Do women choose to earn less money? There’s a persistent effort to naturalize the gender wage gap; that is, to show that women earn less than men not because of discrimination or bad policy design but simply because they choose to.

A 2022 paper titled “Why Do Women Earn Less than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators” began with the premise that, in the United States, the gender pay gap is around 18%. The economists zoomed in on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, or MBTA, which runs transit in the Boston metropolitan area, to illuminate the drivers of the gender pay gap.

Here they found a much lower gap: around 11%. Since these are the same workplaces (so career choice does not matter), all workers have similar minimal training (so there are no education decisions), they do the same work, and all workers are unionized (so a lot of discretionary pay decisions cannot legally happen), why is there still a wage gap?

The main innovation of the paper, like most contemporary economics research, is in the data: MBTA granted the authors confidential administrative data used by their HR department, merging time card data (that is, when someone starts and stops working) with particular worker characteristics (age, gender, prior experience, marital status, etc.). So the paper is more an accomplishment in quilting than in economic theory.

That way, considering MBTA has very few discretionary decisions on worker pay and promotions, the authors can isolate a very small source of variability: scheduled and unscheduled overtime and paid and unpaid time off (family leave, known as FMLA for the Family and Medical Leave Act). The authors found that the 11% gap in earnings between male and female bus and train operators comes from the fact that women take less unscheduled overtime and take more unpaid time off.

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Regardless of seniority, men take about twice as much overtime as women when it is scheduled on short notice, and women take about twice as much unpaid family leave. Given that the number of hours worked is one of the very few decisions workers have over their earnings at MBTA, this explains basically all of the gap away.

The authors present four possible explanations:

The first is the value of time: Women just like spending less time at work than men.

The second is schedule predictability: Women don’t like time off more than men, but can’t take time off at short notice.

The third is schedule conventionality (preferring a 9-to-5 more strongly), which is just the value of time with extra steps.

The fourth is a stronger response by men than women to undesirable schedules, which, again, is just the value of time.

So, really, there are two explanations: Women just like spending time at work less or that women can’t take short-notice overtime.

The biggest gap in short-notice overtime is between unmarried women and men with children: Men take overtime 40% of the time, and women 34%. However, this happens because the gap in pre-planned overtime is very small (around 7%), while the gap in short-notice overtime is around 45%, and closer to 60% for unmarried men and women with dependents.

At MBTA, men recover the pay they lose to family leave by working extra hours, but women don’t, and that’s most pronounced for unmarried mothers. That’s sometimes taken as evidence that women just value time off more.

But when MBTA tightened its leave and overtime rules to stop people from using leave to skip the least desirable shifts, the pay gap fell to about 6%. That’s probably the most you could honestly blame on free individual choice — roughly half of MBTA’s gap, which is itself about half of the U.S. average. And, of course, people do not make choices in a vacuum.

The right-wing Mises Institute argued that the wage gap is mainly about women’s choices. In another Mises paper about the gender wage gap, the author argued that “female preferences for caregiving and stability align with evolutionary roles in child-rearing, implying that gender roles are deeply rooted in biology rather than social constructs.” It attributed much of the wage gap to choices “shaped by hormonal and biological influences.”

An opinion column on FoxNews.com argued that “women are doing just fine” and “by most measures, it’s our boys and men who are struggling.” The author claimed that “to the extent that the gap exists, it can be largely attributed to deliberate and meaningful choices made by women in the workforce that prioritize home and family over career.”

This is a common refrain among the right: That our choices can be structured by our institutional and cultural environment — which conservatives usually understand well — suddenly reads like liberal gobbledygook when applied to the question of what shapes women’s preferences.

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Americans are on track to gamble away a record-high quarter-trillion dollars this year. Since the Supreme Court stripped away federal bans on sports gambling, regulators have behaved like negligent parents: good enough to keep their charges alive, but only just.

Total losses have grown 67% since COVID-19 started and are up another 8% over the last year alone, increasing faster than at any point from 2000 to 2020. That’s excluding gambling-adjacent activities that happen via crypto, prediction markets, stock options, or other avenues.

America’s modern gambling boom really kicked off after the 2018 Supreme Court decision in Murphy v. NCAA overturned the federal ban on sports betting; since then, 39 states and D.C. have legalized the practice in some form.

Then, during the pandemic, many consumers were stuck at home bored, isolated, and often with money to spare. This further accelerated gambling activity. Were it not for the two most populous states, California and Texas, holding out against the tide of legalization, an even larger supermajority of Americans would now have easy access to official sports betting.

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Plenty of people can gamble without letting it ruin their lives. They can play blackjack and bet on their local team without expecting to win big or risking unwise amounts of money, similar to how most people can consume alcohol with no worse outcomes than a hangover. Nearly all vices imply some risk of addiction or self-harm; that doesn’t mean we should automatically ban them.

But it does mean we must take seriously and guard against the potentially life-altering consequences of sports gambling. One brutal finding shows just how devastating losses can be to families: In states where sports betting is legal, an NFL home team upset loss raises intimate partner violence by 10 percentage points more than in non-legal states.

The industry regularly produces addicts who bet to their own detriment, losing large chunks of their income and still convincing themselves to bet more. These are people who gamble a rent payment, credit card bill, or student loan and lose — just to come back next month and gamble more. Research by New York Fed economists Jacob Goss and Daniel Mangrum, looking at millions of credit reports, showed that debt delinquency rates increased as states legalized sports gambling, especially for men and people under 40.

Fundamentally, betting losses cannot continually grow 10% per year without bilking a growing well of problem gamblers.

The pro-gambler, anti-casino lane

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For decades, kids were getting better at math. The best measure of this — the National Assessment of Educational Progress Long-Term Trend assessment — displays a long climb from 1978 until 2012, when 13-year-old math performance peaked. By 2025, we had wiped out over three decades of gains and were roughly back to where kids were performing in the mid-1990s.

Relative to the literacy crisis — which has spurred endless think pieces, journalism, and legislative responses — declining math performance has received relatively little attention. But they’re part of the same narrative.

You’ve probably heard some version of the simple story about how America messed up reading:

It starts with a movement of educators arguing that the traditional approach was wrong, that instead of emphasizing phonics — which involves boring things like drilling letter sounds and explaining how letter combinations work — schools should embrace a “whole language” approach to learning.

Instead of doing drills, students were encouraged to look at picture books and guess the words from context clues.1 The hope was that this would inculcate not just the skill of reading but the love of reading.

This did not work.

Reading scores declined precipitously until word got out. Excellent investigative journalism brought about mass awareness of how reading was (or wasn’t) being taught. Since then, 42 states (and D.C.) have adopted new laws and policy changes demanding that reading be taught in line with best practices.

Math education went through a similar trajectory:

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

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The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

Hello from Aspen, Colorado, where I’m reporting from the Aspen Ideas Festival. I was supposed to be on a plane back by now, but a last-minute announcement of a nonrecorded debate between Peter Thiel and Francis Fukuyama has kept me in town. I’ll be reporting everything for The Argument, so stay tuned.

My big thought this week is that the 21st Century ROAD to Housing act is on the verge of becoming law, and despite all of the hullabaloo from populists about needing to attack private equity and institutional investors in the housing market by restricting the build-to-rent market, in the end, YIMBYs won that argument.

The Road to Housing Act has dozens of different measures, but two of the most significant pieces are:

1. Setting a framework for incentivizing states and localities to loosen zoning and land use rules

2. Making it easier to build manufactured housing

At one point, it seemed that the bill’s best measures could be completely undercut by a measure that would have kneecapped the institutional build-to-rent market of single-family homes.

The bill would have required large institutional investors to sell their newly built rental homes to individual buyers after seven years, which would have destroyed the economics of big firms building more housing in a bill that’s ostensibly trying to get everyone to build more housing.

That mandate is gone. The final bill still caps the number of single family homes large institutional investors can buy — but with large exceptions for the aforementioned build-to-rent market, substantial rehabilitation, senior housing, and certain secondary-market transactions. Even that has a pretty big loophole, though, since investors can skirt the 350-home cap by splitting holdings into smaller entities. Firms already over the limit also don’t have to divest anything.

That mandate was the exact provision on which Sen. Brian Schatz gave a floor speech, arguing that, “We have decided, for no particular reason other than what I think is a drafting error, to demonize people who want to build rental housing for folks.” Schatz ended up as the lone Democratic “no” because he worried that this provision would severely undercut the entire bill’s efficacy.

David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, slammed Schatz for this, calling his vote a signal to moneyed interests and private equity that he is their guy. He even quoted an anonymous Hill staffer who claimed that Schatz had a pattern of “undermining bills that take on corporate power.” The Revolving Door Project (RDP) put out a similar hit.

Then, Schatz won. Seventy-six House members signed a letter demanding the build-to-rent provisions be stripped and the National Association of Home Builders warned the provision could hurt industry support for the bill. The House then cut it out, passing a clean version in a 396-13 vote.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who fought for the provision, voted for the package anyway and is now out here chanting YIMBY slogans. Good for her! It’s commendable that she helped shepherd through a great bill even if she didn’t get everything she wanted.

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But I do want to note: The exact thing the populists said made Schatz a private-equity stooge became the consensus position of both the House and Senate. The very provisions that The Prospect celebrated Warren for are gone or severely limited. So I await with bated breath articles about how Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders tragically lost to corporate power (or are also in the pocket of private equity?) because they voted for the ROAD to Housing Act.

The Prospect should, of course, not do this, and it is commendable that Warren and others came around here and didn’t let this dispute destroy an otherwise good bill.

The big point I want to make is that people tend to doom about the possibility for persuasion to work, but this was a piece of legislation on a high-salience issue where the slopulism faction lost to reasoned, sustained pressure from people with better arguments.

This wasn’t Secret Congress where a bill’s details get hashed out without any public attention. This was Congress doing the right thing despite getting pressure to do the exact opposite.

This should be a straightforward win for everyone involved — including Trump, who really needs a big win on the economy. Yet, the president is threatening to blow up the housing bill unless Congress first passes the SAVE America Act — a voter-ID law that would require most Americans to present a passport or birth certificate in person to register to vote.

The veto-proof majorities are heartening, but never underestimate Trump’s ability to pull a loss from thin air.

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Top stories this week, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

Milan Singh ran the numbers: Tariffs cost the U.S. 274,000 manufacturing jobs before Trump’s second term (between 2018 and 2024). In an adapted version of his own original research, Milan walks us through why the economists’ broad consensus against tariffs still holds. It’s priceless reading:

Meanwhile, some have started to fret that new housing starts haven’t spiked within a year of California passing housing legislation. Jerusalem Demsas thinks this kind of talk needlessly puts the YIMBY movement on its back foot: Who said a decades-old supply crunch would be fixed in under a year? As she surveys the evidence on housing legislation, she explains why liberals need to be more confident about their wins:

Finally, New York State Assemblymember Alex Bores lost his primary race for a U.S. House district in New York after Leading the Future (a super PAC funded by top figures in the AI industry) targeted him for regulating AI. In the lead up to that race, Kelsey Piper covered the Super PAC’s sleazy tactics, counterproductive efforts, and the implications for the future of AI regulation. Strange world to come. Learn more here:

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• Utah put a massive solar project online with 400 megawatts of solar and 400 megawatts of battery storage. This means powering up to 110,000 homes and potentially carrying up to 10% of the state’s energy load, according to an official associated with the project.

• The NRC renewed both Edwin I. Hatch reactors in Georgia in under 12 months, keeping 1.8 GW of carbon-free baseload on the grid for another 20 years.

• Two cheers for basic research: Normal hearing aids amplify everything in your surroundings, but there are signs that a new technology could use people’s brainwaves to amplify specific sounds in their environment, mimicking normal human hearing. I am frequently astonished by modernity.

Worth watching...

History took an awful turn the moment Joe Biden stepped on that debate stage in June 2024, which only confirmed the extreme irresponsibility of his decision to run again. But guess what? Joe made other mistakes, too! Jerusalem and Matt hash out their top five Biden errors on the pod this week.

Try to think of your own top 5 before you listen in:

I am still buzzing from last week’s release of Lakshya Jain’s 2026 election model, which clashed with the outlook from major qualitative ratings institutions. This week, Lakshya brought that debate to a Substack live video with Erin Covey of The Cook Political Report. It’s an incredible back-and-forth that gets at some of the fundamental questions in political forecasting. Please check it out:

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

I was worried my teammates would give me a tedious list of World Cup matches to write about this week. Thankfully, however, we are not in touch with the masses at all. Maibritt Henkel is literally going to watch Shakespeare tonight.

“My recommendation is buying theatre tickets many months in advance and thereby treating yourself to one of life’s great pleasures: anticipation,” she said with a giddy lilt.

She’s going to see The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Othello. Stay tuned for her reactions next week.

Unfortunately, I’m also bringing a highfalutin recommendation to the table: Being in the World. It’s a documentary that is technically about Heidegger scholar Hubert Dreyfus, but really, the philosophy chatter is like a backing track to lively footage of musicians, jugglers, cooks, and craftsmen interacting with the physical world, embodying their knowledge per the philosophy espoused by Dreyfus. This jazzy, fast-paced film was also shot by someone with a maniac’s sense for a level frame.

Our video producer Justin Zuckerman was actually implicated in this philosophy business with me, but he declined to recommend the movie. Instead, he was a real man of the people and recommended an album that “spans from western country to pop” — Box for Buddy, Box for Star by This Is Lorelei.

Eli Richman was also fairly down-home with a horror comedy recommendation, Widow’s Bay, with great lines like, “The witch trials. Great source of pride. We caught ‘em. We burned ‘em.”

Milan Singh wanted to put both an audiobook (Empire of Liberty) and some Instagram cooking videos (by Hailee Catalano) on the audience’s radar.

“Apparently everyone in 1800s America was drunk all the time — including the kids!” he said of the audiobook.

When I looked back at this list, I considered that maybe we weren’t so elitist after all. Maibritt and I, with our Shakespeare and philosophy, were the main problems. But then someone reminded me: Angela Tracy reads plays.

When I turned to welcome Angela to the highbrow culture clique, she suggested the play Rhinoceros and said, “Mm, thanks for the invitation, but I only read plays. I don’t gooo to them.”

Maibritt Henkel declined to comment.

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Elon Musk really doesn’t want you to say he’s responsible for the deaths of millions.

Earlier this week, Musk threatened to sue Rep. Ro Khanna for charging him with destroying the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and putting millions of lives at risk around the world:

“There needs to be accountability for Elon Musk,” Khanna said. “You know, they’re celebrating that he created 4,400 millionaires [with his SpaceX IPO], but they don’t talk about the 4.5 million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling USAID.”

In response, Musk called Khanna a liar, threatened to sue, and said he should be in prison.

But Khanna is making a perfectly reasonable claim here. In that quote, he is (carefully) citing a peer-reviewed study that estimated the effects of dismantling USAID. It found that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will result in 14 million deaths overall by 2030, of which 4.5 million will be children under the age of 5.

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This is probably a high-end estimate, but even lower end projections with different methodologies sit between 670,000 and 1.6 million annual deaths compared to a fiscal year 2023 baseline.

In other words, the toll from USAID cuts seems to be at best around two-thirds of a million people annually1; that’s about as many people as were killed during the Civil War. At worst, Musk is tied to the deaths of 14 million.

If DOGE had managed to cut tens of billions of dollars from the federal budget, Musk and his defenders would certainly have taken credit. It’s bizarre then to disclaim responsibility for the tragic consequences of the cuts they did make.

Yet Musk and his defenders insist that Khanna is somehow slandering him.

There are a couple of interlocking issues worth separating here: one is the factual question of what actually happened to USAID, where Musk is now downplaying his actions. A second question is what is likely to happen out in the real world to real people without USAID. And the final issue is whether Musk should be subject to basic Congressional oversight for wrecking whole government agencies as an outside adviser to the president.

Unfortunately for Musk, he’s on the wrong side of each one.

Did Musk cut global health aid?

It’s best to start with a simple timeline of events, given Musk’s slipperiness with the facts here.

On Jan. 20, inauguration day, Donald Trump froze USAID funding for 90 days. On Jan. 24, Secretary of State Marco Rubio executed this freeze, and then on Jan. 28, amid chaos on the ground, Rubio issued a waiver to the freeze for “core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance.”2

Days later, on Feb. 3, Musk issued his infamous tweet saying that he had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” That was one day after he’d called it a “criminal organization,” adding, grimly, “Time for it to die.”

It’s important to note that as USAID offices shuttered, contract officers asked for the appropriate paperwork to show the cancellation. According to the Associated Press, a Musk associate merely replied that the order had come from “the most senior levels.” Despite his braggadocio online, Musk seemed to keep his fingerprints off the formal actions as much as possible.

Finally, the next month, on March 10, Marco Rubio announced the end of 5,200 USAID programs, or 83% of its programs. The other thousand programs would be moved to the State Department. In his announcement, Rubio thanked DOGE for this “historic reform.”

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All the while, DOGE’s abrupt stop-work orders literally left USAID workers stranded abroad fearing for their lives.

“We heard the mobs outside our gates, right? … We heard explosions. We heard gunshots,” Kenneth Bledsoe said, an attorney working with USAID in the Congo, but “because all the leaders were gone … I was worried we might be abandoned there.”

Despite all of this happening in plain sight, as of this Tuesday, Musk contended that “All DOGE required was contact information of the recipients to confirm that funding was not fraudulent.”

I find it genuinely absurd to construe the well-reported evaporation of U.S.-funded programs on the ground in dozens of countries as a simple fraud verification layer. Musk and others involved were clearly aware this wasn’t some skimpy payment issue.

At the time, Nicholas Enrich, USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health, wrote a series of memos laying out the likely consequences of DOGE’s actions, which included things like 71,000 to 166,000 additional annual deaths from malaria and 1 million additional children facing malnutrition annually. Enrich was placed on leave for this.

But let’s say Musk was just combating fraud, one pesky payment verification at a time. Even that would point to his detachment from the reality on the ground.

Musk was fond of tweeting that only 10% of payments made by USAID made it through to their intended targets, which was the apparent motivation for this fraud detection scheme. But that 10% number is actually the percentage of funds that go to local organizations in order to deliver aid — a larger share went to international organizations that deliver aid at scale. The debate was between which kinds of organizations the money passed through, not whether it got to recipients.

Now, there is legitimate, good faith, cross-partisan criticism that says a larger share should go to local organizations and less money should run through big international ones. Atul Gawande, assistant administrator for global health under the Biden administration from 2022 to 2025, has said that he aimed to get the 10% number up to 30%. But this is a wholly different issue than saying aid is not getting out into the world to help its intended recipients.

Musk’s whole venture, even in the narrow way he framed it, was a blind ideological attack against an agency that performed lifesaving work at low cost to people who need it most.

How many people will die as a result?

Once we set aside the notion that Musk isn’t responsible for the massive withdrawal of U.S. global health funding, the next question is what the effect of that withdrawal has been so far and will be going forward — the crux of Musk’s assertion that Khanna is lying.

Start from the basics: Until last year, the U.S. accounted for about 40% of government-funded global health funding,3 including malaria prevention, HIV/AIDS prevention, nutritional assistance, maternal health, disease monitoring, and more. It’s a reasonable starting assumption that if this aid disappears, it would cause worse health, even death, in the places that receive the aid.

The Lancet study that Khanna referred to merely quantified this, as best as the researchers could.

It started by looking to the past, finding a 15% reduction in all-cause mortality and a 32% reduction among children under 5 due to U.S. aid over the past 21 years. That amounts to 91.8 million lives saved overall, including 30.4 million children under 5, over the past two decades. It then applied its model to the future, aiming to capture deaths by 2030.

Now, a critique of this study says that there were only 79 million lives saved on net since 2001, so a 92 million figure would have to attribute all lives saved to USAID plus some number of phantom lives saved. And if they’re overshooting by that much on their model of the past, they could be overshooting their projection of the future, too, the author argued.

The issue is that the critique assumes the 2001 death rate stays constant without intervention. It measures lives saved (79 million) by counting the observed death rate below 2001 in each year, but the global population both grew and aged in this period. Holding to the 2001 death rate would have been an efficacious intervention in and of itself, without lowering the death rate at all. Beyond that, lowering the death rate by, say, 79 million lives is a further success.

So, in principle, it’s not impossible to have greater than 79 million lives saved through an intervention. That doesn’t make the Lancet study correct in and of itself, but it’s also not logically invalid, as the critique suggests.

I do think the Lancet study is a high-end estimate.

More conservative estimates by the Center for Global Development (CGD) put total additional deaths between 670,000 and 1.6 million annually by using estimates of lives saved per dollar and then matching this to funding cuts.

According to a modeling tracker built by Brooke Nichols, a Boston University associate professor of global health, USAID cuts are estimated to have caused roughly 260,000 adult and over 500,000 child deaths at the one-year mark.4

If all you did was draw out this trend, which is roughly in line with CGD’s in terms of magnitude, it would be at least 2.5 million people who had passed, because of USAID cuts, by 2030.

The world is, of course, dynamic and messy. It’s hard to say how a reduction in funding at one clinic translates into deaths. Maybe someone finds a way to get their antivirals by travelling to the next township, or maybe a new funder comes in to maintain the clinic, even if it means that funder also has to withdraw public health funding elsewhere. On top of these inherent difficulties, the U.S. government is also not releasing data right now on the two largest bilateral health programs, which are for HIV/AIDS and malaria.5

You can take issue with the assumptions and methodological choices that go into these estimates, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that DOGE’s program cancellations won’t cause any deaths. The range of numbers here seems to be between a few million and tens of millions, and neither end of that spectrum absolves Musk.

In fact, Musk’s defenders inadvertently admit that there must be some significant number of deaths as they try to defend him.

In an article defending Musk, which Musk tweeted out, Pirate Wire’s Max Weiner said that The Lancet study posits a “fake world” because it assumes “A world in which DOGE’s funding reductions remain in place through 2030,” which Weiner says is unlikely.

That means his number one reason DOGE cuts will not cause millions of deaths is that… they will be reversed? That’s just an admission that the cuts will, in fact, cause millions of deaths!

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The Bidens are in the news again, and they are busy desperately trying to salvage their legacy while lashing out at those they deem disloyal.

This time, the former president is featured in New York Magazine as he struggles to raise funds for his presidential library, while Jill is busy promoting her new memoir, View from the East Wing. Hunter joined Candace Owens’ podcast and is all over Twitter writing AI-generated election analysis while correcting a user for creating an AI-generated image of him smoking a meth pipe instead of a crack pipe. And the broader Biden cinematic universe is still clamoring to tell its story, including recent books from Kamala Harris and Karine Jean-Pierre.

So, since Matt and I can’t seem to escape Sleepy Joe, we decided to rank the worst parts of his presidency and see what can be learned from it. Here are my rankings, which differ from Matt’s in a few key ways:

1. It’s the economy

I am a woman of the people, so my number one problem with Sleepy Joe was his failure to adequately tackle inflation — which was downstream from his apparent contempt for the people who actually understand economics. Much of the administration was a revolt against economists, wonks, and the white-paper style of governance that defined the Obama years.

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Tariffs, energy, housing… all areas he could have taken more of an interest in. But, as is a theme in my beef with Biden, he didn’t seem all that interested in major parts of economic and domestic policy.

Additionally, people with private-sector experience were treated as inherently suspect. I understand not wanting the SEC run by hedge fund managers, but Biden took it further. He leaned on Warrenite bureaucrats who seemed hostile to the idea of letting private-sector people in at all.

None of this was helped by the fact that Biden was barely engaged with his own domestic agenda. He wasn’t the one in the room hashing out the details of the Inflation Reduction Act or playing hardball with Joe Manchin. It’s the kind of disinterest you’d expect from a president too old and self-absorbed to get bogged down in the minutiae of actually governing.

And when he did engage, even amid record inflation, it was to stay loyal to the labor and green groups whose agendas often pushed prices higher.

2. Running again

Joe Biden’s administration actively concealed his decline from the American public, and that is why Donald Trump, a man anathema to liberalism, is president. Remember when it took a movie star donor who had no elected responsibility to the public to reveal that something was seriously wrong with the sitting president running for reelection?

Worse still, Biden got his allies to tie themselves in knots and embarrass themselves on cable news as they tried to convince voters that he was still up to the job — all because he couldn’t recognize (or acknowledge) that he was not fit to run again.

3. Israel

You can’t talk about Biden’s downfall without getting into a heated argument about Israel. Matt is more defensive of Biden here, claiming he successfully worked to prevent the very war with Iran that Trump and Netanyahu have since carried out. I think that Biden was far too permissive of Israel’s destructive actions in Gaza and the West Bank.

Plenty on the far left have sadly turned a blind eye to the terrorism of Hamas, but Democrats have been too lenient when it comes to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians for decades, and Biden’s decision to bear hug Netanyahu was a moral and strategic error.

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4. Immigration

The Biden administration avoided taking charge of immigration resettlement and ceded authority to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Biden was not that personally interested in any major macroeconomic issue, which clearly affected his administration’s ability to attack the border security problem effectively.

5. Kamala

Full disclosure: I worked for Kamala Harris in South Carolina in 2019, and I left politics shortly afterward. So I come to this with some history.

In 2020, we were at a moment when people badly wanted to elevate a nonwhite candidate, and especially a Black woman, to higher office. When you look around the halls of power and notice they’re dominated by the same few groups, the impulse to correct that is the right one.

But deciding that the solution is to find any Black woman at all to elevate is obviously stupid. It’s insulting to Black women, and to Black people in general, to suggest that the way you serve a community with real concerns about inflation, schools, and crime is to hand power to someone who simply happens to share some of their characteristics.

The Democratic base didn’t want Kamala at the top of the ticket in 2020, and there should have been an open primary in 2024 to find out whether that had changed. Instead, she was handed the nomination in a coronation, and we never got to test it.

Matt points out that this identity-based philosophy was integral to the Biden administration. From his Supreme Court pick to cabinet secretaries to Merrick Garland as U.S. attorney general, Biden was seemingly obsessed with optics rather than putting together a formidable administration.

We get into all of it on this week’s episode.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

*In a couple of weeks, we’ll be reviewing Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, so grab a copy and read along!

The Argument. Libbing out.

(Illustration by The Argument, photo by Justin Sullivan/Staff via Getty)

The transcript will be after the paywall in this post for paying subscribers.

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Corrections:

• Around 19:00, Matt says that the Biden White House leaked to Politico that it pushed for Karine Jean-Pierre to take a job at EMILY’s List and leave her job as press secretary, but it was The New York Post that broke this story

• Around 21:00, Jerusalem says that in Trump’s second term, “there’s a gay cabinet member for the first time,” referring to Scott Bessent. That distinction actually goes to either Richard Grenell, Trump’s acting director of national intelligence appointed in 2020, or Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary, depending on whether you consider Senate confirmation a relevant qualifier.

• Around 25:00, Matt says that Biden “immediately fires his campaign manager after winning the primary.” The leadership shake-up actually happened mid-primary, while Bernie Sanders was still in the race.

Show notes:

• Ben Terris article about Bidens getting back in public eye: New York Magazine article

• “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” short story by Ursula K. Le Guin referenced by Matt. The story features a utopian society whose happiness and prosperity are contingent upon the suffering of a single innocent child. Goodreads page, Full story

• George Clooney op-ed sounding the alarm on Biden being too old to be the 2024 Democratic nominee: The New York Times article

• Jay Kelly, film starring George Clooney about a famous actor’s relationship with his manager: IMDb page, Netflix streaming

• Ezra Klein February 2024 audio essay calling for Democrats to find a nominee other than Biden: The New York Times article

• Podcasts Matt referenced in which he argued against choosing Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate: The Weeds episode, The Weeds episode

• “Karine Jean-Pierre is not a #Girlboss,” article by Jerusalem criticizing Jean-Pierre’s selection and job performance: The Argument article

• Reporting indicating the Biden administration avoided taking action on migrant resettling because it didn’t want to “own the issue”: CBS News article

• “America needs clearer goals on migration,” article by Matt criticizing the Biden administration’s lack of strategy on migrants: Slow Boring article

• Research indicating that the American Rescue Plan and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) together raised inflation by about 3 percentage points by the end of 2021: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco letter

• Biden executive order to create a government-wide antitrust crackdown: White House fact sheet

• Peer Review: “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates,” by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelmann: NBER working paper

• “The New Divide in American Marriage,” Jerusalem’s podcast episode interviewing Benjamin Goldman about the paper: The Atlantic podcast

• “Yelling at ambitious young women won’t boost marriage,” article by Matt arguing the decline in marriage rates is not being led by highly educated women: Slow Boring article

• “Boy moms and Nazi POWs: How ‘The Feminine Mystique’ changed feminism,” podcast episode about Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique: The Argument podcast

• Love After Lockup, reality show referenced by Jerusalem about couples that begin with one partner in prison: IMDb page

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, famous book about urban planning by Jane Jacobs that will be the subject of an upcoming episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

Transcript

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Erin argued that Cook’s ratings, which take into account a large amount of internal and public information alike, are designed to be “stickier,” erring on the side of caution. For instance, in Arizona’s 6th Congressional District, both VoteHub and Split Ticket think Republican Congressman Juan Ciscomani is the clear underdog, whereas Cook believes it to be a toss-up. This, Erin argued, is because of the paucity of polling, combined with lack of data on the challenger’s quality.

In another example, Texas’ 35th is rated as a highly competitive race by VoteHub and Split Ticket, while Cook labels it a Likely Republican seat. Erin claimed that the historical lean of this seat (even Beto O’Rourke didn’t win it in 2018) make it a tough lift for Democrats, and she expressed skepticism that it would ever become a true toss-up this cycle.

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Lakshya wasn’t fully convinced by the argument, in part because Split Ticket’s model factors in Wins-Above-Replacement and district-specific demographic factors. But the crew did find a point of agreement in New York City, where all three of them agreed that the left was insurgent in the Democratic Party, especially in elections where electability was less relevant (or less clearly defined).

And they all believed that Darializa Avila Chevalier’s election would not be an anchor around swing-seat Democrats. To see why, check out the video above

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Over the last decade, protectionism has come back into vogue in the United States. Starting in 2018, both Republican and Democratic administrations have imposed new tariffs on U.S. imports; some trading partners have responded with tariffs on U.S. exports. The stated justification for this return to protectionism is to bolster manufacturing employment.

In theory, tariffs could increase domestic employment in protected industries if consumers substituted away from imported goods and toward domestically produced substitutes. In a September 2024 piece in The Atlantic, Oren Cass, the founder of right-populist think tank American Compass, made just this argument, claiming that critics of Trump’s tariff proposals “ignore even the possibility that higher import prices might encourage investment in domestic production” — production that “anchors local economies in a way that personal services cannot.”

But Cass’ implicit model of the economy assumes a fairly simple supply chain: Some products are made wholly in America, others are made wholly outside America, and consumers choose between the two.

That may have been common in the past, but it is increasingly less so today. These days, supply chains are multinational. The cars made by General Motors and Ford in Detroit include components shipped between Michigan and Ontario as many as four times before they are finished. So, in a world of complex supply chains, imposing new tariffs on (say) Canada would raise production costs for American automakers and reduce American employment.

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That’s exactly what happened. From 2018 to 2024, import tariffs had a negative, statistically significant effect on manufacturing employment. Specifically, I estimate that tariffs reduced manufacturing employment by approximately 274,000 jobs over this period.

The bipartisan return to protectionism

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Anyone who has ever won an argument knows that victory is rarely served with an admission of failure. Instead, the goalposts shift, the vanquished discard their earlier positions, and a once-controversial view becomes mainstream. You shouldn’t be churlish when you find yourself on the winning side, but it is still important to be clear about what arguments and ideas have been proven correct.

So, while screaming “I told you so” is both off-putting and unhelpful, it’s also unhelpful to be so gracious in victory that people learn the wrong lessons. Which is what I’m worried is happening with the Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) movement right now.

A decade ago, nearly every faction of the American political spectrum was virulently anti-YIMBY. In superstar cities and suburbs across the country, local elected officials across the political spectrum ranged from being blithely unaware of the housing supply crisis and tacitly supporting exclusionary zoning laws to staunchly opposing faster private-market development.

In 2018, one of the first prominent YIMBY elected officials, Scott Wiener, proposed SB 827, a transit-oriented development bill that would have required cities to permit small apartment buildings near major transit stops.

It was opposed by tenant groups, the Sierra Club, DSA Los Angeles, homeowners associations, prominent local elected officials in California, the Beverly Hills and Palo Alto city councils, Mayor Eric Garcetti, and others. Under such crushing opposition, it died in committee with both Democrats and Republicans voting no.

Seven years later, not only has California passed similar legislation (SB 79), so too have Washington, Colorado, Massachusetts, Utah, Connecticut, Chicago, Minneapolis, Austin, and New York City… just off the top of my head.

It’s not just transit-oriented development, of course. The fundamental precepts of YIMBYism — that exclusionary zoning is bad, that undersupply is at the heart of the housing crisis, that private-market development is necessary — are now championed by everyone from the democratic socialist mayor of New York City to the Trump-supporting governors of Montana and Florida.

And yet, some people, including some YIMBYs, have begun to worry that not enough progress is being made:

Derek Thompson, coauthor of Abundance and a regular columnist here at The Argument, recently noted on The Ezra Klein Show that if you look at the housing starts in California, Abundance’s performance is lackluster. He argued that in the six months since the state passed SB 79, “California still hasn’t actually increased housing starts.”

Klein agreed, saying earlier in the episode that looking at the housing numbers over the past decade, you can’t even see evidence of the YIMBY movement’s work.

These comments were seized on by anti-YIMBY voices as proof that pro-housing policy doesn’t work.

I find myself baffled at the presumption that YIMBY legislation hasn’t succeeded. I think it has succeeded; any honest accounting shows that, and pro-housing voices should stop being so bashful about this.

No one ever said the California housing crisis could be solved in a year. In fact, many of us have been warning that the fix will be the work of decades, and we risk inculcating the idea that YIMBYism has failed when all evidence shows that it is most definitely working.

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All the evidence that YIMBY reforms are producing more housing

Washington state has passed some of the most ambitious pro-housing reforms in the nation. In 2024, Seattle set a record for housing completions: Builders opened 12,730 units through October alone, already the most of any calendar year in two decades and well past the prior high of 10,937 set during the 2019 Amazon boom. What’s even more remarkable is that Seattle kept production booming during the worst financing environment for new construction since the Great Recession.

But, to be honest, while this sort of eyeballing a graph can provide suggestive evidence, it’s not smart to rely on it when trying to tease out the exact impact of specific pieces of legislation. The problem with looking at a graph of housing starts in California and concluding that YIMBY legislation hasn’t had an effect is that you’re not measuring the counterfactual. We don’t know how much housing would have been built without YIMBY legislation — perhaps even fewer units would have been built! That’s why God gave us economists and causal inference.

Perhaps the world’s most comprehensive major zoning reform success story happened in 2016 in New Zealand. The country had seen its home prices increase by roughly 50% between 2009 and 2016, spurring dramatic action. Lawmakers upzoned about 75% of Auckland’s residential land, roughly tripling the zoned capacity of the city. Because these are such major reforms, they are a really good case for teasing out what the effect of upzoning actually is.

Economists looked at Auckland and found that the major housing reforms there took two years before the data revealed a statistically significant above-trend amount of housing. The effect was massive: Within six years, the reforms produced an additional 43,500 housing permits and rents ended up about 28% lower than they would have been without it.

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Auckland wasn’t a fluke; São Paulo overhauled its zoning that very same year, and it took a year for permits to visibly surge in the data and the actual housing showed up three to four years down the line.

Closer to home, in New York City, upzoned neighborhoods took three years to show a difference from pre-trend construction rates.

It’s useful to think through why it takes so long for new housing to get built. Upzoning legislation is not a mandate to build; it’s just granting the first step in a long line of permissions developers need to get in order to begin building.

Even in places with sky-high demand, developers need to understand the new legal environment, purchase parcels of land, pull together financing for a project, and often get permits from local governments to commence building. And all of that can be derailed by shocks to the construction labor force (check), building materials (check), and general economic instability (check!).

That’s why, even in places like New York City or Los Angeles, where there is incredibly high demand, there are still parcels of land that have not been developed. There are just a lot of barriers to growth!

The Atlantic’s Rogé Karma conducted a thoughtful investigation of why California in particular has had a hard time getting housing units built. Karma found that “the problem in California is … even as [legislators] removed some regulatory barriers, they created new ones. In trying to accomplish every objective and accommodate every interest, all at once, California set up its housing agenda to fail.”

Despite the ideological victory of the YIMBY movement, there are significant anti-growth headwinds. The most difficult barrier to growth is that decision-making on housing is heavily decentralized, so even if you do get state action, localities have infinite tools at their disposal to delay implementation or create an inhospitable environment for developers.

Why is it so hard for liberals to take the W?

“A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel,” Robert Frost once quipped.

Open-mindedness is good, epistemic humility is good, and changing your mind in light of new evidence is good, but excessive self-effacement is a scourge. The whole point of all these high-minded liberal norms about reasoning isn’t to display them for their own sake, it’s to get us all closer to the truth. More specifically, these are instruments to protect against one specific failure mode: overconfidence.

Liberals, and by this I mean those of us in the tradition of Rawls and Mill, rightly worry about being insufficiently open to new ideas. Lots of very well-meaning liberals supported ideas like scientific racism and eugenics, the inferiority of women, and the exclusion of religious minorities. It’s good to maintain the constant self-discipline of recognizing that you could be wrong and missing something hugely important.

But what happens when liberals are right? The norms that guard relentlessly against overconfidence don’t actually help with the opposite problem of excessive doubt. In fact, they can actually hurt, causing people to end up underweighting a conclusion that is actually true.

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If everyone were a liberal, this would be less of a problem, but we’re in a discursive environment where most political factions barely care about being correct at all. When people see that someone on their side is wrong, they tend to shrug and ignore it because at least their team is directionally correct.

Take Vice President JD Vance, who popularized the story of Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. When pressed about the veracity of his argument, he retreated to: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Who cares if it’s not literally true that Haitians are eating dogs in Springfield? What matters is that immigrants are destroying our way of life, and that’s what you need to focus on.

This isn’t a quirk of the populist right. The same move runs through every faction that has made up its mind in advance. When people — including yours truly — pointed out that private equity was not the root of the housing crisis, that didn’t stop left-populists from doubling down on casting private equity firms as responsible for high home prices.

Senate Democrats have introduced roughly a dozen such bills, from the HOPE for Homeownership Act to the American Homeownership Act, each premised on the idea that hedge funds are "driving up home prices." The obsession with this myth almost brought down the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the most significant piece of federal housing legislation in a generation.

And while I don’t advocate for liberals discarding all our principles, we should recognize that humility doesn’t mean you can’t recognize when you’re almost certainly correct about something. YIMBYs spent two decades insisting that the housing crisis was a supply crisis, that zoning was the culprit, and that building more would bring costs down. They were called developer shills and told that supply doesn’t filter, that prices would never be affected by zoning reforms. And then Auckland, Minneapolis, Austin, São Paulo, and Seattle proved that YIMBYs had been correct all along.

This is as close to vindication as politics ever offers. So stop being broad-minded and let’s take the W.

Recommended reading:

Last August, a press release announced the formation of a new $100 million super PAC, Leading the Future.

The group was funded by OpenAI President Greg Brockman and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and, according to its press release, represented “a coalition of leading AI companies and innovators” aiming to “support candidates aligned with the pro-AI agenda and ensure America leads the world in AI innovation and oppose those that do not.”1

Leading the Future was modeled on Fairshake, an extremely successful cryptocurrency PAC that Andreessen Horowitz had invested in during the previous election cycle. Fairshake’s theory of political pressure was simple: If you were against cryptocurrency, they would run primary and general election ads against you or for your opponents.

And it worked. Fairshake spent $40 million to defeat former Sen. Sherrod Brown’s 2024 reelection bid, another $10 million in a successful effort to defeat Senate candidate Katie Porter, and $2 million against former Rep. Jamaal Bowman in New York. In all three of those contests, Fairshake got its way and probably made a lot of other candidates extremely hesitant to put forward anti-crypto regulation as a result.

The plan with LTF was to repeat the successful experiment, this time to go after candidates bent on regulating AI. But it’s taken less than a year for that plan to crash and burn spectacularly.

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AI isn’t crypto. Fairshake’s playbook worked because crypto is a low-salience issue where most voters aren’t paying attention.

AI is completely different: Americans are beginning to care intensely and likely will care more and more as the technology spreads through various sectors of the economy. LTF was a bet against AI’s own importance, placed by many of the people building the technology. And it’s a bet they’re losing.

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

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The Verdict

Happy Father’s Day! I hope you also had a great day with a dad in your life. I decided to do a light investigation into how dads spend their time relative to (male) non-dads. The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) randomly selects a person age 15 or older from households that have completed the Current Population Survey. They are then asked to walk through the previous 24 hours in their own words, and each activity is then logged.

There are, of course, myriad ways this could go wrong: People could misremember how much time they spend driving, and they could inflate things like time spent with family and minimize things like time spent scrolling TikTok. But it’s the best source of information we have on how Americans are spending their days.

Using this data, I, using Claude, decided to figure out what dads are up to.

The survey doesn’t actually ask whether respondents are fathers, but you can find out whether people are living with a child in the home. I chose an expansive definition, which includes men living with a child who is not their own. As a result, I may have inadvertently included older brothers, uncles, or other male roommates living with minors, but that was a scant concern compared with leaving out foster dads, granddads, and unofficial stepdads, of which there are many.

This approach, of course, leaves out dads who are not living with their children, either because their children have already left the nest or they are the noncustodial parent or they are a deadbeat or any other reason.

The top three differences between dads and male non-dads are:

1. Dads spend roughly one hour a day on childcare, whereas non-dads spend no time on childcare.

2. Dads lose one hour of leisure time a day, which is, to a large extent, just less screen time. (While dads play fewer video games, spend less time on the internet for fun, and spend less time reading for pleasure, there is one leisure category where they edge out non-dads: socializing.)

3. Dads lose roughly 25 minutes of sleep compared with non-dads.

The toughest call I had to make was to restrict this to employed men, because if I include nonemployed men (and dads are likelier to be employed than non-dads) then almost all of the effects would be driven by the fact that some people are spending most of their day at their job.

I had Claude pull nonemployed men between 25 and 54 and compare the ones living with a child in the home with the ones living without. This is a very tiny sample (47 fathers, 101 childless), so I’m not reading too much into this, but topline findings showed that nonemployed dads do more childcare than employed dads (roughly 1.84 hours per day versus 1.02 for employed dads). This is probably reflecting the growing share of stay-at-home fathers. Unsurprisingly, nonemployed childless men are the champions of leisure — roughly 7.6 hours per day of socializing/relaxing/leisure time.

To the employed and nonemployed dads alike, I hope you’re able to make back some of that leisure time today.

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Top stories this week, by Maibritt Henkel

As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

The big news of the week is that the Split Ticket 2026 Midterms Model has gone live on The Argument’s website. In this piece, Lakshya covers the headline findings and explains why they differ from those of other major polls. To give you the TL;DR: Our numbers put the Senate essentially at a toss-up but strongly favor Democrats winning the House.

As per usual, Jeremiah contributed a cultural take that got the people going: Sometimes you have to hurt people. The piece is inspired in part by Phoebe Bridgers’ controversial concert phone ban and in part by an insane football lawsuit (and also… abundance). He points out that maybe the best response to zoomers who say they can’t live without their phones for two hours is to defend the good old-fashioned principle of the greatest good for the greatest number — even if someone, somewhere gets hurt.

Kobe wrote a piece that tries to make sense of the place software engineers hold in the American public imagination, from the #learntocode craze of the 2010s to the now-peculiarly widespread concern for tech workers in the 2020s. Our May poll revealed that people are more willing to support a protectionist ban against using AI in software engineering than in any other industry. But do the software engineers really have it so bad?

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• Congress is set to pass the much-beleaguered 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Jerusalem wrote about one of the most controversial parts of this bill earlier in the year. A lot of hard work from YIMBYs made this possible!

• The U.S. Energy Information Administration published its June outlook, and utility-scale solar generation is forecast to rise 19% this summer compared with last, reflecting a 20% increase in average solar capacity.

• Scientists in Denmark identified hydrogen radicals as a mechanism for breaking down PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” that may be cause for concern when they build up in water, soil, and the human body.

Worth watching...

This week on the pod, Jerusalem and Matt bravely entered the world of gender slop. My favorite line comes from Jerusalem, who argued that dating advice based on gender stereotyping makes people less curious about the individual in front of them, ultimately hurting their romantic chances. So libbed out.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Maibritt Henkel

It’s World Cup season, and because Denmark, my small and clearly not-so-mighty home country, did not qualify this year, I asked the office which team to root for instead.

told me her son has gone “all in on Cabo Verde.” And while the team’s goalkeeper, Vozinha, stole ’ heart, she is obviously holding out for “AMERICA.” (Separately, she recommended Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth as a good summer read.)

has also been watching the World Cup, and he has been amused by the reaction of foreign fans to “American abundance.” Apparently, there are anecdotes circling on Twitter of “Japanese people startled at bottomless chips” and “the British being like “WTF?” at Waffle House.”

I don’t know how many World Cup matches has watched, but I do know that he watched the four-part docuseries The Dark Wizard, which he very emphatically declared “the best climbing doc for anyone who is not into climbing at all.” Now, Kobe is in fact into climbing, which slightly undermines his authority on that point, but he did call the whole thing “really beautiful,” both visually and spiritually.

Justin attended the DC/DOX film festival, where he saw Soul Patrol, a documentary about an all-Black special operations unit in the Vietnam War. “The film cuts between the final reunion for the last living vets of the unit and Super 8 footage shot entirely by young soldiers in the war.”

Finally, went to Sunset Cinema at The Wharf, a free weekly outdoor movie series at Transit Pier in D.C. They will be screening Hamilton on July 8. Just a heads up.

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Lincoln’s re-election wasn’t a sure thing, and the president worried that if he lost, his opponent might decide to compromise with the traitorous secessionists without ridding the nation of slavery. But, of course, Lincoln did win, and this speech was delivered roughly a month before the South surrendered and the president was assassinated.

I’ve included the full text below for you to consider making it a part of your Juneteenth tradition.

I’m also going to celebrate by cheering on America as we play Australia in the World Cup today—you should too! The Argument will be back to our regularly scheduled programming on Sunday, enjoy the long weekend!

Fellow-Countrymen:

At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented.

The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

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I hate dating advice on the internet.

The form is inherently reductive and requires the person giving said advice to speak in generalized, sensational terms. Men are aggressive, women are anxious. Use these tips to dominate any woman. Spot the red flags in the guy you’re dating before it’s too late.

I originally resisted doing an episode on this topic, but my co-host, Matt Yglesias, convinced me that, as good liberals, it’s our job to check in every so often and make sure the kids are all right. The optimistic version of the genre comes from people like Noah Smith, who recently made the case that, contrary to what the incels would have you believe, there are a lot of average women out there interested in average guys — a view Matt and I largely agree with.

So I made an anonymous YouTube account, set the gender to male, and watched what got served up. Unsurprisingly, I did not get “here are some polite questions you could ask a woman at a bar.” Instead, it was a lot of “women want money and power, and they need you to dominate the conversation.”

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Matt watched self-improvement tips from Andrew Tate, an accused rapist and all-around horrible person. He also came across Dan Bilzerian, a far-right antisemite, advising his viewers to wait at least five minutes before texting a woman back in order to make her anxious and self-conscious.

The female-focused content has its own reductive and skewed worldview. Much of it is a strange kind of anti-dating advice, where women teach others how to make sure a man won’t embarrass them. You need to constantly scan for red flags but also be careful not to be a shrew.

The premise is that dating is a minefield, and your job is to avoid the landmines.

Matt is more sympathetic to getting dating advice online. He thinks there’s real demand among young men for words of wisdom that feel honest and politically incorrect. He’s less worried about the rules on texting a girl than about these videos acting as a gateway to conspiracy theories on the Elders of Zion.

But, whether it comes from the right or the left, flattening people into stereotypes is not only gross but just bad advice. Curiosity about the specific person in front of you is the kind of thing relationships are built on, after all.

My deeper objection is that none of this is oriented toward long-term happiness. Building a real relationship requires risk. It means forgiving early mistakes, sticking by someone when you don’t have perfect information, and seeing if there’s a genuine connection.

If Mr. Darcy had a manosphere influencer yapping in his ear after Elizabeth Bennet’s first rejection, he would have just moved on. There is no Pemberley, no second proposal, no happily ever after.

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The advice telling you to neg that girl at the bar might get her to go out with you. But when you’ve gone on a pile of dates with women who can’t give you what you want long term, what was the point?

Because internet dating advice is made by people who don’t know you and don’t care about you, it’s almost certainly not worth putting much stock in. Instead, if you want my advice, take notes from the successful couples in your life and seek out help from people who know you well and genuinely care about your well-being and happiness.

Matt and I get into all of it on this week’s episode.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

(Illustration by The Argument, photo by Stringer via Getty)

The transcript will be after the paywall in this post for paying subscribers.

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WATCH THE EPISODE HERE (YouTube)

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For an ad-free version and full transcript, subscribe at TheArgumentMag.com.

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Show notes:

• The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, book by Neil Strauss about so-called “pickup artists,” mentioned by Matt in reference to “negging”: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Noah Smith essay giving dating advice for men, mentioned by Jerusalem as example of the genre taking hold of the “wonk class”: Noahpinion article

• Andrew Tate video about importance of appearing impressive, mentioned by Matt and played in clip: YouTube video

• Coverage of Andrew Tate arrest for sexual trafficking and assault: BBC article, The New Yorker article

• Example of advice (targeted to men) that women mainly want a partner who is rich, powerful, and assertive: forums.red post

• Examples of advice (targeted to men) that they need to be impressive themselves to meet an impressive women: YouTube Short, YouTube Short

• Dan Bilzerian video advising men to wait before texting women back: Instagram video

• The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right, dating advice book by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, mentioned by Matt in reference to determining how long to wait before responding to a potential romantic partner: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Joe Rogan Experience viewership metrics: Forbes article, JRE Library stats

• Hasan Piker Twitch viewership metrics: SullyGnome analysis

• Capable, upcoming book by Rachel Cohen Booth about personal agency (scheduled to be released Spring 2027), mentioned by Jerusalem in reference to personal agency advice-giving increasingly appearing right-coded: Book announcement, Tweet

• Coverage of world population reaching approximately 8.3 billion people: World Population Review article

• Discourse about phrase “Don’t ask a fish how to catch a fish; ask a fisherman” in reference to dating: The Dating Boss article, r/dating-advice thread

• Survey on how couples meet and stay together (first fielded in 2009) showing a plurality now meet online: Stanford page, ICPSR page, Line graph

• Coverage of marriage rates declining: The New York Times article, Our World in Data page

• Coverage of Kamala Harris’ viral “coconut tree” quote: Forbes article, The New Yorker article

• Example of advice (targeted to women) that if men are truly romantically interested, it will be obvious: Instagram Reel, Instagram Reel, Instagram Reel, TikTok video

• He’s Just Not That Into You, book and film adaptation illustrating “if he wanted to, he would”-type advice: Goodreads page, IMDb page

• Example of advice (targeted to women) that’s important to watch out for warning signs in the early days of dating: Instagram Reel, TikTok video

• Examples of advice (targeted to women) that attracting men means capturing and presenting “feminine energy”: Instagram Reel, Instagram Reel, Instagram Reel, Instagram Reel, TikTok video

• “The Feminine Reset” dating quiz about whether or not you are “in your feminine energy” mentioned by Jerusalem: Blooming Queen Club quiz

• Coverage of male-oriented heteropessimism: Archives of Sexual Behavior article, Cartoons Hate Her article

• Coverage of female-oriented heteropessimism: The New York Times op-ed, New York Magazine article

• Pride and Prejudice, famous novel by Jane Austen depicting Regency-era upper class courting conventions. Brought up by Jerusalem to illustrate the impact of dating advice influencers: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Does Height Matter? An Examination of Height Preferences in Romantic Coupling,” study showing 57% of women say height matters when seeking a date and that 49% of women prefer to exclusively date men taller than themselves: Journal of Family Issues article

• Coverage of women being diagnosed with depression and anxiety at approximately twice the rate of men: Mayo Clinic article, Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology article

• Coverage showing that while men get angry at approximately the same rate as women, they express that anger as aggression more frequently: Psychology Today article, Journal of Interpersonal Violence article, Wisconsin Public Radio article

• Coverage of testosterone rates correlating with rates of aggression: International Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism article, Hormones and Behavior article, The Harvard Gazette article

• Example of manosphere-style content showing what percentage of the population women are purportedly limiting themselves to with their purported dating preferences: r/NotHowGirlsWork post

• Example of advice (targeted to women) that men should be doing most of the planning for dates: TikTok video

• Example of advice (targeted to women) that men should be willing to change for you: YouTube Short

• Study of Big Five personality traits showing women tend to score higher on Warmth and Positive Emotions, while men tend to score higher on Assertiveness and Excitement Seeking: Frontiers in Psychology article

• Coverage of fathers of daughters having, on average, higher support for gender egalitarianism: Psychology Today article, Public Opinion Quarterly article, Brandeis Now article

• Peer review: “How Much Has Shale Gas Saved U.S. Consumers?” paper by Lucas W. Davis calculating how much natural gas customers have saved annually, between 2007 and 2025, as a result of the fracking boom: NBER working paper

• Discourse about divergence in path of U.S. and European economies: Euronews article, Newsweek article, Calm Down article

• Coverage of fracking boom causing economic growth in Obama and Biden presidencies: Cato Institute article, Council on Foreign Relations article, Politico article

• Explanations of how hydraulic fracturing works to free shale gas: London School of Economics explainer, National Geographic Society video, EPA snapshot

• Coverage of natural gas drilling causing methane leaks: Environmental Defense Fund fact sheet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article

• Coverage of methane being worse than carbon dioxide for climate in the short term but not the long term: MIT Climate Portal article, Climate and Clean Air Coalition article

• “Economics versus Politics: Pitfalls of Policy Advice,” article by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson arguing that analysis of trade-offs should include an exploration of what might have happened had an intervention not taken place: Journal of Economic Perspectives article

• Coverage of natural gas having somewhat lower carbon emissions and much lower particulate emissions than coal: iScience article, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions article, Swarthmore research

• Coverage of fracking getting banned in New York state: ProPublica article, NRDC blog

• Coverage of fracking getting banned in much of Europe: Investigate Europe article, European Parliament briefing

• Silent Spring, famous book by Rachel Carson about pesticides and environmentalism, the subject of a previous podcast episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Previous podcast episode about Silent Spring, referenced at end of this episode: The Argument podcast episode

• Previous podcast episode about Chinese electric cars, referenced at the end of this episode: The Argument podcast episode

• Explanation of how geothermal energy works to utilize underground pockets of heat: MIT Climate Portal article, Union of Concerned Scientists article,

• Coverage of Mammoth, a geothermally powered carbon capture and storage facility in Iceland: BBC article, CNN article, Climeworks page

• Coverage of Blue Lagoon, outdoor geothermal spa in Iceland: Forbes article, Blue Lagoon site

Transcript

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The Argument is holding another live event, this time on June 17 in Washington, D.C.!

Jerusalem Demsas will be interviewing USC psychologist Darby Saxbe about her new book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives.

Drawing on two decades of research, Darby explains how becoming a father changes men, from their hormones and brain architecture to their sense of purpose. (Yes, men experience postpartum depression, and “dad bod” is real.)

They’ll get into hot-button topics like:

• Are great dads born or made?

• How do men’s brains and hormones change when they become fathers?

• Why does motherhood get all the attention while fatherhood goes overlooked?

• Does the way dads play with their kids matter?

The conversation kicks off at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave. NW).

Details here

This cycle, I’ve been baffled at how expert ratings seem to be forecasting a neutral-to-good year for Republicans in the House. As of this moment, both The Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball both show more seats leaning Republican than Democratic.1

I think this is completely wrong. In fact, all of the modeling we’re doing suggests that this isn’t even close. The House leans Democratic, and extremely strongly so. That’s why our midterms model finds that Democrats have an 86% chance of winning the lower chamber, even after all of the mid-decade redistricting takes place, with a median outcome of 229 Democrats to 206 Republicans.

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On a seat-by-seat level, it looks even more grim for Republicans. The Texas gerrymander that the party created to bolster its majority is likely to net the party just two new seats instead of the five they originally envisioned.2 Meanwhile, Democrats are cleaning up in the heavily Hispanic seats that had recently begun to slide away from them.

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Phoebe Bridgers recently announced that her upcoming tour would feature “no phones” at all shows. Fans would be required to leave phones at home or lock them in Yondr pouches for the duration of the show.

While many fans expressed excitement and viewed the move positively, other fans went ballistic at the thought of not being able to use their phones. If we’re allowed to be honest, the root cause is obviously that Bridgers’ fanbase skews toward Gen Z, and many of them are utterly addicted to their phones. They find the thought of having to mainline reality without filtering it through the black mirror of their smartphone existentially terrifying.

But they couldn’t exactly say “I’m pathetically addicted to my phone,” so instead these angry fans made all kinds of other claims. The cost-of-living crisis entitles them to record concerts. Banning phones is classist. Comparisons were made to racial segregation. But the most interesting claim to me was that banning phones would hurt disabled people. One user claimed to experience “pseudo-seizures” and said that only looking at their phone could calm them down and stop the seizure.

One approach to this kind of ridiculous claim is to argue in detail about the merits of the claim. I could argue that “looking at my phone” is not a medically necessary intervention for pseudo-seizures. I could mention that pseudo-seizures are a murky concept, a psychogenic “diagnosis of exclusion“ that medical resources claim is difficult to distinguish from malingering,1 and subject to abuse.

I could further point out that perhaps a gigantic arena concert is not the best place for someone who describes themselves as having seizures and passing out in response to overstimulation. I might even mention that if someone did need their phone, they could simply step into the venue’s concourse and use said phone there, away from the show.

But all of those arguments are in some way accepting a faulty premise. What I actually want to argue is that even if you take every single silly claim at face value, even if you allow that some small number of disabled people will be excluded or harmed by this decision, that’s OK. There are times when it’s fine to exclude or harm people. And we need to be better at saying that out loud.

The tyranny of the edge case

If there’s any possible way that an action could harm someone — no matter how unlikely the scenario is, how small the harm might be, or how easily it might be mitigated — there will exist people who demand that nobody take that action. God forbid the action intersect with any of the various -isms like racism, sexism, or ableism. You’ll probably get dragged to The Hague. This is what I call “the tyranny of the edge case.”

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It would be bad enough if this absurdity were limited to social media discourses and online nonsense. But this worldview is now infecting society beyond the crumbling walls of Twitter and Reddit:

• Standardized testing might conceivably harm students of color, so we must abolish it.

• Common-sense criminal justice reforms might perpetuate racial disparities, so we can’t implement them.

• A solar plant might endanger the threecorner milkvetch, so it must be delayed.

• We can’t build housing because new buildings might cast shadows that would be mildly unpleasant, or because some people would be sad to lose a historic laundromat.

Recently, Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby was revealed to be an inveterate gambler, one who had even bet on games involving his own team. There’s not yet any evidence that he threw games, but he did bet on games as an insider who knew the state of his team’s readiness better than any outsider could have.

Naturally, the NCAA banned him, but Sorsby sued the athletic organization, arguing that he was a gambling addict and in recovery, and that he would be irreparably harmed by being banned from college football. This week, a Texas judge granted him an injunction that will allow him to play anyway, and the injunction’s reasoning is filled with edge-case nonsense. It argues that Sorsby would be deprived of “coaching, training resources, camaraderie, and regimen”2 if removed from the team, that he would face “hardships” against his rights and interests if he can’t play, and that as long as he’s in treatment for his gambling addiction, he can’t be prevented from being a member of the team.

In other words, you can’t ban a gambler who undermined the integrity of the sport because he might be addicted to gambling!

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The Argument is holding another live event, this time on June 17 in Washington, D.C.!

Jerusalem Demsas will be interviewing USC psychologist Darby Saxbe about her new book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives.

Drawing on two decades of research, Darby explains how becoming a father changes men, from their hormones and brain architecture to their sense of purpose. (Yes, men experience postpartum depression, and “dad bod” is real.)

They’ll get into hot-button topics like:

• Are great dads born or made?

• How do men’s brains and hormones change when they become fathers?

• Why does motherhood get all the attention while fatherhood goes overlooked?

• Does the way dads play with their kids matter?

The conversation kicks off at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave. NW).

Details here

Americans are not Luddites, except on behalf of software engineers.

In our latest poll, The Argument asked respondents whether they would support a ban on AI to replace human workers in a number of professions, a policy that would represent, perhaps, the best modern equivalent to Luddism.

I expected Americans to be Luddites for teachers or Luddites for truckers — for any profession that had a human touch or a little bit of workingman’s valor.

Instead, the only profession that got plurality support for a ban on AI use was software engineering:

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Overall, Americans supported the ban on AI in software engineering by a split of 44 to 41. It’s a small margin but a notable one given that bans for many professions were underwater by double digits.

One obvious explanation for this is that the public responds to a drumbeat of news stories about whatever industry is being automated next. The industry with the second-most support for a ban was manufacturing, which was sitting at break-even support (44 to 44). For a long time, manufacturing has been the stereotypical job facing automation, but now that software engineering is in that spotlight, Americans are willing to protect it.

That explanation is probably true, but it’s also a big step from hearing that an industry could be automated to supporting a ban to protect it.

The surprising support for a ban on the automation of software engineering likely also stems from the fact that it has spent over a decade as the field that represented social mobility, including for those who didn’t go to an elite school.

In the 2010s, the advice “learn to code” became something of a mantra, both as advice to young people as well as a taunt to people in declining industries. Now, in the late 2020s, with massive labor market disruption in the offing, it’s unclear what advice replaces it. A lot of Americans are willing to throw up blockers to preserve the old path, even if that path was only aspirational.

Americans viewed coding as the path up

Most bans in our poll showed a strong age gradient. On average, across all of the industries where we polled automation bans, young people (18 to 29) were 9.5 percentage points more likely to support a ban on AI in a given profession compared to 45- to 64-year-olds.1 This makes sense because younger people, earlier in their careers, have more of a stake in any given ban.

With software engineers, that age gradient all but disappeared. Older cohorts roughly matched the support of young people for a ban. Our poll showed relatively muted differences along race and gender lines. The other thing that did stick out along the age gradient was that the young cohort was 20 points more likely to want to ban AI in K-12 education than people in the 45 to 64 cohort, which is double its support for other bans.

As a teenager in the 2010s, I remember getting two kinds of professional advice from my elders: Learn Chinese and learn to code.2 These two things were, respectively, the future of international business and, well… international business, domestic business, business, and even entrepreneurship.

In the early 2010s, it was common to think that everything was computer, or would be.3

In 2014, BuzzFeed published a quiz called “Should You Learn To Code?” The quiz asked people to click on an identity that described them so they could get a personalized answer, listing everything from being a woman to being a rapper.

The joke, of course, was that every square led to a hyperlink where someone was telling that group they should learn to code. Basketball fans should learn to code because basketball star Chris Bosh said you should learn to code. A disabled veteran should learn to code because when one disabled veteran asked Reddit for advice on his future, Reddit users mobbed him with advice to code. Everyone was being told the same thing: Learn. To. Code.

It’s important to distinguish between two versions of this advice. One kind was directed at young people going to college and another was purportedly meant as a DIY path back from a layoff or otherwise dimmed financial prospects.

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In 2012, billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tweeted an endorsement of Codecademy’s campaign #codeyear, posting that coding was his own New Year’s resolution. Codecademy was one of the online outlets that had popped up to give people a DIY way to get into the industry.

Bloomberg’s advice was a common nudge to those living through a decade of slow job growth and flat wages. Retraining as a coder was, apparently, the way back up.

By the end of the decade, that kind of advice would produce backlash, perhaps reasonably.

In 2019, when a round of layoffs hit BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post, the hashtag #LearnToCode blew up as a sardonic jab at journalists who had made this suggestion many times to laid off coal miners. “Learn to code” was now seen as the way elites offered outsiders the dregs of an economy that had rewarded knowledge work in superstar cities.

Separately from the retraining discourse, students entering college were driven to computer science in large numbers: Data from Revelio Labs shows that computer science majors peaked at 11% in this year’s graduating class. This means that the peak year for the enrollment of computer science majors was 2022, which had been climbing throughout the decade prior.

That growing share of computer science majors were responding to a real wage premium. In 2016, a typical computer science graduate earned $19,000 more than a mechanical engineering graduate from the same school, according to Revelio. But by 2024, this premium had dropped to less than $10,000.4

There are more reasons for this than the widespread release of chatbots in 2022. For one, the tech industry had major layoffs in 2024 as interest rates rose, lowering demand for software engineers. But whatever the causes, it’s easy to see how the economic bump for computer science majors is unlikely to come back.

The brief path coding offered in the 2010s has now narrowed, if not disappeared.

Americans aren’t learning to vibe code

The irony is that AI makes coding itself more accessible, not less accessible. The threat to software engineers is a threat precisely because it makes their skillset less scarce and more available to others.

As of right now, however, not many people are using AI to code, despite the fact that it requires zero prior coding knowledge to produce fully functional projects. With AI, if you want to start a business, you can not only create your website with AI, but you can now run all your business processes — from expense tracking to payroll — with a set of prepackaged commands.

Nonetheless, the vast majority of people use AI to do enhanced Googling.

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In our poll, we asked responders how they use AI. A majority said they used AI for looking up information (55%), while just 8% used it for coding, despite the immense range of self-starting projects it could facilitate.

But software engineers are themselves an unusual vanguard. Norms in the industry favor disruption, quitting, and entrepreneurship, which makes an odd fit for protectionist politics.

The most valorized software engineers are not old hands who stay at the same company for 30+ years but those who leave and start their own companies. Remarkably, in a recent Pew Research Center poll, workers in information and technology were among the most likely to say the technology would help, not hurt, their future job prospects.

Those workers may be right.

In their latest essay, authors Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan argued that software engineering may not be at risk at all. In it, they cited three recent news stories in which either CEOs or the media credited a tech company’s layoffs to AI when there were really other causes.

It can be helpful for CEOs to point at AI when a business has other reasons for layoffs. It turns a bad story into one where the CEO is a hero for driving adoption. But as Kapoor and Narayanan pointed out, layoffs would not be the sign of rapid AI productivity gains — slower hiring is much more likely to be a sign of AI’s effect on an industry.

In other words, a lot of the stories that have led to concern for software engineers might be based on a false premise and a few flashy news stories.

But if the public is ready to go to war for even the software engineers, it raises the question: How strange will the politics get if AI disruption comes for very different industries? Ones with credentialism baked into the DNA, with lobbyists ready to push for state-by-state bans, with unions ready to fight back?

If AI disruption reaches these industries, then the latent protectionism within large swaths of the American public will no longer be cutting against the professions’ own instincts; they will be aligned.

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Recommended reading:

Welcome to the The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Argument is holding another live event, this time on June 17 in Washington, D.C.!

Jerusalem Demsas will be interviewing USC psychologist Darby Saxbe about her new book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives.

Drawing on two decades of research, Darby explains how becoming a father changes men, from their hormones and brain architecture to their sense of purpose. (Yes, men experience postpartum depression, and “dad bod” is real.)

They’ll get into hot-button topics like:

• Are great dads born or made?

• How do men’s brains and hormones change when they become fathers?

• Why does motherhood get all the attention while fatherhood goes overlooked?

• Does the way dads play with their kids matter?

The conversation kicks off at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave. NW).

Details here

The Verdict

Elon Musk became a trillionaire this week after his company SpaceX went public.

SpaceX is a genuine achievement — yes, space stuff in general is cool, but what I find the most impressive is the financial powerhouse behind the company: Starlink.

Starlink is an achievement of physics, vertical integration, and manufacturing. Traditional satellites are launched up to roughly 35,000 km away from earth on a rocket and then are launched sideways at tremendous speed. But orbiting 35,000 km away presents a lot of challenges (your signal has to travel 70,000 km back and forth; that’s why the old satellite internet was SO slow).1

Starlink has instead blanketed its satellites at the 480km to 550km range, close enough that it actually beats fiber-optic cable since traveling through glass is slower than in empty space. This isn’t a post about how cool Starlink is, but the number of challenges SpaceX had to solve to do this is extraordinary: Launch costs, manufacturing speed, phased array antennas…

Most of the conversation about SpaceX’s IPO was about Musk himself, who has become a reactionary and powerful political figure seeking to prop up far-right political parties, anti-immigration politics, and a broad hostility to the liberal economic and political regime that made his life story possible.

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I agree with all of those critiques of Musk, but I want to focus on the specific ire that his inauguration as the first trillionaire has drawn, because it’s exposed an unhealthy habit of mind among populists that focuses on gaps rather than absolute measures.

When people hear “world’s first trillionaire” they’re imagining that this is money in a bank account, but around 95% of Musk’s wealth is held in stocks of SpaceX and Tesla. That means if those companies start doing badly, his wealth will decline. Of course, Musk is able to liquify his assets by leveraging his stocks to borrow money if he so chooses, but that would require his companies to continue being successful, which is not an easy thing to do.

If we had a system where Elon was still CEO of SpaceX and Tesla but simply had to redistribute more of his shares and make many more billionares, would that really change how much political power he has? I doubt it. He’d still get to decide whether Ukraine or Russia gets Starlink access.

Sometimes Westerners will do a sort of cope where they point out that the multiples that separate the average American and Musk are way larger than those between the world’s poorest and the average American. But even under inequality-logic, that only works if you ignore the many, many people with zero wealth and negative wealth. After all, the multiple between zero and $193,000 is infinity, whereas the multiple between $193,000 and $1 trillion is 5.2 million.

But most importantly: the difference between me and someone living in rural Eritrea is not just our wealth but the inequality that comes with living in a country without basic access to civil liberties like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, strong property rights protections, government-provided infrastructure, and protection from casual violence.

Mostly, I just don’t think material inequality is a good way to organize one’s political thinking. Absolute measures of well-being like longevity, access to clean running water, health care, housing, and education are more conceptually clear.

After all, the same flawed logic that would indict Musk for his mindboggling amounts of wealth would indict everyone reading this article when compared to the billions of people living in abject poverty.

Gaps between people, absent material deprivation, is simply not a moral problem. If everyone in the world had access to a decent standard of living, but some people were quadrillionaires, I don’t know that I would care about the latter. Moreover, it’s easy to imagine a world without much inequality but significant deprivation; that’s just most of human history when most people lived in subsistence agrarian economies.

Largely, when you look at measures of inequality, it’s possible to have high-inequality, high-poverty countries (South Africa, Botswana, Namibia) and low-inequality, high-poverty countries (Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine). I just don’t think inequality is that related to the central problems facing society, and structuring our discourse around it makes for a genuinely incoherent politics.

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Top stories this week, by Milan Singh

As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

Not to gas myself up too much, but I think my article on Monday was pretty good. I argued that centrist Democrats should just give up on the 2028 presidential primary. The party has changed a lot since the 1990s, and liberal Democrats are now in the majority.

Jerusalem had an excellent piece on the crisis of patriotism on the left. If you want to save our country from MAGA, you actually need to like our country. But it seems many people on the left are either too embarrassed to say that they do or are not-so-secretly ashamed of America.

Finally, Lakshya had a great piece breaking down the results of The Argument’s May poll. AI isn’t a top priority for most voters — yet. But to the extent that voters are thinking about AI, they’re skeptical of its benefits and fearful about the potential risks. For all the details on what we found in the data, take a look at the article below.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• Switzerland voters libbed out and voted against capping the country’s population at 10 million.

• California takes forever to count votes (they should fix this), but earlier this week, Los Angeles counted enough votes to confirm that Nithya Raman will advance to the mayoral runoff election against incumbent Karen Bass. People tend to sleep on Raman (and Zohran Mamdani) because they’re democratic socialists. But they both have elite ball knowledge when it comes to housing. Mamdani was much better than Andrew Cuomo on it, and Raman is far superior to Bass, too.

• The CEO of AstraZeneca said that AI was helping the firm speed up the development of new medicines. “The value of AI in our industry is productivity improvement,” he said. “In the way you design a new medicine, a new drug, you can actually do it faster, of course, do it smarter.”

Worth watching...

On their latest podcast episode, Jerusalem and Matt talked about Silent Spring, which helped kickstart the modern environmental movement. Degrowth environmentalism is still alive and well, but how much can we blame Silent Spring for that? Listen in to find out:

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

Lakshya, Kobe, and Jerusalem broke down the results of The Argument’s latest poll on a Substack live video Wednesday. They discussed why so few voters seem to care about AI given the large portion that expects severely negative results from the technology. Will it take a crisis for voters to take notice?

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Milan Singh

Jerusalem said that the (horrific) The New Yorker piece on the Tate brothers “fucked [her] up.” I read the article too, and I concur. Among many other horrifying things, I learned that Paul Ingrassia — the Trump administration appointee who said in a group chat that he had a “Nazi streak” — got his start as the Tates’ lawyer. In the brothers’ defamation suit against a rape survivor who accused them of sex trafficking minors.

Angela read Martyr! for Joey Politano’s fiction book club. The novel follows a young Iranian-American poet as he tries to get sober. “There was so much going on here, to be expected from a poet’s debut novel,” Angela said. “But such fun to unpack every little piece with a group.”

Justin said he’s been listening to the album in “in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music” by Dagmar Zuniga, which he said “feels like a lo-fi folk album out of the 1970s” with “perfect dreamy summer vibes.”

Maibritt finished the show Task, which she could have easily watched in one sitting. The show ticked many of her boxes: “good child acting, complicated yet ultimately positive depictions of masculinity, characters speaking a strong regional dialect, and, well, Mark Ruffalo in uniform.”

I really enjoyed Naomi Kanakia’s essay “The New Yorker offered him a deal,” which was recommended to me by my friend Charlotte. Absolutely fascinating piece; as someone who is not very familiar with this world, I learned a lot about fiction writing in a particular time and a particular place.

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More to read:

Contrary to what you may read online, most Americans love Amazon. I discuss why that might be.

What The Argument’s aggregated polling says about how each state will vote this fall. Hint: Take a look at Ohio and Texas.

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The Argument’s Chief of Staff will have two primary responsibilities:

1. Overseeing day-to-day business and administrative operations for our 10-person team

2. Building out our events business from the ground up

We’re looking for someone entrepreneurial and highly organized, someone who is passionate about both defending liberalism and creating the sorts of processes and systems that keep things running smoothly.

This is an in-person position in Washington, D.C., and the annual salary is $100,000. More details, including instructions on how to apply, below.

Chief of Staff

Washington, D.C. | $100,000/year | Full-time, in-person

Come work at a bold new media startup dedicated to defending and advancing liberal democracy through rigorous, provocative opinion journalism.

Our mission is twofold: mount a vigorous defense of liberal democracy grounded in the real debates people are having about immigration, culture, cost-of-living, and gender, and create a home where liberal thinkers speak plainly and persuasively. We champion abundance over scarcity, evidence over orthodoxy, and meaningful engagement across differences.

We focus on the issues that matter most: promoting abundance-based policies, understanding the American voter through rigorous polling analysis, examining technology’s impact on society, charting a path to gender equality, and advancing human progress.

Position Overview: We’re seeking an entrepreneurial, highly organized Chief of Staff to join our team in downtown Washington, D.C. This role is central to scaling our operations, growing our community and events businesses, and building the systems that will let The Argument grow sustainably while we pursue our mission.

Key Responsibilities

• Oversee day-to-day operations across the organization, ensuring tight coordination between editorial, business, and administrative functions

• Manage and develop our Operations Manager, providing mentorship, structure, and clear priorities

• Lead community-building efforts for our online magazine, developing strategies to deepen reader engagement and grow a loyal subscriber base

• Build and grow our events business — conceiving, planning, and executing public events, salons, and convenings that extend our editorial mission and revenue base

• Design and implement business systems and processes covering project management, vendor relationships, finance and HR coordination, and internal communications

• Partner with leadership on strategic projects, special initiatives, and operational problem-solving

• Will report to the Editor-in-Chief

Qualifications

Required:

• 4+ years of experience in operations, chief of staff, business management, or comparable roles, ideally at a startup or growth-stage organization

• Demonstrated success managing direct reports

• Experience building processes and systems from the ground up

• Strong project management skills and exceptional attention to detail

• Excellent written and verbal communication

• Enthusiasm for our mission to defend and advance liberal democracy

• Familiarity with and genuine excitement for the issues we cover

Preferred:

• Experience in media, publishing, or events

• Background in community building, audience development, or membership programs

• Knowledge of current political and cultural debates

What We Offer

• Competitive salary: $100,000 per year

• Flexible leave policies with 15 paid days off

• Comprehensive benefits package (health, dental, vision, and 401(k) match)

• Opportunity to play a senior role at a dynamic, mission-driven startup publication

• Central location in downtown Washington, D.C.

To Apply: To apply for this position, email jobs@theargumentmag.com to tell us why you’d be a good fit for this position. Please include your resume. Rolling applications.

This is an in-person position located in downtown Washington, D.C.

We are an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.

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The Argument is holding another live event, this time on June 17 in Washington, D.C.!

Jerusalem Demsas will be interviewing USC psychologist Darby Saxbe about her new book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives.

Drawing on two decades of research, Darby explains how becoming a father changes men, from their hormones and brain architecture to their sense of purpose. (Yes, men experience postpartum depression, and “dad bod” is real.)

They’ll get into hot-button topics like:

• Are great dads born or made?

• How do men’s brains and hormones change when they become fathers?

• Why does motherhood get all the attention while fatherhood goes overlooked?

• Does the way dads play with their kids matter?

The conversation kicks off at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave. NW).

Details here

Welcome back to The Argument’s poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our last surveys have asked about artificial intelligence, crime, the economy, gender issues, immigration, education and parenting, the lingering politics of COVID-19, immigration, AI, and free speech. The Argument’s full methodology can be read here.

Contemporary American progressives tend to be highly critical of Big Tech. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has argued that the “biggest threats to journalism” are “tech monopolies”; has supported breaking up Meta; and believes that Amazon’s position as both merchant and marketplace creates antitrust issues.

Bernie Sanders says that AI is being pushed by tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Ellisons at the expense of the working class.

Sanders is also vocally opposed to using automation to replace human workers,1 and he recently penned an op-ed in The New York Times advocating for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund using a one-time 50% tax on the stocks of AI companies.2

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a long history of criticizing Amazon and has publicly gone after the company for unpaid fines.

Graham Platner’s entire campaign is centered around fighting the “oligarchy” (and also addressing his latest scandal).

You might think that this rhetoric is a response to popular backlash against technology companies. And yet, Big Tech firms are popular. In The Argument’s most recent national survey, fielded from May 29 to June 3, most Americans had a favorable opinion of four large tech companies: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple.

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Far fewer Americans had opinions about the leading AI labs. About 87% of respondents had some opinion about OpenAI, but around 4 in 10 had never heard of Anthropic or Elon Musk’s xAI.

Progressives (and some conservatives) are increasingly critical of Big Tech companies and, by extension, artificial intelligence.3 Indeed, Big Tech companies often engage in anticompetitive behavior that harms consumers. But anti-tech populism is poorly suited to serve as the foundation for mass politics.

Americans love Amazon

What is the most popular institution in America? It’s not a government agency — it’s Amazon, followed closely by the military, Google, and the police.

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The Argument is holding another live event, this time on June 17 in Washington, D.C.!

Jerusalem Demsas will be interviewing USC psychologist Darby Saxbe about her new book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives. Drawing on two decades of research, Darby explains how becoming a father changes men, from their hormones and brain architecture to their sense of purpose. (Yes, men experience postpartum depression, and “dad bod” is real.)

Share

They’ll get into hot-button topics like:

• Are great dads born or made?

• How do men’s brains and hormones change when they become fathers?

• Why does motherhood get all the attention while fatherhood goes overlooked?

• Does the way dads play with their kids matter?

The conversation kicks off at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave. NW).

Details here