Once a month, Matt and I do a book club episode of The Argument podcast. In an upcoming episode this month, we are reading Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. Read along if you are interested, and please comment with any questions or ideas you would like us to explore!

True freedom requires a person with a will — and a society that is organized to allow the expression of that will.

I can want something as simple as to walk my dog at night. But if roving gangs threaten my life, then my freedom to pursue that desire is only theoretical. Even worse is if the threat is so pervasive that I can’t even imagine walking my dog at night. In neither case am I really free.

This diminished freedom has long been, to greater and lesser degrees, the status quo for most women in most places.

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Even in a society as egalitarian as the contemporary U.S., polling shows that women feel less safe to roam. Globally, “men are over 20% more likely than women to say they feel safe in their communities.” One paper about women in Delhi finds that women will choose to go to much worse colleges in order to feel safer while traveling, whereas men with similar choices will choose to attend the better colleges more frequently.

One researcher, Alice Evans, recently argued that “our analyses of progress towards gender equality still focus on economic activity and political representation, omitting a far more basic question: can women walk down the street alone at night and be at ease?”

It is not immediately obvious that women should feel less free than men: Men are much more likely than women to be victims of homicide and robbery. Of course, a big part of this is that boys are more likely to be in public spaces unsupervised in the first place.

The freedom to move in the world unburdened by the fear of violence and harassment is a fundamental prerequisite to basically every other freedom we care about: to say what you really think, to associate with whomever you wish. It can be hard to imagine a world where the average woman remains physically weaker than the average man and yet feels as free. But one thing gives me hope: If you were to describe the freedom enjoyed by many women in rich, low-crime neighborhoods in modern-day America to a woman living in the 1700s, it would become clear just how much legal, social, and cultural progress can be made.

#MeToo’s unfinished revolution

The slogan Me Too was first used in 2006 by the activist Tarana Burke to promote what she called “empowerment through empathy.” The idea was that victims of sexual violence and harassment often feel isolated by their experiences. Making people aware that there are others who have gone through the same thing plausibly makes them feel less alone.

But after the hashtag went truly viral in 2017, the slogan’s original purpose no longer seemed to meet the enormity of the task. The allegations against Harvey Weinstein and other abusive male power brokers were horrifying, and the veritable downpour of crimes revealed by women everywhere felt endless. We couldn’t wait for the broad social awareness being cultivated by the hashtag to trickle down into people’s behavior. Responding to stories of assault, harassment, and inequality with mere “likes” on social media was clearly not enough.

But the signal failure of #MeToo was that in seeking to counteract the norm of doubting women’s accounts, “accused” became nearly synonymous with “guilty.” More broadly, #MeToo, by highlighting women’s vulnerability, cast all men in the role of perpetrator.

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In 2022, Burke wrote a retrospective in which she gave examples of the accomplishments of #MeToo. Besides removing “captains of industry” from positions of power, her examples were largely expressive:

• “More than any law that has been passed or policy that has been changed in the past five years, this movement has created visibility and community.”

• “The language we use is shifting, replacing words like victim with survivor.”

• “We talk about mental health and healing.”

• “[E]mployers are crafting thoughtful human-resource policies.”

• “Consumers are more conscientious about the cultural content they consume.”

• Consumers are “vocal about calling out rape culture.”

Burke, not totally comfortable with this accounting, quoted another feminist author, Imani Perry, who argued that “awareness is not a virtue in and of itself.” Burke expressed ambivalence about incarcerating more rapists and ended her piece by calling on the reader to do their part.

But what is their part? If awareness is not enough, and the goal is to effect mass cultural change without incarcerating a lot more rapists, what exactly should we be doing?

My cohost Matt Yglesias argued that the #MeToo movement was thin on specific demands and failed to accomplish very much, which is reasonable enough. Earlier feminist wins were concrete: Recognize our right to vote. Recognize our right to own property. Recognize our right to divorce our husbands and attend college.

The main problem is that both critics and supporters of the #MeToo movement tended to underrate just how radically society would have to change for women to feel as safe as men, or even to come close.

For starters, there is no specific legislative demand that could eliminate sexual harassment. And sexual violence is different from other serious crimes like murder or theft. There is often not dispositive physical evidence like there would be if someone shot you or broke into your house, and therefore cases are typically based almost entirely on witness testimony.

Moreover, victims themselves are often torn about going through the legal system. Sometimes they just want to move on rather than deal with a years-long process that may retraumatize them while hinging entirely on their perceived credibility as a witness. Sometimes the perpetrator is a friend, partner, or community member who they don’t actually want sent to jail.

And, of course, so much of what makes women and girls feel unsafe is not rape itself but the threat of sexual harassment that does not rise to the level of criminal activity.

True equality for women cannot exist in a world where girls are afraid to walk home from school alone and women have to remain on high alert while going about their normal lives. The unfortunate fact is that you can’t legislate freedom.

You can’t bar men from catcalling 13-year-olds, or from leering at women jogging at night. So, what do you do? I don’t think there’s an obvious answer.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

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

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WATCH THE EPISODE ON YOUTUBE HERE

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

Corrections:

• Around 19:00, Jerusalem says The Argument’s February poll found that “44% of Americans say it’s harder for men to socialize with women than they did 10 years ago, versus 14% saying it’s easier.” The true figures are 45% and 15%, respectively, and these are percentages of voters, not all Americans.

• Around 49:30, Matt says Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, in response to the New York Post article about Sen. Ruben Gallego, “did a tweet, and she was like, ‘this is wrong because of the extreme power differential that exists.’” While Luna did tweet about the article, the tweet that used the power imbalance argument came from Rep. Lisa McClain.

Show notes

• She Said, film about the Harvey Weinstein investigation: IMDb page

• “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” June 2020 op-ed by Mariame Kaba: The New York Times article

• Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination, 1979 book by Catharine MacKinnon: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “#MeToo Has Done What the Law Could Not,” February 2018 op-ed by Catharine MacKinnon: The New York Times article

• Disclosure, 1994 film about a sexual harassment allegation: IMDb page

• “I was harassed at the New Republic. I spoke up. Nothing happened.” article by Sarah Wildman about Leon Wieseltier: Vox article

• “Leon Wieseltier: A Reckoning,” article by Michelle Cottle: The Atlantic article

• Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, book by Zeynep Tufekci about social media launching mass movements: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, book by Susan Faludi debunking antifeminist talking points: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, book by Amia Srinivasan that includes an essay on power dynamics in professor-student romances: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Swalwell pal Sen. Ruben Gallego had sexual relationships with two House staffers, sources reveal to The Post,” article about Gallego’s relationships with staffers in other offices when he was a representative: New York Post article

• “The Glass Floor: Sexual Harassment in the Restaurant Industry” report on how restaurant servers often have an economic incentive to ignore sexual harassment, which garnered much coverage: ROC and Forward Together report

• Off Campus, the “straight Heated Rivalry”: IMDb page

• Heated Rivalry, the “gay Off Campus”: IMDb page

• Peer review: “Dynamic Individuals, Static Neighborhoods: Migration and Earnings Changes in Poor Neighborhoods,” article by Andrew Garin, Ethan Jenkins, Evan Mast, and Bryan Stuart about why poor neighborhoods stay poor: NBER working paper

• “What’s Causing Black Flight?” article by Jerusalem Demsas about the decreasing Black share of urban populations: The Atlantic article

• “You don’t actually want to buy a house,” podcast episode about homeownership: The Argument podcast

• “Was Jane Jacobs the first NIMBY?,” podcast episode about The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The Argument podcast

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, book by Jane Jacobs that formed the central topic of a previous episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, book by Robert Putnam that will form the central topic of an upcoming episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

Transcript

Once a month, Matt and I do a book club episode of The Argument podcast. In an upcoming episode this month, we are reading Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. Read along if you are interested, and please comment with any questions or ideas you would like us to explore!

As soon as I began writing publicly about housing policy, people began to ask me for real estate advice. Should I refinance my mortgage? Is it a good time to buy a condo in Northeast D.C.? Am I too young to buy a house?

I have always emphasized that I am not in the business of giving personal financial advice. But I do, unsurprisingly, have a few strongly held views.

To put it glibly, I’m anti-homeownership.

To put it slightly less glibly, I think that the bipartisan cult of homeownership — a cult that urges people to go all in on one immovable, nondiversified asset in hopes that they will be able to sell it at just the right moment to finance their retirement — is extremely irresponsible.

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If you want to buy a house as a matter of consumption, have at it. If I were wealthy, I would definitely find it fun to outfit a house to my exacting, idiosyncratic preferences. But so many people are invested in convincing you that it is always the correct financial decision to buy rather than rent.

David Bach, author of The Automatic Millionaire, an incredibly popular personal finance book that achieved global reach after being launched on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2004, argued that “the most important advice I can tell you right now if you’re young is: Don’t listen to these people that tell you should [sic] rent versus buy .”

Perhaps the media’s most popular financial-advice personality is Dave Ramsey, who treats the choice to rent as a temporary state for people who are either in debt or haven’t saved up enough for a down payment.

In politics, then-President George W. Bush proclaimed that “we want everybody in America to own their own home.”

But I’m not buying it.

I probably don’t have to quote all these people because you, like me, have probably been at the receiving end of familial and public pressure to become a homeowner. And while a home is a legitimate consumption choice and sometimes a good investment, let me reiterate: It is an irresponsible public message to treat a leveraged, nondiversified, illiquid asset as the universally correct foundation for personal financial security.

My skepticism toward the cult of homeownership stems from two beliefs:

First, the best personal financial advice is to diversify your assets. And not only is a home a single asset, it is also tied closely to your employment prospects. If, for instance, there’s a local labor market shock — like the president of the United States empowering the world’s richest man to illegally fire employees of your region’s largest employer — that blow to your job opportunities is going to correlate with home prices in your area also going down.

As a result, instead of an asset that’s there for you when other things are going poorly, a home is an asset that is likely to perform poorly exactly when you need it not to.

Second is the belief is that people severely underrate the benefits of mobility in maintaining financial security. Owning a home makes it much harder to leave your region if you need to. When you lose your job — or just want a new one — homeownership acts as a drag. Two economists argued in a 2024 paper that it contributes to “lower migration to better job markets.”

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The cult of homeownership can have disastrous policy consequences. If politicians believe that promoting homeownership is an overriding concern, they do things like sell houses in floodplains to low-income homebuyers.

When pressed about this practice during the Biden administration, a Department of Housing and Urban Development spokesperson argued that “locking low-income homebuyers out of a great number of affordable homeownership opportunities because the homes are located in communities within flood zones not only runs contrary to the Administration’s objectives of achieving greater equity in homeownership, but prohibiting sales based on income would be comparable to sanctioning a resurgence of redlining.”

You heard that right: It is redlining not to sell a home to a first-time homebuyer in a floodplain.

Matt, who owns not one but two homes, is much less convinced of my anti-homeownership agenda. While he agrees that homes aren’t fantastic investments — and that in an ideal world, we would change a lot about American homeownership policy — he thinks that the way homeownership forces savings is reason enough to recommend it to people in general. (Allow me to reiterate that none of this is personal financial advice.)

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

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

WATCH THE EPISODE ON YOUTUBE HERE

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

Subscribe now

Show notes:

• “‘Giving Up’: The Impact of Decreasing Housing Affordability on Consumption, Work Effort, and Investment,” article by Seung Hyeong Lee and Younggeun Yoo showing that people who see homeownership as out of reach spend more and save less: SSRN page

• “All Debates Are Bravery Debates,” article by Scott Alexander referenced by Matt: LessWrong article

• “The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake,” article by Jerusalem that interviewed Zillow economists about home equity loans: The Atlantic article

• “The Federal Government Sells Flood-Prone Homes To Often Unsuspecting Buyers, NPR Finds,” reporting referenced by Jerusalem: NPR article

• Vanguard investing accounts, not the sponsor of this podcast: Vanguard.com

• “What Percentage of Americans Have a Retirement Savings Account?” 2025 polling that showed 59% of U.S. adults had a 401(k) or similar retirement plan, either alone or with a spouse: Gallup poll

• “Insurance Against Rent Increases,” paper by Han-Suck Song exploring a design for rent insurance to protect against dramatic rent hikes: European Real Estate Society article

• Peer Review: “Fortunate Families? The Effects of Wealth on Marriage and Fertility,” article by David Cesarini, Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling, and Anastasia Terskaya: NBER working paper

• The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, book by Melissa S. Kearney about the economic consequences of decreasing marriage rates: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, book by Brad Wilcox alleging that the ruling class discourages marriage despite its benefits: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Jake Kozloski tweet about couples sorting on intelligence: Tweet

• Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, book by Robert D. Putnam that will be the subject of an upcoming episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

Transcript:

When I quit my job at The Atlantic to start The Argument, I used AI every day to help me figure out how to build a new company. I had no idea how people raised money or what kinds of lawyers I should be looking for or which forms of liability insurance were really necessary.

In bygone years, I would have probably just done some reading and made an educated guess here or there. But in this age of large language models (LLMs), I constantly turned to my colleague ChatGPT for help setting up the new business.

It turns out that I am not the only American to have had my entrepreneurial ambitions nurtured by an LLM. Ernie Tedeschi, Stripe’s chief economist who formerly served on the Biden White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, recently pointed out that AI is likely fueling solo entrepreneurs like yours truly:

All of this might make you think that I’m bullish on AI eliminating large swaths of white-collar jobs. But, in reality, it has made me incredibly skeptical.

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According to The Argument’s recent polling, one of the most widespread fears about AI is unemployment — 70% of respondents said AI may cause large-scale job losses within the next five to 10 years.

It’s very hard to know what people consider to be “large-scale job losses.” In a healthy economy, there are nearly 2 million layoffs every month.

The reason this doesn’t turn into a full-blown recession is that many millions more are being hired at the same time.

So when people express worry about the impact of AI on the labor market, are they making a narrow point about the disruption they fear in their industry, a broader point about expecting to see a lot more layoffs, or an apocalyptic point about how AI is going to usher in a new age of mass unemployment?

One of the biggest AI doomers — or optimists, depending on how you look at it — is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Amodei has repeatedly said that he believes U.S. unemployment could reach 10% to 20%. For reference, in April of 2020, when the whole world shut down due to the spread of COVID-19, the unemployment rate didn’t exceed 15%. Great Depression joblessness peaked at 25%.

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So what Amodei is talking about is more than the usual labor market churn. And others who expect massive disruption have forecast something even scarier than high unemployment: that human labor will become a minor input into production, making most human beings unnecessary for the production of most goods and services.

I feel very skeptical about all this for a few reasons:

1. A job is more than the sum of its tasks. AI can automate a lot of tasks, but that doesn’t mean it can automate an entire job. AI could help me come up with a development pitch, help fact-check my articles, sort through my email, and produce slide decks for meetings.
   
   It can even do many of these tasks as well as — or better and faster — than I. And yet, an AI could not run The Argument.
   

2. AI diffusion will be slowed by the same things that slow high-speed rail. It is technically possible to have high-speed rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It is technically possible for nurses to prescribe Schedule II drugs safely. It is technically possible to build bus rapid transit infrastructure.
   
   And yet, in many places where this would easily and quickly improve the lives of millions of people, we don’t make these improvements. Not because we don’t have the money, but because lots of stakeholders don’t want the current economic arrangement to change; they are benefiting from it.
   

3. People like other people. There are cheap, automated versions of lots of things. There are vending machines for books and food, and there are QR codes for menus. But the preference for a human being to do stuff for you continues to provide demand for jobs. One fact that I think speaks to this at another level is that in May 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer defeated world champ Garry Kasparov in chess — and yet chess has never been more popular.

This is not to say that people should calm down.

As I have written before, the economic growth spurred by the printing press was costly: “For hundreds of years following the invention of the printing press, millions of people died in religious conflicts spurred by the Protestant Reformation. The rise of the nation state enabled the mass slaughter of millions in world wars, not to mention brutal colonial empires. Modernity and the industrial revolution came after decades of conflict over who got to control the canonizing institutions.”

But the policy responses, while politically difficult, are extremely straightforward: Expand unemployment insurance, invest in job training and matching, conduct expansionary monetary policy, and make other necessary investments in the social safety net.

My podcast cohost and The Argument columnist Matt Yglesias thinks I’m being way too complacent, so I brought on our mutual friend and first-ever guest of the pod — Understanding AI’s Tim Lee — to browbeat him with me.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

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

Subscribe now

WATCH THE EPISODE ON YOUTUBE HERE

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

Correction:

• Around 00:28, Tim describes memos sent to Starbucks staff “once about a decade ago and then once again more recently.” The recent memo was sent in 2025, but the previous one was sent in 2007, which is closer to 20 years ago.

Show notes:

• R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), 1920 play by Karel Capek, referenced by Matt, which is widely credited with introducing the word “robot” to the English language: Project Gutenberg page

• “Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t,” article referenced by Tim Lee discussing the concept of jobs as a sandwich, of which AI can only replace a part: AI as Normal Technology article

• “The Case Against the AI Job Apocalypse,” podcast episode in which economist Alex Imas draws an analogy between AI and a world-class chef, whose perfect work would be ruined if it were oversalted at the end: Plain English episode

• METR chart referenced by Tim and shown in the episode, showing the growing length of task (based on how long it would take a human) that AIs are able to accomplish with reasonable accuracy: METR page

• “Canaries Dashboard,” project by Stanford Digital Economy Lab using ADP Research data to show changes in employment of AI-exposed industries. It shows early career software engineering jobs dropping and early career home health aide jobs rising: Stanford page

• “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence,” study by Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen showing relative employment decline for young workers that didn’t affect older workers: Stanford research

• “The Broken Ladder: AI, Remote Work, and Early-Career Hiring,” study by Peter John Lambert and Yannick Schindler suggesting the decline in employment among young workers could be attributed to the growth in remote work: SSRN page

• Average Is Over, book by Tyler Cowen discussing the decrease in appreciation of competent, but not extraordinary, people: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Peer Review: “Zoning: Externalities or Misallocation?” paper by Yu-Hsin Ho, Chang-Tai Hsieh, Wen-Tai Hsu, and Yu-Jhih Luo using data from Taipei to show that mixed-use development brings economic advantage: NBER working paper

• “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” article by Xochitl Gonzalez arguing that an expectation of quiet is at odds with minority cultures: The Atlantic article

Transcript:

The notion that there is a handful of wealthy, powerful people who are secretly pulling the strings is seductive. It appeals to people’s sense that extreme inequality is unjust, while also offering a simpler explanation for political failure than one involving the incentives and interactions of dozens of competing groups and institutions.

But that doesn’t mean it’s right.

On today’s episode of The Argument, my co-host Matt Yglesias argues that “I don’t think the oligarchy is real.” At a literal level, this statement is straightforwardly correct. There is no unified billionaire class that decides elections and gets its way whenever it throws money around. And while power is distributed unequally, billionaires are merely one set of actors with an unequal share of political power.

However, I accept that word meanings and usage naturally change over time so I think the energy behind Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ Fighting Oligarchy tour is worth taking seriously. As a political journalist, I’ve watched very wealthy people receive a kind of access to elected officials that ordinary citizens cannot get. While none of this proves quid pro quo, it still violates an important democratic ideal: Not just, one person, one vote, but the promise that citizens have equal standing.

And money buys more than meetings. It buys the ability to shape the discourse. Wealthy donors fund think tanks, advocacy groups, research, lobbying, and media. Usually, they are not purchasing beliefs, rather they are amplifying the voices of people who they like. Take Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. In doing so, he has altered the information environment in which politicians and journalists operate, shifting the window of what is reasonable farther right by removing moderation rules that marginalized bigoted views.

Defining a problem accurately is the first step to actually addressing it. Is the issue that politicians literally do whatever billionaires want even when it comes in conflict with voter preferences? Well, that’s clearly not the case.

Wealthy people lose all the time! Self-funded candidates flame out (see: Billionaire Tom Steyer in California), better funded candidates lose elections (see: Hillary Clinton in 2016), lobbying campaigns fail(see: Big Pharma’s campaign against Medicare drug-price negotiation)… Voters have agency, and small-d democratic preferences, particularly on salient issues, have a large effect. But a theory that treats every billionaire victory as proof while ignoring every billionaire defeat is a theory that can never be falsified.

And when I consider the structure of power in American politics, it often cleaves along lines that have nothing to do with being a billionaire. Homeowners dominate land use politics, professional associations capture licensing rules, industry representatives shape low-salience regulations on their issues because few other people care enough to engage. All of this can produce profoundly unequal outcomes without being the work of a coherent oligarchic class.

It is morally revolting to see a homeless person sleeping outside a $10 million house but a wealth tax doesn’t build a homeless shelter. The relevant questions for addressing homelessness are practical: How do we build more shelters at cost? Where should they go? How do we deal with the small number of homeless individuals who refuse offers of aid? Higher taxes may help fund some of those answers, but punishing winners is not actually the same thing as helping the losers.

Matt is far more down on oligarchy messaging than I. Listen to us get into all of it on this week’s episode.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

WATCH THE EPISODE ON YOUTUBE HERE

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

Corrections:

• Around 0:05:00, Jerusalem says Josh Kalla and David Broockman’s research shows that donors are “five times as likely to get a senior staffer and, like, three times as likely to get face time with the candidate,” compared to simply a constituent. The 2015 study showed donors are three to four times as likely to get access to a senior staffer and four times as likely to get facetime with a member of Congress.

• Around 0:21:30, Matt observed that Eric Jones had been “trailing outside the top two in another Bay Area race.” This was true for weeks, but Jones eventually made it into the top two and advanced to the general election.

Show notes:

• Website for the Fighting Oligarchy tour: Bernie Sanders website

• Sen. Amy Klobuchar tweet criticizing policies to help the “broligarchy”: Tweet

• “Campaign Contributions Facilitate Access to Congressional Officials: A Randomized Field Experiment,” article by Joshua Kalla and David Broockman, referenced by Jerusalem, about to what extent donors get better access to candidates: American Journal of Political Science article

• Polling asking “Would you say the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves or that it is run for the benefit of all the people?” that shows a large majority responding “few big interests”: ANES survey

• OpenSecrets campaign finance data referenced by Jerusalem: OpenSecrets article

• “The Business of American Democracy: Citizens United, Independent Spending, and Elections,” article by Tilman Klumpp, Hugo Mialon, and Michael A. Williams comparing the effects of Citizens United on states that did and did not have strong union support: SSRN page

• The Homevoter Hypothesis: How Home Values Influence Local Government Taxation, School Finance, and Land-Use Policies, book by William Fischel arguing that people vote to exclude apartment buildings from their communities in order to drive up their home values: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis, book by Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick, and Maxwell Palmer about participatory democracy’s role in defeating housing projects: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” article by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page arguing the U.S. is an oligarchy: Perspectives on Politics article

• Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why, book by Frank Baumgartner, Jeffrey Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David Kimball, and Beth Leech studying the effects of lobbyists’ work: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Capital in the 21st Century, economics book by Thomas Piketty, referenced by Matt: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Abundance, influential book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that you have probably read if you subscribe to this magazine: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “The Doom Loop of Oligarchy,” article by Ezra Klein in reaction to Piketty’s Capital. Vox archives

• Peer review: “Is Immigration Good for Health? The Effect of Immigration on Older Adult Mortality in the United States,” article by David C. Grabowski, Jonathan Gruber, and Brian E. McGarry: NBER working paper

• “We may miss the sweatshops,” article by Matt about how AI’s labor potential weakens the economic case for immigration: The Argument article

• “Where the rubber meets the road: Emerging environmental impacts of tire wear particles and their chemical cocktails,” study by Paul Mayer, Kelly Moran, and others, referenced by Matt, about air particulates caused by dissolving car tires: Science of the Total Environment article

• “Should we end asylum?” podcast episode where Matt and Jerusalem debated asylum policy: The Argument podcast

• “A.I. progress is giving me writer’s block,” article by Matt about how AI uncertainty makes it difficult to think through effective policy solutions: Slow Boring article

• One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, book by Matt arguing that Americans’ path to prosperity lies in increasing the size of our population: Goodreads page, Amazon page

Transcript:

There are a lot of bad vibes about cities: They’re crime-ridden, full of degenerates, dirty, crowded, and ugly. Real America is rural, or, maybe, suburban.

When politicians talk about America, they tend to locate authentic national identity outside of its urban environments. Thomas Jefferson gave us an early version of this rhetorical move, arguing that the “mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body” in an essay where he explained why Americans should prefer farming to manufacturing. But he was just the first.

At a fundraiser in North Carolina in 2008, Sarah Palin asserted that “the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America.” And, of course, Donald Trump has supplied the contemporary version of this, painting inner cities as “disgusting, rat and rodent infested” messes and casting himself as the defender of the Suburban Lifestyle Dream. A dream that needs to be protected from the horrors of new housing and crime.

As a hardcore defender of cities (aesthetically and dispositionally), I really loved Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities the first time I read it in my early 20s. Economics had taught me that cities were brilliant engines of economic innovation and opportunity; Jacobs gave me a fellow urbanist’s love letter to her favorite neighborhoods and helped put into words what made certain neighborhoods lovely to look at.

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Rereading it now, much of what Jacobs wrote still rings true. Some of it, like her insistence on small city blocks, is pretty weak. But her other prescriptions hold up well:

• Dense concentrations of buildings and people let a neighborhood sustain real variety, from the bodega to the fancy restaurant to the hipster record store.

• Border vacuums, the dead zones that form beside highways, should be avoided.

• Above all, mixed primary uses help keep a street alive at every hour.

That last one I think about all the time. Walk through a neighborhood built around a single use, like a school, and in the evening it feels dead, because nobody’s there at night. Jacobs wanted homes and shops and offices sitting together, so that someone always has a reason to be on the street.

That makes an area feel more alive, and safer too. It’s what she called “eyes on the street.” She argued that foot traffic and visibility deter crime, since people are less likely to break the law when others are around.

She was also right about the problem of central planning. Jacobs understood, perhaps better than anyone at the time, that you cannot sit in an office and perfectly predict and arrange the lives of millions of people. This Hayekian criticism deserves its flowers.

Her biggest flaw was shared by many of her contemporaries — she thought more local control could solve the information and coordination problem of central planning. Jacobs concluded that the city planners should devolve power down to the local level, where residents supposedly have the knowledge that planners lack.

That policy is almost singularly responsible for the housing shortage we’re now living in. The neighborhood veto she championed as a defense against demolition became the tool by which existing residents block everything new. She won the war against top-down destruction so completely that her victory is, in its own way, just as damaging.

Near the end of her life, Jacobs reportedly lamented that the Greenwich Village home she bought for just $7,000 would be unaffordable to her now. That complaint should have prompted more self-reflection than it likely did.

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The book has other blind spots too. Jacobs appears almost completely uninterested in the fact that a city is an economic engine. People and firms crowd into the same place because proximity makes them more productive, spawns innovation, and creates the jobs that draw the next wave of residents. That is why cities exist, and she wrote a roughly 450-page book that barely touches it.

To be fair, she was writing at a time when cities were seen as slums and New York’s economic value was falling, not rising. Her whole project was to make people fall back in love with cities, and a dry argument about economics was never going to do that. But the omission still shapes what’s wrong with the book, because once you stop seeing a city as an engine, you lose sight of what it’s really for.

(Darling is referencing an infamous niche tweet by transit wonk Nilo Cobau.)

My co-host, Matt Yglesias, is much harder on the book than I am. His sharpest critique is that Jacobs is doing the very thing she accuses the planners of. Le Corbusier looked at a city and decided superblocks with dozens of towers were the answer. Jacobs looked around and claimed everything should be like her charming stretch of Hudson Street. Both would rather impose the picture in their heads than let markets figure it out.

Ultimately, what makes a neighborhood great is the people, not the buildings. It’s nice to walk around Greenwich Village or Paris and feel transported back in time, but freezing a city in place also means stagnation and exclusion. Cities are dynamic things, and they need to be able to change in order to survive and thrive.

Jacobs was right that you can’t plan life into a place from the top down. She was wrong that you protect that life by handing a permanent veto to whoever already lives there. After all, look at Greenwich Village today.

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, image by Frank Lennon/Contributor via Getty)

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

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WATCH THE EPISODE ON YOUTUBE HERE

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

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Show notes:

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, book by Jane Jacobs that forms the central topic of this episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Explanation of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible that brings together the five books of the Torah, the Nevi’im (Prophets), and the Ketuvim (Writings): My Jewish Learning article

• Silent Spring, famous book by Rachel Carson about pesticides that is often credited with launching the environmental movement and served as the topic for a previous episode of The Argument: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “How NIMBYs hijacked the climate movement,” previous podcast episode about Silent Spring: The Argument podcast episode

• There Goes the Gayborhood, book by Amin Ghaziani about how historically gay neighborhoods have changed and evolved over time: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Operationalizing Jane Jacobs’s Urban Design Theory: Empirical Verification from the Great City of Seoul, Korea,” study by Hyungun Sung, Sugie Lee, and SangHyun Cheon testing Jacobs’ conclusions against evidence from Seoul: Journal of Planning Education and Research article, University of Chicago summary

• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, famous book by Robert Caro about the profound ways Moses shaped New York City: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Archived collection of Robert Moses articles written for The Atlantic: The Atlantic page

• “How Sociotropic Aesthetic Judgments Drive Opposition to Housing Development,” article by David Broockman, Christopher Elmendorf, and Joshua Kalla tracking the rationale for people’s support (or lack thereof) for apartment buildings: Center for Open Science preprint

• Polling that shows 55% of Americans prefer living in a community where “houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores, and restaurants are several miles away,” while 44% prefer one where “houses are smaller and closer to each other, but schools, stores and restaurants are within walking distance”: Pew Research Center poll

• Stuck, book by Yoni Applebaum about how the desire to maintain neighborhood character has stymied progress: Goodreads page, Amazon page, The Atlantic excerpt

• “Cities are not about fun. They’re places where people go to do serious things like study, and make vaccines, and negotiate contracts. The fun that they create is merely a positive externality, and we shouldn’t ever forget that or we’ll mix up what actually makes them great,” infamous tweet by Nilo Cobau, now deleted but republished by Matt Darling: Tweet

• Peer review: “Keys to Upward Mobility: Typewriter Adoption and Women’s Economic Outcomes,” by Myera Rashid: Northwestern Institute for Policy Research article

• Study here

• The Feminine Mystique, famous book by Betty Friedan encouraging women to join the labor force, which served as the central topic for a previous podcast episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

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

• “Effect of Online Dating on Assortative Mating: Evidence from South Korea,” article by Soohyung Lee showing that online dating has decreased geographic and occupational sorting while increasing educational sorting: Journal of Applied Econometrics article

Transcript:

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I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, but when I travel around the world, I don’t have to tell people I’m an American.

It’s not just that I “pass” as American, it’s that I am American. Like millions before me, I went through an assimilation process that included public K-12 schools, cross-cultural friendships, and workplace norms and expectations.

Assimilation has become more controversial. It implies that to become an American, you have to change yourself. It’s also difficult to promote assimilating into a culture you think is fundamentally rotten.

“Assimilation has fallen into disrepute,” begins a 1997 academic article in The International Migration Review. And the left in particular, which is the strongest pro-immigration constituency in America, has had to reconcile its pro-immigration views with arguments that America is, at its core, structurally bigoted, built for the purpose of preserving slavery, and imbued with institutions that are oppositional to social progress.

From 2016 to 2020, the share of Democrats saying that it’s important to share American customs and traditions fell from 79% to 59%.1 Anecdotally, the melting pot metaphor has been abandoned in favor of “salad bowl,” “mosaic,” and “kaleidoscope.”

In 1991, New Deal liberal Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. warned that new ideas were taking root that rejected America as a nation of individuals from all nations melting into a new nationality. Rather, these ideas recast America as a nation of groups that “threatens to become a counter-revolution against the original theory of America as ‘one people’, a common culture, a single nation.”

The result is pieces like this recent one by The Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, who argued that “Muslims shouldn’t have to assimilate to belong.”

Hamid was responding to a bigoted tweet from Rep. Andy Ogles, who wrote that Muslims don’t belong in American society and that pluralism is a lie.

Of course, Muslims do belong, and pluralism is self-evidently all around us.

But promoting assimilation is both necessary for a healthy pro-immigration politics and good on its own terms. Being an American is great, people who come here largely think so, and we should help them achieve the ideal of American identity (just as they help us).

In 2014, just 39% of immigrants agreed that “there are some things about America today that make me feel ashamed,” versus 69% of native-born Americans. Immigrants and their children also express more trust in all three branches of government than native-born Americans.

Anti-assimilation advocates tend to ignore that immigrants largely self-select for liking America. Many grew up on our books, movies, and music, and they arrived wanting to fit in.

They may keep their faith and remain culturally or socially distinctive in some ways, but most people don’t want a stranger clocking them on the street as different. Many immigrants report having an easier time assimilating here than in more homogenous countries. America lets you fade into the background and do your own thing.

And immigrants are often clear-eyed about what the alternatives presented by other countries actually are: The U.S. ranks first globally in the share of foreign-born adults who say their local area is a good place for immigrants to live (96%).

We’ve been doing a great job of assimilating for over 100 years. In Streets of Gold, economists Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky went through millions of census records and found that the children of immigrants climb the income ladder today at roughly the same rate as those who entered through Ellis Island at the turn of the last century, with Mexican immigrants among the fastest assimilators. It’s just not common for a kid to arrive here not knowing any English and still have that issue by the time they reach adulthood. Nearly 98% of immigrants who arrive before age 5 know English.

Hamid closed his column by arguing that America was founded on the idea that citizens never have to converge on foundational questions. I think this is partly true. You’ll find wildly different visions of the good life in this country.

But there are better and worse ideas that we should try to select for and inculcate in both native-born and foreign-born Americans. I don’t want a wave of authoritarian-minded newcomers trying to install a dictatorship. The real question of assimilation has little to do with what you eat or how you pray. It’s really about whether you can get on board with liberal democracy and basic equality.

People imagine that assimilation has to be a sort of violent process that seeks to strip people of their cultural garments, religion, and language. But most assimilation comes through second-generation kids telling their parents not to microwave fish in the company kitchen.

The best definition of assimilation that I’ve seen comes from 1921: “a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons or groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life.”

At some level, it probably seems a bit condescending to teach someone how to be a “good American,” but I think most people would actually appreciate knowing the rules. A pluralistic, diverse country benefits from more explicit rules about common standards of behavior because everyone is coming from a different standpoint about what is reasonable.

Before my first solo trip to Germany, my dad warned me not to take long showers. I reluctantly took a quick one, and the next morning, my host thanked me for not being like those wasteful Americans. I was glad my father cared enough to tell me. I didn’t want to come off as rude or ignorant.

My co-host Matt Yglesias agrees on the merits of assimilation and wants to push it further: He thinks progressives treat ethnic conflict as a uniquely American problem, although in reality, it’s simply an unfortunate feature of the human condition. They have let America become defined by its worst chapters, and, in that process, are ceding the ideas of patriotism to the right — a problem I’ve written about previously.

But the progressive story is an American one. It’s the abolitionists, the suffragists, and the civil rights movement. When liberals invite immigrants into this country, we’re not inviting them into a world of slavery and exclusion. We’re inviting them into the part that fought it.

Matt and I 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, image by William Warby via Wikimedia Commons)

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

Subscribe now

WATCH THE EPISODE HERE (YouTube)

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

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

Corrections:

• Around 20:30, Jerusalem says that a greater proportion of Black people ride bikes than white people. However, Black people have the lowest rates of commuting by bike. Some evidence suggests that Black Americans are overrepresented in using rideshare services and, notably, low-income Americans are the most likely to commute by bike.

Show notes:

• “Muslims shouldn’t have to assimilate to belong,” opinion article by Shadi Hamid that inspired this episode: Washington Post opinion article

• Rep. Andrew Ogles tweet that inspired Hamid’s article: Tweet

• Definitions of melting pot and salad bowl read by Matt: Black and Green Atlantic article

• Suddenly Amish, reality TV show about non-Amish people adapting into Amish life referenced by Jerusalem: IMDb page

• Witness, film directed by Peter Weir about a detective hiding out in Amish country, referenced by Matt: IMDb page

• “Do Immigrants’ Partisan Preferences Influence Americans’ Support for Immigration?,” article by Daniel McDowell and David Steinberg referenced by Jerusalem: Journal of Experimental Political Science article

• Streets of Gold, book by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan examining immigrant assimilation in different groups and at different time periods, referenced by Jerusalem: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “The Integration of Immigrants into American Society,” 2015 report about immigrants’ success integrating into American society referenced by Jerusalem: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report

• “Why are Conservatives Winning?” article by Alice Evans about Muslim immigrant women’s economic inactivity, referenced by Matt: The Great Gender Divergence article

• “American Pride Slips to New Low,” polling showing that the percentage of U.S. adults who were extremely or very proud to be an American fell from 85% in 2013 to 58% in 2025: Gallup poll

• Peer Review: “Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly” white paper by Caitlin K. Myers and Ezekiel Hooper about the correlation between fertility rate decline and smartphone availability. NBER working paper

• “The answer to bad tech is better tech,” article by Jerusalem about her experience with a dumb phone in 2025: The Argument article

• 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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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.

Subscribe now

WATCH THE EPISODE HERE (YouTube)

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

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

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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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.

Subscribe now

WATCH THE EPISODE HERE (YouTube)

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

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

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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I expected to hate Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring — Carson is often name-checked as a precursor to modern degrowth environmentalism (including by degrowthers themselves). But Silent Spring wasn’t some 400-page diatribe against progress and growth; it was a thorough, dense, and methodical explanation of the harms of various pesticides and herbicides. And it was very persuasive. (And boring!)

In all likelihood, most environmentalists and anti-environmentalists haven’t read the book. What they remember is what the book came to symbolize, in large part due to the public opposition:

When Carson published her book in 1962, the backlash was fierce. Chemical industry groups claimed Carson wanted to send America back to the Dark Ages, with predictions of famine and insect swarms. They wrote books attacking her credibility, spread rumors she was a communist, and suggested that a mere lady biologist had no business second-guessing the manly chemists.

“It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used,” Carson wrote. Her case was that DDT was increasingly harmful to humans and wildlife and decreasingly harmful to mosquitoes. She believed we could use biological controls, targeted application, and other tested solutions that would more effectively solve the problem. That’s pretty much the whole book.

In the end, Carson prevailed over the lobbyists, and DDT was banned, thanks in large part to the fact that she was thorough in her research and advocated for a measured and science-based approach to solving natural issues, rather than an ideological agenda.

I don’t want to oversell it. There are parts of the book that reveal Carson’s underlying Romantic and tech-negative tendencies, most notably the opening chapter, a “fable” that imagines a mythical perfect town with tons of beautiful wildlife and happy farms and travelers who come to fish. The town is destroyed by an “evil spell” that rid the town of birds and made farm life untenable, and the once-verdant countryside is now “lined with browned and withered vegetation.”

It’s telling that this town has no industry (outside of farming, which at the time was under 9% of the population) and therefore no clear way of sustaining human life. This type of Romantic fairy tale (dystopia?) of a place unspoiled by human activity is a recurring one in the degrowth-environmental imagination.

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I came up through the climate movement — interning at the Climate Action Campaign and the Center for American Progress’ Energy & Environment team. Climate change is, to me, a genuine threat to human flourishing. But over a decade later, I’m struck by how much energy in the green movement has been focused on efforts like banning natural gas, blocking denser housing, and counterproductive protest strategies instead of engaging in more objectively effective policies.

The roots of this mismatch are worth understanding. The large-scale environmental movement was fueled by suburbanites who were fundamentally anti-growth. When wealthy people moved to the suburbs in the postwar era, they resented that newer developments kept eating into the green space and seclusion they had been promised.

On our newest podcast episode, Matt Yglesias summed up this mentality based on his own observations from living part-time in Maine: “I’m here to be near the forest. I cut down trees for my house. But you can’t cut down trees for your house because I’m trying to be close to the trees.”

When the movement’s base lives in sprawling suburbs and defines environmental protection as keeping things the way they are, the focus becomes less “protect the environment” and more “degrowth.” That explains why building denser housing, rather than single-family homes with big lawns, is seen as the enemy instead of the solution.

The effects of these positions are felt globally, mostly by poor people in the developing world. The people holding them mostly live in pleasant suburbs.

The real lesson of Carson’s book isn’t in its version of the good life but in its implicit argument for how to be persuasive. Carson is methodical and sober-minded. In the face of increasingly hysterical and sexist attacks, she remained poised and focused on her goals: eliminating DDT and spreading awareness of the negative externalities of various chemical spraying practices.

And she won! The U.S. banned DDT for farming in 1972, the Stockholm Convention put it on its original list of “dirty dozen” pollutants to be eliminated, and global use has collapsed to 369 metric tons in 2023, with just three countries still spraying it.

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

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

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

WATCH THE EPISODE HERE (YouTube)

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

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Show notes:

• Silent Spring, book about pesticides by Rachel Carson that serves as the central point of discussion: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Silent Spring,” series of articles by Rachel Carson that formed the basis for much of her book: New Yorker article

• Coverage of World War II chemicals being repurposed for pesticides: American Heritage article, The Pantagraph article

• Coverage of Carson dying of breast cancer: Silent Spring Institute page, NOAA page

• Conservative discourse arguing Carson’s work was responsible for millions of malaria deaths: Competitive Enterprise Institute op-ed, AEI article

• Coverage of DDT resistance becoming a big problem in the 1970s: EPA archive, Royal Society of Chemistry article, Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health article

• Coverage of planes spreading aldrin over Detroit suburbs in 1959 to kill Japanese beetles. The program was not a secret, but government agencies were not required to inform or gain permission from landowners: Detroit Free Press archive

• Coverage of planes spreading DDT over Long Island in 1957 to kill gypsy moth caterpillars: The New York Times article, Literary Hub article, New York Entomological Society article

• Frankenstein, book by Mary Shelley about messing with forces beyond our control: Goodreads page, Project Gutenberg e-book

• CBS documentary about Silent Spring: IMDb page, YouTube video

• The Population Bomb, book about overpopulation by Paul Ehrlich, mentioned by Matt as a contrast to Silent Spring: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Coverage of program to drop sterilized screwworms in an area to kill large populations and stop them from affecting American farming: The Atlantic article

• Coverage of DOGE cutting monitoring for the effective screwworm program: Agri-Pulse article, Slow Boring article

• Coverage of Clean Power Plan, Obama-era regulation agenda for existing and new coal power plants: EPA archive, The Guardian article, EIA article

• Jerusalem Demsas article about tension in environmentalism between technologists and degrowth, anti-change elements: The Atlantic article

• Coverage of Endangered Species Act being invoked to restrict logging in spotted owl habitats, causing a loss of jobs: EBSCO research, Bird Alliance of Oregon article, University of Chicago article, Los Angeles Times article

• Article about campaign to save the snail darter as a pretense for blocking a dam: The New York Times article, The New York Times archive

• Coverage of deer population in the U.S.: World Population Review data, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service page

• Definition of “angler”: “A person who catches fish with a hook and fishing line,” Merriam-Webster entry

• Don’t Blame Us, book by Lily Geismer about suburban liberalism: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Coverage of Congressional negotiations over energy permitting bill, which would make it easier to construct both renewable and hydrocarbon energy: Politico article, Bloomberg Government article

• Coverage of natural gas power being marginally better for greenhouse gas emissions and significantly better for air particulate matter than coal power: iScience article, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions article, Swarthmore research

• The Feminine Mystique, book by Betty Friedan encouraging women to rejoin the workforce, discussed in previous episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Previous podcast episode discussing The Feminine Mystique: The Argument podcast episode

• Coverage of Carson being maligned as a crazy spinster: JSTOR article,

• Speculation of Carson’s relationship with a neighboring woman: Clean Water Action article, Lida Maxwell book

• Coverage of the term “Boston Marriage”: National Park Service article, Boston.com article

• Coverage of Carson not identifying as a feminist (“I’m not interested in things done by women or by men but in things done by people”): Environment and Society portal article

• Coverage of letter to President Eisenhower by Agriculture Secretary Ezra Benson arguing Carson must be a communist because she was pretty but unmarried: Tulane University article, Environmental History article

• Coverage of solar energy sites being slowed down or halted by environmental reviews: E&E News article, NPR article, Los Angeles Times article, Union of Concerned Scientists explainer

• Coverage of New England oil companies using environmental impact litigation to halt the construction of transmission lines from Canada: Boston Globe article, AP article

• Coverage of boundary reanalysis in Montgomery County, Maryland: Montgomery County Public Schools article, Bethesda Magazine article

• Peer review: “Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks,” paper by Noah Arman Kouchekinia, David Neumark, and Tim A. Bruckner showing that people who took early retirement faced worse cognitive decline than similar people who didn’t: NBER working paper

• Coverage of the “Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE)” movement, a community of people who made it their mission to retire as early as 35: The Boston Globe article, r/Fire subreddit

• “Grandparents’ cognition and caregiving for grandchildren,” paper by Flavia Chereches, Gabriel Olaru, Nicola Ballhausen, and Yvonne Brehmer showing that spending time caregiving for grandchildren was associated with slower cognitive decline among grandparents: Psychology and Aging article

• Montessori Baby Visual Stimulation Cards, which purportedly encourage cognitive development among infants by engaging their eyes: Montessori Toys page

• Clarification of millennial ages, with birth years ranging from 1981 through 1996: Britannica page

Transcript

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We’ve had to put up with a lot when it comes to AI: From taking people’s clothes off on Twitter to helping kids cheat on tests to producing fruit dramas we can’t help but watch (just me?). But if AI could cure cancer, the holy grail of biotech, would it all be worth it? And would an AI that was powerful enough to cure cancer be an AI we would even want to live alongside?

Now, the bar for a normal business being net positive isn’t “provides a major medical breakthrough.” As staff writer Kelsey Piper recently explained at The Argument’s San Francisco debate: “I see a billboard. It’s like ‘Here’s cloud infrastructure balancing.’ Is cloud infrastructure balancing going to cure cancer? No, but it’s good… The world is good because of lots of things that are small and make something a little bit better.”

Sure, but AI companies carry very different risks from other types of businesses. I’m less convinced than Kelsey by the arguments for potential human extinction, but even if we limit ourselves to potential destabilizations to labor markets, educational institutions, and the very core of what it means to be human, AI has greater risks than any other technology.

All major technological breakthroughs are disruptive, but what makes them worth it is they improve living standards. If the risk of AI is truly as great as its creators believe, then the potential rewards better be worth it.

After reporting on AI’s scientific capabilities, I found myself becoming cautiously optimistic on the ability of AI to help scientists make major step changes in addressing cancer. AI excels at pattern matching, and that’s one of the main ingredients to diagnosing, treating, and ultimately curing cancer.

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For example: The five-year survival rate for localized breast cancer is nearly 100%. However, if the cancer metastasizes, it’s around 33%. If AI made us better at catching many types of cancer early, we would already be well on our way to curing it, at least in the way viewed by epidemiologists.

What it means to “cure cancer” isn’t totally straightforward. Does it mean the possibility of remission is eliminated? That the five-year survival rate for cancer survivors is indistinguishable from the non-cancer-having population?

When Google’s Demis Hassabis says AlphaFold will one day cure cancer, he’s referring to AI tools that can speed up protein prediction and drug discovery. AlphaFold doesn’t work like the typical LLMs or promise a magic cancer-curing pill, but it could allow us to gradually develop therapeutics.

OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, meanwhile, shared a story about a man who treated his dog’s cancer, claiming it was cured with a personalized vaccine developed with assistance from ChatGPT. ChatGPT didn’t actually make the drug or cure the dog, but it was able to help the dog’s owner find the right people, machines, and techniques to treat his pet and extend its life.

And when Anthropic’s Dario Amodei talks about curing cancer, he’s relying on recursive self-improvement: a model that trains a better model until you have something so capable it solves everything.

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When I talked with Kelsey about all this, I was surprised to find that for all her optimism (pessimism?) about AI’s transformational impact, she was skeptical about its application in cancer research. Her bottom-line argument is that while LLMs are good at verifiable tasks, the goal of “curing cancer” is full of unverifiable ones.

So, we decided to debate it live at our first event in San Francisco, where a crowd full of experts could help us figure it out. Listen to us — and them — discuss.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

(Illustration by The Argument, photo by Mariah Miranda Photography)

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

WATCH THE EPISODE HERE

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

Subscribe now

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

Corrections:

• Around 13:00, Kelsey says “something like 25% of adults are up on all of their recommended cancer screenings.” This is inverted; researchers found that in 2021, around 25% of adults were not up to date with breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer screening recommendations, according to the 2021 National Health Interview Survey.

• Around 22:00, Jerusalem says the survival rate for breast cancer that has metastasized is around 38%. The figure is closer to 31% to 33%.

• Around 48:00, Jerusalem says X “stopped letting” users create deepfakes and other nonconsensual images through Grok. But an NBC News investigation revealed it is still happening, despite the company’s pledge to stop.

Show notes:

• AI boosters discussing the promise of AI in cancer treatment:

  • Interior Secretary Doug Burgum promising that “curing cancer” would be among the “wonderful things that can come from AI”: The Hill article

  • Burgum promising AI will “not only gonna cure cancer, but it’s gonna eliminate all kinds of drudgery, repetitive jobs”: Gizmodo article

  • Energy Secretary Chris Wright promising that AI could help turn “most cancers, many of which today are ultimate death sentences, into manageable conditions”: Fortune article

  • Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, saying AI can be used to “cure all disease,” including cancer: 60 Minutes broadcast

  • Greg Brockman boosting story about man who used ChatGPT to help create a personalized vaccine to treat his dog’s cancer: Tweet, The Australian article, Decrypt article

  • “Machines of Loving Grace,” document by Dario Amodei describing using recursive self-improvement to solve various long-term problems, including curing cancer: Dario Amodei essay

• Coverage of AI data centers (among other things) driving up electricity costs: Bloomberg article

• Coverage of AI enabling students to cheat: Education Week article, The Guardian article, UC Berkeley study

• Example tweet contrasting AI promises of curing cancer with observed use-cases of sexualizing women: Tweet

• Coverage of Grok making sexualized images of real people at users’ request: The New York Times article, The Guardian article

• Coverage of oddly common AI-generated dramas featuring animated fruits on TikTok and Instagram Reels: The Conversation article

• 2022 study claiming to show that around half of AI researchers believe AI has at least a 10% chance of causing human extinction: AI Impacts survey

  • Article criticizing the AI Impacts survey for having a low response rate and lack of peer review: AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans article

• Coverage contrasting cancer treatments today to the effective death sentence the disease represented 50 years ago: NIH Medline Plus article, Cancer Research UK article, AARP article

• Explanation of “statistical cures,” or cancer epidemiologists considering cancer “cured” if, after five years, people who had it are statistically indistinguishable from the population: BMC Medical Research Methodology article

• Study showing 25% of adults are not up to date with breast, cervical, and CRC screening recommendations in 2021: Preventing Chronic Disease article

• Policy options to increase the number of preventative screenings performed:

  • Organized screening programs: Cancer article, Best Practice & Research Clinical Gastroenterology article

  • Invitation letters and reminders: BMC Public Health article

  • Mailed kits and self-sampling: Cureus article

  • Patient navigation: Asia-Pacific Journal of Oncology Nursing article

  • Financial incentives: JAMA Network Open article

• Coverage of AlphaFold protein prediction: Nature article

• Coverage of cancer treatments gaining accelerated approval at higher rates than other specialties: The Lancet Oncology article

• Coverage of Firefox making several security-related changes after being informed of vulnerabilities by Claude Mythos: Mozilla blog article, TechCrunch article

• Coverage of Novo Nordisk using Claude to create a platform to help cut down on the paperwork necessary for clinical trials: Anthropic customer story, The Wall Street Journal article

• Coverage comparing breast cancer’s 99% survival rate if it’s caught before it’s metastasized, versus 31% to 33% if it reaches stage 4: National Breast Cancer Foundation overview, National Cancer Institute (NCI) page

• Coverage of AI analyzing screenings better than human doctors:

  • Mammograms: Breastcancer.org article, Diagnostics article

  • Lung cancer: Healthcare article, Northwestern Medicine article

  • Cervical cancer: NCI release

• Coverage showing most cancer-associated genes present in a large portion of the population have already been discovered: Nature Reviews Cancer article

• Research showing that around 85% of proteins are not druggable: Pharmacology & Therapeutics article, Cancer Research UK article

• Coverage of data becoming more valuable as we’ve discovered more AI-related use cases: Forbes article

• Coverage showing around 40% of research labs’ work is spent on operations, not science: Research Management Review article, AAAS blog

• Coverage of C-Myc and p53, two proteins researchers have been unsuccessfully trying to drug for decades: Nature Reviews Drug Discovery article, Creative Diagnostics article, International Journal of Biological Sciences article, Cancer Research UK article

• Coverage of hepatitis C having a 95% cure rate if patients take direct-acting antivirals: CDC page, Antiviral Research article

• Coverage of two-thirds of hepatitis C patients not getting proper treatment: CDC page, Gastroenterology Advisor article, Hep article

• Coverage of Medicaid cuts happening next year: The Commonwealth Fund article

• X statement promising to crack down on Grok creating nonconsensual sexualized images of real women: Statement

• Coverage showing Grok deepfakes are still happening: NBC News article

• “Are you there Grok? It’s me, Margaret,” article by Jerusalem Demsas about the potential for AI to serve as a centralizing technology, restoring some shared truth between fractured communities: The Argument article

• “@Grok Is This True? LLM-Powered Fact-Checking on Social Media,” study showing Grok has proved valuable to spreading real facts on Twitter: Study

• “Do AIs think differently in different languages?” article by Kelsey Piper discovering whether AIs would provide different responses if asked in languages other than English: The Argument article

• Polls showing a plurality of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI: Pew Research Center article

• Coverage of OpenAI Foundation investing in Alzheimer’s disease research: OpenAI Foundation article, TODAY interview

• Coverage of MASAI trial that found the use of AI detection software contributed to a 12% reduction in interval cancers: ScreenPoint Insights article

Transcript:

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A frustrating fact about the politics of crime is that everyone freaks out when crime goes up, but the reaction when crime goes down is much more muted. In related news, we’re about to have the lowest homicide year since the 19th century.

It’s remarkable, given how dire things looked in 2020, and a far cry from Trump’s 2022 declaration that “the blood-soaked streets of our once great cities are cesspools of violent crimes.”

It’s not just that crime has fallen from pandemic-era highs; it’s that it’s lower than the pre-2020 crime spike trajectory would suggest. That raises the question: What happened?

My view is that this is all downstream of two things: one obvious, one less so. The obvious one is that COVID-19 had a bunch of criminogenic factors, like:

1. shifting police deployment and activity to limit COVID exposure.

2. cutting potentially violent young people off from school and work while concentrating them in close proximity with people they have disputes with.

The less obvious explanation is the Great Cop Vibe Shift. Despite all the mayors and governors touting their various (and varied) crime-fighting policies, largely what happened is that we live in a country where the willingness of police to arrest criminals, track down leads, and issue traffic violations plays an incredibly significant role in crime trends.

Police forces across the country essentially went on an informal work-to-rule strike — not actually walking off the job, but just doing the bare minimum — to protest the disrespect they were receiving from the politicians and citizens they’re supposed to serve. In San Francisco, police officers mostly just stopped doing any citations when the pandemic hit (reasonable) and then did barely any until roughly January 2024.

No matter how you feel about the police, the fact that they can and do retreat from their duties in such a manner reveals a catastrophic failure of democratic accountability. Whether you think the 2020 protests and anti-police attitudes were justified or not, police officers should be under the control of democratically elected officials. In practice, they are not.

Years ago, I wrote about the Ferguson effect — the phenomenon whereby protests against police reduce officer morale and therefore effort (thus yielding higher crime), which is often used to berate advocates for protesting. While I think this development carries lessons for anti-police advocates, it’s rarely wielded in favor of reforming police unions and increasing mayoral control of police policy and practices in general.

On today’s episode of The Argument, I discuss this all with my co-host Matt Yglesias, who, true to form, has a more pessimistic view of police reform advocates.

Yet, the ultimate version of reform would mean addressing the problem with police unions. Currently, we have a system where, not only do these unions bargain on wages and benefits, they also shield cops who have no business remaining on the force. It’s bad enough when teachers’ unions do this; it’s worse when the employee gets to carry a gun to work. University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley and former senior White House official Robert Gordon both argued for merit-based reforms to public unions.

We talk about that and much more on this week’s episode of The Argument.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

(Illustration by The Argument, image by Ira L. Black via Getty)

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

Subscribe now

WATCH THE EPISODE HERE

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

Corrections:

• Around 21:00, Matt describes a situation in which a D.C. cop was “chasing a kid on a bicycle” when the kid was hit by a car. Matt says he thinks the kid had a gun. However, in the case of Karon Hylton-Brown, the 20-year-old was riding a moped, not a bike, and there is no evidence he had a gun.

• Around 35:00, Matt says the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed the Democratic candidate for president from 1996 to 2008. While the organization did endorse Bill Clinton in 1996, it endorsed George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004, as well as John McCain in 2008. Instead, the National Association of Police Organizations endorsed Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama.

• Around 49:00, Matt says all Landmark Theatres locations sell alcohol. Most do, but not all.

Show notes:

• Council on Criminal Justice 2025 annual report: Council on Criminal Justice report

• John Roman Substack article discussing the report: External Processing article

• Coverage of bipartisan criminal justice reform efforts involving conservatives such as the Koch brothers: The Washington Post article

• Coverage of James Comey blaming a “Ferguson effect” for increased crime: The New York Times article

• Richard Rosenfeld’s June 2015 study that took a skeptical lens to the Ferguson effect: The Sentencing Project policy brief

• Richard Rosenfeld’s June 2016 study that reversed his skeptical conclusions, determining more research was needed: National Institute of Justice paper

• “Policing the Police: The Impact of ‘Pattern-or-Practice’ Investigations on Crime,” paper by Tanaya Devi and Roland Fryer showing that when the Department of Justice undertakes investigations into police departments, it leads to a statistically significant reduction in homicides and total crime — as long as the investigation was not preceded by a “viral” incident. If it was, then this leads to an increase in crime: NBER working paper

• “Who Protests, What Do They Protest, and Why?” paper by Erica Chenoweth, Barton Hamilton, Hedwig Lee, Nicholas Papageorge, Stephen Roll, and Matthew Zahn showing the demographics of those who protested in 2020 were more representative of the U.S. public than the demographics of those who voted in 2020. John Hopkins study

• Coverage of Mitt Romney participating in a George Floyd protest in 2020 “to make sure people understand that black lives matter”: CNN article

• Coverage of 30 states, plus D.C., passing statewide legislative policing reforms in the wake of 2020 police killings: Brennan Center for Justice article

• Data on Denmark’s COVID-era crime decline: Macrotrends metrics

• Data on the U.K.’s COVID-era crime decline: U.K. Office for National Statistics release

• Data on Spain’s COVID-era crime decline: Macrotrends metrics

• Data on Italy’s COVID-era crime decline: Macrotrends metrics

• Data on the U.S. COVID-era crime increase: Council on Criminal Justice report

• Data on Germany’s COVID-era crime increase: Macrotrends metrics

• Data on Portugal’s COVID-era crime increase: Macrotrends metrics

• Coverage of Daniel Lurie being elected mayor of San Francisco to fight crime in the wake of COVID’s crime wave: The Washington Post article

• Coverage of recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and replacement by pro-law enforcement Brooke Jenkins: Politico article

• Coverage of Secure D.C. Act, which made changes to D.C. police restraint policies, which was introduced by Councilmember Brooke Pinto and signed by Mayor Muriel Bowser: DCist article

• Coverage of D.C. police chase and death of 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown, for which Officer Terence Sutton was convicted by a jury before being pardoned by President Trump and reinstated: U.S. Attorney’s Office release, DCist article, NBC Washington article, The Washington Post article

• Analysis of “work-to-rule” slowdowns being particularly common in the airline industry: GAO analysis

• Research indicating collective bargaining and union rules for police officers have negative impact on cities: Center for Labor & A Just Economy report, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy article

• Coverage of then-Gov. Scott Walker limiting collective bargaining in Wisconsin, but exempting cops and firefighters to make the politics easier: The New Yorker article, Wisconsin Examiner article

• Coverage of police officers mainly living in distant exurbs or “cop neighborhoods,” rather than in the communities they police: WBAL-TV 11 article, USA Today article

• Coverage of D.C. being unable to fill police academy classes, despite putting money into new hiring: The Washington Post article

• “Police State,” song by Agnostic Front described by Matt: YouTube video

• Image shown on screen during Agnostic Front song: Wikimedia Commons page

• Coverage of Rodney King murder and subsequent demonstrations: USC article

• Coverage of Fraternal Order of Police presidential endorsements: The New York Times article, CNN article, The Oklahoman article, The New York Times article, NBC News article, Roll Call article

• Coverage of most soldiers identifying as Republicans or Republican-leaning: Gallup polling

• Coverage of non-college-educated voters becoming more Republican in recent cycles: Pew Research Center polling, Manhattan Institute article

• Coverage of “Defund the Police” lacking majority support, with most truly wanting reform: Gallup polling

• Coverage of 2020 Jacob Blake killing in Kenosha, Wisconsin: DOJ archived release, EBSCO article

• “Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?” 2008 paper by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna showing short-term crime decreases following the release of violent movies that young men enjoy: NBER working paper

• Coverage of more movie theaters selling alcohol: KBAK article, Mission Local article, New Jersey Digest article

• “Effects of violent media content: Evidence from the rise of the UFC,” 2022 paper by Jason Lindo, Isaac Swenson, and Glen Waddell showing that early exposure to the TV show The Ultimate Fighter significantly reduced crime: Journal of Health Economics article

• Coverage of paper showing that dealing with childcare during the pandemic worsened parents’ mental health: NBER working paper, The Atlantic article

• Coverage of evidence indicating that parents had comparatively better mental health outcomes during the pandemic: Demography article

Transcript:

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“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” used to be the gripe about how technological progress moved away from advancements in the physical world to “advancements” in the digital world.

But now we sort of do have flying, well, jumping cars. And more than that, we have cars that are unbelievably technologically advanced. The problem is they’re made in China, and both Republicans and Democrats have decided to collude so that I can’t buy them.

And worse than not being able to buy cool electric jumping cars that can add 250 miles of charge in five minutes flat, I’m also barred from buying cheap advanced cars.

A new car now costs nearly $50,000 on average. I could buy five new Chinese EVs for that price, though I’d settle for just one.

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It’s rare for one of my private purchasing decisions to be the subject of so much political and policy discourse, but that’s tariffs for you: Everything from wedding dresses to coffee and televisions has been affected by taxes on foreign imports.

To be fair, I recognize that there are valid concerns about America’s (and our allies’) dwindling capacity to build batteries. But… blocking consumers from buying EVs doesn’t magically produce a domestic battery industry.

The protectionist case was supposed to be about buying time for American manufacturers to catch up. That hasn’t happened. Ford and SK announced an $11.4 billion battery joint venture, took a $9.6 billion government loan, and then dissolved the whole thing when EV demand fell short of projections. These companies are not making the decades-long capital commitments that would make them competitive with China’s BYD.

My co-host, Matt Yglesias, doesn’t care much about my personal car troubles (he has a plug-in hybrid) and is more sympathetic to tariffs on Chinese EVs. He points to Apple’s shift toward manufacturing in India as a positive example. He also brings up President Reagan’s restrictions on Japanese car imports, which didn’t do much for the Big Three but did successfully pressure Japanese automakers to open factories in the U.S.

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Transportation is the second-largest household expense in America. Blocking cheaper, often better technology from entering the market imposes real costs on real people, disproportionately on the working-class people politicians in both parties claim to be fighting for.

The frustrating thing is that a more targeted approach is available. Subsidies, tax breaks, and friendshoring can build the domestic battery industry we need. The Inflation Reduction Act’s 45X production tax credits1 — which rewarded companies for actually manufacturing batteries rather than just announcing factory deals — are closer to the right idea. We could also remove environmental blockers and mine rare earths domestically or encourage mining in friendly nations. And you can still let me buy a cheap, cool car!

After all, the best industrial policy has always focused on export discipline — that is, the idea that the infant industries you’re nursing should be forced to compete against existing giants. Otherwise, you could spend decades forcing Americans to pay high prices to help domestic manufacturers make a bad product.

We get into all of it — the failure of Trump’s tariff regime, what serious industrial policy might actually look like, and how the climate activists are once again missing the mark — on this week’s episode of The Argument.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

(Illustration by The Argument, photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS via Getty)

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

Subscribe now

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

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

Time stamps:

• 0:00-The BYD car that can jump over potholes

• 4:07-Climate activists miss the mark

• 11:46-Setting the stage for war with China

• 20:13-Protecting nonunion electric vehicles

• 27:50-Let Jerusalem buy a cheap Chinese EV

• 35:13-Matt Yglesias’ trade solutions

• 41:20-Comparing today to 1980s Japan auto policy

• 46:10-Peer review: The effects of school phone bans

Corrections:

• Around 03:25, Jerusalem says we have a 130% tariff rate against China. This was the rate at one point, before the Trump administration lowered it to 10% in November 2025.

• Around 12:21, Matt says Graham Allison titled his book The Thucydides Trap. This was actually the name of an earlier essay by Allison. His book was titled Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

• Around 18:17, Jerusalem says BYD has a battery that can charge to 90% in five minutes. Their claim is actually that it can add 400 km of range with five minutes of charging. EV Powered reports it can charge from 10% to 70% in five minutes.

• Around 36:25, Jerusalem says, “I don’t think it’s great that 90% of the world’s rare earths that go into lithium-ion batteries are coming from China.” Around 90% of rare earth mineral refining does come from China, but these materials are typically used in the motors of EVs, not the lithium-ion batteries.

• Around 42:24, Matt ambiguously says “they” bought Rockefeller Center in New York after he was discussing Sony. It was actually Mitsubishi that bought Rockefeller Center.

Show notes:

• Full video of BYD’s $230,000 Yangwang U9 jumping over pot holes and road spikes; clip shown near beginning of episode: YouTube video

• Coverage of solar subsidies transferring costs to apartment dwellers: CalMatters article

• David Roberts expressing support for allowing Americans to buy Chinese EVs: Bluesky post, The Breakthrough Institute article

• Noah Smith expressing support for allowing Americans to buy Chinese EVs: Noahpinion article

• Coverage of Biden maintaining, and in some cases increasing, Trump’s first-term tariffs against China: NPR article, Reason article

• Coverage of Biden and Harris campaigning against Trump tariffs: NBC News article, Newsweek article

• Coverage of European tariffs (ranging from 7.8% to 35%) against Chinese products, which are meant to counteract China’s own subsidies: European Commission page, S&P Global article, Luxembourg Times article

• Coverage of second-term Trump tariffs against China peaking at 145%: The New York Times article, CNN article

• Coverage of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s social media thread encouraging Democrats to talk about climate change, one of the party’s less-popular issues, in the midterms: Twitter thread, E&E News article, Politico article

• Coverage of Congress overturning California’s attempt to phase out internal combustion cars. Frontline Democrats in the House voted with Republicans, but senators, including Gary Peters from Michigan, were whipped into voting against it: CalMatters article, E&E News article

• Coverage of Biden administration’s thinking about banning the sale of Chinese EVs to support U.S. automobile and battery manufacturing: NPR article, The Wall Street Journal article

• Coverage of trade war with China threatening supply of lithium-ion batteries: CSIS analysis, TariffTax article

• On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, book by David Ricardo about comparative advantage using an example of England trading cloth for Portugal’s wine: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Economic Interdependence and War, book by Dale Copeland arguing that open trade supports peaceful relations by nurturing an expectation of future trade: Princeton University Press page

• The Sparrow, novel by Mary Doria Russell about a Jesuit priest making first contact with aliens: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• The American Prospect editors expressing interest in the U.S. China Security and Economic Review Commission: The American Prospect article, The American Prospect article

• The Thucydides Trap, essay by Graham Allison arguing that preparations for war between the U.S. and China could become a self-fulfilling prophecy: The Atlantic essay, follow-up book

• Coverage of WWI-era naval posturing between Germany and Britain leading to war: World History Encyclopedia article

• Coverage of Chinese government suppressing protest movement in Hong Kong and the city’s “one country, two systems” status quo: Council of Foreign Relations article, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace article

• Coverage of Chinese government’s repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang: Council of Foreign Relations article, Human Rights Watch article

• Coverage of UAE government fomenting war and repression in Sudan: The Washington Post article

• Details of 45X program, part of the Inflation Reduction Act that provided a specific credit rate to manufacturers of critical energy production components: IRS page, Congress.gov article

• Coverage of BYD’s “Super e-Platform” battery that charges to 70% in five minutes, enabling around 250 miles of range: Inside EVs article, EV Powered article, Electric Motor Engineering article

• Coverage of decrease in manufacturing jobs under Trump administration’s tariff regime: Center for American Progress article, Cato Institute article

• Coverage of bifurcated U.S. automobile industry between UAW factories in Michigan and foreign factories in the South: CBS News article, Jacobin article

• Coverage of Trump administration’s change of heart on battery development: Axios article, CSIS article

• Coverage of BYD’s transformation from a battery company into a car company: CNBC article, BYD company intro

• Study detailing why Chinese EVs are able to be sold at low prices: Rhodium Group report, CNBC article

• Coverage showing that Chinese state subsidies account for just 5% of BYD’s per-vehicle cost advantage over Tesla: Rhodium Group report, EVXL article

• Coverage of $11.4-billion joint venture in 2021 between Ford and SK, and its subsequent $9.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy, which was dissolved because of lack of EV demand: Utility Dive article, Carscoops article

• Coverage of Reagan-era experience of curtailing Japanese car sales: NPR article, City Journal article, The New York Times archived article

• Coverage of U.S. EV share peaking at 10.6% in Q3 2025 before falling to 5.8% the following quarter: Kelley Blue Book article, Cox Automotive article

• Coverage of China branding plug-in hybrids as “New Energy Vehicles: The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies article, DieselNet article, Green Car Reports article

• Coverage of Geely, a Chinese company, buying Volvo from Ford in 2010: Reuters article, Volvo release

• Coverage of Apple shifting manufacturing away from China to India: Reuters article, CNET article, Time article

• Coverage of 91% of the world’s rare earth mineral refining coming from China: IEA article, The New York Times article

• Coverage of Trump exempting components of data centers from tariffs: White House proclamation, Facilities Dive article, GHY article

• Coverage of Trump allowing Nvidia to export its chips to China: Time article, Lawfare article

• Coverage of Walter Mondale’s comments about Japanese takeovers of U.S. assets, in which he said “What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?” The New York Times archived article, Stanford University Press book

• Coverage of Japanese companies reinvesting profits into U.S. assets, such as Sony buying Columbia Pictures Entertainment and Mitsubishi buying Rockefeller Center: The New York Times archived opinion article, Los Angeles Times article, The New York Times archived article, Los Angeles Times article

• Rising Sun, 1992 book (and adapted into a 1993 film) depicting the volatility of Japanese-U.S. business relations in the 1980s: Goodreads page, Amazon page, IMDb page

• David Autor articles about Chinese imports depleting U.S. manufacturing: American Economic Review article, Annual Review of Economics article

• Economist Adam Ozimek arguing that $40,000 is too much to spend on a new car: tweet, tweet

• Coverage of the median cost of a new car exceeding $50,000 for the first time in September 2025: Kelley Blue Book release

• Peer Review: “The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches,” paper by Hunt Allcott, E. Jason Baron, Thomas Dee, Angela L. Duckworth, Matthew Gentzkow, and Brian Jacob: NBER working paper

• Coverage portraying the Allcott et al. paper as being a disappointing result for the phone ban industry: The Washington Post article, The New York Times article

• Coverage of Yondr pouches: Yondr “How it works” page, The Valley Breeze article

• Coverage of students figuring out how to open Yondr pouches: The New York Times article

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Spirit Airlines is dead, and the right, true to form, is blaming Joe Biden.

The immediate cause of Spirit’s demise is pretty clear: The war with Iran spiked jet fuel costs, and the already-battered airline couldn’t absorb the hit to its bottom line. Last I checked, Joe Biden didn’t start any wars with Iran.

Spirit also had some other problems — a Pratt & Whitney engine recall that grounded a huge share of its fleet, legacy carriers copying its unbundled-fare model and capturing some of its customer base, a failed strategic pivot toward premium offerings…

If Spirit Airlines merged with JetBlue would it still be around? Maybe. Or maybe the expanded JetBlue would be bankrupt, too.

The Biden Department of Justice argued successfully against the JetBlue-Spirit merger on the grounds that we needed to preserve Spirit as an independent, ultra-low-cost carrier disciplining legacy fares. And while the right’s shrill attempts at deflecting from Trump’s death spiral of a presidency are unpersuasive, I do find the deflections of the anti-merger crowd to be a bit “The lady doth protest too much.”

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Matt Yglesias has been bugging me for a while about how the airline deregulation discourse is a “skeleton key” for understanding what the modern “anti-monopoly” movement is really about. I had sort of brushed him off because it was very much giving conspiracy theory.

But when he proposed we talk about it for this week’s episode of The Argument, I also fell down the rabbit hole.

As Matt says of the Biden administration’s antitrust intervention: “It’s not that they caused Spirit to go bankrupt … it just calls into question what they were trying to accomplish here.”

Anti-monopoly implies a focus on competition, so much of what this crowd does sounds like that’s the focus. The Open Markets Institute, the American Economic Liberties Project? These sound like organizations focused on increasing competition and free enterprise. But that’s just not what’s going on.

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Take airlines: The single biggest unlock for lowering prices for consumers and raising competition is allowing foreign airlines to compete against domestic airlines. But, as far as I can tell, not a single one of these organizations is focused on making that happen.

As proof, many European countries similarly deregulated their airline industries a decade or two after the U.S. and allowed much more competition than the U.S., including making them accessible to foreign ownership and foreign carriers. As a result, the top four airline groups now control just 40% of the market. (In the U.S., without this competition, the top four control 74%.)

And, importantly, the pre-airline-deregulation decades that the anti-merger crowd yearns for were straightforwardly anti-competitive. The Civil Aeronautics Board regulated basically everything about air travel, and it wasn’t trying to pave the way forward for new airlines to compete against existing ones for the purpose of lowering consumer prices; it was actively making it difficult for new entrants to join the market in order to artificially keep prices up.

Flights in the previous era cost travelers 20% to 100% more than they would have in a competitive market.

And all of that is justified by the idea that airlines are such a weird market that, if allowed to go unregulated, it will lead to something called “destructive competition.”

We talk about that and more on this week’s episode of The Argument.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

(Illustration by The Argument, image by Justin Sullivan via Getty)

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

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WATCH THE EPISODE HERE

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

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Time stamps:

0:00-Spirit Airlines is dead

7:07-The blocked JetBlue merger

14:54-1960s airline nostalgia

21:12-Matt’s tinfoil hat theory

26:29-Pre-Carter airline monopolies

35:26-The dawn of deregulation

47:17-Anti-monopolists want less competition

54:19-America’s protectionist policies

58:22-Peer review: Marriage and gender-coded purchases

Corrections:

• At 0:55:00, Jerusalem says the EU began creating its single aviation market starting in 1992 and going through 1997. While the full package of legislation did take effect in 1997, the first legislative package was passed in 1987.

• At 0:55:24, Jerusalem says that the five largest European aircraft control 45% of the European market while the four largest U.S. aircraft control 80% of the U.S. market. Those figures were accurate, but slightly more recent analysis shows the markets have shifted somewhat. A 2018 analysis showed the four largest European airlines controlled 40% of the EU market, while a 2025 analysis showed the four largest U.S. airlines controlled 74% of the U.S. market.

Show Notes:

• Coverage of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas travel, being closed since Feb. 28: Brookings article, CBS News article

• Coverage of jet fuel composing 20% to 30% of airlines’ costs: OpenAirlines article, Seeking Alpha article, IATA article

• Coverage of Spirit attempting Chapter 11 bankruptcies to save itself before shutting down under Chapter seven: Law.com article, OAG article, Las Vegas Sun article

• Coverage of Spirit blaming rising fuel costs in bankruptcy filing: AirlineGeeks article, Time article

• Podcast hosted by conservative comedians Stu Burguiere and Dave Landau that blamed Spirit’s failure on the Biden administration’s decision to block Spirit and JetBlue’s merger: BlazeTV podcast episode

• Coverage of Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy blaming Spirit’s failure on the Biden administration’s decision to block Spirit and JetBlue’s merger: Fox News article, ABC7 article

• Coverage of JetBlue losing money: Reuters article, Quartz article, The New York Times article

• Coverage of Pratt & Whitney’s recall of its geared turbofan engine, which impacted more Spirit aircraft than all other airlines combined: Simple Flying article, FlightGlobal article

• Coverage of Spirit receiving over $150 million in compensation from Pratt & Whitney due to recall: Aerospace Global News article

• Coverage of a Reagan-era judge blocking JetBlue’s merger with Spirit Airlines after President Biden’s DOJ sued to stop it: AP article, CNBC article

• Coverage of Spirit boosting premium offerings after its merger was blocked: Reuters article, Upgraded Points article, Spirit Airlines release

• Coverage of Delta president grudgingly introducing Basic Economy fares to compete with Spirit, even though “People don’t really want the product when they see exactly what it is.”: Conde Nast Traveler article, CNBC article, AJC article

• Photos shown depicting 1960s and 1970s air travel: Getty image, Getty image

• Coverage of plans at low-cost European airlines, including Ryanair, to offer short flights with small, vertical, stool-like seats that resemble leaning more than sitting. Prices for these flights could be as low as five Euros: EuroWeekly News article, Thrillist article

• Coverage of 1978 airline deregulation changes, initially under Jimmy Carter: Journal of Transport Geography article, Air and Space Museum article, EBSCO article

• Coverage of Trump Shuttle’s operations and failure: The Washington Post article, AeroTime article

• “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” article by Lina Khan on Amazon’s e-commerce domination: The Yale Law Journal article

• “Terminal Sickness,” article by Phillip Longman and Lina Khan attacking airline deregulation: Washington Monthly article

• “Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It,” book by Ganesh Sitaraman arguing that airline deregulation was a mistake: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “The Anti-Bigness Ideology,” article by Matt Bruenig about why bigness isn’t a huge concern for his socialist ideology: Mattbruenig.com article

• Federal Aviation Report of 1935, which defended the lack of competition created by strict airline regulations, saying “To allow half a dozen air lines to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence where there is enough traffic to support one really first-class service and one alone would be a piece of folly.”: Govinfo page

• Article profiling former Sec. Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s conversion to the anti-monopoly cause: Politico article

• “How Airline Markets Work… or Do They? Regulatory Reform in the Airline Industry,” paper by Severin Borenstein and Nancy L. Rose arguing that the price volatility in airlines can be explained by normal macroeconomic conditions: NBER chapter

• Abundance, book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Airline Deregulation, Revisited,” essay by former Justice Stephen Breyer expressing regret about the effect airline deregulation had on workers: Bloomberg Businessweek article

• History of the United Fruit Company’s actions in Latin America: Harvard Review of Latin America article, Retrospect Journal article, The World article

• “Why airlines are always going bankrupt,” article by David Oks about competition in the airline industry: David Oks article

• “We Fly Congress: Market Actions as Corporate Political Activity in the U.S. Airline Industry,” Temple University study showing airlines increase flights to districts where members of Congressional transportation committees live: Organization Science article

• “The Secret to Reindustrializing America Is Not Tax Cuts and Tariffs. It’s Regulated Competition,” 2025 article by Phillip Longman, cited by Matt: Washington Monthly article

• Red Plenty, book by Francis Spufford about communist abundance: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• 49 USC § 40102(a)(15), U.S. law that states domestic airlines must have 75% of voting stock and a majority of equity owned by U.S. citizens: GovInfo U.S. code

• Fact sheet on EU air transport rules to form a single aviation market, which began in 1987 and were implemented through 1997: EU fact sheet

• 2015 analysis showing the five largest European airlines (Ryanaid, EasyJet, Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, and IAG) control 45% of the European market: European Commission page

• Slightly more recent analysis (2018) showing that the four largest European airlines (Ryanair, Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, and IAG) control 40% of the European market: Global Finance article

• 2025 analysis showing the four largest U.S. airlines (United, American, Delta, and Southwest) control about 74% of the U.S. market: Spherical Insights analysis

• “Do Airlines in Chapter 11 harm their rivals?: Bankruptcy and pricing behavior in U.S. airline markets,” paper by Severin Borenstein and Nancy Rose showing that bankruptcies can cause prices to dip briefly: NBER working paper

• Peer review: “Gender-Specific Economic Shocks and Household Bargaining Power,” paper by Rania Gihleb, Osea Giuntella, and Dor Morag: NBER working paper

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Betty Friedan thought Korean POWs were dying in captivity because their mothers were housewives. She thought boy moms were making their sons gay. She wrote a whole chapter comparing suburban kitchens to concentration camps — in 1963, while America was still processing what concentration camps actually were.

The Feminine Mystique is one of those important books that everyone “knows” but no one has actually read. Fair enough; until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t either.

For today’s episode of The Argument podcast, Matthew Yglesias and I read the book that kicked off second-wave feminism.

Stripped of its most… bizarre elements, Friedan’s core argument — that women in postwar America were depressed, and society’s conventional prescription was to “housewife harder” — is one of the most successful arguments of the 20th century.

Friedan blamed women’s magazines, Freudian psychoanalysts, and university curricula for suppressing women’s aspirations. Instead, she said women should strive for a career — but not just any career. To Friedan, the only people who are truly fulfilled are those who live the life of the mind, are college-educated, and have a specific set of middle-class values.

In short, she was the original #girlboss.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

The Argument. Libbing out.

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

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Time stamps:

0:00 - Introduction to The Feminine Mystique

9:02 - Psychotherapy, Mad Men, and Marxist origins

20:02 - The true drivers of social change

30:52 - Famous books with massive effects

35:07 - The most insane parts of The Feminine Mystique

47:33 - The female happiness paradox

51:34 - Rating the book’s success

56:54 - Peer Review: Health benefits of WWII-era sugar rationing

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

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Show notes:

• The Feminine Mystique, 1963 book by Betty Friedan that serves as the main focus of this episode: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Articles critiquing The Feminine Mystique for centering white upper class women:

  • “4 Big Problems With The Feminine Mystique”: The Atlantic article

  • “A Critical Look at The Feminist Mystique”: The Stranger article

• Information on Betty Friedan founding the National Organization for Women (NOW): NOW page

• “Shoot the messenger,” article by Jerusalem Demsas about how the people who drive the discourse forward often disproportionately center their own experiences: The Argument article

• Information on Radcliffe College presidents: Harvard page

• A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, book by Stephanie Coontz that details some of the impacts created by The Feminine Mystique, which contains the quote (referenced by Jerusalem), “Books don’t become best sellers because they are ahead of their time”: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• “Books as Bombs,” article by Louis Menand about the impact of The Feminine Mystique: The New Yorker article

• Silent Spring, book by Rachel Carson often credited with kicking off much of the environmentalist movement: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Unsafe at Any Speed, book by Ralph Nader that led to many consumer protection regulations: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, book by Jane Jacobs that critiqued 20th-century urban planning and large-scale renewal projects: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Capital in the Twenty-First Century, book by Thomas Piketty that proposed several novel economic policies to advance income compression: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• The Anxious Generation, book by Jonathan Haidt that contains arguments against helicopter parenting: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, book by Lily Geismer about how NIMBY activism in the Boston suburbs was developed by highly educated women who didn’t have full-time careers outside the home: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Explanation of the section of morning Jewish prayers in which traditional Jewish men praise God who, among other things, “has not made me a woman.” The Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Reform movements have opted to substitute that language with alternatives: My Jewish Learning article

• Coverage of the campaign against mandatory retirement ages and other discriminatory practices for stewardesses: The New York Times archive, ACLU commentary, PBS article

• “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” paper by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers about why self-reported happiness among women has gone down even as their material well-being and rights have empirically increased: American Economic Journal: Economic Policy article

• “Karine Jean-Pierre is not a #GirlBoss,” article by Jerusalem Demsas: The Argument article

• “In defense of the ‘girlboss’,” article by Matt Yglesias: Slow Boring article

• Peer Review: “Early-Life Sugar Restrictions Reduce Genetic Disparities in Adult Adiposity,” article by Tadeja Gracner, Claire Boone, Patrick Turley, and Paul Gertler using data from U.K. sugar rationing in World War II to show the effect lack of sugar had on individuals with high genetic risk for obesity: NBER working paper

• Coverage of people getting “excommunicated” from psych fields for contradicting Freud: Freud Museum London article, Janet Malcolm book

(Illustration by The Argument, image by Harold M. Lambert via Getty)

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Matthew Yglesias wants to end asylum.

Asylum is a broadly reactive and procedural mechanism that takes control over who gets to enter the U.S. (and how many of them) out of the hands of politicians and the people who elected them. On a new episode of The Argument, Matt argues that the post-WWII asylum framework is not just politically untenable but practically unworkable.

I, true to form, disagree.

Let’s not kid ourselves, asylum is a huge political and policy problem for liberals. Anyone who takes seriously democratic legitimacy, economic growth, and basic human rights can’t pretend the backlash to Trump will fix the politics of immigration.

But I think giving up on asylum actually undersells the difficulty of the problem. People want to come to the U.S., and most Americans are open to legal, orderly immigration when they believe the system is working for them, not for foreigners. How do we produce that system?

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“Immigration policy should be designed to maximize the national interest, and the proceduralism and reactiveness of asylum does not fit into that very well,” Matt argues.

He’s right about the first part, dead wrong about the last.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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

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WATCH THE EPISODE HERE

New episodes post every Thursday.

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

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Corrections:

• At 0:17:13, Jerusalem says 2024 U.S. asylum grant rates for “Afghans, Syrians, Cameroonians, Eritreans, and Venezuelans” were at or above 75%. TRAC data shows this was true for Afghans (88.4%) and Eritreans (85.3%), but slightly higher than the rates for Cameroonians (74.4%), Syrians (68.9%), and Venezuelans (64.5%).

• At 0:17:59, Matt says “I’m sure people who want to move there [the Dominican Republic] from here [the U.S.] have good reasons for it. He means people who want to move from the Dominican Republic to the U.S.

• At 0:43:00, Jerusalem said the hiring rate in March 2022 was 7.4%, which was actually the job opening rate. The hiring rate was 4.4%.

• At 0:45:00, Matt says Trump has expanded “H-1A visa programs,” when he means H-2A.

• At 0:50:06, Jerusalem says that “I think a series of extremely specific and narrow programs is actually incentivizing this gaming the system rather than incentivizing it.” She means those programs incentivize gaming the system rather than addressing it.

Show notes:

• Border Act of 2024, sponsored by Sens. Chris Murphy, James Lankford, and Kyrsten Sinema, which would have set aside funding for immigration judges and asylum officers in an effort to get processing down to 90 days: Congressional Record, Sen. Murphy page, GovTrack bill text

• Manhattan Institute study arguing that around $1 billion a year for new judges and asylum officers would solve the asylum crisis: Manhattan Institute report

• ICE budget document showing an $11.3 billion budget in 2026 (not counting extra funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill): DHS file (PDF)

• One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, book by Matthew Yglesias making the case for rapidly increasing the U.S. population through immigration, in an effort to reframe the conversation in a more patriotic way: Goodreads page, Amazon page

• Report showing 84% of Americans support resettling Afghans who helped troops during the war to resettle in the U.S.: With Honor PAC report

• Polling showing 78% of Americans supported admitting up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees from the war in 2022: Gallup report

• Polling showing 66% of Americans supported admitting Kosovar refugees in 1999: Gallup report

• “Europeans’ support for refugees of varying background is stable over time,” study by Kirk Bansak, Jens Hainmueller, and Dominik Hangartner showing general support for admitting asylum seekers in 15 European countries: Nature article

• “Why America is so much better than Europe at immigration,” article co-written by Alexander Kustov and Kelsey Piper about the differences between U.S. and European approaches to immigration: The Argument article

• In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular, book by Alexander Kustov examining immigration issues through a strict framework of self-interest: Columbia University Press page, Amazon page

• Report showing that U.S. asylum seekers from five countries had grant rates at less than 20%: Dominican Republic at 11%, Mexico at 16.6%, Colombia at 19.3%, Ecuador at 19.7%, and Brazil at 19.7%: TRAC report

• Coverage of Bush-era emphasis on border security: Bush White House archived page, CBS News article

• “Democrats can’t hide from immigration forever,” 2025 article by Matt Yglesias that described the CHNV immigration parole program as having reduced irregular migration and border chaos: Slow Boring article

• Article cited by Matt about Nigerian migrants in the U.K. being coached on how to appear gay in order to get asylum: BBC article

• Coverage of Venezuela hitting 10,000,000% inflation: CNBC article

• Coverage showing over 70% of Venezuelans are still in their country: UNHCR page, N-IUSSP article

• Coverage showing around 70% of Syrians stayed in the country even through the war: MSF release

• Coverage showing over 90% of Sudan’s population remains in the country despite famine, civil war, and internal displacement: International Organization for Migration article, Al Jazeera article

• “How Deterrence Policies Create Border Chaos,” 2023 article by Jerusalem Demsas arguing that deterrence policies in immigration don’t work: The Atlantic article

• Chart showing nearly half as many U.S. job openings in 2026 as in 2022: FRED data

• Chart showing U.S. hiring rate at 3.1% in February 2026 and 4.4% in March 2022: FRED data

• Quinnipiac poll showing Biden hitting 33% approval in January 2022: The Hill article

• Coverage of Trump expanding the H-2A visa program for guest agricultural workers: Newsweek article, Time article

• Coverage of Biden-era labor regulations, which made it more difficult to get an au pair, among other things: The Washington Post article, The Wall Street Journal article, Cato Institute commentary

• Coverage of Australia having a higher share of foreign-born residents than the U.S. does: McCrindle Research article

• Coverage of Australia letting in more immigrants, relative to the existing population, than the U.S. does: NPR article, Cato Institute article

• Coverage of the creation of the CBP One app, which made it possible to set up an appointment with an asylum officer ahead of time: Los Angeles Times article, CBS News article

• Peer Review: “Germs in the Family: The Short- and Long-Term Consequences of Intra-Household Disease Spread,” by N. Meltem Daysal, Hui Ding, Maya Rossin-Slater, and Hannes Schwandt, showing younger siblings have much higher rates of hospitalization due to respiratory conditions contracted from older siblings: NBER working paper (PDF)

• Study showing that households with at least two children have an illness at least 50% of the time: Clinical Infectious Diseases article

• Studies showing that, on average, younger siblings…

  • Have higher delinquency rates: NBER working paper

  • Have less educational attainment: Intelligence study

  • Have lower lifetime earnings: PNAS Nexus study, The Times article

• Studies showing that, on average, winter birth dates are…

  • Slightly worse for life outcomes (higher risk of schizophrenia, asthma, or cardiovascular disease): Current Biology article, The Lancet article, JAMIA article

  • Slightly better for life outcomes (longer lifespan): PNAS article, The Science of Nature article, PLoS One article, Demographic Research article

• Next week’s reading: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan: Goodreads page, Amazon page

(Illustration by The Argument, image by David Dee Delgado/Stringer via Getty)

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While the United States was preaching the right to self-determination, it also decided it needed to make some practical choices. Ethiopia was a strategic ally in the burgeoning Cold War, and Ethiopia wanted Eritrea’s Red Sea coastline.

What followed was a brutal, decades-long oppression campaign against the Eritreans by the ruling Ethiopian government.

For all of you realpolitik heads out there, this didn’t even work out great for the U.S.’ strategic interests: Ethiopia ended up siding with the USSR anyway.

It’s easy for someone to look at this period of history and conclude that American liberal hypocrisy was a big failure. America could be a force for good, but only when it was convenient.

My podcast cohost Matt Yglesias makes a version of this argument. He thinks the push to frame foreign policy in idealistic terms tends to obscure more than it clarifies. It stops people from doing proper cost-benefit analysis and can justify bloody interventions.

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

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He points to the NATO bombing campaign in Libya as an example. “It’s not super clear how helpful that was. It cost billions of dollars. And, like, the whole time, nobody was saying, ‘maybe we should try to develop a malaria vaccine.’”

That’s all well and good, but the purpose of having high standards, even if you often fail to meet them, is that hopefully you try to hold yourself to them sometimes.

During the Cold War, Soviet propaganda highlighted the contradiction between America’s stated liberal ideals of freedom and equality on the international stage and the reality of Jim Crow at home. This painful truth became impossible to ignore domestically, and it helped create the conditions for the Civil Rights Movement.

What would the world look like without liberal hypocrisy, anyway? Well, we’re kind of living it.

While Trump’s typical off-the-cuff and offensive rhetoric has been charitably read as “telling it like it is” by his supporters, it also emboldens his most nefarious instincts. What we’re left with is the president’s gross justifications for military action — like capturing the president of Venezuela for the oil and attacking Iran before it could supposedly attack us. Any stated desire for peace and prosperity in these regions is offered like an afterthought.

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Show notes:

• “Missing liberal hypocrisy,” Jerusalem’s article on foreign policy ideals that Matt reacted to: The Argument article

• Coverage of the United Arab Emirates funding militia groups in Sudan: The Guardian article, Council on Foreign Relations post

• Coverage of U.S. supporting Ethiopia as a Cold War ally instead of supporting Eritreans’ right of self-determination: Britannica page, UCLA article

• Coverage of British intervention of Sierra Leone: The Guardian article, DTIC case study

• Coverage of Kenya training Haitian police officers: NPR report, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime analysis

• Coverage of Brazilian efforts to train Haitian police officers: The Rio Times article

• Oregon bill preempting Portland and other municipalities from enforcing affordable housing requirements on developers in many cases: Oregon State Legislature overview

• Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, book by Mary Dudziak about how U.S. self-interest aligned with its ideals during the Civil Rights Movement: Goodreads page

• Coverage of money being spent on global public health programs after USAID was shuttered: The New York Times article

• Coverage of Libyan intervention costing over $1 billion: Council on Foreign Relations article, CNN article

• Why Nations Fail, book by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson arguing that there are critical junctures in time where a country develops extractive or inclusive institutions: Goodreads page

• Peer review: “Easy A’s, Less Pay: The Long-Term Effects of Grade Inflation,” study by Jeffrey T. Denning, Rachel L. Nesbit, Nolan G. Pope, and Merrill Warnick: NBER working paper

• Coverage of Harvard limiting the number of A grades teachers can distribute: The Harvard Gazette article, Harvard Magazine article, Inside Higher Ed article

(Illustration by The Argument, image by XNY/Star Max via Getty)

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But modern anonymity is an entirely new beast.

When Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison wrote the essays that would become The Federalist Papers, they weren’t anonymous in the modern sense. That is, friends of Hamilton and Madiso…

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The case, decided along ideological lines, caused a stir among progressives.

But was this discrimination the inevitable consequence of affirmative action policies? Or did it simply give cover to people with genuinely racist beliefs?

“The core problem with affirmative action — how it was being practiced, particularly at Harvard — is that they were just being racist to Asians … What was happening was not just like, ‘Oh, we’re all well-meaning people trying to improve [society].’ These people had racist views about Asian Americans,” declared Jerusalem Demsas in The Argument’s premiere podcast episode.

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In this heated conversation, Matthew Yglesias and Jerusalem tackled affirmative action, an increasingly unpopular policy. And the Harvard case sits at the heart of the debate.

“In a basic way,” lamented Matt, “it is not a good idea to be slotting people into racial and ethnic categories and judging them on that basis. It’s not fair to people, and it’s not healthy for society.”

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Further reading:

“Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges” by Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman

“Breaking Systemic Barriers: Being Black in the Aquatic Sciences and Related Fields” by Lauren Pharr

“Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities” by Vishal R. Patel, Christopher M. Worsham, Michael Liu, and Anupam B. Jena

Corrections:

• At 0:05:36, Matt says “LSAT flunk rates” when he means “bar exam flunk rates.”

• At 0:07:06, Jerusalem says “data from Sander’s” when she means “data from Sander’s critics.”

• At 0:18:46, Jerusalem says Raj Chetty’s data shows that attending an elite school “doubles” the likelihood of reaching the top income quintile when she means “increases by 50%.”

Show notes:

• Research showing Black patients have better health outcomes in areas with more Black doctors: JAMA Network Open study, JAMA Network Open study

• Research showing Black doctors are more likely to choose primary care specialties than their white counterparts: Journal of the National Medical Association study, Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) study

• Coverage of U.S. shortage of primary care doctors: Harvard Health Publishing article, AAMC study

• Research showing the presence of Black judges on a federal appellate panel changes behavior of their non-Black colleagues: Princeton study, Crime & Delinquency study

• Research on India’s caste-based reservation system: International Journal of Law study

• Research showing presence of female legislators in India makes female constituents’ concerns more likely to be heard: Cambridge University Press study

  • Research showing this increases water and road infrastructure: Econometrica study

• Research on mismatch effect in law schools: Journal of College and University Law article, ABA Journal article, Journal of Legal Education article

• Research on selective school enrollment only having a significant effect on lifetime earnings if the student comes from a disadvantaged background: National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research working paper

• Coverage of decrease in professional diversity after California’s affirmative action law was struck down: NPR article, Berkeley Law study, Industrial and Labor Relations Review study

• Coverage of Elizabeth Warren taking a DNA test to demonstrate Native American ancestry and subsequently apologizing The New York Times article, The Washington Post article, NPR article

• Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman research showing large effects of attending elite schools: NBER working paper

• Coverage of future-President Obama saying his daughters didn’t need affirmative action assistance: Politico article, The Seattle Times opinion article, The New York Times article

• Coverage of President Clinton campaigning on a promise to “mend not end” affirmative action: The New York Times article, The Baltimore Sun article

• Coverage of Harvard admissions discriminating against Asian Americans: European Economic Review article, Harvard Law Review article

• Article by Judge Glock describing how firms promote minority leaders in order to obtain contracts set aside for “disadvantaged” companies: City Journal article

• Coverage of men getting an advantage in college admissions because of gender imbalances: The New York Times Magazine article, New York Post article

• 2021 argument that marine biology needed more diversity: Coastwatch magazine article

• Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? by Martin Luther King, Jr.

• Coverage of affirmative action gaining momentum during Kennedy and LBJ administrations: UCI Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity brief

• Books by Richard Kahlenberg on affirmative action:

  • The Remedy: Class, Race, And Affirmative Action, 1996: Goodreads page

  • Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, 2025: Goodreads page

• Coverage of Texas’ “Top 10% Rule,” which initially stated that anyone in the top 10% of their high school class was automatically admitted to UT Austin. The rule has since been amended to the top 6% being admitted to UT Austin: UT News article, Texas Comptroller program page

• Peer Review^TM study: “Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities,” by Vishal R. Patel, Christopher M. Worsham, Michael Liu & Anupam B. Jena: NBER working paper

• Public opinion data on self-driving cars: The Argument polling, Pew Research Center polling, Brookings article

• Coverage of voice-activated devices proving distracting for drivers: AAA study, ABC News article

(Illustration by The Argument, image by Harvard University)

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Welcome to The Argument, a weekly podcast from yours truly and Matthew Yglesias.

Matt and I have been on many podcasts together, back in the days of The Weeds where we first libbed out about zoning reform, to when I interviewed him at The Atlantic for Good on Paper, and just last year when we talked about liberalism here at The Argument.

We have a lot in common—particularly when it comes to housing and economic policy—but that makes it all the more interesting how much we tend to disagree.

So instead of a Crossfire-style debate show where two people who have no overlapping interests yell at each other and make you feel bad about the world, we’re doing something different.

The Argument is a show where two friends, well, argue about politics, policy, and whatever else is on their minds.

It’s a debate show for people who want to get into the weeds and are turned off by screaming matches and softball interviews where everyone just agrees with each other. Each week, one host argues a distinctive point of view — armed with facts and research, not just pundit bluster — and then Matt and I hash it out.

New episodes post every Thursday, starting April 9.

WATCH THE TRAILER ON YOUTUBE HERE

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In this episode of The Argument, host Jerusa…

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