Originality is overrated

Politicians should worry about being right, instead of being novel

Tom Steyer, one of the leading candidates for governor of California, has proposed a new jobs guarantee to address AI-induced job disruption, rather than a boost to proven programs. (Photo by Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)

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

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We’re taking The Argument to San Francisco! On May 13, Kelsey Piper and Jerusalem Demsas are debating a question that feels unavoidable right now: Is AI actually changing how science gets done, or are we in the middle of a very expensive illusion? Jerusalem is bullish; Kelsey is skeptical.

And you won’t just be watching. You’ll get to join in on the argument, too.

Join us May 13 at The Chapel from 7 to 10 p.m. Come argue with us! RSVP here.

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The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

The currency of a great reporter is scoops.

But academics, opinion writers, and politicians don’t have that much in common with the shoe-leather reporters chasing down a lead in the streets of Baltimore or Beijing. Still, perhaps because of our physical and occupational proximity to scoop-obsessed journalists, these professions sometimes absorb this obsession with originality.

The most absurd example of this phenomenon I can recall came when Derek Thompson wrote a piece about “Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out” (perhaps one of the most hot-button questions in social science) and was promptly embroiled in beef with the author of the book Hanging Out, a professor at Champlain College who seemed to think she had invented the phrase.

But communications professors are not really the problem — it’s politicians and policy wonks who yearn for a new, fresh policy idea to our collective detriment. Because while it may not be what Twitter and the media reward, it’s more important to be right than it is to be fresh.

Take AI labor market disruption. We’ve published multiple pieces that argue for focusing on the boring steps of shoring up existing unemployment insurance programs, copying existing examples of social wealth funds, and investing in existing public job-matching programs.

Yet instead of championing these ideas, elected officials are taken in by the novelty of a brand-new jobs guarantee (California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer proposed a new one this week) or robot taxes.

Boring, tried and true policies are the ones that have been stress-tested in the court of public opinion and in the realm of policy analysis. That makes them boring, yes, but it also means they might work.

Arguments for a jobs guarantee in particular keep grinding my gears.

Just imagine all the politically toxic and genuinely administratively complicated things such a program would have to do:

1. Determine how much individuals should be compensated. Equally? Based on education? Based on their previous income? Does that mean college grads get to make $100,000 while service sector workers go on making minimum wage?

2. Identify the individuals who have been displaced. Millions of layoffs happen in a healthy economy. Which of those individuals will find good, productive jobs in a few short weeks of searching and which should be eligible for a jobs guarantee?

3. What should these individuals do? Steyer wants folks working in a range of sectors including affordable housing construction and public services. But the reason more people aren’t working in those sectors is that there’s not enough demand (in some cases because of restrictions on building) and because of insufficient pay (in which case we don’t need a jobs guarantee; we just need to raise public sector employee salaries!)

In any case, the big problem here is politicians’ fetish for novelty, which seems to periodically overwhelm the good sense of policy wonks.

If marketers want to call unemployment insurance “anti-AI job displacement insurance” or raising public sector salaries “a public jobs guarantee,” I will not begrudge them their PR. But the goal of making policy is to do something that works.

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Top stories this week, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

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

This week in The Argument, Kelsey Piper took on the mistaken, peak-woke belief that it’s somehow progressive to not enforce the law. When we fail to adequately police crime, she argued, it hurts disadvantaged Americans the most. Learn more in the full story:

Our moral obligation to prevent crime

Meanwhile, Jerusalem Demsas countered fears that AI could accelerate the rise of a post-truth world. AI is a centralizing technology, like the printing press, she said. It could actually help unwind the world that social media made. Check out the take:

Are you there Grok? It's me, Margaret

Finally, Maibritt Henkel complicated the notion that men are the ones who are tough on crime. Debriefing The Argument’s latest polling results, she found several cases in which women are more punitive than men (and where men are willing to overlook the victims of certain crimes). Find out which ones below:

When men are soft on crime

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🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• This week, the FDA approved a new pancreatic cancer treatment, which had been fast-tracked by the agency. The drug was shown to double the survival rate in people with advanced stages of the disease.

• The Bipartisan Policy Center conducted a poll and found that 89% of Americans want the House and Senate to work together on affordable housing legislation. The poll comes as the two houses try to work out the final details of the ROAD To Housing Act and as President Trump waffles on whether or not he will sign the bill.

• Finally, the International Renewable Energy Agency put out a report demonstrating that 24/7 solar and wind with battery storage beats fossil fuels on costs. So to those standing in the way of a green energy future, we ask… build? baby? build?

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Worth watching...

This week on the pod, Jerusalem and Matt dug into the landmark 1960s book The Feminine Mystique. Listen to them duke it out over competing theories of change: What role do books and ideas actually have in social progress? As readers, I’m sure we would all like to know.

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

Over on Substack live, The Argument’s Lakshya Jain raised a red flag about VoteHub’s choice to incorporate data from prediction markets into their polling model — and he did it directly with VoteHub’s Head of Data Science Zachary Donnini.

It made for a fascinating exchange. Take a look:

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What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

In honor of The Argument’s event in San Francisco, I will recommend some of my favorite songs about my home state: “California Stars,” “California Girls,” “California,” and of course, “California.” If you couldn’t tell, I’m thrilled to be out west. Expect some more… regionally inspired music from me next week.

In film and TV, Eli Richman gave us an ambivalent review of the film Exit 8, while Milan Singh enthusiastically rewatched Breaking Bad.¹

In games, Angela Tracy brought us FoodGuessr, which is exactly what it sounds like. You guess a dish from an image and list of ingredients. There is also an election-themed version of this called BallotGuessr, where you guess how the residents voted in 2024 based on a Google Street View image. Good luck.

Finally this week, we had Justin Zuckerman covering the books department alongside Maibritt Henkel and Jerusalem Demsas. Justin urged folks to check out The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover. (That is the full title.) Maibritt Henkel was partway through Ben Lerner’s new novella Transcription, and seemed to be smitten by it so far.

“At a sentence level, Lerner always scratches a particular itch in my brain,” she told me.

Jerusalem read Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash, which she loved (it includes the first non-monogamy storyline she’s read that didn’t make her want to roll her eyes out of her head) and The Jasad Heir by Sara Hashem, which is a very fun fantasy book that meditates on the duties we owe our fellow countrymen.

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I was wearing my Argument quarter zip as I wrote this pitch to buy some merch. You could also try a keychain, a hat, or a sticker instead. Each one is a great conversation starter in its own way. Buy them here.

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More to read:

1. Milan wanted me to make special mention of Bryan Cranston’s acting, which I double endorse. I once saw Cranston as LBJ on Broadway and now LBJ is Cranston in my head.