pocket burdens: Adjusted for inflation, they have risen steadily and now sit at $1,400 per person, per year.
Third, child care. The median annual cost ranges from $18,000 to $29,000, depending on the child’s age and the care setting. In high-cost cities, such as New York and San Francisco, families routinely shell out even more than that. Millions of Americans who can’t afford it, predominantly women, drop out of the labor force or quit working full-time to take care of their kids.
These obscene costs for working families do not translate into living wages for child-care workers, many of whom live in poverty. The situation has gotten even worse lately, as tens of thousands of day-care workers and nannies have opted to switch to better-paid positions, including in retail, and as pandemic-related federal funding has dried up. Many centers have been forced to raise tuition, though parents are already paying more than they can afford.
No wonder Americans report feeling like they just are not able to get ahead, no matter how much they are earning.
6) Brian Klaas with a great summary of a cool new book, “Inheritance: How Evolution Shaped Our Brains and Forged the Modern World” ChatGPT summary (I’m experiment with paying for it this month, instead of Claude):
Harvey Whitehouse’s new book, Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World, explores why humans engage in such self-sacrificial acts and other social behaviors. Whitehouse, who studied rituals in diverse cultures like Papua New Guinea, argues that humans are evolutionarily inclined to conform, belong, and believe, which shapes much of our behavior and societal structures. He suggests that these traits, though sometimes leading to negative outcomes like tribalism, can also foster cooperation and societal progress. Whitehouse’s work combines anthropology and cognitive science to provide insights into our shared human nature and the ways it influences our modern world.
7) Yikes, “Ancient Genomes Reveal Which Children the Maya Selected for Sacrifice“
Nearly 60 years later, ancient DNA extracted from 64 of the children is offering new insights into the religious rituals of the ancient Maya and their ties to modern descendants. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, an international cohort of researchers revealed that the children — sacrificial victims killed between 500 and 900 A.D. — were all local Maya boys who may have been specifically selected to be killed in sibling pairs.
“These are the first ancient Maya genomes to be published,” said Johannes Krause, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The DNA work provided a previously unseen glimpse into the identities of the sacrificed children. “One feels quite moved by such a finding,” Dr. Krause said, noting that he himself has a young son…
Early archaeologists studying the Maya had proposed that the culture was preoccupied with sacrificing young virgin women. That theory has been challenged in recent decades with the discovery that most people sacrificed in the sacred cenote — a natural sinkhole at Chichén Itzá — were children.
“That obviously flew in the face of the argument that it was mostly young virgin women being thrown into the cenote,” said Jaime Awe, an archaeologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff who was not involved in the study. The obsession with virgins in archaeological circles most likely arose from a combination of colonial ideas and limited data, he said.
Now, DNA confirms that the children from the chultún were all male, he said, adding: “We would not have known who they were had the DNA study not been conducted.”
Subsequent genetic testing also showed that many of the boys were related to one another, and among them were two sets of identical twins. Why these boys were chosen for sacrifice is unknown, Dr. Barquera said. But it is possible that siblings, or close relatives, were selected to reflect the trials of the Hero Twins, key figures in Maya cosmology who underwent cycles of sacrifice and rebirth.
“Rituals from ancient times tend to be particular,” Dr. Awe said. “This study indicates that for some religious ceremonies, it was important that only male children were selected for sacrifice.”
8) Now, speaking of really ancient people. I love cave art. Turns out I love cave sculpture, too. “World’s 1st carved horse: The 35,000-year-old ivory figurine from Vogelherd cave”
A small sculpture of a horse The small horse figurine is carved out of mammoth ivory. (Image credit: Velislava-Germany via Alamy)
9) Interestingly this has never been proven before. Turns out my very mild response to vaccinations means I’m not getting as many antibodies:
363 participants were included in symptom-related analyses (65.6% female; mean age, 52.4 years [SD, 11.9]), and 147 were included in biometric-related analyses (66.0% female; mean age, 58.8 years [SD, 5.3]). Chills, tiredness, feeling unwell, and headache after the second dose were each associated with 1.4 to 1.6 fold higher nAB at 1 and 6 months after vaccination. Symptom count and vaccination-induced change in skin temperature and heart rate were all positively associated with nAB across both follow-up time points. Each 1 °C increase in skin temperature after dose 2 was associated with 1.8 fold higher nAB 1 month later and 3.1 fold higher nAB 6 months later.
10) Now, this is the sort of privacy sensationalism that drives me crazy, “AI Tools Are Secretly Training on Real Images of Children: A popular AI training dataset is “stealing and weaponizing” the faces of Brazilian children without their knowledge or consent, human rights activists claim.”
Oh, no children!! They are already on the internet. The idea that your face training an AI model on human faces is somehow harmful is just absurd on it’s face.
11) AI and the future of music (and if you haven’t tried Suno yourself, it really is pretty amazing):
When ChatGPT was first released, a common critique was to point out what it couldn’t do. It couldn’t write poetry, it couldn’t report the news accurately—and so on.
In fact, earlier this year big-shot New York Times journalist Ezra Klein said about AI: “I can’t for the life of me figure out how to use it in my own day-to-day job.”
Klein’s critique of AI misses the wood for the trees. It’s the same argument I’ve most regularly seen made by people with high status jobs: Think company directors, or top-flight journalists who write for prestige publications.
Of course AI can’t produce original, high-quality journalism, or plan a company strategy or make management decisions.
But look further down the corporate food-chain, and everyone else can see the benefits of AI clearly—mostly because they’re probably already routinely using ChatGPT on the sly to do their work.
For example, if your job involves boring admin tasks like reformatting address data to move it from one database to another, or building spreadsheets with complicated Excel formulas, or writing boilerplate legal disclaimers… then of course AI can make a big difference to how you work.
Even if AI was to develop no further than its capabilities today, it is already world-changing, as it represents billions of small, marginal gains in productivity. And I think this extends to AI-generated music. Even if AI music doesn’t improve any further, it already represents a profound change to the music industry.
Like the high status jobs I describe above, I don’t think it will make a huge difference at the “top” of the industry. Taylor Swift, Coldplay and, regrettably, U2, will continue to release albums and sell out stadiums. No one is going to stop you somehow enjoying Bono’s music.
But where I do think AI will make a difference are the billion other lower-grade circumstances where music is playing. If you need background music for your corporate health and safety training video, or you need a theme tune for your podcast, then it is a no-brainer to use AI instead of paying an expensive musician.
For better or worse then, AI will become the ubiquitous source of, essentially, “elevator music” for the entire world, and it will have terrible consequences for many people working in the music industry today. Musicians who earn a living making adverts or taking commissions from el-cheapo outsourcing websites like Fiverr are basically fucked—just like “low-level” visual artists and copywriters are by Midjourney and ChatGPT.
12) Yglesias endorses Biden’s pragmatic take on asylum and immigration:
Before we get into the weeds, though, I want to say first that I love immigration — see my book, One Billion Americans — and I sincerely hate the Trumpian impulse to demonize immigrants and asylum-seekers. There are always some troublemakers in any large population, but immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans, and the vast majority of people seeking to exploit the asylum loophole are just people seeking opportunity for themselves and their families in this country, the same as our ancestors did. My great-grandparents had the privilege to immigrate legally at a time when the legal barriers to immigration from Europe and Latin America were dramatically lower than they are today. The motives and interests of the people coming today are no different from their motives, and we shouldn’t talk shit about them or fearmonger.
But even though push factors are relevant, the flip side of not demonizing the people exploiting asylum loopholes is we shouldn’t play dumb about it. People come here not because they are bad people or criminals, but for the same reason people have always come here — economic opportunity. If we want to preserve special humanitarian exemptions to the rules over the long term, we need to demonstrate that those exemptions are not gaping loopholes to the system of immigration laws. That means cracking down until the numbers become manageable and committing to repeating that process if they become unmanageable again.
If we want to increase the number of people who are allowed to move here legally (which I certainly do), we need to do what the Biden administration has been doing on a separate track, which is creating more paths to orderly legal migration…
The essence of the new Biden system is to declare that the system is now overwhelmed, and anyone who crosses into the country illegally will be per se ineligible for asylum. If the number of encounters falls dramatically to a much more manageable level, that rule will lift and we will return to adjudicating fresh asylum claims.
For a variety of reasons, it is a little hard to say how effective this will be in practice. But I think it makes sense as a rule, and I hope that Biden articulates it forcefully to the public, because it correctly captures two ideas that I think most people can support:
It is a good idea, in principle, for people to be able to seek asylum in the United States.
The current system is not working as intended and is causing tons of problems.
Biden is not saying that he hates refugees and the United States should never again be a beacon of hope for desperate people. But he is saying that he is going to place the practical day-to-day needs of American citizens ahead of the procedural rights of foreigners…
The essence of the new Biden system is to declare that the system is now overwhelmed, and anyone who crosses into the country illegally will be per se ineligible for asylum. If the number of encounters falls dramatically to a much more manageable level, that rule will lift and we will return to adjudicating fresh asylum claims.
For a variety of reasons, it is a little hard to say how effective this will be in practice. But I think it makes sense as a rule, and I hope that Biden articulates it forcefully to the public, because it correctly captures two ideas that I think most people can support:
It is a good idea, in principle, for people to be able to seek asylum in the United States.
The current system is not working as intended and is causing tons of problems.
Biden is not saying that he hates refugees and the United States should never again be a beacon of hope for desperate people. But he is saying that he is going to place the practical day-to-day needs of American citizens ahead of the procedural rights of foreigners…
In pro-Trump circles, the answer to all these questions is that Trump won’t actually do the insane things he says he’s going to do. And maybe he won’t — his reputation for dishonesty is well-deserved — but his stated agenda is terrible. The correct solution is to do roughly what Biden is trying to do: gain control of the asylum system and expand legal migration to meet the labor market needs of a country with an aging population.
13) Jessica Grose, “Young Women Are Fleeing Organized Religion. This Was Predictable.”
While over the past half-century, Americans of all ages, genders and backgrounds have moved away from organized religion, as I wrote in a series on religious nones — atheists, agnostics and nothing-in-particulars — young women are now disaffiliating from organized religion in greater percentages than young men. And women pushing back on the beliefs and practices of several faiths, particularly different Christian traditions, is something I have been reading about moreand more.
Cox and Hammond wrote:
What’s remarkable is how much larger the generational differences are among women than men. Gen Z men are only 11 points more religiously unaffiliated than baby boomer men, but the gap among women is almost two and a half times as large. Thirty-nine percent of Gen Z women are unaffiliated compared to only 14 percent of baby boomer women.
The proportion of unaffiliated millennial women is pretty close to that of Gen Z women: 34 percent. The big shift seems to have taken place between Gen X and millennials, as only 23 percent of Gen X women described themselves as nones, according to Cox and Hammond’s analysis. They argued that increasingly, there’s a cultural mismatch between young women — who are more likely to call themselves feminists and to support L.G.B.T.Q. rights and reproductive rights — and the teachings of some of the largest Christian denominations in America, which are veering right and turning toward more retrogressive ideas about women’s place in their organizations.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, may be the most glaring example of this tension. As my newsroom colleagues Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham reported last year, an “ultraconservative” wing of the church’s leadership flexed its muscles and voted to bar women from its leadership ranks, ousting several churches that retained female pastors. The final vote on the issue is taking place this week at the denomination’s annual convention.
“The crackdown on women,” Dias and Graham reported, “is, on its face, about biblical interpretation. But it also stems from growing anxieties many evangelicals have about what they see as swiftly changing norms around gender and sexuality in America.”
14) Jeff Maurer from last month, “Hilary Cass Endorsed Youth Gender Transition in Some Cases and We Ignored It Because It Didn’t Fit Any of Our Narratives”
This week, the New York Times ran an interview with Dr. Cass. Most reactions focused on the response to Dr. Cass’ report from professional organizations in the U.S., which has mostly been to put their fingers in their ears and run in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, this quote from Dr. Cass went almost completely unnoticed:
“There are young people who absolutely benefit from a medical pathway, and we need to make sure that those young people have access — under a research protocol, because we need to improve the research — but not assume that that’s the right pathway for everyone.”
We often don’t know how to react when someone does something against type. I’d be thrown if Jane Goodall started hawking Monster Energy Drink, or if Ken Burns wrote a book called Swagitude: Nine Simple Tricks To Bagging Hot Chicks. And I think that’s why the quote above mostly got ignored: Here was Hilary Cass, who had become the poster child for concern about youth gender medicine, saying that some young people would benefit from transitioning. Maybe it wasn’t quite as shocking as Ken Burns in leather pants instructing young nerds to “release their alpha tiger”, but I’m sure it confounded many people’s expectations.
Of course, people who have been following the issue closely might not have been surprised. After all: Though the Cass Report raised serious concerns about youth gender medicine, it did not recommend an outright ban on hormone treatments for minors. It recommended that the treatments be prescribed with “extreme caution”, and also called for puberty blockers to only be prescribed in clinical trials. This is similar to what Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark did: They all restricted the use of hormones but didn’t ban them. These countries crafted policies based on the recognition that something might be appropriate in one context, but inappropriate in another, which everyone understands when it comes to things like sex, alcohol, and sending children dressed like monsters to strangers’ houses begging for candy. But for some reason, we struggle to apply this knowledge to youth gender medicine.
The extreme polarization of the youth gender medicine debate in the US has crowded out moderate positions. The activist left has demanded absolute adherence to its agenda on trans issues, including non-skepticism of the private health care industry and the objectively untrue belief that “the science is settled”. The right, meanwhile, has sought to ban the field altogether: 23 states have made it illegal to proscribe cross-gender hormones to minors. As often happens, the extremes have played off each other: Left-wing narratives focus on the bans and ignore evidence of unscientific practices, and right-wing narratives focus on detransition horror stories without acknowledging that transition sometimes leads to healthier, happier lives.
But two things can be true at the same time. It can be true that:
Social factors have caused some young people whose lives would not be improved by gender transition to seek guidance from gender clinics, only to receive hasty and one-size-fits-all treatment from hack clinicians who have convinced themselves that a few data points constitute a robust scientific consensus; and
Some people with gender dysphoria would have their lives improved by seeking gender transition before the age of 18.
It seems that Dr. Cass — who is either a righteous pro-science warrior or a hateful anti-trans bigot, depending on your perspective — believes that both of these things are true.1 And so do I.
And so do I.
15) The US Senate is truly awful. This is going into my Intro to American Government readings. Lee Drutman, “Wither the Senate? Thoughts and charts on the bias and legitimacy of America’s distinctly malapportioned upper chamber” ChatGPT summary:
The essay argues that the United States Senate is disproportionately powerful and biased, favoring Republicans despite representing a minority of the American population. Key points include:
Malapportionment and Partisan Bias: The Senate’s structure overrepresents small states, which tend to be more Republican. This has led to Republicans often controlling the Senate despite representing fewer Americans.
Legislative Impact: This bias results in significant policy consequences, with Republican policies passing more easily and Democratic policies facing more obstacles.
Demographic Bias: The Senate also overrepresents White voters and underrepresents voters of color, exacerbating racial and demographic disparities.
Historical and Comparative Context: The U.S. Senate is unique in its power compared to other democracies, where upper chambers are either less powerful or nonexistent.
Calls for Reform: The essay suggests various reforms, including reducing the Senate’s power, enhancing federalism, and considering proportional representation to address the Senate’s legitimacy crisis.
Legitimacy Crisis: The essay warns that the Senate’s current structure and bias may lead to a broader legitimacy crisis for American democracy.
Potential Solutions: Proposals include a grand bargain for a more limited Senate role in exchange for clearer federalism rules, and a reverse filibuster requiring 60% opposition to block legislation.
Historical Precedent: The essay notes the 17th Amendment as a past reform that enhanced Senate legitimacy by mandating direct elections, suggesting that similar reforms could address current challenges.
Overall, the essay calls for creative thinking and conversation about the future of bicameralism and the Senate’s role in American democracy.
16) It’s been a long time since I had to obsess about the sleep of my own children, but I still really loved this data-based look from Emily Oster.
Big picture
What do we take from this data, other than that I got a little graph-happy with it? I’d draw a few conclusions.
First (and I couldn’t resist one more graph below): Total night sleep time does not vary as much by age as we might think! Little kids sleep more overall (we’ll see that in the next post, on naps), but the average amount of sleep at night is pretty consistent at 10 to 11 hours. Kids 5 to 10 years old are getting only about 45 minutes less sleep at night than their much younger siblings.
Second: This small decline in total sleep is almost all being driven by small changes in bedtime as kids age, not in changes in their wake-up time. This is important because it tells us that bedtime is where you should consider adjusting if you want your kid to get more sleep.
Third: Overnight wake-ups lessen over the first year, but the improvement seems to stagnate. I do think this says that if your child is still waking up and that’s an issue for you, it may be a good idea to consider how you can intervene. They will eventually stop doing it, but it may go on much longer than you expect.
Fourth, and finally: The first three months, all bets are off. They are staying up late like a teenager, waking up all the time overnight, sleeping a bit later in the morning. Hang in there! It gets way more predictable even a few months later.
17) This is pretty cool… how Sweden builds modular housing at scale in factories. This one is really cool, really relevant fro US housing issues, and has lots of cool images, so gift link.
18) This story is awesome, “How a fed-up carpenter found his stolen power tools — and 15,000 others: A carpenter deployed locator devices to track his tools after thieves stole from him twice, helping lead Howard County investigators to millions of dollars’ worth of pilfered equipment.” Gift link.
19) Good stuff from Jesse Singal, “Please Stop Publishing And Disseminating Underpowered Priming Studies.” Also, I’m totally not one of those people who reflexively dislikes superstar academics, but Adam Grant is an embarrassment.
The best place to relax is near water. After just 2 minutes of viewing water outdoors, blood pressure and heart rate drop. It’s more calming to look at a lake, pool, or stream than trees or grass. Beaches are popular for a reason. Wider bodies of water bring more tranquility.
Anyone familiar with psychology’s recent replication travails, particularly when it comes to anything related to social priming (the idea that brief cues can significantly alter people’s judgements and/or behavior), should be skeptical of a study like this. Sure enough, there are all sorts of red flags, both in the study itself and in Grant’s summary of it.
Before we even get to them, though, I found the animating theory of this paper weird. The authors note that since we as a species require water to survive, we might have a deep evolutionary and psychological link to it. It makes sense, then, that seeing it might relax us. Okay, but about 97% of the earth’s water is salty, and given the hundreds of thousands of miles of coastline on the planet, surely “seeing water” is tightly correlated with “seeing saltwater,” which throws this whole thing into question? And even if researchers did prove that perceiving water led to a relaxation response, wouldn’t they have to either prove that this effect didn’t occur on ocean beaches (which seems unlikely), or explain how it could apply to both situations? …
Psychology researchers shouldn’t run studies like this anymore, and journalists shouldn’t publish them. This study doesn’t tell us anything. The researchers threw a bunch of stuff at a wall to see what stuck, and then some stuff stuck, and the researchers said “Look at what stuck!” In all likelihood, they ran a bunch of other exploratory statistical tests, didn’t get anything, and simply didn’t report their results.
And then a very famous psychologist summarized all this as
The best place to relax is near water. After just 2 minutes of viewing water outdoors, blood pressure and heart rate drop. It’s more calming to look at a lake, pool, or stream than trees or grass. Beaches are popular for a reason. Wider bodies of water bring more tranquility.
We should really be past this by now! Even if these results are robust — and I would bet real, actual money against a robust replication — they don’t necessarily tell us anything meaningful about human life in real-world situations. The authors do note the artificial nature of their experiment at the end of the paper, but propose that maybe all those glimpses at water could have a cumulative effect during a walk.
I think a much better theory is that social priming research has been more or less debunked and that researchers should spend their limited resources on other, more promising kinds of work. At bare minimum, if you do insist on publishing a study like this, it should have guardrails in place, foremost among them preregistration, to forestall charges of cherry-picking and more general methodological uselessness.
Anyway, I found this annoying. I’m going to go seek out some water to chill out a bit.
20) Peter Coy on social security, “Want to Fix Social Security? The Well-Off Must Accept Smaller Checks.”
Eleven years. That’s all that’s left until the combined Social Security accounts — the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund and the Disability Insurance Trust Fund — are likely to run out of money and can no longer pay full scheduled benefits, according to the latest report of the Social Security trustees.
I don’t worry too much that the checks won’t go out after the projected 2035 exhaustion of the funds, which though legally separate are often regarded as a single pool of money. Current beneficiaries wouldn’t stand for it, and neither would their children. (Even with no fix at all — highly unlikely — incoming payroll taxes would cover 83 percent of scheduled benefits.)
What I do worry about is what Washington’s patch for Social Security will look like. Flimsy, I’m afraid.
The cold math shows that fixing Social Security in a lasting way will require a combination of tax increases and benefit cuts. Both. Yet Republicans have been loath to discuss higher taxes. And both parties’ leaders — President Biden and former President Donald Trump — have ruled benefit cuts off the table.
I support benefit cuts, although not for everyone. Lower-income Americans should be spared. If anything, their benefits need to go up. People 55 and older should also be spared, since they’re either retired or close to it, so they can’t offset any reductions by working and saving more.
But upper-income Americans of working age are going to have to get used to the idea that Social Security will be less generous than they expected. They will need to stuff more money into their 401(k)s and maybe delay their retirement by a few years.
Social Security’s maximum benefit is about $48,000 this year for someone retiring at the normal retirement age, rising to around $65,000 (in today’s dollars) by 2050. Double those maximums for two-earner couples.
Democrats who otherwise don’t have any problem with taking a bite out of the rich have historically resisted big changes in the benefit formula for Social Security. The program is already a better deal for the poor than for the rich (although that’s partly offset by rich people’s longer life spans). They fear that Social Security will lose political support if it comes to be seen even more as a form of redistribution from the rich to the poor rather than a kind of self-insurance.
But that longstanding fear may be unfounded. Means-tested programs, including Medicaid, college aid and nutrition assistance, have grown rapidly over the past half century and for the most part aren’t perceived as unjustified giveaways.
21) It’s really hard to properly measure support for third party candidates:
Our experiment worked like this: All respondents were shown both the long and short questions, but half were shown the full list first, and the other half were first shown the two-way race.
Among those who saw the long list first, Mr. Kennedy garnered 7 percent of the vote.
But among those respondents who encountered the head-to-head contest before seeing the full list, Mr. Kennedy’s support shot up six percentage points to 13 percent…
Why the increase, if the questions are the same? There are many factors that can explain this, but it is at least partly related to a phenomenon that pollsters call expressive responding. This is when people might use a survey response to show their frustration or express a particular feeling that’s not exactly what is being asked.
In this case, many respondents seem to be using the second question to convey frustration with the choices for president in the first question, whether or not their answers reflect their full views. When respondents have already been given a chance to express their support for one of the two major-party candidates, they seem to be more likely to register a protest of that first choice with their response to the fuller ballot. Some of the respondents given the longer list first are also probably expressing their frustration with the major-party candidates, but our results help demonstrate that effect is magnified when the longest list of candidates is asked second.
[You can find the full results of the poll, including the exact questions that were asked and how the poll was conducted, here.]
That might also explain why Mr. Davis, the Times editor who has no aspirations for higher office, won the support of about 1.5 percent of respondents, putting him on par with an actual Libertarian Party candidate. His support was only slightly lower among respondents who saw the third-party candidates first — evidence that voter frustration, though less pronounced under that scenario, still exists.
What’s more, Mr. Davis gets 4 percent among voters who feel unfavorably toward Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump.
The effects of this phenomenon show up when looking across many high-quality polls. Among 11 recent national polls, those that listed third-party candidates as the second question generally saw higher support for those candidates when compared with the polls that showed third-party candidates as the first question. (In the latest Times/Siena battleground polls released Monday, Mr. Kennedy was listed in the first question and received 10 percent support across the six states.)
1) Not great! “Dozens of CVS Generic Drug Recalls Expose Link to Tainted Factories: The chain’s branded drugs were recalled about two times more than those of its biggest rival, Walgreens”
One factory making CVS-branded pain and fever medications for children used contaminated water. Another made drugs for kids that were too potent. And a third made nasal sprays for babies on the same machines it used to produce pesticides.
The drugs were among those sold by CVS Health Corp., the largest US pharmacy, under its store-brand label before being recalled.
Other chains have seen their share of recalls for their own store-branded medications. But over the past decade CVS’s have been recalled about two times more than those from Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. and three times more than those from Walmart Inc., a Bloomberg analysis of public records found. Both CVS and Walgreens say they offer more than 2,000 store-brand health and wellness products; Walmart declined to say how many it had for sale, but its website indicates it has many of the same drugs available as CVS and Walgreens do under its Equate store brand.
CVS Has Many More Store-Brand Recalls Than Rivals
Over-the-counter generics with safety concerns in the last decade
Source: Food and Drug Administration data
This potentially dangerous pattern has roots in the quality of the factories from which CVS sources its generic medicines, the findings show.
There’s little incentive for large drug purchasers like pharmacies and hospitals to choose suppliers based on quality, said Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. Rather, they often choose the lowest-cost manufacturing contracts, which Schulman’s research has found leads to lower-quality medicines. “The best way to make a low-price product is to skimp on quality and that’s what we’re seeing over and over and over again,” he said.
2) Sad, but, true. Ezra Klein makes this point all the time. Aaron Blake, “The incredible low-information voter How much are Americans paying attention to politics? This little.”
I’m sorry to say this, dear reader, but you will not be deciding the 2024 election. That’s not a reflection on you personally (I value your readership dearly), nor am I diminishing the power of your vote (vote!). It’s just a fact of the matter that people reading campaign politics newsletters in June 2024 are not generally the ones who will be on the fence and making crucial calls late in the campaign.
The decisive voters are going to be those who have little to no idea what you and I have been talking about for the past five months — quite literally…
But it’s hardly the only evidence that many voters simply haven’t engaged with the 2024 campaign or politics more generally on the most basic of levels.
To wit:
1 in 5 voters in the Yahoo/YouGov survey said either that they didn’t know about Trump’s Manhattan verdict, that Trump was not guilty or that the trial was ongoing. That includes 2 out of every 5 registered voters under the age of 30.
A majority of independents have said they’ve heard only “a little” or “nothing at all” about Trump’s classified-documents indictment, according to Marquette University Law School polling.
Just 1 in 5 voters in a May Reuters/Ipsos poll said they were familiar with Trump having said that purported voter fraud in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
Republicans, especially, will often tell pollsters things about Donald Trump and his legal problems that are simply wrong.
Voters also believe strikingly wrong things about the economy, including a majority believing we’re in a recession and half thinking unemployment is at a 50-year high. (Unemployment has actually been at 4 percent or below for its longest stretch in those 50 years.)
None of this means that we’re bound to see big shifts in the 2024 election once voters start paying more attention.
It’s likely many people will go on being unfamiliar with these things through November. And even if people do engage with the substance of these issues as they make their voting decisions and start seeing campaign ads about these things, we’ve seen how polarization can negate the impact of them. The vast majority of Americans are now familiar with Trump’s guilty verdict in Manhattan, and he lost one or two points, at most.
But nor should we discount the fact that, in a close race, low-information voters who could well decide things could be going on a bit — or even a lot — more information than they are now.
Simply put, research shows that most fathers are particularly skilled at fostering independence in their children. And these social trends point to why children need the positive influence of their father in their lives more than ever. Years of lived experience, backed by parenting research, teach us that the effective nurturing of children requires not only the capacity to “hold them close,” but also the ability to “let them go”—something fathers seem particularly apt in preparing children to do.
Research based on observations of mothers’ and fathers’ different psychological dispositions and behaviors in parenting has consistently found that both mothers and fathers influence multiple aspects of child development, but they do so through different processes. These studies show that fathers tend to be particularly attuned to developing children’s physical, emotional, and intellectual independence—in everything from children making their own lunches and tying their own shoes to doing household chores and making decisions for themselves after they have left home. Fathers are also more likely than mothers to encourage children to take risks, while also ensuring safety and security, thus helping children develop confidence, navigate new transitions, and bravely confront unfamiliar situations.
It is exactly this fostering of independence that is needed in greater supply among the rising generation. Paradoxically, our culture today is one where too many young people are unfortunately under-nurtured in fractured families, while others are over-nurtured by helicopter parenting and prolonged sheltering.
One of the ways to make family formation more appealing to young adults is to promote more of the building blocks of sustainable relationships, including maturity, competence, and personal responsibility. As O’Rourke concluded,
To make marriage and childrearing more attainable for young adults, parents must allow (or encourage) their children to take on the responsibilities of young adulthood. For marriage and family life to prosper, young people must become more independent, not less.
Other Positive Influences of Fathers
The benefits of loving and involved fathers go far beyond simply fostering independence. Research shows that fathers are much more than just a “second parent” in a child’s life. Involved fathers can bring numerous benefits to their children’s lives that no other person is as likely to bring. Too often as a society, we minimize the virtues and strengths of fathers and the unique role they can play in their children’s lives, despite the significant and growing body of research that shows otherwise.
For example, in an article in Marriage and Family Review, professor William Jeynes reported a meta-analysis of 34 studies with more than 37,000 participants that found statistically-significant effects highlighting the unique role of fathers in child rearing. Fathering had a statistically significant connection to a number of outcomes, including psychological well-being, emotional resilience, improved social relationships, and higher academic achievement. This was true for both boys and girls of different ages.
“Based on the results, a clear theme emerged,” Jeynes remarked in an IFS blog post about the study, “while mothers often tested as being more nurturing in their relationship with children, fathers tended to be more involved in preparing children to deal with life.” He added:
The results also suggest that there is often a balance established when the unique role of the father is combined with the distinct role of the mother. Granted, there is clearly some overlap in the advantages provided by father and mother monitoring. Nevertheless, mothers consistently demonstrated higher average levels of patience and nurturing than did fathers, but fathers tended to have higher expectations of their children than mothers and tended to emphasize the preparatory aspect of child-rearing more than mothers did.
Fathers also play a unique role in the emotional development of their children. When fathers respond to children’s emotional distress, they are more likely to focus on fixing the problem than they are addressing the hurt feelings. This seeming “indifference to the emotion” may not appear nurturing but becomes very useful as children grow older, as children tend to seek out and share things with their dads precisely because of their measured, problem-solving responses. The “indifference” actually becomes a strategic form of nurturing in emotionally charged situations.
A central predicament of the Biden campaign is how to persuade voters to abandon Donald Trump.
“In 2012 the Obama campaign turned a nice guy, Mitt Romney, into a piece of crap,” Steve Murphy, a co-founder of the Democratic media firm MVAR Media, told me. “You can’t do that to Trump because everybody already knows he’s a piece of crap.”
Not only do voters know that Trump is corrupt, a liar, narcissistic and venal, his supporters have repeatedly found ways to slide by his liabilities.
In April, before the former president was convicted on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, and again earlier this month, after he was found guilty, YouGov asked voters:
“Do you think someone who has been convicted of a felony should be allowed to become president?”
In April, before the verdict, Republicans were decisively opposed to a felon becoming president, 17 percent in favor, 58 percent opposed (the remaining 25 percent not sure).
In June, after the conviction, Republicans somersaulted: 58 percent said a felon should be allowed to become president, 23 percent were opposed, and 19 percent were unsure.
YouGov also asked voters: “Do you consider falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star a serious crime?”
In six pre-conviction polls from June 2023 to April 2024, the share of Republicans saying it was a serious crime to falsify records was consistently in the 27-to-29 percent range. In June, after Trump’s conviction, the Republican percentage fell to 9 percent.
This has been a continuing pattern for Trump loyalists.
In 2011, well before Trump’s presidential campaign, P.R.R.I. (formerly the Public Religion Research Institute) asked members of different denominations whether “elected officials can still perform their public duties in an ethical manner even if they have committed immoral personal acts.”
White evangelical protestants were by far the most adamant in rejecting politicians with histories of personal immorality. Just 30 percent said a politician compromised in that way could perform in an ethical manner if elected to public office.
In 2016, when Trump became the Republican nominee, P.R.R.I. posed the same question. This time, 72 percent of white evangelical protestants said a personally immoral politician could conduct himself ethically in public office, the highest percentage for all the denominations queried.
In other words, trying to set a meaningful standard of decency for Trump is like trying to catch an eel barehanded.
But we should reserve some of the blame for ourselves. Americans are eager customers of the products that industrial-scale animal husbandry provides: milk, eggs, beef, chicken and pork. They arrive on our supermarket shelves wrapped in plastic or in cardboard cartons from vast factory farms perfectly suited to serve as petri dishes for the evolution of novel pathogens — novel to humans, anyway. We have surrounded ourselves with chattel animals, raised and milked and fattened and slaughtered and plucked and butchered in staggering numbers. It’s no surprise that sometimes they give us their viruses.
One contributing factor to the looming threat of H5N1 is that it has spread among poultry flocks. Quantity of hosts correlates with the quantity of opportunities, and there are, by one authoritative estimate, about 34 billion chickens alive on Earth at a given moment. Most of those are in big commercial operations. What makes such scales dangerous is not the inhumanity involved (that’s a separate issue) but the abundance and concentration of animals. Evolution is a numbers game like roulette, though with higher stakes, and for a virus, even in a single host, the numbers are often huge.
One particle of a flu virus replicating in an animal might produce 100 billion more flu particles in a few days. Those offspring will contain many random mutations, which are raw material for evolution. The more spins of that roulette wheel, the greater cumulative chance that the pearly ball will land on a number that breaks the bank.
There are reasons H5N1 probably won’t evolve from an avian virus transmitted in feces into a human virus of the airways, capable of killing millions of people. It would need a combination of long-shot mutations: changes in how it copies itself and in what sorts of cells in what parts of a host’s body it infects and whether it can remain lethal while floating through indoor air. Combining all those changes into one incarnation of the virus is highly unlikely. But odds against any unlikely event go down as the number of chances goes up. That’s how evolution over the ages has given us mammals that fly (bats), birds that swim (penguins), insects that live within elaborate social systems (ants) and the duck-billed platypus.
One area where those improbable mutations might be brought together is in the udders of dairy cows. Cow udders are hot spots for copious replication of the virus, and some new research (albeit not yet peer-reviewed) suggests that udders may contain both cells with receptors hospitable to bird flu viruses and other cells with receptors hospitable to human flu viruses. If a bird flu and a human flu happened to infect the same udder cell at the same time, they could swap sections of their genomes and emerge as a hybrid capable of causing a pandemic.
If. Probably won’t. Could. Nothing is certain about how an influenza virus will evolve until it happens.
6) Great perspective on the Indian election in Good Authority.
In nine of India’s largest states, the BJP’s vote share increased in 2024, and in another five states it decreased by about 3 percentage points or less. Significant losses were limited mainly to five major states.
Here is another important piece of context: In 2014, when the BJP first came to power with a legislative majority, its vote share was significantly lower than the vote share that it won in this election. In other words, even though the BJP just lost its majority in the legislature, it remains more popular with voters today than it was when it first came to power ten years ago!
The deeper story in 2024
What that tells us is that the real action in 2024 was where the BJP won votes and how those votes translated into legislative seats. The BJP’s problem in 2024 was not a massive erosion of its popular support. Rather, the challenge was that its popular gains did not help it win many seats, whereas its popular losses cost it quite a few seats.
To illustrate, consider the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where BJP support historically has been very weak. The party’s vote share increased by more than 7 percentage points from 2019. But it still won only 11% of the vote in 2024. Perhaps these gains will serve the BJP well in future elections if support continues to grow in Tamil Nadu. But, for now, that growth did not actually help the BJP win any seats in the state.
Now think about Uttar Pradesh, India’s biggest state. In 2019, the BJP won nearly 50% of the vote and about three-quarters of the state’s 80 seats. In this year’s election, the BJP saw its vote decline to about 41%. It is still a major force in Uttar Pradesh. But that decline was enough to make it a really close race between the BJP and the rival alliance headed by the Samajwadi Party, a regional party. In such a close race, the BJP managed to win only about half as many seats as it did in the last election.
An analogy for U.S. readers
So, imagine that Joe Biden made modest gains in red states like Wyoming or Oklahoma but lost some ground in purple states like Michigan or Wisconsin. His gains would probably not be enough to win any more electoral votes in those traditionally red states, but those losses would likely cost him electoral votes in swing states. Something similar happened to the BJP.
It is always tempting to look for a big national story to help make sense of an election outcome. But in 2024, there was no big national trend. As has often been true in India’s national elections over the past 30 years, we see really different patterns from state to state. The BJP’s performance was a mix of gains and losses. The same is largely true for the Congress party – the largest opposition party – whose national vote share only increased by about 2 percentage points.
7) This is great from David French. Worth a gift link. “The Day My Old Church Canceled Me Was a Very Sad Day”
That some capitalists will turn on democracy, or at least show indifference to its fate, when it seems that democracy might impede the accumulation of wealth is useful context for recent developments in the 2024 presidential election.
According to Sam Sutton, writing in Politico, several Wall Street executives and Silicon Valley venture capitalists who backed Donald Trump and then spurned him after the Jan. 6 insurrection have now returned to the fold, with open arms and open wallets. They are, he writes, “looking past qualms about his personality and willingness to bulldoze institutional norms and focusing instead on issues closer to the heart: how he might ease regulations, cut their taxes or flex U.S. power on the global stage.”
For these donors, President Biden’s efforts to enforce antitrust law and “tighten rules around markets and mergers” are such a threat to their financial interests that they’ve abandoned the misgivings they entertained in the wake of Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. One must also imagine that there is some unhappiness with Biden’s efforts to create and preserve a tight labor market that puts more income into the hands of ordinary workers. Whatever their grievance, these business leaders have come to believe that “the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump.”
Of course, this idea is nonsense. There is no way in which the Democratic Party constitutes a threat to capitalism. At most, the party’s program of regulation, redistribution and higher taxes may shrink, ever so slightly, the profit rate for some of the nation’s wealthiest shareholders. But when compared with Trump’s promise to destroy the regulatory state and siphon the public coffers into the accounts of his billionaire friends and allies, even modest intervention on behalf of consumers and labor looks like the harbinger of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
The truth is that regimes of corrupt, personalist rule — in which authoritarians wield the state to reward friends, punish enemies and secure their fortunes — are much less prosperous than the alternative. It’s not as if Viktor Orban’s Hungary, a shining city on the hill for the MAGA right, can claim to possess anything like a dynamic, growing economy. And the big-ticket items on Trump’s supposed second-term agenda — large tariffs on most goods entering the United States, the total politicization of the federal bureaucracy, including the Federal Reserve, and a plan to systematically deport who he says are tens of millions of undocumented immigrants — would plunge the country into turmoil and economic disarray.
As Anthony Scaramucci, onetime communication director for the former president, told Politico in a striking critique of Trump’s billionaire supporters: “You need a democracy to have effective capitalism. If you don’t, you get cronyism. You get oligarchy. You get crony capitalism. You get arbitrary and capricious administration to the law, which reduces people’s tendency to invest in your country.”
Frustrating as hell that presumably smart people have their thinking so warped by a bottomless desire to accumulate wealth that they cannot see this.
9) It honestly never ceases to amaze me just how thoroughly Trump has rotted not just the base, but the institutional framework of the Republican Party. Michele Goldberg on the state party in Colorado:
The Colorado Republican Party last week sent a mass email with the subject line, “God hates Pride.” The missive denounced Pride Month as a time when “godless groomers” attack what is “decent, holy and righteous.” It included a clip of a sermon by a famously misogynist pastor named Mark Driscoll, with thumbnail text proclaiming, in a nod to the slogan of the obscenely anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, “God hates flags.” The party also posted on the social media platform X, “Burn all the #pride flags this June.”
These messages, which have rocked Republican politics in Colorado, are the latest demonstration of how Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has thrown state parties into turmoil. But they’ve also set off a furious backlash from within the party, an indication that beneath a veneer of pro-Trump unanimity, old-school Republicans are locked in a power struggle with the fanatics, trolls and conspiracy theorists Trump has empowered. It’s a strange dynamic: A bloc of conservatives who’ve mostly capitulated to Trump is still fighting Trumpism, as if the two things can be separated.
10) Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern pull no punches on the Supreme Court’s medication abortion ruling:
On Thursday, the Supreme Court did the bare minimum necessary to operate like an actual court of law, unanimously throwing out an absurd and dangerous lawsuit against medication abortion. The justices do not deserve extra credit for refusing to embrace this deeply unserious litigation, and they should earn no gold stars for maintaining the legal status quo on abortion pills. They merely acted as minimally responsible adults in a room of sugared-up preschoolers, shutting down the lower courts’ lawless rampage over all known rules of standing in desperate pursuit of an anti-abortion agenda. It is chilling to the bone that activist lawyers and judges were able to wreak as much havoc as they did before SCOTUS put them in timeout. And this bad joke of a case isn’t even over: A lower court has already teed up a do-over that could once again jeopardize access to reproductive care in all 50 states. Don’t call this decision a victory. It is at best a reprieve—an election-year performance of Supreme Court unanimity and sobriety that masks the damage the conservative supermajority has already inflicted, as well as the threats to reproductive freedom that lie ahead.
The ruling, FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, grew out of arguably the most obscene case of judge shopping in recent memory. A far-right Christian nationalist law firm called the Alliance Defending Freedom brought together a group of anti-abortion doctors and dentists in 2022 to serve as plaintiffs in a lawsuit against mifepristone. (The Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone, which is the first medication in a two-part regimen that ends a pregnancy, in 2000.) The plaintiffs argued, falsely, that the drug is extraordinarily dangerous to “women and girls,” sends countless patients to the hospital with life-threatening conditions, and should never have been approved. The ADF called the phony association the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and incorporated it in Amarillo, Texas. Why Amarillo? Because just one judge sits in the federal courthouse there: Matthew Kacsmaryk, who worked as an anti-abortion activist before former President Donald Trump appointed him to the bench. Kacsmaryk and his colleagues have rigged the rules to ensure that any case filed in Amarillo gets sent to him, a departure from the standard procedure of random assignment.
11) Thomas Mills went camping in the Smoky Mountains and has some interesting observations:
This year, I met a woman who spends a lot of her time traveling around the country. She’s been on and off the road for the past seven years since she retired from teaching.
Somehow, we figured out that we were both Democrats and started talking a little politics. She’s originally from Louisiana and now lives in a small town in north Georgia. She said most of the people she knows are Trump supporters. In campgrounds, she feels them out by bringing up immigration. Depending on their response, she decides whether to bring up current events.
I think she’s right. Strip away everything else and immigration is the great divider both here and in Europe. To conservatives, immigrants are a symbol for everything that threatens their way of life. They are “others.” They bring new customs, languages, and religions. Those newcomers are replacing the people and businesses that are fleeing for more prosperous areas. Small town groceries are replaced with tiendas. Catholic churches are thriving while traditional protestant ones age and die.
In Europe, the right is emerging in response to the influx of immigrants and people of color. Right-wing parties won big in France and Germany in the European Parliament elections last week. In Sweden, where my daughter lives, the far-right has been rising for the past couple of years, even though they had their first setback in the EU election. Still, immigration seems to be the defining issue that drives people from center-right to far-right and even from centrist to center right…
I left the park on Thursday, heading south from the Gatlinburg entrance to the one in Cherokee. I stopped for gas at the first station I saw on the right side of the road. Inside, a bulletin board was covered by dozens of decals with a sign that read, “Decals for sale at front.” Many were pro-Trump, some reading “Make America Safe Again,” a refrain I also saw on billboards. One had Trump as Rambo, carrying some sort of huge gun that read, “Trump: Taking our country back.” Another had an American flag that read, “If you hate this flag, I’ll help you pack.”
The whole scene left me dismayed. The decals described a country that only exists in the fevered minds of people living in fear of threats exploited by right-wing media and Republican politicians. The fact that the proprietor displayed the decals so prominently and proudly showed both that he’s not concerned about losing business over his extremist views and that they’ve become mainstreamed for too many Americans. After three days of relative calm and serenity, it was a rude reminder of our jolting reality.
Americans have become significantly more likely to identify as liberal in their views on social issues over the past quarter century. In most annual measures since 2015, they have been about equally likely to express having liberal views as moderate and conservative ones — reflecting a shift from Gallup’s earliest measures, when liberal perspectives on social issues were a firmly minority viewpoint.
Meanwhile, Americans still lean conservative on economic issues, but the percentage leaning liberal has been trending up slightly.
Both trends toward more liberal views than in the past are driven by U.S. Democrats; neither Republicans nor independents have become more liberal in their views over time. These trends on social and economic views are separate from the slight long-term increase in Americans’ description of their political views, broadly, as liberal…
Bottom Line
Compared with 2004 and 2014, Republicans have become more conservative and Democrats have become more liberal in their views on both social and economic issues, but not at the same rate. The growth in liberal views among Democrats has outpaced that in conservative views among Republicans, which were already the dominant position among the latter group. As the ideological makeup of political independents has remained steady, the liberalization of Democratic views has altered the national averages on both social and economic issues.
Americans’ views on economic matters, broadly, still lean more conservative than liberal, despite a growing number of Americans who identify as economically liberal. However, in the wake of landmark changes on LGBTQ+ rights, legalization of marijuana in much of the country, and the Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, the nation is now less conservative than in the past on social issues, with equal shares identifying as liberal, moderate and conservative.
Here are three charts showing fiscal discipline for every president since Ronald Reagan. They show three things.
First, Republicans raise a lot less revenue than Democrats. Second, Republicans blow up spending while Democrats keep it under control. Third, as a result, deficits generally get worse under Republicans and improve under Democrats.
There’s a bonus fourth chart at the bottom that shows annual GDP growth. Democratic presidents rank first and third, so there’s obviously no penalty for Democratic policies.
POSTSCRIPT: Is the spending chart unfair to Donald Trump since it includes a lot of bipartisan COVID spending? Sure. But his second budget was 6.3% higher than his first one. He was on track to blow up spending all on his own.
13) Wild! “Every Elephant Has Its Own Name, Study Suggests: An analysis of elephant calls using an artificial intelligence tool suggests that the animals may use and respond to individualized rumbles.”
14) Amongst all the awfulness out there, good to see some genuine progress, “Dr Pepper Ties Pepsi as America’s No. 2 Soda.” As I’ve probably mentioned, many days I get most of my liquid consumption from Diet Dr Pepper. And Diet Pepsi is absolute trash.
There is a new contender in the cola wars, and it isn’t a cola. It’s Dr Pepper.
The 139-year-old soda brand is now tied with Pepsi-Cola as the No. 2 carbonated soft drink brand in America behind Coke. The regular versions of Pepsi and Dr Pepper are neck-and-neck in a spot that Pepsi has held nearly every year for four decades, according to sales-volume data from Beverage Digest.
Dr Pepper’s new ranking follows a steady climb over the past 20 years. Its ascent is a product of big marketing investments, novel flavors and a quirk in Dr Pepper’s distribution that put it on more soda fountains than any other soft drink in the U.S. At the same time, consumption of regular Pepsi has fallen as its drinkers switch to Pepsi Zero Sugar or migrate to other drinks.
The overall Pepsi brand, including Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Zero Sugar, remains the No. 2 soda trademark in the U.S., though its market share has been slipping. Coke has more than twice the market share by volume of any of its rivals.
Dr Pepper is one of the oldest soda brands in the U.S. — older than Coca-Cola or Pepsi. It was invented in 1885 by Charles Alderton, a pharmacist and soda-fountain operator who wanted a drink that evoked the aroma of the drugstore where he worked in Waco, Texas. His syrup combined 23 flavors, including cherry and vanilla, with other fruits and spices. Coca-Cola was invented a year later, followed by Pepsi-Cola in the 1890s.
Coca-Cola emerged as the most popular fountain drink, while Dr Pepper retained a stronghold in the South. The cola wars began in the 1960s, when PepsiCo launched its Pepsi Generation campaign. It cast Pepsi as the hip, upstart cola for young people and Coke as old-fashioned.
Pepsi didn’t catch Coke, but it reached a close second. Pepsi-Cola has held the No. 2 spot nearly every year since 1985, when Beverage Digest began collecting data, except for a stretch from 2010 to 2013, when Diet Coke unseated regular Pepsi to grab second place.
The $97 billion U.S. soft-drink market is largely organized into red and blue camps, representing the packaging colors of Coke and Pepsi. Each has its own distribution network, and each competes for national restaurant chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s.
Dr Pepper, which is owned by Keurig Dr Pepper, has alliances with both sides. Any soda fountain with Coke brands or Pepsi brands probably has Dr Pepper on it, too.
That ubiquity has helped introduce Dr Pepper to more people, said Keurig Dr Pepper’s chief marketing officer, Andrew Springate, who has worked with the brand for the past two decades.
In 2004, Dr Pepper was tied with Sprite in sixth place. Its market share has climbed steadily since then. During that time, Springate said, the brand has kept a consistent marketing theme, focusing on Dr Pepper’s unique taste. Dr Pepper’s marketing spending includes large investments in college football, he said.
Dr Pepper now has strong sales across the country and is growing fastest among Gen Z drinkers, Springate said.
Consumer surveys showed that people like to drink Dr Pepper as a treat, so the brand has leaned into the idea of a sweet indulgence, he said. Noting a trend of younger consumers’ seeking out unusual flavors, Dr Pepper has introduced such variations as strawberries and cream to attract new drinkers. Some of them then become fans of traditional Dr Pepper, he said.
The new flavors have also proven popular among Hispanic consumers, a growing demographic in the U.S.
And, yes, the fact that somehow Dr Pepper worked it out that it is often included with both Pepsi and Coke fountain machines is pretty amazing and something for which I am very grateful.
15) Drum on the Supreme Court’s bump stock ruling:
It’s pretty obvious that this is literally not a question of law at all. Is it a “single function of the trigger” if you merely keep the trigger depressed to fire multiple rounds but you have to rhythmically “bump” the rifle after every shot? What law is going to decide that?
Thomas’s best argument, I think, has nothing to do with how a bump stock operates:
On more than 10 separate occasions over several administrations, ATF consistently concluded that rifles equipped with bump stocks cannot “automatically” fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.”
….ATF abruptly reversed course in response to a mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada. In October 2017, a gunman fired on a crowd attending an outdoor music festival in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and wounding over 500 more. The gunman equipped his weapons with bump stocks, which allowed him to fire hundreds of rounds in a matter of minutes. This tragedy created tremendous political pressure to outlaw bump stocks nationwide.
This is true. It’s pretty obvious that ATF changed its rules for purely political reasons, not because it genuinely believed bump stocks turned rifles into machine guns.
In any case, what happened is the usual thing. Even though this case is based on statutory language, not constitutional issues; and even though it depends on a very delicate interpretation of a single phrase; and even though both sides essentially agree on the particulars—despite all that, the conservatives all voted one way and the liberals the other way. And by an amazing coincidence, all nine justices decided that this delicate statutory interpretation matched their ideological preferences. How about that?
16) This is definitely not for everybody, but given my line of work, I found this fascinating and enjoyed digging into the details, “Representativeness versus Response Quality: Assessing Nine Opt-In Online Survey Samples”
Social scientists rely heavily on data collected from human participants via surveys or experiments. To obtain these data, many social scientists recruit participants from opt-in online panels that provide access to large numbers of people willing to complete tasks for modest compensation. In a large study (total N=13,053), we explore nine opt-in non-probability samples of American respondents drawn from panels widely used in social science research, comparing them on three dimensions: response quality (attention, effort, honesty, speeding, and attrition), representativeness (observable demographics, measured attitude typicality, and responding to experimental treatments), and professionalism (number of studies taken, frequency of taking studies, and modality of device on which the study is taken). We document substantial variation across these samples on each dimension. Most notably, we observe a clear tradeoff between sample representativeness and response quality (particularly regarding attention), such that samples with more attentive respondents tend to be less representative, and vice versa. Even so, we find that for some samples, this tension can be largely eliminated by adding modest attention filters to more representative samples. This and other insights enable us to provide a guide to help researchers decide which online opt-in sample is optimal given one’s research question and constraints.
17) Loved the movie “Hitman” (now on Netflix) and really liked this article, “The Real Reason Netflix’s New Hit Could Make Glen Powell a Star: The secret to being a leading man isn’t just being a Ron. It’s being a Gary.”
18) And damn did I love this profile of Powell. Consider me a huge Glen Powell fan now.
19) Nigeria has turned into an economic basket case. Really, really unfortunate for the people who live there:
Nigeria is facing its worst economic crisis in decades, with skyrocketing inflation, a national currency in free-fall and millions of people struggling to buy food. Only two years ago Africa’s biggest economy, Nigeria is projected to drop to fourth place this year.
The pain is widespread. Unions strike to protest salaries of around $20 a month. People die in stampedes, desperate for free sacks of rice. Hospitals are overrun with women wracked by spasms from calcium deficiencies.
The crisis is largely believed to be rooted in two major changes implemented by a president elected 15 months ago: the partial removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of the currency, which together have caused major price rises.
A nation of entrepreneurs, Nigeria’s more than 200 million citizens are skilled at managing in tough circumstances, without the services states usually provide. They generate their own electricity and source their own water. They take up arms and defend their communities when the armed forces cannot. They negotiate with kidnappers when family members are abducted….
On a recent morning in a corner of the biggest emergency room in northern Nigeria, three women were convulsing in painful spasms, unable to speak. Each year, the E.R. at Murtala Muhammed Specialist Hospital in Kano, Nigeria’s second-largest city, received one or two cases of hypocalcemia caused by malnutrition, said Salisu Garba, a kindly health worker who hurried from bed to bed, ward to ward.
Now, with many unable to afford food, the hospital sees multiple cases every day.
Mr. Garba was sizing up the women’s husbands. Which source of nutrition he recommended depended on what he thought they could afford. Baobab leaves or tiger nuts for the poor; boiled-up bones for the slightly better off. He laughed at the suggestion that anyone could afford milk.
20) I mean, yeah, there’s plenty of corrupt money in US politics, but, geez…”$800,000 wire transfer from billionaire donor to US Chamber raises curtain on dark money“
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce received an $800,000 wire transfer from billionaire donor Hank Meijer days after it endorsed his son, then-Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), in a contentious 2022 primary, according to previously unreported internal emails reviewed by The Hill.
Within days of the transfer, the Chamber spent $381,000 on “Media Advertisement – Energy and Taxes – Mentioning Rep. Peter Meijer,” according to a report filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
But because the ad — titled “Thank you, Rep. Peter Meijer” — does not explicitly advocate for his election or defeat, the pro-business lobbying giant did not have to legally disclose the donation from Hank Meijer, the co-chair and CEO of the Meijer chain of superstores. It also did not have to disclose any other potential contributions behind the $1.8 million it told the FEC it spent on “electioneering communications” that cycle.
Emails obtained by The Hilllay out the timeline of the endorsement, donation and ad buy just weeks before the Aug. 2, 2022, House GOP primary in Michigan. Campaign finance experts told The Hill that the emails pull back the curtain on a surge of “dark money” in U.S. elections, spending where the ultimate source of the money is not publicly disclosed.
“They’re exploiting a legal loophole to help them conceal the sources of election spending in this race,” said Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at the nonprofit watchdog Campaign Legal Center (CLC), which filed a complaint during the 2020 cycle alleging an individual later identified as Hank Meijer tried to obscure separate donations by using a limited liability corporation (LLC) to donate to another super PAC supporting his son.
“And they’re doing it in a very sophisticated way, but ultimately the voters suffer as a result,” Ghosh added.
21) This is cool, for some reason a new Covid-influenza combo vaccine is more effective than the two vaccines given separately.
There could be a combined Covid-19 and flu shot in our future, although it won’t be ready for this year’s flu season.
On Monday, vaccine maker Moderna announced positive late-stage trial results for its Covid-flu combination vaccine it calls mRNA-1083.
Calling the outcome of the late-stage trial “breakthrough results,” Moderna’s Chief Medical Affairs Officer Francesca Ceddia told CNN that people in the trial who got mRNA-1083 showed an improved immune response compared with those who got the standalone flu and Covid vaccines that are available now. The results were true even for people in the trial who were 65 years and older. Generally, older people don’t mount as robust a response to vaccines as younger people do.
“When we think about the combination vaccine, we often only think about the element of convenience, one shot instead of two, but what is really, really breakthrough is the fact that you not only offer that advantage, you also offer the proof of clinical benefit. I think this is the most important message,” Ceddia said.
22) Mark Robinson gets the New York treatment. Good stuff, even if they didn’t interview a certain NC State professor, “Mark Robinson Is MAGA’s Great Black Hope The North Carolina gubernatorial candidate has no experience and few accomplishments. But he sure is mad.”
23) My favorite part of this story is how good my virtual zoom background– a photo I took of my office from the perspective of my webcam– worked for this interview in my bedroom.
As an academic, it’s always especially cool to make it into the Chronicle of Higher Education. I got lots of my thoughts into the latest article on how professors are responding to LLM’s.
Steven Greene, a political-science professor at North Carolina State University, explicitly encouraged AI use in his senior seminar this past spring. But his focus there was to have his students, who already understood the content, use generative AI (he prefers one called Claude) to improve the writing in their papers. He sees that as akin to asking a classmate to read over a final draft.
Even still, Greene wishes his students used AI more effectively by creating better prompts that would allow for more sophisticated feedback. “There was definitely less truly bad writing in the final seminar papers I graded,” he notes. “But over all, it struck me that most students massively failed to fully take advantage of AI to improve their papers.”
Greene, a tenured professor who teaches two courses per semester, which he says gives him the opportunity to experiment, also doesn’t worry about assigning take-home exams. “My prompt literally said, ‘You can use the AI to help your writing, but in large part because of that, I am looking to see not just your knowledge of political parties, but your knowledge of … spring 2024 Steve Greene’s political-parties class.’”
He has continued to use take-home finals in an introductory class. He figures that if about three out of 20 students used AI, “that’s a cost I’m willing to pay at this point.” Still, he is careful, he says, to design questions that he thinks AI would do a mediocre job answering, at best. He asked them to describe, for example, what important concept for understanding how government and politics works is widely misunderstood by the American public. They also had to cite research, explain how democracy would work better if people understood the concept, and consider what they might have gotten wrong about the argument.
Like other AI users, Greene is bothered by how little discussion is taking place among the faculty and administration. “I get where that’s coming from, because there is such a strong tradition and culture of faculty autonomy,” he says. “And it’s like: ‘We’re not going to tell you how to teach your class. We’re not going to tell you how to use this tool.’ But that’s not enough. A lot of people are like: ‘I don’t get it. I need help. I want to understand how I need to evolve and adapt in response to this tool.’”
For the record, I actually massively worry about take-home finals, but, for now, I have been able to modify them enough that I am reasonably confident my students, not the LLM’s are doing the thinking. Also the assignment described was a paper assignment, not a take-home final.
How we deal with AI in the classroom is very much a work in progress. One thing I am quite confident of, though, is that burying our heads in the sand gets us nowhere.
If the United States’ economy were an athlete, right now it would be peak LeBron James. If it were a pop star, it would be peak Taylor Swift. Four years ago, the pandemic temporarily brought much of the world economy to a halt. Since then, America’s economic performance has left other countries in the dust and even broken some of its own records. The growth rate is high, the unemployment rate is at historic lows, household wealth is surging, and wages are rising faster than costs, especially for the working class. There are many ways to define a good economy. America is in tremendous shape according to just about any of them…
The American public doesn’t feel that way—a dynamic that many people, including me, have recently tried to explain. But if, instead of asking how people feel about the economy, we ask how it’s objectively performing, we get a very different answer.
Let’s start with economists’ favorite metric: growth. When an economy is growing, more money is being spent. More stuff is being produced, more services are being performed, more businesses are being started, more workers are being hired—and, because of this abundance, living standards are probablyrising. (On the flip side, during a recession—literally, when the economy shrinks—life gets materially worse.) Right now America’s economic-growth rate is the envy of the world. From the end of 2019 to the end of 2023, U.S. GDP grew by 8.2 percent—nearly twice as fast as Canada’s, three times as fast as the European Union’s, and more than eight times as fast as the United Kingdom’s.
“It’s hard to think of a time when the U.S. economy has diverged so fundamentally from its peers,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. Over the past year, some of the world’s biggest economies, including those of Japan and Germany, have fallen into recession, complete with mass layoffs and angry street protests. In the U.S., however, the post-pandemic recession never arrived. The economy just keeps growing.
Source: Briefing Book
Still, growth is a crude measure that says very little about people’s day-to-day lives. Perhaps the right question to ask is: Are most Americans better off financially than they were before the pandemic? …
Other nations probably wish they had the luxury of debating such technicalities. From the beginning of the pandemic through the fall of 2023, the last period for which we have good comparative data, real wages in both Europe and Japan fell. In Germany, workers lost 7 percent of their purchasing power; in Italy, 9 percent. By these metrics, the only workers in the entire developed world who are meaningfully better off than they were four years ago are American ones.
Source: US Department of the Treasury
Averages can conceal a lot, of course. The rise in inflation-adjusted wages, which economists call “real wages,” might not be such good news if it were flowing mostly to the already-wealthy, as it did during the recovery from the Great Recession. In fact, from 1964 through 2018, real wages for most workers hardly budged; almost all gains went to the richest Americans. In the early days of the pandemic, when millions of low-income workers found themselves suddenly out of a job, it would have been reasonable to expect the same trend to play itself out…
Instead, the opposite happened. A recent analysis from the Economic Policy Institute found that from the end of 2019 to the end of 2023, the lowest-paid decile of workers saw their wages rise four times faster than middle-class workers and more than 10 times faster than the richest decile.
So, what’s the problem with perceptions?
Indeed, the out-of-control cost of housing is perhaps the biggest black mark on an otherwise excellent economy. This problem started decades ago—since the 1980s, the median U.S. home price has increased by more than 400 percent, twice as fast as incomes—and got even worse during the pandemic, as the rise of remote work prompted millions of people to seek more space. Those rising prices have collided with higher interest rates to produce the most punishing housing market in at least a generation. Would-be homeowners can’t afford to buy, and many existing homeowners feel stuck in place.
Ezra Klein and Annie Lowrey had a great discussion about this on his podcast this week.
Annie Lowrey
Both you and I became reporters during the George W. Bush administration. And I was doing a lot of intense beat reporting during the Obama administration. And throughout this entire period, and this is what people are experiencing in the economy, the economy is defined by low growth, low interest rates, low inflation, high inequality. And the primary problem that policymakers are trying and failing to solve has to do with consumer demand, with demand in the economy. The issue is that people aren’t making enough money to buy things.
This entire time, this cost of living crisis is also brewing. And you can even date it somewhat earlier, but I think probably, the aughts are a good place to start it, where the cost of — I identify four things, but there are probably five. These are costs that are big and are sticky, and that you are not transacting frequently. And the four things are health care, child care, higher ed, so higher ed debt, and then housing. And the cost of all four of those things becomes really, really brutal, not just for low income Americans, but middle income, and in some cases, even upper-middle income Americans.
And it really changes our relationship to the economy. And it sneaks up on us again because we’re in this circumstance in which the primary issue is wages and low demand.
And Karma’s article had this, but it’s a really important point just how great we are doing compared to other countries. Noah Smith:
Although East Europe has seen robust catch-up growth, living standards in the core European economies of France and Germany have been lagging behind the U.S.:
In 1990, France’s per capita GDP was 83% of the U.S. Now it’s down to 71%. And the divergence has only accelerated since the pandemic, with the U.S.’ recovery outpacing Europe’s by leaps and bounds:
And, lastly, Kevin Drum with a great point on the inflation that surely has been a major factor in Biden’s unpopularity:
Europe measures inflation using something called HICP—the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices. This is measured a bit differently than CPI in the United States, but luckily the BLS calculates an unofficial HICP index for the US every month. This allows an apples-to-apples comparison of inflation in the US and Europe. Here it is:
It should surprise no one that inflation is pretty closely matched. In particular, our recent inflationary surge happened almost identically in Europe with a lag of a few months. This is why you shouldn’t pay much attention to anyone who suggests there was some kind of unique American action that caused inflation. It was a worldwide phenomenon and that points in pretty much one direction: COVID.
It wasn’t Joe Biden’s stimulus. It wasn’t greedy American companies. And it wasn’t anything special about our response to COVID. It was supply constrictions caused by the pandemic combined with government actions to keep incomes stable. Reduced supply + stable demand = inflation. Simple.
In a rational world, sure we would be working on policies for housing problems, etc., but with this economy, Biden should be cruising to a re-election. As has been well-documented, we don’t live in a remotely rational world.
How to signal to your side that you are more committed, virtuous, etc.? Just go to the extreme and insist on it as a matter of moral righteousness. The latest on IVF…”Why the Southern Baptists’ vote opposing IVF could change national politics The move may signal the beginning of a broad turn on the right against IVF, an issue that many social conservatives see as the “pro-life” movement’s next frontier.”
If this headline and subhead are, in fact, accurate, this is a political disaster for the right. Talk about finding a way to lose the culture war.
Honestly, what I started thinking about is those on the cultural left going so all-in on trans issues to the point of completely ignoring biology. To be clear, I am all for giving trans people basic rights and basic respect and accommodating in ways that are clearly reasonable. But there’s a bunch of people out there insisting that, no transwomen should really be competing against biological women in sports and that’s just fine. This is obviously wrong and unsurprisingly highly unpopular. There’s also a bunch of people out there insisting that to ever question that we shouldn’t medically “affirm” the gender identity of every single adolescent who struggles is to be a horrible transphobe (most of us who have been or know teenagers recognize how unstable and fraught identity can be in this period).
But, when those on the left takes these positions, they show to other lefties just how committed and virtuous they are. And, of course, it’s a great way to lose politically by turning off normie voters. I don’t know if the IVF thing is the perfect equivalency, but I do think there are similar dynamics of “look how committed and ideologically pure we are!” aspect to both of these. And the result, in both cases, is bad policy and bad politics. In this case, I’d love to see the right lose voters over this, though, because I’ll take anything I can get to move people away from anti-democratic authoritarianism.
Busy and exciting weekend in the Greene household. My 18-year old son graduated Cary High. He’ll be joining me at NC State in the Fall to major in (probably Chemical) Engineering. My 22 (in two days) year old son graduated Athens Drive High (you can can to high school through age 21 if you are in special education classes). And we celebrated his birthday since we had a lot of family here. A great weekend, but not a ton of time for quick hits.
But, here’s some!
1) One thing I did this weekend was extoll the virtue of LLM’s to my visiting family members. I shared this Ethan Mollick post with my sister, “Which AI should I use? Superpowers and the State of Play”
We are in a brief period in the AI era where there are now multiple leading models, but none has yet definitively beaten the GPT-4 benchmark set over a year ago. While this may represent a plateau in AI abilities, I believe this is likely to change in the coming months as, at some point, models like GPT-5 and Gemini 2.0 will be released. In the meantime, you should be using a GPT-4 class model and using it often enough to learn what it does well. You can’t go wrong with any of them, pick a favorite and use it (Claude 3 is likely to freak you out most in conversation with its insights, GPT-4 is pleasantly neutral and has the most complete feature set, and Gemini often gives the most accessible answer).
However, even as you use these models, get ready for the next wave of advances. Even if LLMs don’t get smarter (though I suspect they will, and soon) new capabilities and modes of interacting with AIs, like agents and massive context windows, will help LLMs do dramatic new feats. They may not exceed human abilities in many areas, but they will also have their own superpowers, all the same.
2) Vulture ranks the streaming services. I quite enjoyed this. Netflix comes out on top in a big way.
3) A great NYT guest essay on the crisis for boys and young men. I shared this with my 18-year old son, so you get the gift link, too.
I have spent the last few years talking to boys as research for my new book, as well as raising my own three sons, and I have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness. This is a new problem bumping up against an old one. All the old deficiencies and blind spots of male socialization are still in circulation — the same mass failure to teach boys relational skills and emotional intelligence, the same rigid masculinity norms and social prohibitions that push them away from intimacy and emotionality. But in screen-addicted, culture war-torn America, we have also added new ones.
The micro-generation that was just hitting puberty as the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017 is now of college (and voting) age. They have lived their whole adolescence not just in the digital era, with a glorious array of virtual options to avoid the angst of real-world socializing, but also in the shadow of a wider cultural reckoning around toxic masculinity.
We have spent the past half-decade wrestling with ideas of gender and privilege, attempting to challenge the old stereotypes and power structures. These conversations should have been an opportunity to throw out the old pressures and norms of manhood, and to help boys and men be more emotionally open and engaged. But in many ways this environment has apparently had the opposite effect — it has shut them down even further.
For many progressives, weary from a pileup of male misconduct, the refusal to engage with men’s feelings has now become almost a point of principle. For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,” there’s a voice from the left telling him that to express his concerns is to take airtime away from a woman or someone more marginalized. The two are not morally equivalent, but to boys, the impact can often feel similar. In many cases, the same people who are urging boys and men to become more emotionally expressive are also taking a moral stand against hearing how they actually feel. For many boys, it can seem as though their emotions get dismissed by both sides. This political isolation has combined with existing masculine norms to push a worrying number of boys into a kind of resentful, semi-politicized reclusion.
The statistics are starting to feel like their own cliché. Over a quarter of men under 30 say they have no close friends. Teenage boys now spend two hours less a week socializing than girls and they also spend about seven hours more per week than their female peers on screens.
As a mother of boys, I get a chill down my spine at these numbers. And my own research has fed my fears. I talked to boys of all types. Jocks and incels, popular kids and socially awkward, rich and poor. And the same theme came up over and over for boys who on the face of it had little else in common. They were lonely.
4) Yglesias’ intern, Ben Krauss, on the awful job of being a college president:
The college presidency is nasty, brutish, and short
A 2022 survey by the American Council on Education found that the average tenure for the position has fallen from 8.5 years in 2006 to 5.9 in 2022, with nearly 45% of schools having presidents with tenures less than four years. In a recent New York Times article, Nicholas Dirks, the former U.C. Berkeley chancellor, said candidate pools for opening jobs are shrinking due to lack of interest.
So why are so many people fleeing this extraordinarily high-status, high-paying job?
Daniel Drezner, a Tufts international politics professor and a nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings, has some ideas. He recently wrote an op-ed titled “You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a College President.”
While Drezner told me he’d be terrible in the role, he specified why exactly the job is so hard in the first place. “The job of any college president is to simultaneously inspire, but really you’re just dealing with a whole bunch of ridiculously entitled interest groups.”
These interest groups can range from dogmatic students and faculty to the dueling, and sometimes conflicting, voices of the alumni, big-shot donors, and the state (for public institutions).
The university president’s job is to satisfy all of them, all while dealing with an exceedingly long list of core job responsibilities. Michael T. Miller, a professor of higher education at the University of Arkansas, said, “The college president is responsible for everything that happens on a college campus.” This extensive mandate ranges from fundraising (far and away the number one priority) to student performance, graduation rates, and quality of campus life.
Interestingly, this extended presidential portfolio is actually a new concept. In a Washington Post article, Jeffrey J. Selingo, the former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, described the evolution of the college presidency:
“A century ago, the college presidency was often described as “a club,” as those in the position came largely from the faculty ranks and were from a similar pedigree. In the 1970s, as financial pressures grew on higher education, presidents were hired for their administrative experience. These days the president is expected to be a multidimensional leader able to navigate a range of challenges from technology to sexual assault as well as keep up with the changing nature of learning and emerging academic disciplines..
In my conversation with former UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor, Holden Thorp —who resigned from his position after several sports related scandals — he added another issue that is prevalent at many universities: declining trust between the board and president. “Boards are spending more time deciding whether to support the president than they are in how they will support the president.”
So it’s a tricky time to be a college president. You have to manage a weary board, juggle a wide range of responsibilities, and deal with constant pressure from interest groups. On top of all that, the higher education business model is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain at many universities.
This all invites an existential question about the presidency: Should it really be done by one person?
5) This is amazing– an AI that generates a conversation based on research papers. It’s so good.
6) Enjoyed reading about this Duke professor who is working hard to create civil discourse and challenge students:
In 2021, Rose, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the virtue of open-mindedness, published an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, diving into “How I Liberated My Classroom.” In the piece, Rose noted that he surveyed more than 100 of his students, with eye-opening results. “Sixty-eight percent told me they self-censor around certain political topics. That includes self-described conservative students and also half of the liberals.”
Reading the Journal that day was Washington, D.C., attorney and former Duke trustee Peter Kahn. He said Rose’s words struck a chord. He would later come to find out that other alums felt the same. After a series of discussions among them, Kahn led the creation of a working group in spring 2022 with Rose and other faculty and alumni joining in. Eventually, he attended Rose’s class to see for himself what it was like.
“I was blown away,” said Kahn. “These are great kids. They come from all sorts of backgrounds. And they had this open and respectful discussion.”
Buoyed by the classroom climate, Kahn and his group met with university leadership – President Vincent Price and former Provost Sally Kornbluth, among others – and they found support for a proposed new alumni group. At the reunions this spring, their group, Friends for Free Speech & Intellectual Diversity at Duke, debuted. About 300 people showed up for a panel discussion, and it was clear, said Kahn, that there was a need and interest.
“The climate is ripe for someone like John at Duke, and at other universities as well, to take this on and give it the support it deserves to create a widespread culture of free speech and viewpoint diversity,” says Kahn. “I think what we are seeing is that faculty and students are very much afraid to have these open discussions lest they be censored or shamed.”
7) Drum on the short-term polling impact of Trump’s conviction. And the amazing inanity of voters:
I didn’t notice this when it was published, but I see that polling from the New York Times confirms the YouGov results I mentioned yesterday. Donald Trump’s conviction on felony charges has moved voters only slightly:
The Times interviewed some of the folks who were previously Trumpish or undecided. Here are their complaints about Biden:
Jack: Earlier this year, he said he considered himself a Trump voter primarily because of his anger over Mr. Biden’s economic policies.
Eric: Mr. Tabor said he had turned to Mr. Trump after Mr. Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan was rejected by the Supreme Court, and Mr. Tabor was left with the feeling that the president was getting little done.
Jamie: She blamed him for not saving abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Carla: She watched Mr. Biden perform the job as president and could not envision voting for him again. “Sometimes Biden says things without thinking,” she said.
This is all crazy. The economy is great under Biden. Biden has gotten a ton of things done. It makes no sense to blame him for a conservative Supreme Court that Trump appointed. As for saying things without thinking, has Carla ever listened to Trump?
But crazy or not, this is how a lot of people think. You just have to figure out a way of getting through to them.
8) And let’s stick with Drum. This one is really important as I think it gets to a fundamental problem in so much left politics these days: “Bogus doomsaying is bad for progressives”
Why do so many people think that things in the US are far worse than they really are? A big part of the reason is that it’s not just individual scientists who are manipulating data to protect their own fiefdoms. On the left, practically the entire think tank industry is dedicated to doomsaying in order to keep the public focused generally on the need for stronger social programs.
We need an eviction crisis to maintain focus on the homeless. We need a safety net crisis to maintain focus on the poor. We need an incarceration crisis to maintain focus on racism. We need a wage crisis to maintain focus on the working class. We need an education crisis to maintain focus on the children. We need a police shooting crisis to maintain focus on social justice. We need a jobs crisis among the young to maintain focus on Gen Z. We need a democracy crisis to maintain focus on Donald Trump. We need a tuition crisis to maintain focus on higher education. We need a lead crisis in Flint to maintain focus on Black people. We need a pandemic education crisis to maintain focus on in-person learning. We need a cyberbullying crisis to maintain focus on the ills of social media.
Needless to say, conservatives do the same thing: They cherry pick statistics to “prove” dubious points that are politically convenient. But generally speaking they use anecdotal outrage to keep their audience motivated. Lefties use an endless barrage of social crises.
What this means is that both sides are in a relentless battle to paint America as a hellscape. Is it any wonder, then, that so many people think America is a hellscape?
This is a particularly bad strategy for progressives. When people are frightened and scared, they tend to vote conservatives. That’s why scaring people is a core part of movement conservatism. Conversely, people tend to be more generous and open-minded when they feel good. In the long run, an endless cascade of crises isn’t good for the progressive cause, and that’s especially true when the crises aren’t even real. At the very least, we need to focus on real crises—fentanyl, climate change, Black schoolchildren—and spend a lot less time on the fake ones.
9) As someone who monitors my heartrate on a smartwatch (a lot more on that soon), and definitely paid attention when I had Covid last year, I really enjoyed this from Jeremy Faust, “Could a smartwatch have prevented my Covid illness?”
Smartwatches, it turns out, can provide advanced notice that something is amiss in our bodies. In fact, colleagues of mine recently published a study in a Lancet network journal that demonstrated the power that smartwatches may have in giving us notice that we may be sick.
Volunteers were given smartwatches, and they wore them for years. During that time, of the 4,700 participants, there were 490 confirmed cases of influenza, 2,206 Covid-19 illnesses, and 320 bouts of bacterial strep throat (Group A Strep).
What did the smartwatches reveal? Heart rate changes. The baseline heart rates of smartwatch wearers had statistically detectable increases well before testing for the three pathogens was sought out. In the case of flu, heart rates increased around 68 hours prior to when they actually got tested; for Covid, increased heart rates were detectable 64 hours prior to testing; for strep, the lead time was 58 hours. Two or three days of advanced notice is huge in disease transmission dynamics.
On top of that, the participants kept track of their symptoms. So from this, we can see that there’s a pretty predictable pattern:
Heart rate increases.
Symptoms develop (on average 2-3 days later).
Testing occurs (on average 1.5-2 days after symptoms).
So the interval between the smartwatch “canary in the coal mine” and the time that patients actually got tested was often 2-5 days. This is massive…
It looks to me that smartwatch data applied at the individual level has a real chance to lower the reproduction number of a pathogen—that is, to how many people the average infected person spreads a pathogen. In a world in which even someone like me can’t stay vigilant with rapid testing forever, perhaps a smartwatch could be the nudge I need to do a test. (There are commercially available apps that supposedly do this; I have not vetted them.) Instead of doing a rapid test when I think of it, I would do one when my watch alerts me that my biophysical baseline has changed unexpectedly.
10) Great take on Ibram Kendi from deBoer, “I Think Ibram Kendi is Just… an Academic: with academic problems, of multiple kinds” deBoer is often hard to get pull quotes from, so Claude’s (for the record, free Claude, this month, not the paid I have been using) summary:
The document is a commentary on Ibram X. Kendi, a prominent academic and author known for his work on antiracism. The author reflects on a profile of Kendi by Rachel Poser and offers their own thoughts on Kendi’s ideas and public persona. Key points include:
1. Kendi is portrayed as a professor who got in over his head, rather than a nefarious figure as some right-wing critics suggest.
2. Kendi has moderated his central claim about “racist vs. antiracist ideas,” stating that it applies only to ideas about race, not to everything. The author sees this as a classic “motte-and-bailey” tactic common in the modern “ideas industry.”
3. The author compares Kendi’s situation to other academic works like the 1619 Project, arguing that they often present a more provocative version for publicity and a more nuanced version when criticized.
4. Despite his branding, Kendi is seen as temperamentally not a radical but rather a reformist within academic norms.
5. Kendi’s struggles as an administrator at his research center are seen as typical of academics thrust into management roles, though the financial mismanagement is noted as scandalous.
6. The author concludes that Kendi is a “mostly-harmless dork professor” who is more comfortable in academia than in the public eye, and who has become a target for conservative anger despite having some dopey and some inoffensive ideas.
I was recently catching up on Atlantic articles I had missed over the last few months and read this piece from Roge Karma. People aren’t talking about the vibecession nearly as much as they were when this was published in February, but the disconnect between the state of the economy and subjective views remains a real problem for Biden. We know what’s going with Republicans, but this is the best explanation I’ve seen for why Democrats remain surprisingly negative, too:
Meanwhile, although sentiment among Democrats has recovered to nearly where it stood before inflation began to rise in 2021, it remains well below its level at the end of the Obama administration. It may never return to its previous heights. Over the past decade, the belief that the economy is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful has become central to progressive self-identity. Among Democrats ages 18 to 34, who tend to be more progressive than older Democrats, positive views of capitalism fell from 56 to 40 percent between 2010 and 2019, according to Gallup. Dim views of the broader economic system may be limiting how positively some Democrats feel about the economy, even when one of their own occupies the Oval Office. According to a CNN poll in late January, 63 percent of Democrats ages 45 and older believed that the economy was on the upswing—but only 35 percent of younger Democrats believed the same. To fully embrace the economy’s strength would be to sacrifice part of the modern progressive’s ideological sense of self.
The media may be contributing to economic gloom for people of every political stripe. According to Mahoney, one possible explanation for Republicans’ disproportionate economic negativity when a Democrat is in office is the fact that the news sources many Republicans consume—namely, right-wing media like Fox News—tend to be more brazenly partisan than the sources Democrats consume, which tend to be a balance of mainstream and partisan media. But mainstream media have also gotten more negative about the economy in recent years, regardless of who’s held the presidency. According to a new analysis by the Brookings Institution, from 1988 to 2016, the “sentiment” of economic-news coverage in mainstream newspapers tracked closely with measures such as inflation, employment, and the stock market. Then, during Donald Trump’s presidency, coverage became more negative than the economic fundamentals would have predicted. After Joe Biden took office, the gap widened. Journalists have long focused more on surfacing problems than on highlighting successes—bringing problems to light is an essential part of the job—but the more recent shift could be explained by the same economic pessimism afflicting many young liberals (many newspaper journalists, after all, are liberals themselves). In other words, the media’s negativity could be both a reflection and a source of today’s economic pessimism.
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I was part of the Kerry-Edwards direct mail team. Two weeks after the ad began running, Kerry had not responded but the controversy continued to brew. Members of the paid communications team grumbled that the campaign should hit back, attacking Bush for serving in the reserves and comparing the two candidates’ war records. The campaign held a conference call to quell the dissension in the ranks.
The lead pollsters told us that the ads were not affecting Kerry’s numbers and that his war record was still his strongest single attribute. They believed that the controversy would die down and that we would not hear about criticism of Kerry’s heroics going down the stretch in the period from Labor Day to Election Day. They would not respond with attacks on Bush and would address the ad’s criticism mainly through the press.
I thought then, and believe now, that it was the most naive response to an attack I had seen up to that point in my political career. Democratic strategists did not understand what was happening. Regardless of the impact on polling numbers, Kerry was on the defensive for the rest of the race. From the Swift Boat ad at the beginning of August until the Wolves ad that closed out the campaign, the GOP defined Kerry as unprepared to lead the country in a time of terrorism and war. The Democrats tried to make the race about health care and missed the emotional response that Republicans evoked in the wake of the country’s uncertainty due to 9-11.
Today, we’re seeing a similar response to Trump’s conviction. Republicans are unified in their response to verdict. They universally called it a miscarriage of justice. They attacked the legal system and accused Joe Biden of using the justice system to lock up his political opponents. They don’t even try to deny that Trump did what he was accused of doing. They just attack.
Meanwhile, Democrats are arguing about how or whether to respond to the verdict. What the hell? Throw caution to the wind. We’re about to elect a convicted felon to be President of the United States and the entire Republican Party is attacking the rule of law.
Every elected Democrat should be calling for Donald Trump to drop out of the race. He was convicted by a jury of his peers for paying off a porn star to hide an affair that could damage his campaign and he conspired with the leading tabloid in the country to kill negative stories that could hurt his presidential bid. Americans should be outraged and it’s Democrats’ job to make sure they are.
If every Democrat from city hall to the White House stood up and called on Donald Trump to drop out of the race we would be probably arguing over whether a convicted felon is fit to serve, not whether the conviction was political. In other words, Democrats would be controlling the debate. That’s smart politics. [emphases mine]
Republicans have a unified national response that is being covered in every media outlet in the United States and being parroted ad nauseam throughout the right-wing media ecosystem. In contrast, Democratic strategists are waiting for the polls to come in to determine how to respond and which witty ad to make. They look weak, uncertain, and incompetent…
Well, here’s a message: Republicans are so desperate to end access to abortion that they are willing to attack the rule of law and support a convicted felon for President of the United States. The debate, right now, should be about whether a convicted felon is fit for office, not whether the conviction was legitimate. Silence leaves people assuming that even Democrats quietly agree that Trump’s conviction was political. Don’t let that happen.
Boring title, but, the result is that when it comes to politicians being incentivized to deliver for constituents the end result is… lol nothing matters. From Electoral Studies, “Is opinion-policy congruence rewarded at the ballot box?”
It is well known that voters prefer parties whose policy positions align with their own. But do voters actually reward incumbents who implement policies preferred by the electorate? Using cross-country data covering more than 350 elections and opinion-policy congruence measures based on 166 issues, our analysis reveals an unexpected non-correlation between opinion-policy congruence and electoral success. Governments that implement (or keep in place) policies with higher levels of support in the electorate do not do better in subsequent elections. This result holds when controlling for the state of the economy, and when using other, country-specific, datasets. The study reinforces conclusions from previous research that retrospective policy voting seems to be very limited.
So, yeah, state of the economy matters (which is often so beyond the short-term control of the government, but, anything else you might accomplish? So what. I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t be depressingly shared around by Biden staffers.
This is one of those findings that is definitely going into my future lectures.
Fully Myelinated 
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