One issue I've long had with this moderation-or-not discourse is that it's a moving target. If we define moderate as something like the median of the current distribution of political views (ignoring all the complications with that concept), then there must be people who organically and earnestly hold those specific views. Yet those people are only moderates for as long as their views happen to be at the median. If the underlying distribution of views changes, which it does, then people who were formerly moderates, so defined, no longer are.

But the people who advocate moderation, like Matt Yglesias, are almost never moderate in this organic sense. Yglesias's views, e.g. those in One Billion Americans, are definitely not at the current median. These people are instead strategic moderates who advocate that politicians and other political actors determine what the current median is and then adopt those views, including in their own political advocacy.

This sounds sensible until you realize that the median is constantly changing and that minoritarian views become majoritarian (and thus moderate) views only because people advocate for them in the political sphere broadly defined. If you are constantly sampling the point-in-time median to define your views, you will have very unstable views and you will end up having taken positions that become wildly unpopular.

Yglesias on Israel

Israel provides a useful case study on how this sort of strategic moderation can go wrong. After the October 7 attacks, US support for the Israeli military became a hot-button issue that divided the left from the center-left in the Democratic party. In the early period of that dispute, public polling was generally pro-Israel. But this completely reversed over the next couple of years (Gallup, Pew). This whipsawing of public opinion resulted in strategic moderates like Yglesias recommending taking positions that quickly became toxic, creating a "defund the police" type problem for all of the politicians and political actors who followed Yglesias's advice.

To see just how bad this advice really was, I used a coding agent to download every Matt Yglesias tweet from October 7, 2023 to present that mentioned "Israel," "Palestine," or "Gaza." I was hoping I could plot some kind of change over time with that data, but Yglesias appears to have deleted all of his tweets from August 2024 through May 2026. This was presumably done through a tweet deletion service that said it would delete all of his tweets but actually only deleted his last 3,200.

So I shifted to a second idea, which was to have Claude analyze all 492 Israel-related tweets Yglesias made between October 7 and August 2024 (i.e. before the mass deletion) and to identify the ones in which Yglesias was arguing, directly or implicitly, that it was smart politics to be pro-Israel. You can browse the complete results of this here. Below are a few of them:

The last screenshot is the one that piqued my interest in all of this because it stuck in my head from when I first saw it nearly three years ago. Narrowly, on the merits, everything about it is backwards. All else equal, sending money to Israel is not good for the American poor, and as a matter of political rhetoric, it is pretty easy to say we should be spending that money on services at home. In the years since, that particular rhetorical line seems to have become fairly common and effective.

But Yglesias was not making a point about the policy merits. He was saying that Torres was, whether sincerely or not, being a smart political moderate because he was doing good position-taking. Just two years later, three members of Congress in Torres-adjacent NYC districts were primaried by people who were, to a large extent, running against the pro-Israel positions of the incumbents. Torres did not face a similar sort of challenge this go-around. He may have won even if he did. But it's hard to believe today that his past pro-Israel position-taking is a political asset that is helping his impoverished constituents.

The same is true for other politicians, not just Ritchie Torres, who shrewdly followed the polls in 2023 and now have a record on Israel that puts them at odds with the majority of Americans and the vast majority of Democrats.

Earnest Politics Are Unavoidable

The problems with this sort of strategic moderation are not just that you can get burned by a rapid change of public opinion. There is also something more conceptually troubling about it, which is that it is, in a Kantian sense, not universalizable. If everyone were to try to deduce what the median is and then adopt that view, then there would be no median. To have a median, you need people to earnestly engage in political opinion formation and political advocacy that generates a distribution of political views. Yet, this sort of earnest political engagement, which is what makes strategic moderation possible at all, is regarded as naive and reckless by strategic moderates.

These days, Yglesias has, in the spirit of strategic moderation, said that Democrats should actually bash Israel. That is, after all, what the current median requires. But if everyone took his advice in 2023, then the median would have never moved to the current anti-Israel position.

To the extent that Yglesias tries to deal with these paradoxes, it's by imagining that it's possible to simultaneously be moving public opinion in your direction without that bleeding over at all into the electoral process. But these two things are obviously intertwined. There is no secret place where you can spread your ideas away from the ears of voters and winning politician support is part of the process of moving public opinion.

Yglesias's favored example on this point actually proves the opposite. On Twitter and elsewhere, Yglesias likes to point out that gay marriage advocates did not press Obama to run as a gay marriage proponent because they knew it was not yet popular enough at the time and Obama had given reassurances that he was actually lying about his views on gay marriage. Yet, these same gay marriage advocates had in the 1990s and 2000s, pursued state-level lawsuits aimed at legalizing gay marriage as part of a long-haul strategy of changing public opinion. Some of these suits succeeded, but they also generated public backlash in the form of state-level constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. It was in this back-and-forth that a durable public consensus in favor of gay marriage was forged.

Free-riding off of earnest politics by having others do it and then, as if floating above it all, putting your finger on the median and going "there" can be very psychologically satisfying. It makes you feel like you are one of the only serious people in politics. But what it really does is turn yourself into a non-factor, someone whose political views twist in the wind based on how persuasive other political actors — the ones who don't engage in strategic moderation — end up being.

1. Ditching Wordpress

This website, People's Policy Project, and my wife's website have all historically run on WordPress, hosted by Nearly Free Speech. I don't really like Wordpress, but it is the industry standard and the path of least resistance for most things.

AI coding agents now make it easy to build and maintain a custom website, including a somewhat complicated one involving a content management system (CMS). So I switched all three sites away from WordPress.

My wife's website was converted to a simple static site.

This website and People's Policy Project now run on a very similar "stack" of Python, Flask, nginx, and markdown files for holding the content. This includes a custom CMS that is WordPress-like but simpler and made to work exactly the way I want it to.

Whenever I want to change the CMS — such as recently when I wanted to be able to add images to a post by dragging and dropping them — I can just SSH into the server, fire up Claude Code or Codex, explain what I want, and it makes it happen. Similarly, if I want to edit a piece after drafting it, to catch grammar, spelling, and typographical mistakes, I can have an LLM harness look at it, make suggestions, and tell it which ones to implement. I do that for all of my pieces now, including this one.

I am able to manage all these lighter, simpler sites on the same server that runs my NLRB Research website, which saves me several hundred dollars a year in hosting fees.

2. Microdata Analysis

I wrote a lot of statistical programming code over the last 15 years or so. I would never get rid of any code I wrote because, if I found myself doing something similar later, I could use it as a reference. This has proven to be a very valuable resource in setting up my new way of doing microdata analysis orchestrated entirely through AI coding agents.

In my new approach, I have assembled a neatly organized directory of microdata sets along with a set of markdown files containing instructions about how to use each set and a shared theme for making graphs out of the data.

I'll spare you the details, but what this all allows me to do is start up a Claude Code session inside that directory and quickly produce figures and graphics on pretty much anything covered by commonly-used microdata sets. For example, below is a graph I produced using the American Time Use Survey that shows how Sunday TV viewing goes up during the NFL season. I did this solely by prompting Claude Code.

Previously, to make graphs like this, I would copy the figures into a Google Sheet and use its graphing wizard.

3. Podcast Stuff

I have a regular podcast called The Bruenigs. It is mostly a live-to-tape type of thing, with minimal editing, but I do try to make sure the audio quality meets the podcast standard people are used to. Previously, I used a paid service called Auphonic to normalize sound, convert the WAV to an MP3, and handle other post-processing. Now I just prompt Claude to do all of this with FFmpeg. This includes cutting things out and also readying audio clips from elsewhere on the internet. This has saved me a little over $100/year while also making my process faster and easier.

4. Procedural Rules

One thing I really hate about litigating, which I find myself doing more and more these days, is all the little procedural rules. If you are litigating in the Eastern District of California, for instance, you will need to follow the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Local Rules for the EDCA, and the rules for the specific EDCA judge you are assigned. Taken together, this amounts to around 500 pages of overlapping rules that govern often very tedious things like footer formatting. What I do for my cases now is throw all of those rules into a NotebookLM notebook and then work within that system to get assistance with following the rules. So, for instance, before I file a pleading in a case, I will put it in my NotebookLM instance and ask it if it is rule-conforming. This is a good way to find any mistakes you made that go against one of the many hundreds of little rules and then fix those before you file.

I gather law firms have associates and paralegals for that sort of thing. I do not.

5. Digesting Exhibits and Other Document Dumps

During various parts of litigation, opposing parties will send you a bunch of documents. This might be as a response to discovery requests or as part of exchanging exhibits. It can be very tedious to go through all of these documents and especially to create an index or summary of each of them, which is often necessary to make them useful. One thing I often do these days is just point Claude Code or Codex to the directory with the documents and ask it to create a spreadsheet that contains the name of each document, a brief summary of its contents, and even a brief guess at how the document might be used in the case. For the latter bit of information, it's useful to include in your prompt what the case is about and other context that can help it make a good guess.

This sort of initial summarizing and organizing makes it much faster to go through the documents and to reference and use the documents effectively later.

6. Legal Research

I have discussed this before, but my main accomplishment using AI tools remains my NLRB Research AI Assistants. I have created a comprehensive self-updating database of documents related to the National Labor Relations Act and National Labor Relations Board, as well as a Skill file to be used by LLM harnesses (generally Claude but the Skill file is technically harness and model agnostic) to search through those documents to answer NLRB and NLRA questions. I have done the same thing for the LMRDA, MSPB, and CA PERB, as well as created a similar tool for looking through collective-bargaining agreements.

I started selling subscriptions to these tools a few months ago and currently have 26 subscribers — a mix of individuals, unions, and union-side law firms that together pay $22,860 per year.

In addition to making money on subscriptions, I personally use the tool all of the time. A lot of the day-to-day life of providing legal services to unions — whether as outside counsel or on staff — is to answer discrete little questions about whether this or that thing is protected or illegal or similar. And the NLRB Research tools are excellent at that, in addition to being a good way to find legal authorities for more significant legal writing.

As I explain in this video, this is what I have been trying to accomplish for the last 2+ years. It wasn't possible until the most recent models and harnesses. But with this skill and the API into my NLRB Research database, you really can just ask any labor law question and get a high-quality answer with citations and links to case law.

The way it works is not by hoping Claude has the information in its training data, but rather by instructing Claude and the Claude Cowork/Code harness how to iteratively query my database, analyze the results, query some more, analyze some more, and so on until it can construct an answer. So, in other words, getting it to use the database the way a real lawyer would use a legal database, and indeed the exact way I use the NLRB Research database to research labor law questions.

Check out the video. I do intend to sell this for real to firms and unions in a SaaS-type model. Email matt@nlrbedge.com if interested.

I produced this YouTube video tonight about a topic that has irritated me for a while, which is the discourse around so-called "AI agents." I think the way people talk about this is extremely confusing, mystical-sounding, and unhelpful.

In the video, I write my own LLM harness (or coding agent?) called Bruenig Code to show you what exactly people are talking about. I hope you leave the video with the understanding that, ultimately, LLMs are just like other APIs: you send text to them, they send text back. Strictly speaking, they don't do anything other than that. They don't control your computer, run your web browser, do your shopping, or whatever. You send text to them. They send text back. That's it.

It just turns out that, if you cleverly construct other tools around this exchanging of text through an API, you can accomplish a lot.

I have never seen someone write a reference book using this method and, if you were to try to do so manually, it would be a monumental effort requiring a massive amount of human labor. I did not do this labor, but instead mostly used Google Gemini and Claude Sonnet to generate the book.

I have been talking about producing this book for several months on X and a number of people have asked for more of the technical details of how I did it. That is what this post is about.

Constructing the Database

A couple of years ago I created the NLRB Law Database at NLRBResearch.com. This database tracks fourteen different types of documents that essentially define the practical meaning of the National Labor Relations Act. The database is updated once a day using bespoke web scrapers that I wrote in Python. At the time, I used ChatGPT to help me a little with the coding, but not that much, as this was in the early LLM days before the code-writing ability of LLMs got really good.

This database is the centerpiece of the book-generation process. It contains all NLRB decisions issued from 1935 to present and every Supreme Court case that has ever used the phrase "National Labor Relations" along with tens of thousands of other sorts of documents that cite to those decisions. All of this material is stored in plain text with metadata like the name, date, and citation for the case.

Finding the Most-Cited Cases

Once the database was constructed, it was fairly trivial to find the most-cited cases. Using code, I made a list of every NLRB and Supreme Court decision in the database along with each decision's citation. NLRB cases have citations that look like "90 NLRB 289" and Supreme Court cases have citations that look like "395 U.S. 575." I conducted a search in the database for each of the cases on the list, e.g., this search for "90 NLRB 289." Every case that contains that text shows up in the search results as a match and so you can add up the number of matches to determine how many times it has been cited.

Once you do this for every single NLRB and Supreme Court decision, you can simply sort the cases from most citations to least citations to find the 100 most-cited cases. Once you have the 100 most-cited cases, you can go back into the database, search for the citation of each of those cases again, and then pull down the 100 most-recent cases that cite to each target case in a JSON file.

So the result of this process is you end up with 100 JSON files, one for each of the 100 most-cited cases. Those JSON files contain the names, dates, citations, and full text of the 100 most-recent cases citing to the target case.

Producing the Summaries

It would be nice if you could just upload each of these JSON files to an LLM and ask it to produce a summary. But you cannot do this because the files are too big. For instance, the JSON file containing the 100 most-recent cases citing to "90 NLRB 289" is over 3.3 million tokens in length. The most tokens you can give a high-quality frontier LLM at a time is 1 million.

So what I did instead was write a Python script that walks through a JSON file one case at a time and sends each case's information to Google Gemini Flash while prompting it to provide a 100-word summary of that case that focuses on how that case applied the target case. The prompt also instructed Gemini to send its response back as JSON so that I could compile all of the summaries into a new JSON file for the next step of the process.

So, for example, the most-cited case in NLRB history is F.W. Woolworth Co., 90 NLRB 289 (1950), which is a case about how to calculate backpay remedies. I grabbed a JSON containing the 100 most-recent cases citing to F.W. Woolworth in my NLRB Law Database. Then I went through that JSON file one case at a time and had Gemini provide a 100-word summary that described what legal rule F.W. Woolworth established and how F.W. Woolworth was applied in that case. This 100-word summary was sent back in JSON format with other metadata, allowing me to construct a new JSON file that contained 100-word summaries for each of the cases in the original JSON file.

Once I had this new JSON file — the one with the 100-word summaries — I sent that file to Claude Sonnet and had it produce a summary of the target case using the 100 Gemini Flash summaries. This text is what made it into the book.

To be clear, all of what I am describing above is being done with Python code that was written with Claude Code, mostly with the Claude Sonnet model though occasionally with the Claude Opus model. I didn't do any of this manually.

Compiling the Book

Once you have all of these summaries, you still have to compile them into a book. People who buy The National Labor Relations Book get sent an email with a PDF, EPUB, and HTML version of the book. To produce those three things, I had to compile all of the summaries, with my edits and other contributions, into some kind of intermediary document that could then produce these files.

The way I did that was to have the final summaries from Claude Sonnet sent to me as markdown files. Markdown is a simple markup language that can create headings, subheadings, hyperlinked text, and so on. These markdown files were all placed in a directory with numerical prefixes to make sure they all lined up in the order desired for the book (so the first part of the book is 000-Introduction.md, the next part is 001-Method.md, and so on). Once the markdown files are all lined up in the directory like this, it is easy to move cases around in the book by changing their numerical prefixes and also easy to edit the files. Because markdown is just plain text, it was also possible to prompt Claude Code to move things around or to edit the text.

To compile the markdown into the PDF, EPUB, and HTML, I used pandoc. I actually created a Makefile that contained the pandoc command for generating each of the three files. And so whenever I wanted to compile the book to see what it looked like, I could just type "make pdf" or "make epub" or "make html" or, to do all of them, "make all."

The book also contains a couple of graphical illustrations and a nicely-designed table in it. These were written in LaTeX, which was placed in the markdown files.

As with the prior section, basically all of the coding aspects of what I am describing here were done by Claude Code using the Sonnet model. It wrote the Makefile. It wrote the LaTeX markup. It installed pandoc, LaTeX, and all the other packages needed to do all of this.

Selling the Book

When it came time to sell the book, I wanted to see if I could do so without using an e-commerce platform that takes a cut of your sales. There are a number of such platforms, including Amazon, for self-published books. But, what's the point of a coding agent if not to allow me to set all that up myself without having to pay a third party? I keep hearing that LLMs are going to kill SaaS. So let's kill it.

I SSH'd into my NLRBResearch.com server, which also has Claude Code installed. I explained to Claude what I wanted to do — take card payments and automatically email the PDF, EPUB, and HTML to buyers — and asked it to come up with a plan for doing it in the simplest way possible.

Claude concluded that the best way to do it would be to set up a small Flask app with Stripe (payment processing) and Resend (emailing) integrations. I already have a Stripe account for NLRB Research, so Claude walked me through how to create a new product on Stripe and how to get the relevant Stripe secrets/keys. It also walked me through how to set up a Resend account and get a Resend API key. It instructed me not to share those keys with Claude, which was reassuring, and then proceeded to write the Flask app, edit my nginx (server) configuration, and create a systemd entry that launches everything. The systemd entry had three empty variables where I was told to paste my Resend/Stripe keys, which I did.

And it worked. I am selling my book without paying a platform fee.

Conclusion

As I noted in my prior post about AI, I find all of this stuff incredibly useful. In some of the more practically minded LLM discourse (not the philosophical discourse), I keep seeing this painful phrase "solopreneur" and I guess that is what I am and have been for the last 10 years or so, with all of my projects. I've never hired an employee and only occasionally hire outside contractors, like writers, editors, and designers for People's Policy Project.

For someone in my situation, LLMs enable me (1) to do different stuff than I have ever done before because they have abilities I do not, (2) to do more stuff than I have previously been able to do because they work faster, and (3) to in-house things I would have previously had to outsource to a particular person (like an editor) or to a service (like an e-commerce platform).

But one thing I think we can see with this book is that the LLMs are not just labor-replacing and productivity-expanding, but can, in some circumstances at least, enable the production of totally new things. Obviously there are other labor law introductions and reference books. But this particular method of deriving the law from 10,000 carefully selected cases is not something that would have been feasible without LLMs. In the absence of LLMs, the only option for producing a book like this is to use expert judgment. This can also be useful (indeed, I used some of that in writing this book), but it is not the same product.

I do think this book will be useful for certain kinds of people who I hope will buy it. But I think the process of making it was also very useful as far as skill-building goes. LLMs look poised to become a standard aspect of most white-collar professions in the future. So better to get ahead of such things than get left behind.

Politically, I align with the socialist left and have since I was a teenager. On the internet, I am most well-known as a left-wing economic policy guy who runs the People's Policy Project think tank and helps left-wing politicians — like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani — with their policy agendas. I also practice union-side labor law, maintain the NLRB Research database, and publish the NLRB Edge newsletter, which I'm told has been helpful in a small way to the labor movement.

But I am also really into coding, mostly as a hobby and as something I can use for my various other projects, but not as something I have ever wanted to make a specific career out of. I used to be a lot better at it. When I was a teenager, I got really into Linux and Bash scripting and even contributed some system scripts to a couple of Linux distributions (my most lasting contribution was this rankmirrors script which is still used by the Archlinux package manager). Later on, I got very interested in Python, especially when I wanted to learn statistical programming. I can still do both reasonably well, but, as the saying goes, if you don't use it, you lose it, and that has happened to some extent with me as I spend most of my work time on legal work and public writing and most of my free time on my kids.

For various reasons — some understandable, others not — there is a lot of reflexive opposition to AI/LLMs on the left. But even though I am of the left, this has not been my reflexive response to the technology, perhaps because of my hobbyist coding background. Instead, when it was first introduced a few years ago, I was very intrigued by it. As it has gotten better, that intrigue has only grown. What generative AI does and how it does it is genuinely amazing, and I have found so many ways to make use of it, both to speed up work I already do and to enable me to do work I didn't previously have the time or ability to do.

What I Do

For example, I have not written any statistical programming code in many months and I don't see why I would ever write any such code ever again. I know how to do it, but I don't need to. Instead, I can take my extensive knowledge about the various public microdata sets and simply prompt an LLM harness, like Claude Code, to do it for me, after which I can eyeball it to make sure it looks right. This is not complicated coding by any means, but it reduces an hour-long task to a few seconds.

For another example, my NLRB Edge publication tracks all new documents put out by the agency using scrapers and the NLRB Research database that I used AI coding assistants to help construct (I did a lot of this before those assistants got as good as they are now, but even in their more error-prone days, they were helpful). Those new documents are then summarized by an LLM and posted to the NLRB Edge newsletter, which has 13,000 subscribers.

More recently, I spent a lot of time with Claude Code and the Opus 4.5 model working through how to reliably grab down election, case, and docket data from the NLRB website, which is not straightforward because the NLRB website is a mess and there are a bunch of frustrating technical problems with the parts of the website that serve up this kind of information. Claude Code also struggled to figure out solutions to these problems. At one point, it even sharply concluded that the NLRB had done "sloppy database work," which is the meanest I have ever seen it be. But by bouncing ideas back and forth with Opus 4.5 and having it quickly write code to test the ideas, eventually I was able to figure out how to produce the clean, comprehensive, self-updating datasets I wanted.

For legal research, the LLMs have proven less helpful than I once thought they would be because they all have limited "context windows," which refers to how much material you can feed it to help it answer your prompt. But even there, I have figured out ways to make it useful by narrowing the legal documents I want to get information from through a more conventional search first and then feeding only those matches to the LLM (this is called RAG). Another, even more useful path has been to take a large chunk of cases where I think the information might be and have an LLM go through them one at a time and summarize them, and then feed all of the summaries back to the LLM and prompt it from there (this is called Map/Reduce). I've used this approach to generate a legal reference book about the NLRB that summarizes the most-cited points of NLRB case law (to be released soon).

Even in my free time with my kids, it has provided amusement in the form of making simple javascript games with them, which we have posted at GamesAxolotl.com.

Skepticism

The skepticism I've read about AI/LLMs comes in various forms and it's important not to lump it all together. These forms are listed below:

1. Skepticism of the technology itself. This is the most indefensible type of skepticism, but also the least concerning. If something like this actually works, it will prove itself because people will make use of it. Of course, they already are making use of it, but it's early days, and there are many sectors that are unaffected. Sometimes, this skepticism comes along with examples of it not working. But everything has an error rate and things only work if you use them correctly. On this point, I think it's useful to distinguish between people who just prompt general-knowledge chatbots without providing any of their own material ("context") to work with and people who prompt the LLMs along with context. A lot of regular people have only ever experienced the former use of LLMs, but that is the most error prone. Professional applications of LLMs all use context. Indeed much of the design of those applications is dominated by context management questions.
   
2. Skepticism of the valuation of the technology. This is what most of the "AI bubble" discourse is about. This particular skepticism can be fueled by (1), but is logically distinct from it. After all, it could be that the technology works and is really useful, but also that financial markets think it is 10x more valuable than it actually is or will be. This seems like very reasonable skepticism to me, but also not that interesting and hard to really know. Overvaluation of companies and sectors happens all the time. If you can spot it and also time the correction, you can make a lot of money shorting it. But that's easier said than done.
   
3. Skepticism of the distributive effects of the technology. Necessarily a labor-saving technology like this will result in the reallocation of labor factors (i.e. people having to change their jobs, which also involves unemployment spells). The companies that win the scramble for market share will end up minting many billionaires and the creation of extremely rich industrialists can have hugely negative impacts on American society and politics, as we've seen. These concerns also seem quite reasonable to me, but I see them as valid critiques of the capitalist system, not of LLMs. It's a great case for socialism, but not really a case against any particular labor-saving technology. I've written extensively about the fact that capitalism distributes the gains from economic production and innovation in a completely insane and indefensible way, but that's a problem with capitalism not with economic production and innovation per se.

One of the ironies of the left-tinted skepticism of AI is that it seems in part to be related to dislike of the tech sector, which also is very reasonable. But the sector that is going to be most shook up by this is the tech sector. The labor that is being replaced is tech labor, coding labor. Whether this results in a total decimation of tech head counts (same output but now done by LLMs) or in an expansion of tech output (more output enabled by LLMs) is hard to say at this point. But if you don't like the tech sector, a new technology that makes it so that coding is trivially easy seems like exactly the thing you might invent to stick it to them!

For me, ultimately what I like is the technology, not any particular story I have about what its ultimate distributive results will be. It reminds me of what it was like when I first figured out that you can use a computer, not just to run other people's software, but to write your own, to have it do whatever you want to do. It reminds me of what it was like when I first got into open source software and the free software movement where you could read any code you wanted and therefore, with enough time, figure out how to do whatever you wanted. This is all of that on steroids and it's very nice to have a tool that enables you to do a lot more of what you want to do than you could before.

Pointing out this amusing contradiction piqued Geoff who is apparently the managing editor of Compact and has a bunch of unrelated grievances about higher education. Here is a sampling of the incredibly stupid exchange that followed:

From an argument perspective, this should be a very humiliating exchange for Geoff.

He initially tries to argue that exporting 600,000 units of higher education only creates administrative jobs, which is both obviously untrue and beside the point: even if it only created those kinds of jobs, it would still be the case that these education exports balance trade, promote industry, and create middle-class jobs, which is what Mottl says MAGA should focus on.

Then he complains that America is price-gouging the Chinese by charging them high tuition only to later claim he never said that. He did say that (the tweet remains undeleted), but, more importantly, as with the first argument, he seems totally unaware of the irrelevance of this point. Charging foreigners high prices for our exports promotes the "America First" principle of "balancing trade," which is what Mottl says we should focus on.

Throughout the exchange, Geoff clearly lacks an understanding of what industrial policy is as well as the mental precision to distinguish between the claim "American governments provide subsidies to American universities" and the claim "American governments subsidize the tuition of foreign students." This puts him in the hilarious position of somehow arguing that we both gouge Chinese students and subsidize them.

Although this was my first introduction to Geoff, I've actually met dozens of Geoffs in my life, especially when I used to participate in competitive debate. Geoff is a particular type of person who does not understand how arguments work, does not realize that he lacks this ability, and so winds up spinning his wheels saying things that sort of look like arguments but that are actually just adjacent claims about some of the subjects being argued about. He's the kind of guy who hangs on at the bottom-rung of academia or the debate circuit who cannot ever figure out why nobody else seems to think his stuff is any good. He can't see how what he is doing differs from what others are doing because he doesn't understand arguments have an internal logic, that when you make them you are constructing a system of claims that has to hang together, not just spewing random, disconnected thoughts that express your feelings about something. When he does occasionally write something that works as an argument (I assume this happens), it is like when ChatGPT writes something good: it's a simulation that happened to hit, not the result of achieving the actual human mental state of understanding.

Bernie Bro Elegy

First impressions can sometimes be misleading. But, unfortunately, my second impression of Geoff — formed after reading a piece called "Bernie Bro Elegy" that was sent to me by several people — is much the same as the first. Geoff is a man who is so unable to understand argument that he can only comprehend people making them as either supporting or opposing the specific players that the argument is about. The idea that someone might have a specific argumentative line they are pursuing, one that hangs together with the available facts and is consistent with a broader theory, is totally lost on him. For Geoff, if you don't like something or someone, then you will support all negative arguments about it or them, regardless of how flimsy or contradictory they are. And if you don't do that, then that means you do like it or them or that you have some other kind of nefarious motivation that can be deduced through speculative psychoanalysis.

Geoff thinks everyone is Geoff.

The jumping-off point for Geoff's "Bernie Bro Elegy" is that Jacob Savage wrote a piece at Compact called "The Lost Generation" in which he argued that, starting in 2014, 30-something white male professionals began losing out on a lot of economic opportunities because "DEI became institutionalized across American life." Savage's argument is that this spike in affirmative action happened in the media (Section I), academia (Sections II and III), and "Everywhere Else" (Section IV). Savage's piece also includes a theory as to why aggregate statistics may understate the extent of the change that took place, which is that the DEI-branded affirmative action operated to prevent new white male entrants into PMC jobs but did not clear out the white male incumbents.

As Geoff writes, this piece went "mega-viral" and even got picked up by Ross Douthat at the New York Times. Through these viral mechanisms, it got to me.

When I read the piece, I thought it was very interesting because it makes very clear claims with specific time frames and age ranges that can be checked with Census data. The author attempted to support his theory with a handful of examples from specific employers and then speculated that this was happening more generally. But we don't need to speculate about whether it was happening more generally because we have data that lets us look at the experience of a representative sample of 30-something white male professionals from 2014 to 2024.

I was curious about what that data said and so I spent thirty minutes or so grabbing it from IPUMS and writing some code to get the answer. I then posted the results to People's Policy Project with a few paragraphs of analysis. It turns out that the Census data does not really back up Savage's theory: 30-something white males over this period increased their Bachelor's and post-Bachelor's degree attainment and employment, while holding steady in the arts/media sector and in the upper echelons of the personal earnings distribution. Thus it appears that, though affirmative action disfavoring 30-something white males probably ramped up in certain areas (like Hollywood writing rooms, the example Savage starts with), it did not do so across the labor market generally.

When I was sent Geoff's "Bernie Bro Elegy," I thought he might have an actual critique of my piece. Maybe he spotted an error in my calculations or in my brief commentary on them. But he did not. Instead he tries to come up with a theory to explain why I wrote it in the first place.

His theory starts by stating that People's Policy Project and The Bruenigs podcast (I'd also add NLRB Edge and my legal practice, which is actually my main job) exist "outside of mainstream legacy institutions" and have "avoided all institutionalization." This is why I am "doing fine," because these things are "independent enterprises that avoided the dynamics that overtook elite left-of-center institutions during the 2010s."

Given all of this, he says it is a puzzle why I am (A) "devoting [my] efforts to debunking Savage’s criticisms of the legacy institutions." But he has figured out the solution to this puzzle which is that I am (B) "reliant on subscriber bases that are mostly aligned with the politics of those institutions" and therefore (C) "if [I] took too forceful of a stance against identitarianism, [I] would alienate many of [my] subscribers."

Every single bit of this is false.

My piece was focused on Savage's claim that widespread affirmative action had significantly hurt the economic prospects of white male millennial professionals, not his "criticisms of the legacy institutions." I wasn't trying to debunk his claim. I was trying to see if the Census data supported it. It turns out that it doesn't, but I did not know that when I wrote the code.

Writing responses to popular economic pieces that are wrong is a lot of what I do at People's Policy Project. The piece I wrote just before this one was a response to Michael Green's viral article in The Free Press in which he argues that the real poverty line is $140,000. As with the response to Savage, this piece is driven by my analysis of Census microdata. The two pieces I wrote just prior to that one were a response to Jacobin articles that argued that Nordic countries rely mostly on market income compression, not the welfare state, to achieve low inequality. Jacobin is probably the closest thing to "my audience" as there is (I currently have 203 pieces on the Jacobin website and have spoken at multiple Jacobin-sponsored events) and yet here I am criticizing one of their writers, not once, but twice, including with a piece I headlined "Do Predistribution People Know How to Read?" This is what I do.

I actually don't specifically know who my audience is (they are all anonymized on the various crowdsourcing platforms). But I definitely don't play to any particular audience. This is not even my main job. I am a lawyer. But if I had to guess, I'd say that my audience likes critiques of identitarianism. The reason I would guess this is because I have been an outspoken critic of it for over a decade and am kind of known for doing it. Here are just a few of my earliest pieces on it:

1. 2012: Identitarianism’s class problem
2. 2013: Class and intersectionality
3. 2013: Identitarianism and the Working Class
4. 2013: Liberals and Class
5. 2013: What does identitarian deference require?

The last piece is actually among the most shared things I've ever written and is still frequently shared today. I've continued to write about this sort of stuff into the present. For example, five years ago I wrote a piece titled "Identitarian Deference Continues to Roil Liberalism" where I talked about how identitarianism is being cynically used to fire people. I've produced piece after piece highlighting the centrality of class over race as the driver of inequality in the US. In January of this year, I even wrote a piece specifically about DEI titled "Corporate DEI Was a Mess" in which I argued that DEI is empty HR nonsense and that only unions can offer real checks on employer abuses. Again, this is what I do.

Sidelining Class Politics

There is not much else to Geoff's piece, but he does comically end the piece this way:

Writers like Adolph Reed and Jennifer Pan have long argued that the function of the DEI regime is to neutralize any serious broad-based challenge to the current political and economic order. That socialists remain so reluctant to criticize that regime is evidence of its continued success on that front.

I am very familiar with Reed's arguments on this subject, in part because Reed frequently cites my work when he makes those arguments. Here he is citing me in a piece he wrote with Walter Benn Michaels (of The Trouble With Diversity fame) in 2020 and here he is citing me in an interview he gave to JSTOR in 2021. Reed and I have the same position! Don't take my word for it. Just ask him!

Ultimately, because of Geoff's struggle with argumentation, he cannot understand that it is possible for DEI to distract from or neutralize class-based politics while also not actually being implemented in the form of broad-based affirmative action in education and employment. That is a common argument about DEI from the left, that politicians (like Clinton) and institutions (like Goldman Sachs) make a big show about how they care about it, but don't actually do anything about it. According to this argument, DEI is basically one big land acknowledgement: a performative gesture that does not actually change anything. In this telling, "DEI" often operates like a cynical black hole that swallows a lot of well-meaning political participation.

If this is what you believe, which is what I think the weight of the evidence supports, then Savage's argument must be wrong. It can't be that (1) DEI was cynical corporate nonsense and that (2) DEI was a widespread affirmative action program sidelining millions of 30-something white men. Geoff cannot understand this because he just scans (1) and (2) as saying negative things about DEI and thinks that if you don't like DEI then you must support both (1) and (2) without regard for whether they are contradictory or false. And because he cannot grasp that actually a good argument can't say both (1) and (2), he cannot understand what someone is doing when they pick one or the other but not both. So, he's left to try to make sense of the world with the dumbest possible psychoanalysis of socialists while he is in fact engaged in the project of sidelining class politics in favor of DEI gibberish.

I wish I could say he was doing so because he is captured by his audience of Compact-reading midwits. But really it appears that he is himself a midwit.

As things go on X, the back-and-forth on the topic has featured the usual mix of confusion, stupidity, and deliberate misreading. Clarification does not ever really help such matters because most posting on X seeks in-group approval not accuracy in any ordinary sense. But I do really like this topic and am happy to have an opportunity to discuss it again, especially as I have developed slightly different ways of talking about it in the last decade.

As you might imagine, there are quite a few competing theories of distributive justice, including:

1. Desert — A just distribution is one that distributes to each person an amount commensurate with their contribution.
2. Utilitarianism — A just distribution is one that maximizes the population's aggregate utility, i.e. happiness or well-being.
3. Egalitarianism — A just distribution is one that maximizes equality or the condition of the worse off.
4. Voluntarism — A just distribution is one that results from voluntary economic processes.
5. Democracy — A just distribution is one that results from democratically legitimate laws.

There are more and these are simplified groupings and descriptions, but they are good-enough for our purposes here.

In this list, the first three theories focus on the distributive result to determine whether justice has been achieved while the last two theories focus on the process that generated the distributive result.

As pro-capitalist philosopher Chris Freiman noted in his contribution to the X discussion, "virtually all defenses of capitalism made by economists and political philosophers are rooted in efficiency or rights, not desert theory." By "efficiency," he is presumably referencing utilitarianism and by "rights," he is either referencing voluntarism or perhaps natural rights theories.

From my survey of the writings on this topic, Frieman is correct. Virtually no pro-capitalist philosophers base their arguments in appeals to desert, especially not these days. But in my experience, the majority of non-philosophers do so. Indeed, one of the pieces I linked above was in response to Noah Smith doing so and the discussion on X was full of people attempting desert-based justifications for capitalist income distributions.

Desert Theory

To argue that capitalist distributions correspond to desert, an individual needs to do two things:

1. Articulate what kinds of contributions or characteristics make one deserving. This is sometimes called the "desert base."
2. Show that capitalist distributions are patterned such that each person's distributive share aligns with their share of the desert base as you define it. People who have more of the desert base (which I will describe as having "more desertils") should receive a greater distribution than those who have less of the desert base ("less desertils"). Likewise, people who have the same amount of the desert base ("same desertils") should receive the same distribution.

The most straightforward way to construct such an argument is to start by looking at the capitalist distributive result and then work backwards to find some way of defining a desert base that corresponds with that distributive result. If you can achieve that, others can still critique your position by arguing that you have chosen the wrong desert base or by rejecting desert theory altogether. But you will at least have gotten an argument off the ground. If you can't even find a desert base that matches the pattern of capitalist distributions, then your position is dead on arrival.

So what could the desert base for capitalist distributions actually be? Can someone articulate one that actually works?

When it comes to the capitalist distribution of labor income among laborers, there is a plausible-enough desert base: personal productivity. More productive workers receive more labor income. Less productive workers receive less labor income. Similarly productive workers receive similar labor income. There are some possible objections to this account of things of course, but the argument at least gets off the ground.

Although personal productivity is a plausible-enough desert base for labor income, it fails entirely for capital income. This is because, as Joan Robinson put it best, even if we want to say that capital is itself productive, "owning capital is not a productive activity." This is the point I was getting at in my X post that set off the recent discussion, where I mused that "blind trusts, where the owner gives money to a fund manager and the fund manager invests it without telling the owner where they invest it, is like a thought experiment you would construct to tease out whether capitalists actually do anything for their capital income."

Of course, the non-productiveness of owning capital is not exclusive to blind trusts. The interests, dividends, rents, and capital gains that flow to owners have nothing to do with any work or productivity they are contributing. This is why it is possible for a stream of capital income to be received by someone in a coma and even by someone who is dead through an estate. This is why it is possible for capital income to be received by entities that are not even humans, such as foundations and sovereign wealth funds. This is why it is possible for capital income streams to be shifted from one person to another via transferring of assets, such as through inheritance. None of this can be said of labor, laborers, or labor income.

Given that the personal productivity desert base does not fit with capital income, a desertist argument for capitalism has to either ditch personal productivity for some other desert base or articulate a desert base that has additional components.

One way of expanding the desert base in an attempt to also justify capital income is to add "undertaking risk" to it. This is what Noah Smith attempted to do in our clash a decade ago and what almost all of the discussion on X was about.

Although "undertaking risk" is something you could describe capital owners as doing in general, it is not the case that the capital income distribution matches this desert base. I explained this well in my prior piece, but for novelty's sake, I will give a different presentation of this point here.

Imagine three people — Persons A, B, and C — all of whom are identical in all relevant ways except that Persons A and B have undertaken risk by purchasing and owning the same amount of equally risky financial assets while Person C opted to put the same amount of money under the mattress. Using the language of "desertils" discussed above, we could say something like Persons A and B both have 100 desertils owing to their undertaking of risk while Person C has 0 desertils.

If capitalist distributions were being done according to this "undertaking risk" desert base, then Persons A and B should receive the same distribution because they both have 100 desertils. Also, Persons A and B should receive a greater distribution than Person C who has 0 desertils. Instead, this happens:

1. Person A's investment works out and they receive $1,000.
2. Person B's investment fails and they lose $100.
3. Person C neither gains nor loses any money.

This outcome fails to comply with the requirements of desert. Person A got a greater distribution than Person B despite each having 100 desertils. Even Person C got a greater distribution than Person B despite the fact that Person C had 0 desertils and Person B had 100 desertils.

In the X discussion about this analysis, most of the negative reactions made one or both of the following points:

1. Risk, by definition, results in people who undertake identical risk receiving different rewards.
2. If we were to make it so that people who undertook identical risk received identical rewards, capital markets and capitalism would not work.

To this I respond:

1. Exactly. The way compensating for risk works is inherently incompatible with any desert theory.
2. Exactly. The way capital markets and capitalism works is incompatible with any desert theory.

What is happening with a lot of these responses is that those making them are responding to excerpts of the piece without understanding how those excerpts function in my overall argument about capitalism and desert. In other cases, what's likely going on is that people are simply too stupid to follow any kind of philosophical argument and therefore cannot distinguish between the claims "a desert theory that uses undertaking-risk as the desert base would have to compensate all risk-takers equally" and "Matt Bruenig thinks our economic system should compensate all risk-takers equally." For these latter people, I am not sure if informing them that I do not believe in desert theory would make it easier for them to grasp the difference between these claims or just make their heads spin further.

The other substantive reactions to the argument typically just shifted into justifying capital income using one of the other distributive justice theories, most commonly utilitarianism and voluntarism. I have things to say about the compatibility of capitalism with those other theories of distributive justice as well, but for our purposes here, it suffices to say that having a utilitarian or voluntarist justification for capital income is not the same thing as having a desertist justification for it. I am merely pointing out that capitalism is incompatible with desert theory.

I've been thinking about this in the context of The Argument, a new publication that debuted last week that intends to, among other things, have real people argue real things directly against one another. How will people consume these arguments or make sense of them in a discursive environment devoid of generally-accepted notions of what makes an argument good or successful?

The overwhelming response to the first head-to-head clash — between myself and Kelsey Piper over the importance of cash welfare — provided a good opportunity to answer this question. This response proved the theory that this is a potentially very entertaining and engaging form of content. But it has also confirmed that there is no consensus at all on how to actually evaluate the argument that everyone just read.

Rich Yeselson read the exchange and concluded that it amounted to "Matt Bruenig eviscerat[ing] a hapless lib out of the gate" while Logan Bowers read it and found that he "agreed more and more with Piper after each successive [Bruenig] paragraph." These are just two tweets, but based on my scan, they are reasonably representative of the thousands of other tweets reacting to the debate.

If you think there is something to evaluating argument itself, not just agreeing or disagreeing with conclusions or people, there is something really strange about the inability to reach some kind of consensus about the exchange. It should be possible to say this or that person got the best of it in a way that is mostly detached from your own views. But to do this well requires the ability and willingness to technically dissect an argument, not just impressionistically consume it.

When I looked at Kelsey's first piece from a pure argumentation perspective, what I saw were two moves that go as follows:

1. She contends that cash welfare does not really help much. She presents a few recent studies showing null results for cognitive and health outcomes. She doesn't present an explicit framework for evaluating whether a particular welfare policy is good, but implicitly adopts an evaluative framework that says welfare programs can be deemed good or bad by looking at the extent to which they promote human capital and related indicators.
   
2. She presents an error theory to explain why leftists, liberals, progressives and so on are not reacting much to these studies despite the fact that they are, based on her implicit evaluative framework (human capital promotion), devastating to the pro-cash-welfare argument. The error theory is essentially that they are dishonest actors who refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts.

My response was specifically designed to clash with Piper's on every argumentative level:

1. I make what debaters would call a kritik in which I challenge Piper's implied framework for evaluating the success or failure of welfare programs. Rather than looking to see whether a welfare program promotes human capital (Piper's preferred framework), I argue that we should look to the more traditional goals of the welfare state: eradicating class difference and social alienation, reducing inequality and leveling living standards, compressing and smoothing income and consumption, providing workers and individuals independence and refuge from coercion by reducing economic dependence on the labor market and the family, among other things. To make it clear that this is not some ad-hoc framework I am constructing to reach a preferred conclusion, I cite other authorities on the welfare state that also use it, including perhaps the most celebrated theoretical work on western welfare states,The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.
   
2. I present an error theory to explain why Piper failed to account for these other goals in her argument. The error theory is that (a) she is unfamiliar with them, (b) she has unreflectively adopted recent ideas about the (mostly child-focused) welfare state that present it as an "investment" in human capital, (c) she is drawing upon an effective altruist idea to use direct cash transfers as an economic development strategy in the third world and mistakenly applying that logic to the developed-world welfare state in America.
   
3. I directly respond to Piper's empirical claims by pointing out that there are contrary studies that do find positive results on the outcomes she focuses on. I anticipate her argument that those are "lower quality" because they aren't RCTs by pointing to an RCT that was even higher quality than the ones she relied on.
   
4. I directly respond to Piper's error theory by attacking the premise that nobody is acknowledging these studies by pointing out that the New York Times covered it. The kritik also functions as a response to the error theory: maybe it's not that people dishonestly refuse to acknowledge the studies, but rather that the studies are just irrelevant to the main justifications for the welfare state.

In theory, if we care about evaluating arguments themselves, we could get some agreement that these were the moves and then from there get into the more contentious questions of how they were executed, who won the various clashes involved, etc. In practice, with a few exceptions, people don't really digest arguments in this formalistic way.

One of the things I've found funny in the aftermath of the clash is watching people object to my argumentative style, which they describe as being mean or dismissive or personal or whatever. What these people are actually reacting to is my error theory about how Piper reached (what I regard as) an incorrect conclusion. My error theory is essentially that she is ignorant of the rationale for developed-world welfare states and has been led astray by recent liberal ideas about human capital and effective altruist ideas about third-world development policy.

The reason I find the reaction to that interesting is that Piper also spends a good deal of her piece on an error theory. This error theory is sprinkled throughout the piece but it essentially accuses others of dishonesty. Indeed, she concludes the piece by calling them liars:

We're in a dangerous epistemic environment. One where widespread agreement on basic facts is scarce and noble lies have permeated the halls of truth-seeking organizations like the media. Those of us who care about ending poverty have to choose the integrity of our work over trying to play 5D chess and hoping no one else knows the rules.

As I said above, I designed my arguments to directly clash with Piper's. She presented an error theory that her opponents are liars. I presented an error theory that she is ignorant. Why is my error theory offensive and hers isn't?

There is no actual difference between the offensiveness of our error theories, but there is a psychological difference in how people process them. Piper called a general group of people liars who selectively disregard inconvenient facts while I called a specific person ignorant. Abstractly, it would seem Piper has actually done the more offensive thing because she's said something sort of insulting about a lot of people while I have only said something sort of insulting about one person. But people don't process it this way because they are more affected when they can personalize the insulted party than when they can't.

In the last few years, sub-replacement fertility has made its way to the US and the fertility question has unsurprisingly made its way into the US discourse.

What I find most interesting about the fertility issue are the philosophical tensions that it brings to the surface. The ideal scenario for fertility is that individuals have whatever number of children they wish to have and this results in an aggregate fertility that is not too high and not too low. When this state of affairs obtains, fertility is not a matter of public concern, not something that could ever plausibly be seen as a legitimate subject of politics or policymaking. People will have their own personal opinions about ideal family sizes for themselves and others, just as they have other personal opinions like the value (or not) of stay-at-home parenting. But these remain personal opinions, something perhaps suited for lifestyle blogging, but not much else beyond that.

What is so troubling about a scenario where there is too-low overall fertility is that it confronts us with the reality that something we regard as a deeply personal and private matter is also, in the aggregate, very socially important. This observation is potentially destabilizing to liberal principles — personal autonomy, individual rights, and neutrality towards and acceptance of pluralistic conceptions of the good — that are dominant in American society. If we acknowledge that aggregate fertility is a matter of social concern, then some might conclude that individual fertility is something society and the public should have a say in, which is, among other things, repulsively illiberal and anti-feminist.

There are four ways to respond to this observed tension:

First, you can stake out philosophical positions that deny the tension altogether. This is Nathan Robinson's move when he says that, even if sub-replacement fertility led to full-blown extinction, he does "not think that is a matter of moral concern." For Robinson, the fact that the aggregate of individual fertility choices can have negative spillovers on the rest of the society does not in any way challenge the conclusion that the society has no business concerning itself with aggregate fertility. It remains entirely a matter of private, individual concern.

Second, you can stake out a factual or framing position that attempts to render the tension moot, at least for now. Perhaps aggregate fertility is not presently too high or too low. Perhaps one's notion of aggregate fertility is too narrowly focused on particular geographies, like Japan or the United States, and instead should be focused on the globe, or should take into consideration the possibilities of migration into low-fertility geographies. Perhaps fertility has a cyclical characteristic to it that will match our current bust with a corresponding boom without having to publicly attend to it. Whatever the specific case may be, the way this move works is not by denying that there may be a philosophical tension underneath all of this, but rather by bracketing the philosophical question, and insisting that the blissful ideal scenario of things working out without having to make it a matter of social concern still obtains.

Third, you can navigate the philosophical tension in an illiberal way by adopting essentially authoritarian social and policy stances that attempt to force or shame people into having more children. You can think of this as the The Handmaid's Tale option, even if the particular illiberal mechanisms one might pursue are different. This is obviously where much of the far right goes with the tension as they are already inclined towards rejecting pluralistic conceptions of the good and punishing ways of living that they personally dislike.

Fourth, you can navigate the philosophical tension in a liberal way by looking for policy mechanisms that increase aggregate fertility without sacrificing the ultimately private and individual nature of the millions of personal choices that make up the aggregate. This is where left-of-center (and really even most right-of-center) politicians in other countries, especially in Europe, wind up on the topic.

This last option might seem like a bit of a dodge in itself, or, at minimum, some kind of deception. How can you both respect individual choices while also enacting policy that changes them? Isn't that a straightforward contradiction?

One way to respond to this charge is to point out that people always make decisions within the economic and social system they find themselves in. Changing that system will generate different decisions, but those decisions are no less "theirs" than the decisions they made in the prior system. There is no systemless baseline that can reveal what each person's "real" uncorrupted decisions are. A system that relies more on out-of-pocket spending to cover children's expenses will result in fewer births than a system that relies more on socialized spending to cover children's expenses, but this observation does not tell us which (if either) of the two systems is liberty-respecting or liberty-destroying.

Another way to respond to this charge is by analogy. The fertility discourse tends to treat the question as if it is sui generis, but there are actually many other issues that have the same basic form as the fertility issue. The one that seems most analogous to me is the rural doctor shortage issue.

The rural doctor shortage issue is that there are rural areas in the country where there are too few doctors to provide adequate medical services. You could respond to this issue in all the four ways discussed above:

1. Philosophical Rejection. You could say it is not actually a matter of social concern because it pertains to something that should be left to individual choice. Doctors can locate wherever they'd like and it's none of my business where they live.
2. Factual Rejection. You could say there is not really much of a medical services shortage at all in rural areas and that we have other mechanisms, like telemedicine, that allow for individuals living elsewhere to fill the gap.
3. Illiberal Solution. You could attempt to use illiberal mechanisms to force doctors to live in rural areas, such as by requiring medical school graduates to enter a draft where some are selected to work in rural areas and punished with prison if they do not do so. This sort of thing would finally make some sense of the claims made by libertarians like Rand Paul that a right to healthcare implies a corresponding ability to enslave.
4. Liberal Solution. You could attempt to use liberal mechanisms that result in more doctors deciding to work in rural areas but without requiring any of them to do so. This is in fact what we have done with initiatives like the National Health Service Corps that provides financial incentives for medical professionals to work in underserved areas. This type of thing is not understood by anyone as being repulsive or liberty-destroying.

Of course, the rural doctor shortage is not totally analogous to the fertility question as fertility decisions are perceived as being much more personal, private and individual than where in the country one decides to ply their craft. This difference explains why the fertility issue generates much more intensity of feeling, but it does not actually change any of the basic calculations involved.

Based on this above analysis, it is easy to see why the fertility issue is one that could favor the economic left. The most liberty-respecting policies that increase fertility are the left-wing ones that socialize the cost of children by enacting things like paid parental leave, a monthly cash benefit for kids, and free child care, pre-k, education, and health care. These benefits also happen to be favored by the left for totally other reasons rooted in opposition to inequality and poverty. Indeed, there is such a consensus in favor of the benefits that when people like Nathan Robinson go out of their way to explain that they philosophically reject the idea that fertility can ever be a matter of social concern, they still nevertheless feel the need to indicate that they support all these policies anyways, just for other reasons.

Of the four types of responses identified above, it is ironically the pronatalist right where you will find the most hostility towards these proposals, not because they don't realize that they will, at the margin, increase fertility, but because, for many of them, their commitment to market income distributions takes precedence over their pronatalism. Pushing family benefits would thus have the added benefit of revealing how full of shit they really are.

Despite all of this, I suspect that this issue will, if it has not already, fall prey to a dynamic I call overlapping dissensus.

In Political Liberalism, John Rawls explicates a concept he calls "overlapping consensus," which is meant to address the question of how a diverse, pluralistic society with many divergent moral, religious, and philosophical worldviews can nonetheless operate as a liberal democratic society. Rawls's answer is that people with divergent underlying worldviews and motivations can still develop an overlapping consensus in favor of certain principles (or, I'd add, policy goals). This overlapping consensus allows for governing majorities and relatively peaceful governance to be established because it manages to achieve agreement over governance-relevant things without requiring agreement on more fundamental questions.

Put simply, if you and I both support principle or policy goal A, it doesn't matter that I support it because of worldview B and you support it because of worldview C, even if the worldviews B and C are totally at odds and repulsive to one another.

As elegant as Rawls is on this point, I have found that in a lot of public discourse at least, things often work out in exactly the opposite way. When people see that a person, reason, or worldview that they find repulsive is in favor of a particular principle or policy goal, they will oppose that goal purely because they do not wish to overlap with that person, reason, or worldview. If their own pre-existing worldview seems to favor the same policy goal but for different reasons, they will respond by altering their worldview (including by inserting a contradiction into it) rather than accepting that they are part of an overlapping consensus with a social grouping they despise.

Thus, overlapping does not necessarily result in a plurality-respecting consensus but often in deeper and more vicious dissensus that actually makes policymaking and governance harder, not easier.

Chronology

Yglesias's first critique is about the chronology of it. NAFTA was enacted in the 1990s while this most recent political realignment did not really crystallize until 2016:

It is unquestionably true that NAFTA was very unpopular in the industrial Midwest and that it continues to have a very bad reputation there. But it’s not possible that it was more salient in 2024 than it was a quarter century ago. This doesn’t explain anything about why Kamala Harris did so much worse in the industrial Midwest than Gore did.

The counter to this is that there was an intervening event that made NAFTA, a term that is used to refer to trade liberalization and offshoring generally, especially salient in a way that promoted realignment. That intervening event was a Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, who made it one of his two main issues. Prior to that point, Republicans were supporters of NAFTA and free trade. What opposition to it that did exist was on the Democratic side of things, though this was a minority position among elected Democrats.

I don't think it's at all inconceivable that dislike of trade and offshoring was a simmering aspect of working class politics that only became politically actionable in the form of party realignment when Trump came along.

Gore's opponent was George W. Bush who expanded the number of countries the US had free trade agreements with from three to sixteen. Obama's first opponent was John McCain who the UFCW characterized in 2008 at someone who "consistently voted for unfair trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization despite its ongoing history of human rights and workers’ rights violations." Obama's second opponent was Mitt Romney who released the following campaign position on trade in 2011:

It shouldn't be surprising that none of these Republican candidates were able to electorally capitalize on anti-trade sentiments in the way that Trump did.

Narrow Impact

Yglesias's second critique is that the negative impact of NAFTA (and trade liberalization more generally) was narrowly contained to a specific region of the country while the geography of the political realignment has been much broader.

The alternative explanation of why working class voters have swung against Democrats — they disagreed with 21st-century cultural liberalism — has much broader and deeper explanatory power. Firefighters on Staten Island didn’t have their wages undercut by imports from Mexico. Neither did retirees on the Gulf Coast in Florida. The localized economic impact of NAFTA on union manufacturing workers and factory towns is a very good explanation for why elected officials from those areas were against NAFTA, but the political trends are much too widespread to be explained by something so specific.

What's interesting about this move is that Yglesias decides to compare the NAFTA explanation with an alternative cultural-liberalism explanation, concluding that the latter is broader than the former. Then, when explaining what he means by saying NAFTA is narrow, he offers the criteria of whether someone was directly impacted by it.

But what happens if we apply this directly-impacted criteria to cultural liberalism? How many firefighters on Staten Island or retirees on the Gulf Coast have actually been directly impacted by transgender athletes? Is voter opposition to immigration the strongest in areas where a lot of illegal immigrants live or areas where not very many live?

What Yglesias must recognize with these cultural issues is that various constituencies can develop strong opinions about them separate from whether they have any actual impact on their own lives. But something similar is also possible with NAFTA. Working class constituencies across the country can end up having strong opinions about trade liberalization and offshoring that motivate their electoral behavior even if they personally were spared the negative impacts.

In fact, if you listen to certain people talk about NAFTA, trade liberalization, and offshoring, you'll actually hear a discourse that sounds a lot like the immigration discourse, which contains a mix of economic concerns (foreigners taking jobs and pushing down wage levels) alongside more cultural appeals to nationalism, nativism, and xenophobia. The foreign aid discourse looks that way too.

In this sense, trade liberalization is part of 21st century cultural liberalism, i.e. just another way in which liberal cultural sensibilities have them prioritizing foreigners over the native working class. Indeed, this is exactly the rhetorical synthesis that people like Trump and Vance have pursued about foreign aid, trade, and immigration, which in their telling are not just economic issues but also about the sick priorities of bleeding-heart liberals.

Strategic Considerations

With that all said, it's not at all clear to me what the strategic way forward is. Just because you can tell a history where X caused Y, that does not mean that, going forward, not-X will reverse Y. And of course, as Yglesias points out, there are real tensions at play here between the goals of onshoring through trade deliberalization, counteracting monopoly and concentration through competition, and keeping prices low.

Per my usual bit, I'll end here by just pointing out that if you install egalitarian economic institutions that result in a compressed distribution of income and wealth, the precise regional and sectoral composition of the economy becomes much less important. During trade liberalization, US output per capita did not decrease. In fact, it increased. It is the refusal to use economic institutions that ensure that these increases are broadly distributed that is ultimately the problem.

My System

I got a 7.56 kW solar panel system consisting of 21 LONGi panels and 1 Solar Edge inverter. The unsubsidized all-in price for the system, including labor, was $25,525. After applying a federal tax credit equal to 26 percent of that price, the price fell to $18,889. Initially, I planned to get a loan to finance the system and the payments for that loan would have been $129 per month.

As discussed in the prior piece, due to various timing and contractual snafus, I ended up negotiating down the price a further $5,525 and then purchased the system on my cash back credit card (which I then paid off), saving me a further $400. So my all-in price was $12,963. But this was an unusual situation, so in the calculations below, I am mostly going to compare the amount of money I saved to the $129/mo solar loan.

Solar Production and Utility Bill Savings

In their first three years of operation, the solar panels produced 32,266 kWh of electricity, which is an average of 10,755 kWh per year. As illustrated in the graph below, production is higher in summer months and lower in winter months.

Over this same period, the electricity rates for my area were as follows.

Because my state does net metering, I can calculate utility bill savings by multiplying solar production by the electricity rates. I do this in the graph below. The dashed grey line is the $129/mo loan payment, which is provided for comparison.

Here is the same graph but with cumulative figures rather than monthly figures.

Over this period, the solar panels saved me $8,935 on my electricity bill, which averages to $2,978 per year. Had I been making the $129/mo loan payments, the net savings would have been $4,308 over this three year period.

Had I not used the loan but instead paid the full price up front, minus the federal tax credit, then I would have paid $18,889. With $2,978 of annual savings, it would have taken a total of 6.3 years to recoup the upfront cost. With the actual amount I personally paid — $12,964 — it will take a total of 4.4 years to recoup the upfront cost. The solar panels have a 20-year lifespan.

So ultimately, this is proving to be a very wise financial decision for me. The solar panels save me money and have required no maintenance at all. In a little over a year, I will have fully recouped my costs and have over 15 years of production still ahead of me. Even if I had not lucked into my own personal arrangement and instead taken out a loan on the $18,889 price, I'd still be saving $1,436 per year on net.

This absence made me fairly intellectually detached from the election, not because the outcome doesn't matter, but because it had no real stakes for the stuff that I promote in the discourse.

Other elements of the left-of-center world did not have this luxury.

The macro people are contending with a reality where fiscal and monetary policy helped achieve high employment, good GDP growth, and some wage compression, but Democrats still lost.

The self-styled populists got to run the relevant parts of the administrative state — Lina Kahn at FTC, Jonathan Kanter at DOJ, Rohit Chopra at CFPB, among others — and were able to achieve significant influence beyond that through a "whole-of-government" approach that had agencies as far flung as the Copyright Office, the DOT, and the NLRB all taking actions meant to support this broader agenda. All of these agencies took actions championed and then celebrated by this group. The self-styled populists even had significant influence over crafting the little bits of policy Harris actually released. But Democrats still lost.

The foreign policy apologists spent the year leading up to election in the unenviable position of having to defend that the Biden administration provided money and weapons to the Israeli government to assist the carrying out of an atrocity in Gaza. They argued that this was necessary because a less supportive policy would cause some voters to stop supporting Democrats. To the extent that Biden's actual policy caused some voters to stop supporting Democrats, the argument was that those voters need to get over it and realize that Trump is worse than Harris in a variety of ways. Democrats still lost.

The moderates got to essentially run the Harris campaign. This group claimed that the way to win the election was to move to the right in rhetoric and in policy on things like immigration, guns, and identitarian issues while also paring down the policy agenda to a few seemingly popular topics like health care and abortion. Harris clearly did run her campaign this way, but Democrats still lost.

When the party does what you want, either in policy or in campaigning, but still loses, it is hard to escape this feeling that maybe you are implicated, maybe people now think you are stupid and your ideas were wrong. This also triggers a sort of defensiveness in the form of finding other explanations or defiantly doubling down. It's a troubling thing to watch when viewed from the outside.

The truth of course is that nobody has some kind of silver bullet for how to win elections and generally people who talk a lot about that topic end up having views about the optimal way to govern and campaign so as to win elections that conspicuously overlap with their own separately-formed policy preferences or some unrelated antagonism they have with some other faction in the party.

Last time Trump won, the convenient explanation was that it was because of racism. This is nice because it places the blame elsewhere and on something that there is little you can do about because anti-racism is something that cannot be compromised.

The racism explanation seems to be falling away this time in part because Trump made inroads with nonwhite voters, most prominently Latinos.

The emerging convenient explanation this time is that it all comes down to inflation. Prices are up 20 percent since Biden took office. During the Trump administration, they only grew by 6 percent over the same period of time.

This explanation is convenient because it's plausible to argue that (1) inflation was mostly caused by factors outside of Biden's control, including post-COVID supply issues and the post-COVID spend down of pandemic savings, (2) to the extent that inflation was caused by things like the American Rescue Plan, that was part of achieving the other macroeconomic policy goals of high employment, GDP growth, and wage compression, and (3) the bout of inflation was a one-off thing related to unique dynamics that don't have much to do with policy questions going forward. So the inflation explanation is consistent with "we did nothing wrong" and "we don't need to change anything going forward."

Which is not to say it isn't true, just to say it is convenient in that it can conceivably absolve all of the groups above who may otherwise have a finger pointed at them.

For now, I don't really intend to make bold claims about why this election was lost or how to make changes that will result in the winning of all future elections. Instead, as I did in 2016 and 2020, I will simply try to determine who will carry the torch for the left in the next Democratic presidential primary and see if I can help them construct a well-designed social democratic policy agenda.

The LCA contains the following text about grocery costs:

Lowering Grocery Costs

Vice President Harris knows that rising food prices remain a top concern for American families. Many big grocery chains that have seen production costs level off have nevertheless kept prices high and have seen their highest profits in two decades. While some food companies have passed along these savings, others still have not. Price fluctuations are normal in free markets, but Vice President Harris recognizes there is a big difference between fair pricing and the excessive prices unrelated to the costs of doing business that Americans have seen in the food and grocery industry.

That’s why Vice President Harris and Governor Walz will work to enact a plan in their first 100 days to go after bad actors to bring down Americans’ grocery costs and keep inflation in check. They will work with Congress to:

• Advance the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries;
• Set clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive profits on food and groceries.
• Secure new authority for the FTC and state attorneys general to investigate and impose strict new penalties on companies that break the rules.

The document provides no further elaboration about what exactly is meant by "price gouging." But given that the preface to this particular sentence states that grocery price levels are being inflated by big grocery chains who are excessively profiteering and then states that this plan aims to "bring down Americans' grocery costs," it would be reasonable to assume that Harris is proposing some kind of regulation that would penalize grocery stores for setting prices too far above their costs.

Explicitly imposing some sort of cost-plus rule on grocery store pricing is fairly controversial and so a number of articles were published either critiquing the idea or reporting on the reaction of various economists and industry spokespeople.

Rather than defend the idea of imposing some kind of pricing regulation to bring down grocery store prices right now, various writers have instead decided to defend the much narrower idea of banning certain price hikes in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster.

For instance, in The Atlantic, Zephyr Teachout defends the Harris plan by referencing these very narrow state laws:

Price gouging in the popular imagination has a “know it when you see it” quality, but it is actually a well-developed body of law. A typical price-gouging claim has four elements. First, a triggering event, sometimes called an “abnormal market disruption,” such as a natural disaster or power outage, must have occurred. Second, in most states, the claim must concern essential goods and services. (No one cares if you overcharge for Louis Vuitton handbags during a hurricane.) Third, a price increase must be “excessive” or “unconscionable,” which most states define as exceeding a certain percentage, typically 10 to 25 percent. Finally, the elevated price must be in excess of the seller’s increased cost. This is crucial: Even during emergencies, sellers are allowed to maintain their existing profit margins. They just can’t increase those margins excessively.

At Axios, Emily Peck does the same thing, telling us to "think bans on selling $10 bottles of water after a major hurricane" and explaining that this sort of very narrow anti-price-gouging regulation already exists in 38 states.

Insofar as we only have a single sentence in a five-page document to go on, it is pretty pointless to debate what Harris really meant. Indeed, because this section of this campaign document was probably cobbled together by a variety of people in the OMI-AELP-ILSR-MPU-Prospect policy bloc, it may not even have any specific authorial intent that can actually be discovered.

But if we interpret price gouging the way those defending it in the discourse do, then Harris's proposal to regulate price gouging is not actually going to lower grocery costs right now. At best, it is a promise to keep them from rising too much during natural disasters that occur in the future, something that is already illegal in 38 states anyways.

I don't mean to play dumb too much here. I understand that the election season is a period of intense dishonesty and bad faith. Campaigns have to balance a variety of conflicting constituencies, various discourse participants get really bought in either because they have been consulted or because they are fearful of an adverse election outcome, and so vagueness and misdirection is an intentional persuasion strategy.

In this case, it seems pretty obvious that, in saying she will bring down grocery prices by fighting price gouging, the Harris campaign and those in its orbit hope that regular people will like the sound of that because they don't like the current prices and think that fighting "price gouging" means she is going to lower them while also hoping that the elite discourse can be mollified by insisting that "price gouging" actually refers to a much different policy that will do nothing to lower current grocery store prices.

So long as the streams don't cross, it's a messaging victory. But if you are someone like me who still does kind of like the policy discourse despite it at all, the whole thing is a very frustrating and depressing spectacle.

The first list item is "Protecting and Strengthening Our Democracy" and contains the following vague promise:

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are committed to strengthening our democracy and protecting our freedoms, and we can count on them to stand up to the extremists who undermine our Constitution to increase their own power. Joe and Kamala believe in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people—that is what they work for every single day.

The second list item is "Growing the Middle Class" and, after recounting some legislation passed during the Biden administration, simply promises that "they are running to finish the job and ensure that every American gets a fair shot at the American Dream."

The third list item is "Fighting to Lower Costs for Working Families" and promises that "they will lower drug costs for all Americans, make renting and buying a home more affordable, and give tax cuts to middle-class families" and "continue their fight to crack down on price gouging that pads the profits of big corporations at your expense." This is the first list item that does at least gesture towards certain policies, though it does not say what exactly they are. With the possible exception of the cracking down on price gouging, these are all policy goals, not policies.

The fourth list item is "Building a Fairer Tax System That Works for the Middle Class" and vaguely promises to "give tax cuts to the middle class while making the ultra-wealthy and big corporations finally pay their fair share."

The fifth list item is "Making Health Care More Accessible and Affordable" and promises to "to expand affordable care, lower prescription drug prices for all Americans, and cap the price of insulin and out-of-pocket drug costs for everyone." As with item three, we have here some cognizable policy goals, but not policy proposals.

The final list item is "Fighting to Restore Reproductive Freedom" and promises that "Joe and Kamala are fighting to restore the protections of Roe." Generously, we could read this as the Biden administration saying they want to reenact the Roe regime through federal statute, making this the only full-blown policy proposal on the list.

As a policy guy, obviously I'd love to see more policy. But it's quite possible that policy is simply overrated in elections. Trump won in 2016 without much of a policy agenda and so perhaps it doesn't really matter all that much. In the case of Biden, however, I think it may be wise to start dropping actual policy proposals if for no other reason than to give the media something to talk about other than Biden's apparent mental incapacity.

Recent research using Nordic administrative data has called this consensus into question.

1. Reconciling Estimates of the Long-Term Earnings Effect of Fertility (Norway)
2. Is There Really a Child Penalty in the Long Run? New Evidence from IVF Treatments (Denmark)
3. The Economics of Infertility: Evidence from Reproductive Medicine (Sweden)
4. The Labor Market Returns to Delaying Pregnancy (Sweden)

In a typical study on this question, the authors compare the earnings trajectories of women who become mothers at a certain point to women who do not become mothers at that point. These studies generally show large short-term and long-term earnings penalties associated with becoming a mother.

This approach shows that women tend to see their earnings levels flatten out around the time that they have kids. This could be because having a kid causes women's earnings levels to flatten out due to responsibilities that come with having a kid (the "child penalty" scenario). Or it could be because women choose to have kids around the time that their earnings levels are already flattening out. If it is the latter, then the "child penalty" does not really exist.

These recent Nordic studies take a different approach to estimating the size of the child penalty. Rather than looking at women who have children at a certain point and comparing them to women who don't, they look at women who are undergoing IVF fertility treatments and compare women who succeed at getting pregnant through IVF to women who fail at getting pregnant through IVF.

Using this approach, the authors find that the size of the child earnings penalty is much smaller than conventional estimates.

However, when it comes to the separate estimates for mothers and partners, the event-IV model paints a different picture than the event-study model. For mothers, it estimates only a small longrun negative impact of children on earnings of 3 percent. While we cannot reject a zero effect on earnings, we strongly reject the event-study estimates

[W]e find that the birth of the first child does not lower lifetime female earnings. If anything, we calculate that motherhood leads to a small rise in lifetime female earnings cycle of 2-3 percent. Based on these findings, we conclude that there is no evidence of a sizable long-run child penalty.

At the same time, we find no protective long-run impact on labor-market incomes. This finding is at odds with a large literature that has documented a negative effect of child-bearing on female earnings, which hence may be expected to imply a large positive effect of infertility on earnings. The lack of a “child penalty” in our estimates likely reflects the fact that our analysis focuses on women who reveal a preference for having a child, and is consistent with a small body of evidence using IVF-births. Among women who want a child, our results suggest that remaining childless does not have a long-run protective effect on income. Women who have a successful first assisted conception experience a short-run large drop in income, but catch up with women whose conception was unsuccessful within a year after childbirth.

People who are seeking IVF are, of course, different from the overall population in certain respects. For one thing, their pregnancies and subsequent births are necessarily planned. They also tend to be older. Americans reading this post will also object that they also need to be able to afford IVF, but that is less true in these countries due to their national health insurance programs. For instance, in Norway, the national health insurance covers three rounds of IVF.

The last study in the list above is especially interesting because, in addition to looking at people who succeed or fail at IVF, it also looks at people who get pregnant while on long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs). Just as IVF provides a good way to look at people with planned pregnancies, LARC provides a good way to look at people with unplanned pregnancies.

This points towards the conclusion that people with unplanned pregnancies and births face a child penalty while people with planned pregnancies do not. This also bolsters the general conclusion that people tend to plan their pregnancies around the time that their earnings trajectory is already flattening out, causing most research on the magnitude of the child earnings penalty to be overstated.

This presentation of things matches with lots of little threads you see in the discourse on family-formation and fertility but adds some useful caveats and clarifications:

1. Many people do pursue having kids as a "capstone" event to their life but the particular thing they are capping off is hitting their labor market potential.
   
2. Many people are at least implicitly prioritizing work (i.e. hitting their labor market potential) over family formation and delaying accordingly, consistent with the "workism" discourse.
   
3. The concern that having a kid too early (i.e. before hitting one's labor market potential) will affect one's career and lifetime earnings is based in reality.
   
4. Absent unplanned pregnancies or a change in norms about the importance of earnings, the age of first birth will tend to converge later in the fertility window because that is when people have had a chance to move beyond their entry-level jobs.
   
5. Given (4), average lifetime births will decline because, among other things, it is not possible to have very many kids when age of first birth is pushed so far back in the fertility window.

Over at People's Policy Project, we have occasionally published articles about college admissions exams, generally in the direction of defending them as a better way to implement selective admissions than alternatives. This piece from July of last year discusses a Chetty paper that shows that non-score admissions factors — like extracurricular activities and recommendation letters — heavily favor the rich.

As a general matter, I believe that college selectivity should be hugely dialed back from current levels. The idea that there is any relevant distinction between 99th percentile college applicants and 90th percentile college applicants is obviously ridiculous and the effort to make that distinction is really wasteful and harmful in a variety of ways.

One thing I have not said in my prior writing on this topic is that, in part due to my own experience, I find the argument that these tests are an equalizing force that allows low-income students to demonstrate themselves to be way more plausible than a lot of other people seem to.

The anti-test discourse tends to present the tests as inegalitarian because (1) poor kids have less test preparation resources available to them than rich kids and (2) for this and other reasons, poor kids perform worse on the tests than rich kids on average.

The first point seems to be a bit overrated. Expensive test preparation basically consists of taking practice exams and then reviewing what you got wrong. This can be done inexpensively on your own and it's not clear that it actually increases scores all that much.

The second point is correct, but is confused.

Low-income kids are underrepresented at the top of the test-score distribution just as they are underrepresented at the top of pretty much any other indicator of educational attainment and academic ability. Being poor is disadvantageous in a lot of ways when it comes to excelling academically.

But the top of the test-score distribution is not completely devoid of low-income kids. There are fewer of them than there would be in a random draw, but they do exist. For those kids in particular, the test is often the best and sometimes only way that they can prove their abilities and show that they actually are more capable than their richer peers.

My own case is instructive in this regard.

Neither of my parents went to college and I grew up in a low-income household. I had a lot of disciplinary problems in school, which included being suspended dozens of times, being kicked off of the school's basketball team twice for fighting, and being assigned at one point to an alternative school, though this decision was eventually overturned after appealing to the superintendent.

My sister, who was two years older than me, had not gone to college and I had not intended to go to college either. My parents knew so little about the college application process that, unbeknownst to me, they went to see my high school counselor to talk about colleges in the second semester of my senior year, well after college admissions deadlines.

In my junior year of high school, I took the PSAT and scored in the top 0.3 percent in the country, earning me the designation of National Merit Scholar. Individuals designated as such are put on a list that is distributed to college admissions offices across the country. This resulted in the University of Oklahoma contacting me and offering me what amounted to more than a full-ride scholarship once Pell Grants were considered.

As someone not seriously considering college, I was quite impressed by this offer at the time. OU is a flagship state university and just objectively a very good educational institution. I realize these days that there are levels to this thing and the true elites don't take OU all that seriously. But that also made attending OU fun in various ways.

In any case, it was only the administration of an identical test to over 1.5 million kids that allowed me, a low-income kid, to demonstrate that I can actually perform on the same level as my more well-to-do peers. It may not be a truly level playing field in that different students bring different resources to the test, but I'd rather have a slightly tilted playing field than no playing field at all.

By the time law school rolled around, my situation was quite different. Four years of college, including one in the McNair Scholars Program, left me with a much fuller appreciation of how the admissions game worked and I was a much more strategic applicant by that point.

Still, it was scoring in the top one percent of LSAT test-takers that made it easy for me to demonstrate to schools that, despite my not-so-elite undergraduate institution, I was still able to outperform kids from much more prestigious universities. I was accepted to four T-14 law schools and probably would have been accepted to more but for the fact that the very top of the T-14 schools give extra weight to applicants who do not go straight from undergraduate to law school (a non-academic factor that specifically impeded me, a poor!).

Perhaps this all smacks of "it worked for me, so it is good." But I don't think so. The college system and the economic system are separately and, in their interaction, quite unsavory in many respects. But within all that unsavoriness, it is simply the case that standardized tests allow otherwise disadvantaged kids to show what they can do in a way that no other thing does.

There is a reason why the scandals surrounding the SAT and ACT generally take the form of rich people paying a ringer to fraudulently take the test for their kid. It's because dim rich kids can't outcompete brighter poor kids in that specific arena. There's real value in that.

One of his book-promotion strategies appears to be picking on me every so often on Twitter, which he did again today. These attacks generally either accuse me of being a "marriage critic" that has the same views as the far-right manosphere or of being some kind of hypocrite because I am married to someone I met in high school. For some reason — is it jealousy? — social conservatives frequently seem perturbed by the latter.

One sees this all the time in the public policy arena. People’s Policy Project founder Matt Bruenig is just one example. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma for undergrad and Boston College for law school, Bruenig married his high school sweetheart and has two children with her. 

But when asked about his general opinion on marriage, Bruenig said, “We live in a pluralistic society. Let a thousand flowers bloom on different approaches to life.”

— Conn Caroll, Washington Examiner

The view that I am guilty of espousing is that some marriages and relationships are good while others are bad and that the "pro-marriage" writings of people like Kearney and Wilcox are dumb because they don't take this banal observation very seriously.

Relationships go bad (or fail to form) for a number of reasons including that one or the other relationship partner is just a bad or difficult person to be with or because there is some kind of incompatibility between otherwise good people. Again, this is not a groundbreaking point, but the idea that there is a distribution of relationship quality where one of the tails is home to net-negative outcomes is key for understanding how marriage or long-term partnering can be good in general while not being good in every specific case.

Wilcox and Kearney seem to think it is fun to take this observation and convert it into the point that elites like Matt Bruenig are saying that working/lower class men are unmarriageable. Interestingly, even though my points on this are gender-neutral, it's always that I am saying the men, not the women, are unmarriageable. This seems to be because these writers basically believe that picky women are to blame for everything, but I am not totally sure.

Mostly I think this critique is just a bad-faith effort to turn what is essentially a campaign of scolding lower class people into a populist campaign against "the elites." Wilcox actually puts that feint in his book's title: "Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization." Caroll does the same thing by describing reservations about unqualified marital promotion as a "luxury belief." Douthat, Kearney, and others generally make this point by saying upper class people get married in higher numbers while having more socially liberal views about marriage and therefore do not "preach what they practice."

It is my response to this particular bit of rhetoric that seems to get contorted into saying that I somehow think working class people are unmarriageable. But that is not what I have said nor what I believe. Instead, what I have said is that upper class people, broadly defined, do not simply get married. Rather, they get married to other upper class people. People like Wilcox, Kearney, and Douthat do not, in fact, marry the kinds of people they are imploring others to marry! The elites, in general, have made it very clear that they personally do not find these individuals to be marriageable.

When Kearney was doing this bit a few months ago, I looked to see whether she in fact married a lower class person. It turned out she met her husband, whose dad was the chief investment officer of Aetna, at Princeton University and then married him right as he got admitted to Yale law school.

What about Brad? Did he marry a lower class woman perhaps? No, of course not.

Brad is married to Danielle Wilcox who has a Bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia and a Master's degree from Columbia University. She's the chief development officer of the National Council on Teacher Quality. Danielle's bio says that Brad and her met in her fourth year at UVA.

So both Wilcox and Kearney are married to Ivy League graduates that they met in college. I suppose only they know whether they were specifically screening for an elite spouse, but clearly this is something elites do in general, and it is quite obviously because they don't find less elite people to be marriageable, not to them at least.

My own story of marrying someone I met in high school is somewhat more intriguing perhaps (certainly it intrigues the social conservatives who can't stop talking about it). But despite its unusual beginnings, it is not actually an unusual pairing in the final analysis.

Liz is a Marshall Scholar with a Master's degree from Cambridge and a two-time Pulitzer finalist. I am a National Merit Scholar with a law degree from Boston University (to help burnish my elite credentials further, I'll say here that I was admitted to Northwestern, Georgetown, University of Texas, and Cornell law schools but selected BU because of a scholarship offer). It's weird and kind of cool in some respects that we met in high school — me from a lower class family, her from a middle class family — but we became and married as educated elites.

What's curious about the Wilcox and Kearney stuff is that, precisely because they did not luck into marrying someone they met in high school, they almost certainly had prior relationships that did not work out. Presumably they do not regret passing over those relationships and believe that it would not have been good to marry those individuals. Is this because they are anti-marriage? Or is it because they acknowledge that some relationships are good and others are bad?

I've thought a lot about this question over the years, not so much in this socialists-versus-anarchists vein but just more broadly about the different attitudes, personalities, and approaches people who are engaged in politics often have. From what I have observed over 20-odd years of political engagement, the divergence that Yglesias identifies between socialists and anarchists can actually be found within each of those groups and also within pretty much any political grouping right-wing, left-wing, or otherwise.

A better way to think about this may be that how a particular person approaches their political advocacy is just a (mostly) separate thing from the content of their political advocacy. In simplified terms, you find people who want to feel like they are unique, fringe, and an embattled minority and people who want to feel normal, mainstream, and common-sensical. These different desires sometimes drive people to one or another political viewpoints but they also manifest themselves in rhetorical and presentational choices within each political viewpoint.

For example, there are social conservatives who are very invested in the idea that what they want when it comes to things like sexuality and relationships and the like is normal and mainstream and that everything else is the stuff of freaks and weirdos. But you can also find social conservatives these days especially who relish in the idea that they are the freaks, the counterculture, the embattled minority who knows the truth and lives it defiantly.

Within libertarianism, you will find advocates who present themselves as very normal and who see it as utterly common-sensical that people want the government off their back, including many advocates who tend to focus on scaling back foreign policy, cutting tax, and rolling back certain kinds of rules, boring stuff in other words. But then you will also find people who view libertarianism as a radical break, an essentially revolutionary politics and these individuals often partake in quite a bit of countercultural living themselves: principled childlessness, non-monogamy, drugs, etc.

Even among the center-left, there are clearly some who are attracted to the idea that they are in a tiny minority of people who sees how close we are to a complete totalitarian state and who engage in politics in a totally wild-eyed way. The precise nature of the incipient totalitarianism seems to drift year to year for these people, but their approach to political engagement, which is fringe and bizarre, does not change and they seem to relish being among the few seers.

On the left, where I know the situation best, one way to spot this divide is by seeing how different people describe the same kinds of policies. For some, it is clearly important that various left policy items be described in very radical-sounding terms (e.g. shattering the capitalist health sector and decommodifying medicine) while others care less about that and even evince a preference for the opposite (e.g. extending public insurance to everyone).

One way of presenting this is to just say there are "radicals" and "moderates" within any given politics, but I think this tends to overstate the extent to which this different behavior is driven by substance as opposed to personality.

If you have followed me for the 13 or so years I have been writing publicly about politics, you've probably noticed that, though I am at times aggressive about how I approach things, I tend to be more drawn towards depicting socialist things in the most mainstream and moderate-sounding ways. I'd like to say that this is a strategic choice I have made to restrain my radical impulses in service of trying to popularize left-wing ideas. But it is probably more driven by my personality than anything else.

Because every political grouping has a diversity of personalities and therefore styles of engagement within it, you can kind of find whatever it is you want to hate within it. Generally this takes the form of finding someone with a more fringe-seeking personality and highlighting their rhetorical excesses as representative of the whole. But it can also take the form of finding people with the more normie-seeking personalities and highlighting them as indicative of how lame and cringe their politics are.

This is a very tempting thing to do and I've seen more than a handful of pundits who I previously thought had interesting things to say get sucked into this kind of "nutpicking" as their main approach to social media or content creation. Yglesias does not do this. So this is not a point about him. But others do and it's really an unfortunate thing to see people replace interesting political and economic analysis with picking on personalities, essentially the stuff of interpersonal gossip, but masquerading as something more than that.

I've definitely had periods, especially when I was in my early 20s, where I was intensely irritated by what I now realize are personality types, especially on the left where I have been situated for so long. But it doesn't really bother me anymore, even when these personality divergences result in people sniping at me for no good reason, which happens occasionally.

I think more people for whom politics is a big part of their life would have a better time if they could distinguish personality differences from substantive differences and ask themselves in any given instance whether someone who is extremely irritating to you actually has extremely bad and stupid politics or if you have decided that they do because you can't stand them for non-political reasons.

Every time I do this, some individuals ask how I am able to file charges when I don't have "standing" because I am not the one who is being injured by the coercive statements.

The short answer is that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) has no standing requirement.

Section 10(b) of the NLRA just says that:

Whenever it is charged that any person has engaged in or is engaging in any such unfair labor practice, the Board, or any agent or agency designated by the Board for such purposes, shall have power to issue and cause to be served upon such person a complaint stating the charges in that respect

The NLRB has also clarified in its regulations that this lack of an explicit standing requirement means that:

Any person may file a charge alleging that any person has engaged in or is engaging in any unfair labor practice affecting commerce.

The Supreme Court has also recognized that there is no NLRA standing requirement since 1943.

This may seem like a little statutory drafting quirk that has taken on a life of its own. But it was intentional.

During the drafting of the NLRA, there was debate about whether to limit the right to file charges to affected individuals. Senator Wagner strongly opposed any such limitation and ultimately prevailed in ensuring that anyone can file a charge.

This is the key excerpt from this debate:

The Chairman: I agree with you that it would be unfortunate and improper for some outsider, some busybody, some social worker in the town, to claim that sanitary conditions were not proper in the factory and be able to make a complaint and call this Board's attention to conditions that were satisfactory to the employees but were not satisfactory to outsiders. Of course, it does not seem that a sensible board would pay much attention to such complaints, but anyway I think the point is well made that provisions should be made to limit the issuing and making of complaints in labor disputes to persons who are connected with the plant. I think that is also Senator Wagner's view of it.

Senator Wagner: I will not agree to that limitation. You are restricting the workers' rights there.

…

The Chairman: We are talking about who shall lodge complaints.

Mr. Caldwell: Yes, sir.

The Chairman: Now, I have an industry, and I have employees. Now, you are raising the question of whether this language permits some outsider in the community — some minister or some other person or some woman's organization, or some labor organization, other than the one in the establishment — can lodge a complaint.

Mr. Caldwell: Yes; if no employee in the plant participates. That is my limitation. I said, of course, that if even a very small group of men in the plant belongs to a labor union or have another connection, they have the right to make a complaint, regardless of how few they are, if they have a controversy with the employer, and the Board would certainly be entitled to hear the few as well as the many; but the question I am raising under this language is that whether — no employee being dissatisfied, no employee complaining — whether a third party could come in and say "I will create a controversy in this plant, whether there is one here or not."

Senator Wagner: Of course, it comes back to the old question which is at the bottom of it. I do not say this of your representative plan, but of most representative plans, that you want to retain the economic advantage which you have — where an employee has any complaint to make, he is at once discharged, and rather than lose his job he is not going to make a complaint. Now, do you want to leave workers of that kind absolutely powerless to belong to an outside organization, and there is an individual who may lodge that complaint without running the risk. The complaint may be well founded, without the individual running the risk of being notified the next day that his job is at an end.

The reasoning here is very clear. Employees reasonably fear retaliation from their boss if they file charges. So we want to make it possible for people who cannot be retaliated against to do it instead.

The NLRA does of course contain a protection against retaliation for filing charges, but in reality, it is not hard for an employer to retaliate against employees in indetectable ways, including by deciding not to promote them or give them raises in the future. The drafters recognized this reality and so eliminated a standing requirement to provide another possible way to enforce the law without opening workers up to retaliation.

Today, I personally filed an unfair labor practice charge against Cumulus Media, Inc. The charge alleges that the company maintains an employee handbook containing 17 rules that violate Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act. Below, I have uploaded the charge, a complaint from a federal district court case that helps prove the authenticity of the handbook, and a document listing all of the illegal rules and some explanation about why they are illegal and how I was able to get the handbook.

1. Charge
2. Complaint That Proves Authenticity
3. Explanation

Yglesias starts the piece by establishing what he thinks is normal and productive behavior within a political coalition by pointing to how the right-wing of the Republican party operates, which he says is by providing electoral support without requiring that candidates tout their issues on the hope that they will get their issues dealt with when Republicans win.

Then he contrasts that with the way the left-wing of the Democratic party operates, which is suggesting or threatening to withhold electoral support unless candidates tout their issues and pursue them when they are in office, which he compares to murder-suicide.

I've thought a lot about this question over the years and I've found most people's approach to it lacking, primarily because their view on what constitutes a normal and productive baseline for coalition politics is way off the mark.

To my mind, the normal and productive way to do coalition politics is for the various factions in the coalition to first acknowledge that they disagree on certain things but that it is nevertheless beneficial to work together in order to control the government. From there, the various factions ought to receive policy dispensations that are proportional to their size.

Thus, a small left-wing faction in coalition with a large center-left faction may be allowed to pass a policy or two and get one cabinet position even though the center-left faction may not support the policy or the appointee. In exchange, the left-wing faction will agree to pass the policies and support the appointees of the large center-left faction even though the left-wing faction may not support those policies or the appointees.

You see this kind of arrangement a lot in multi-party democracies during government formation.

Something like this occasionally happens in the US, but not generally. Instead, the general expectation among Democrats at least seems to be that the left should support the appointees and policies of the center-left regardless of the relative sizes of the two factions and that what the left should get in return for that is the avoidance of right-wing governance. Even if a policy is supported by the majority of the Democratic party, including the Democratic elected representatives, it is seen as perfectly normal for even a very small number of moderate Democrats to veto it, so long as that number is enough to prevent a majority.

This bizarre situation where a handful of center-left moderates engage in this kind of hostage-taking and the punditry does not view it as insane and outrageous seems to be caused by a variety of factors, including that there are only two major nominal parties, that the parties are weak, and that we have a tricameral lawmaking process that frustrates the kinds of unified government formation you see elsewhere in the world.

But I don't think you can understand why the left threatens electoral support without fully appreciating the problems created by a world where the center-left's understanding of the proper role of the left is to provide endless confidence and supply rather than to share in the power.

I wrote something similar to this back in 2015 in a post titled "What is the left supposed to do electorally?" In that post, I mused about the fact that the center-left accuses the left of behaving recklessly no matter what it does in elections. If the left runs as a separate party, this is characterized as reckless vote-splitting. If the left runs in party primaries and wins, this is characterized as recklessly risking general election electability. But if you can't run as a third party or run in the primary, then what are you supposed to do?

The answer of course is the same as above: support the center-left even as the center-left's position is that it can and should reject everything you want to do. Not only should you not push the center-left on its policy positions, but you also should not challenge them in elections. Just provide the confidence and supply.

Needless to say, this is not a very effective way to approach someone who you want to partner with. The center-left is very good at spinning up stories about how the wacky left is acting in a wacky way, but very bad at seeing how their approach to working with the left is repulsive and wacky in its own way.

As noted already, I think the theoretical way you solve this problem is through power-sharing where the left is given a certain dispensation over policy and personnel that is commensurate with its size. In a world where the left could trust that this would happen, it probably would focus more on growing its voter base and turning them out for the Democratic party and less on threatening to withhold votes. But for as long as the center-left's attitude is that it should be allowed to govern however it wants rather than share power proportionally, many on the left will not see the point of cooperation.

Today we got the latest dump of data on the question from the Society of Family Planning and the numbers continue to back up the claim that Dobbs has had a very small impact on aggregate abortions. In fact, according to the most recent SFP data, Americans are having more abortions now than they were prior to Dobbs.

The SFP count only includes legal abortions conducted by abortion providers. This means that it misses all of the abortions conducted through less formal means, such as through abortion pills received through the mail or purchased across the border. These types of abortions have also likely increased over this period.

One of the reasons I have been curious about this trickle of data is that, in the discourse on Dobbs, almost all of the takes fell into one of two buckets:

1. Abortion is bad. Overturning Roe will reduce abortions a lot. Therefore Dobbs is good.
   
2. Abortion is good. Overturning Roe will reduce abortions a lot. Therefore Dobbs is bad.

Both views have the same underlying assumption, which is that overturning Roe will reduce abortions a lot. But this has not proven to be true.

Insofar as overturning Roe has caused a variety of practical medical problems for individuals whose pregnancies take a turn for the worse, the "Dobbs is bad" conclusion remains viable, though for different reasons than that Dobbs is radically reducing the abortion rate.

But the "Dobbs is good" conclusion, at least when motivated by a desire to reduce abortion, is looking more and more untenable. Indeed, if one's actual goal is to reduce abortions, it would appear that the decades-long project focused specifically on overturning Roe has been a disaster as it misallocated tremendous amounts of activist resources towards a policy lever that was not actually all that relevant to the national abortion rate.

The short of it is that the Left, in his view, suffers from an end-of-history ennui: their successes have succeeded, their failures have failed, and there is not much action to organize around. In this vacuum, they have become overzealous about the relatively small Israel-Palestine conflict because it is one of the few conflicts that resembles the old-style conflicts that animated so much of leftist anti-imperialism.

Smith ends his piece this way:

In any case, don’t let my analytical tone hide my moral disgust here. People always have a choice whether to cheer for atrocities or to refuse to cheer for them. When your rallies end up with swastikas and “Gas the Jews” and people making fun of dead innocents, well, you made the wrong choice. This episode is going to show a lot of Americans that the leftist movement contains, at the grassroots level, a lot of very inhumane, bloodthirsty people. Ultimately that revelation will hurt the movement in the eyes of progressive Americans, draining some of the goodwill it built up over the last decade.

The point of this ending is also peppered throughout the piece, including in the subtitle.

Personally speaking, international conflicts don't interest me very much and contemporary commentary on them interests me even less because that commentary is loose with facts and frequently overheated to the point of absurdity. But I have found myself somewhat interested in the meta-commentary about this event, which is what Noah Smith, Eric Levitz, Joshua Leifer, Gabriel Winant, Michelle Goldberg, Carl Beijer and many others have been engaging in over the last few days.

What I find strange about this meta-commentary is how much it takes seriously the idea that occasional rhetorical excess by some people in a faction has some kind of deep significance or world-historical meaning.

It's been especially weird to watch Noah Smith spend days tweeting much more extreme versions of the anti-Left argument he made in his newsletter. The reason I find this weird is because Smith tweeted and then deleted this post early on in the recent conflict.

Is this not exactly the same kind of morally grotesque posting he says is infecting the Left? Is he also bored by the end of history and infected by a base thirst for blood? Is that why he posted this?

I point this out not to say that Noah Smith is a hypocrite, but rather because I think that, if Noah actually reflected on why he did this, he could develop a better understanding of why someone else might do it.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Noah's outrage at the underlying situation was so great that he impulsively engaged in a bit of overzealous posting to try to make his enemies angry and to get some kind of catharsis. In most cases, rhetorical exuberance is not that deep and its origins can be found in a particular person's emotions in the moment.

Of course, some people are as mad about Israel's treatment of Palestinians as Noah was about the Hamas attack.

What's interesting about this pattern is that its primary goal does not appear to be the usual goals of smearing and lying. Instead, the behavior seemingly serves some kind of group cohesion purpose, so much so that the more the belief is revealed as ridiculous, the more ostentatiously people signal that they believe it.

The recent discourse surrounding Jamaal Bowman pulling the Cannon building fire alarm is an interesting case study.

The background for this story is that, on Saturday, Congress was rushing to pass a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown. When the House was called to vote, the representatives had to move quickly from their offices in the Cannon, Rayburn, and Longworth buildings to the Capitol building in order to cast their vote.

At this time, Bowman walked to an exit to the Cannon building and pulled a fire alarm at that exit. The exit looked like this:

In a later statement, Bowman explained that he was rushing to vote for the resolution to avert a government shutdown, went to an exit that is usually open for votes, found that it was not open, misread the sign — presumably as "push alarm until sounds" — and surmised that pushing the alarm by the door would cause it to open.

In this telling, Bowman made a comical mistake and certainly it's fun and reasonable to joke about it. Even he says in his statement that the whole thing is pretty embarrassing.

But rather than tease Bowman, conservatives have quickly converged around an alternative theory that makes absolutely no sense: Bowman pulled this fire alarm in order to stop or delay the vote on the continuing resolution. As part of this alternative theory, conservatives even whipped themselves into a frenzy to expel Bowman, with one representative introducing a resolution to do so.

There are three very obvious problems with this theory:

1. Pulling a fire alarm in the Cannon office building would not stop or delay the vote in the Capitol building.
   
2. Bowman wanted the vote to happen. He, along with every other House Democrat except for one, supported the resolution.
   
3. After pulling the alarm and finding that the door still did not open, Bowman ran to another door, exited it, went to the Capitol, and voted for the resolution.

So in this theory, Bowman pulled an alarm in a building other than the one where the vote was happening, in order to stop the vote on something he wanted to pass, and then, rather than not showing up to the vote and blaming the fire alarm, actually went to the vote. What?

On this theory, I guess Bowman must have also planned this out very carefully by walking to a door that had these signs about activating an alarm to exit, thereby giving him plausible deniability.

As I noted up top, nobody really cares at all that this makes absolutely no sense even on its own terms. In fact, the more you point out that this is totally incoherent, the more people seem to be attracted to expressing that they believe it. I've seen this dozens of times now and so it's not particularly surprising, but it is obviously somewhat disconcerting in a world where we are all supposed to at least be pretending to be engaging in deliberative democracy.

If you haven't followed along so far, Kearney has a new book where she bravely argues that it is good for kids to have two parents in their household.

I responded to this argument by rehashing what I take to be the common view on this topic, which is that parent cohabitation is sometimes good and sometimes bad, depending on the characteristics of each parent and how those parents get along. Based on this view, the relevant inquiry is how many of the 22 percent of kids who live in single-parent households would actually be better off if their specific parents lived together.

This is a different inquiry than the one Kearney and her ilk engage in, preferring instead to produce meaningless statistics that do not control for underlying relationship quality and that assume that missing parents have average characteristics, both in the labor market and in the household.

Clarification

My point here is sometimes oversimplified as being about whether men are unmarriageable and Douthat engages in some of that simplification. But there are actually four reasons why parental cohabitation may be a net negative or even impossible for the 22 percent of kids who currently do not have it:

1. One of the parents may be dead, in prison, or living remotely for job reasons. This is not a huge slice of people, but it probably does shave a couple of percentage points off the total.
   
2. Dad might be a bad guy.
   
3. Mom might be a bad lady.
   
4. Dad and mom might be alright but don't mix well.

There is a tendency in some of this writing to focus on dad, presumably because mom typically has the kid and so it seems like the question is just one about whether to add dad to the household. But this is a mistake. The behavior of mom can be just as much a problem for cohabitation as the behavior of dad.

Another worthwhile point of clarification here is that non-cohabitation is not the same thing as abandonment. In some of these cases, mom and dad are both active participants in their kids' lives, even if they don't live together, something typically called "co-parenting." Indeed, if anyone actually cared to study this, they'd find that some non-cohabiting parents spend more time with their kids than many cohabiting parents do. I say this not to endorse the idea of non-cohabitation but just to underscore, once again, that the relevant inquiry requires looking at the specific circumstances of these 22 percent of kids, something Kearney doesn't do.

What Upper Class People Do

In his piece, Douthat also writes this:

From a left-wing perspective, the difficulty in dismissing the importance of marriage and married childbearing is precisely the fact that the upper and upper middle classes still marry at high rates, defer childbearing until marriage and divorce less frequently than other social strata. Because when the well-off follow a particular practice so consistently, the normal left-wing assumption is that the choices must serve their class interests in some way.

Why do upper-class people so often send their kids to private schools, for instance, or hire private tutors, or pressure their offspring to attend elite colleges and universities, or seek to protect their family wealth from the taxman? For the sake of the reproduction of privilege, naturally.

Before getting to my point, I must indulge in a slight nitpick here and point out that the vast majority of upper class people do not send their kids to private K-12 schools. That's a northeast weirdo thing driven primarily by ruinous intraclass status-seeking and paranoia.

Regarding Douthat's marriage point here, he makes a mistake that nearly everyone in this discourse makes and it's kind of driving me crazy over time. The mistake is saying that, contrary to lower class people, upper class people are getting married. The reason this is a mistake is that upper class people are not getting married to lower class people.

If we follow Douthat's recommendation to look at the behavior of upper class people to determine what kinds of behavior are privilege-enhancing, then we are forced to conclude that marrying an upper class spouse is privilege-enhancing while marrying a lower class spouse is not and should be avoided. That's how upper class people actually behave. Right?

Another common and pithy way of expressing Douthat's point here is that upper class people should "preach what they practice," with proponents of that phrase seemingly thinking that it means that upper class people should tell lower class people to marry. But what upper class people practice is not "marriage." It's "marriage to upper class people." Right?

Indeed, if you want an example of how a certain marriage proponent approached marriage in her own life, she conveniently had the New York Times announce the details of her marriage in 2001.

Melissa Jean Schettini, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Louis A. Schettini of Montville, N.J., was married yesterday to Daniel Patrick Kearney Jr.

The bride and bridegroom, both 27, met at Princeton University, where they graduated, she summa cum laude.

Mrs. Kearney is a candidate for a Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Her father owns Per Forms, a Montville company, which manufactures and markets business forms.

Next month, Mr. Kearney is to become a law student at Yale. He received a master's degree in classical studies from Boston College.

The bridegroom's father retired as the chief investment officer of Aetna, the insurance company in Hartford. He was also the president of its investments and financial services division.

Is the upshot from this kind of behavior really "people should get married"? Or is it "when the upper class boyfriend gets the letter from Yale law school, go ahead and lock that down"?

Is it offensive to write this? I gather from my surveying of society that it is. But why is it offensive? Is it because second-guessing people's relationships is offensive? And if so, what should we make of people who write whole books doing that?

Given the hype, I was hoping that Kearney had something new to say on the topic, but sadly she does not. It's the same dumb shit with the same dumb analytical mistakes that I've been seeing every few months since I started doing this work in 2011.

Not Controlling Correctly

The naive way to prove that kids in one-parent households (1P-kids) fare worse than kids in two-parent households (2P-kids) is to track the average life outcomes of each type of kid and see who does better.

But sophisticated researchers, like Kearney, know that this kind of comparison is not sufficient because 1P-kids and 2P-kids are different from one another in other ways, including their socioeconomic status, that may also explain their differences in outcome.

The solution to this problem is to control for these other differences by, for example, comparing 1P-kids and 2P-kids who have the same demographic characteristics. This is described as controlling for these other variables in order to isolate the variable of interest, which is the number of parents present.

But this solution is just as naive as the first one because 1P-kids and 2P-kids with the same demographic characteristics also differ in another important respect: the underlying quality of their parents' relationship. The lack of two parents in the household is not a random occurrence. It generally happens because, for one reason or another, the parents could not get along.

To understand my point here, imagine we have two married families that are demographically and socioeconomically identical. Now imagine that one of those two families experienced a divorce. If we wanted to isolate the effect of that divorce on the kids in that family, would we be able to do so by comparing those kids to the kids in the other family that did not experience a divorce?

Kearney and her ilk say yes. But this is clearly not true. In general, there was some kind of problem present in the family that experienced the divorce that was not present in the family that did not experience the divorce. To actually analyze the effect of the divorce, you would need to compare the divorced family to a hypothetical version of itself that did not divorce despite whatever the problem was that led to the divorce.

Another way to put this is: you need to compare couples with the same kinds of relationship dysfunctions, but where one couple splits and the other couple stays together. Comparing a split-couple with a certain relationship dysfunction to an intact-couple that does not have that relationship dysfunction, which is what all of this research does, is an obvious mistake.

To put this in less abstract terms, if dad beats mom and they get divorced, it's not accurate to say that, but for the divorce, the kids would have fared exactly the same as a similar non-divorced family where dad does not beat mom. Yet that is what the research Kearney relies upon assumes.

Thinking at the Margin

A similar problem that plagues this kind of writing is that it casually assumes that the parent that is "missing" from a 1P family would, if he or she was present, be an average parent. In Kearney's NYT piece, she writes about a hypothetical missing parent who earns $44,000 per year (the median for a high school graduate) and contributes "considerable time and energy to taking care of children."

The assumption that the missing parents in 1P families are average parents who would contribute an average amount of earnings and an average amount of child care is obviously ridiculous. As with any group, the missing parents are a heterogenous bunch, but that population almost certainly skews towards below-average earnings and below-average domestic contribution, with many actually having a net-negative domestic contribution, whether because they are abusive, demanding, or otherwise.

This is easily the goofiest thing about this discourse. To hear Kearney talk about it, you'd think that the single mothers of the world are turning down $44,000 and hundreds of hours of free child care each year. But why would someone do that? If that option is as incredibly beneficial as Kearney says it is, why don't people select it? Do people want their lives to be bad rather than good?

The solution to this seeming paradox is that Kearney and her ilk are just obviously wrong that the missing parent is otherwise an average person who would make average monetary and non-monetary contributions. The relationship that is on the margin of staying intact is not the same as the average intact relationship. This is pretty basic stuff and yet every few years, the discourse is blessed by someone who doesn't get it.

A Better Mental Model

Rather than only make critiques here, let me propose a better framework for thinking through this whole question.

Imagine if the two parents of all of the children in the country lived as couples in the same household. Contrary to the assumptions used in many of the arguments in this discourse, these couples are not all average. Instead, their relationships have varying quality: some extremely low quality, some extremely high quality, and some in the middle.

Let's say we sorted these couples based on the relationship quality thereby creating a distribution of relationship quality. In this distribution, the 1st percentile couple is in a living hell: substance abuse, violence, criminality, you name it. The 100th percentile couple is in paradise: no conflict ever, super-high-earning, equal contributors, and so on.

I think we can all agree that at the lower end of that distribution, it would be better for the kids if their parents' cohabitation ended. We can also all agree that at the higher end of the distribution, it would be worse for the kids if their parents' cohabitation ended.

With these agreements established, the question becomes purely one of where in the distribution does net-negative turn into net-positive. Is the 5th percentile relationship a net-positive? The 10th? The 30th?

This is obviously a very bloodless and abstract way to look at the question, but it is the actual question we should be debating. Kearney surely does not believe that the 1st percentile parenting couple should remain intact and that keeping it intact would be a net positive for kids. So if Kearney wants to actually make an interesting contribution, then she should walk us to the spot in the relationship-quality distribution where she thinks negative turns into positive.

At present around 78 percent of kids live in two-parent households, meaning that 22 percent do not. The interesting question is how many of those 22 percent of kids would be better off if they lived in a two-parent household with their parents at the relationship quality that those parents would have (not at the average relationship quality). We could also ask the opposite question, which is how many of those 78 percent of kids in two-parent households would be better off in one-parent households. Nobody ever asks that question, but the number is definitely not zero.

Hands Off The Welfare State

When I write stuff like this, people sometimes conclude that I have some stake in the "marriage debates." And really I don't. I think people should evangelize whatever lifestyles they want to evangelize. Spread the good news about how good your religion, relationship, exercise, and diet are. I am all for it.

Where I draw the line is when these lifestyle battles bleed into arguments about how only this lifestyle, and not the welfare state, can achieve distributive equality in society. That is a lie and it is the best way to actually hurt the most vulnerable people in the society by laying the ground work for opposition to the welfare state.

The song contains a few lines about the distribution of income that most of the commentary has focused on.

I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay

...

'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end

'Cause of rich men north of Richmond

...

Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eat

And the obese milkin' welfare

Well, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 pounds

Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds

Part of what has made the song such a flashpoint is that commentators seem to struggle a bit with how to put all of this together in a politically coherent way.

On the one hand, receiving low pay in exchange for selling your soul by working all day because of rich men is a fairly standard left-wing understanding of worker exploitation under capitalism. The left also tends to be more concerned with people suffering from hunger and homelessness than the right.

On the other hand, being taxed to no end by politicians ("rich men north of Richmond") so that undeserving people ("obese") can receive government benefits ("welfare") is a standard right-wing description of how workers are exploited by the welfare state.

The most plausible way to explain what is going on is to say, as Carl Beijer does, that Anthony truly is just a centrist of sorts with undeveloped views. This kind of person is not common in online political forums, but is prevalent in the population overall.

However, there is another way to square all of this that is more interesting as a matter of theory and philosophy.

The lyrics quoted above are focused primarily on the justness of the distribution of income in our society. Wages, taxes, and transfers are explicitly mentioned and, perhaps, you could stretch a bit to say that capital income is indirectly being referenced through the invocation of "rich men" and as the flip side of "bullshit pay."

There are of course many competing theories of distributive justice, but, among people not especially interested in the philosophy of it all, discussions of distributive justice tend to start (and frequently end) with appeals to one form or another of desert theory.

The animating principle of desert theory is that each person should be distributed an amount of income (or consumption) that is equal to how much they personally produce. This is frequently expressed in terms of each person being owed "the products of their labor" or similar.

My long views about desert theory can be found in this video I recently posted on YouTube.

My brief views on desert theory are as follows:

1. Desert-patterned distributions are unjust. A distributive system that matched production to income or consumption is one where individuals who do not produce, such as the elderly, the disabled, and children, are entitled to nothing. I think this is wrong.
   
2. Calculating desert is impossible. In advanced economies where production is carried out jointly across complex enterprises and value chains, it is not possible to figure out how much of the output "comes from" each particular input. This is both a conceptual impossibility and measurement impossibility.
   
3. A lot of output is not attributable to any living person. Although calculating this is impossible for the reasons identified in (2), it seems likely that most of our economic output is, in some sense, attributable to knowledge and technology inputs that were contributed by people who are no longer alive. Desert theory provides no guidance on how to distribute this output just as it provides no guidance on how to distribute the output owing to natural resources that also are not the contribution of any particular person.
   
4. Left-wing approaches to desert theory are more compelling. The capital income distributed to wealthy people is a bigger drain on the disposable income of workers than the tax-and-transfer system is, generally speaking. This is especially true for lower-paid workers of the kind Oliver is referencing. Also, the net beneficiaries of our capital income system have far less need for their unearned income than the net beneficiaries of our tax-and-transfer system. So, if you were inclined towards a desert theory approach to distributive justice, which I am not, the left-wing approach is the better of the two.

Oliver's lyrics do not neatly align with left-wing or right-wing approaches to desert theory, but they align well with a third approach to desert theory that is sometimes called "producerism."

Whereas left-wing approaches to desert theory draw attention to the parasites at the top (capitalists) and right-wing approaches to desert theory draw attention to parasites at the bottom (welfare beneficiaries), producerists say that the working class is being drained by both kinds of parasites.

On this view, the capitalist shortchanges the worker by distributing to him income that is not equivalent to the output he produces and then the government grinds down that too-low income even further by taxing and transferring it to welfare beneficiaries. Anthony's lyrics conform to this producerist analysis.

In the first part of this argument, I iterate through three successive policies that go like this:

1. Levy a $100 billion tax on the richest Americans. Pay $3k per child in child benefits.
   
2. Levy a $100 billion tax on the richest Americans. Pay $6k per child in child benefits. Subject the $6k benefit to a 5% phaseout for family earnings above $50k.
   
3. Levy a $100 billion tax on the richest Americans. Pay $6k per child in child benefits. Levy a 5% surcharge tax for family earnings above $50k up to $6k of tax.

In a lot of discussions about universal benefits and means-tested benefits, people insist on comparing policies (1) and (2). The reason they do this is because they think (1) and (2) cost the same amount of money, i.e. $100 billion. Put another way, they compare policy (1) and (2) because these two policies are tax-equivalent where "tax" is defined the way the national accounts define it.

But if you really want to analyze the difference between universal benefits and means-tested benefits, the proper comparison is between policies (2) and (3). The reason this is the proper comparison is because they rely upon the same effective marginal tax rates (EMTRs). The way that policy (2) is able to deliver more benefit to the poor than policy (1) is by imposing an extra 5% EMTR on families with income over $50k. But as we see in policy (3), the universalist can also impose an extra 5% EMTR on families with income over $50k. The universalist does this with a tax instead of a phaseout, but it all ultimately amounts to the same thing.

Thus we can see that, when means-tested and universal policies are EMTR-equivalent (as opposed to tax-equivalent), they do the same thing. The entire case for means-testing therefore is based on tricking people into comparing tax-equivalent policies instead of EMTR-equivalent policies.

Once this point is understood, the next move in the argument is just to observe that phaseouts are more costly to administer than taxes. Thus, since EMTR-equivalent policies are identical in all other respects, the administrative efficiency of universal policies (which use taxes instead of phaseouts) makes them less costly.

Over the last couple of days, I have been genuinely shocked to watch Scott Winship struggle to understand this really basic point about EMTRs, even as his fellow conservative think tank brethren intervene, some with spreadsheets in hand, to try to get his head around it.

Today, he wrote a short blog post explaining why he thinks I am wrong. The key paragraph is this one:

What [Matt says] both strategies really do is provide a universal benefit and then tax it away gradually for families above $50,000 in income, just in different ways. But that’s clearly wrong. The new tax is an additional tax. It makes no difference that all families see the same net change in income under both strategies, which is the point Bruenig wants to emphasize (and which is true). The fact of the matter is that the additional tax revenue could have been used to increase the targeted benefit rather than making the targeted benefit universal. That would reduce poverty and inequality even more. There is no corresponding way to increase the generosity of the targeted benefit under the phase-out strategy that is limited to $100B in revenue.

The bolded part describes a fourth policy that is as follows:

4. Levy a $100 billion tax on the richest Americans. Pay $9k per child in child benefits. Subject the $9k benefit to a 5% phaseout for family earnings above $50k. Levy a 5% surcharge tax for family earnings above $50k up to $9k of tax.

With policy (4), all Winship has done is taken the universal policy (3), added a 5% phaseout to it, and then used the "revenue" (if we can call it that) from that 5% phaseout to increase the child benefit by $3k. Put differently, in moving from policy (3) to policy (4), Winship increased the EMTR of families over $50k from 5% to 10% and then used that to increase the generosity of the child benefit.

If you look closely, you'll see this is the exact same thing that happened when we moved from policy (1) to policy (2) in my initial example. All Winship has observed here is that, when you take the universal benefit and add a phaseout to increase the EMTR by 5 percentage points, you can get more revenue to increase the child benefit.

But we can counter his policy (4) with a new policy (5) that looks like this:

5. Levy a $100 billion tax on the richest Americans. Pay $9k per child in child benefits. Levy a 10% surcharge tax for family earnings above $50k up to $9k of tax.

In this new policy (5), all I have done is take his phaseout and turn it into a tax, which is exactly what I did with my policy (3). Policy (5) is EMTR-equivalent to policy (4) just as policy (3) was EMTR-equivalent to policy (2).

When we EMTR-equivalize the policies — such as when we compare policy (3) to policy (2) and compare policy (5) to policy (4) — there is no distributive difference between them. It's only when we don't EMTR-equivalize and instead tax-equivalize them — such as when we compare policy (2) to policy (1) and compare policy (4) to policy (3) — that we can generate a difference.

We can go in circles on this all day of course. To counter my policy (5), Winship could propose a policy (6) which is just my policy (5) with a 5% phaseout added, at which point I will propose policy (7), which is just his policy (6) with the phaseout replaced by a tax.

But what this round-and-round just keeps showing is what I have said already twice in this post, which is:

1. When we compare EMTR-equivalized policies, there is no distributive difference between means-tested and universal benefits.
   
2. When we compare policies that are tax-equivalized but where the means-tested benefit has a higher EMTR, the means-tested benefit comes out on top.
   
3. Therefore, the only reason means-tested benefits appear to come out on top is due to the fact that the national accountant's definition of "tax" counts regular taxes as tax, but does not count phaseouts as tax. The means-tester therefore is succeeding in the debate only by implementing their EMTR increases in phaseouts that, though they are economically equivalent to taxes, are nevertheless not accounted that way in the official bookkeeping.

I've already explained to Winship many times that the whole thing is just EMTR-equivalization v. tax-equivalization. He insists that it is not and yet in this very blog post, his response is simply to insist that we should compare two policies that are tax-equivalent but not EMTR-equivalent. I don't know what else can be done to get through to him.

This was an unpopular position at the time, especially in North Texas, and so I got lots of pushback and also saw lots of content on radio and TV that blasted war opponents. One of the things these people would say is that opposing the war meant that you did not "support the troops." In response to this, war opponents would sometimes say that it's the opposite: since war is bad for troops, opposing war "supports the troops."

It was in digesting this debate that I consciously realized for the first time that a lot of what passes as debate and argument is actually people fighting over word meanings, aka semantics, linguistic disputes, word games.

In the case of "support the troops," war proponents were using the phrase to refer to supporting what the troops were doing, i.e. fighting the war. They would sometimes say "you can't support the troops if you don't support their mission."

War opponents were using "support the troops" to refer to supporting the well-being of the troops, i.e. not putting them in harm's way.

This passes as a debate and I saw it presented as such dozens of times, but, in a formal sense, it's not really a debate because the different meanings of the phrase "support the troops" were causing people to talk past one another. So there was no actual "clash" of arguments, just ambiguity.

It would have been possible to create a debate with the underlying pieces of this non-debate. All you'd need to do is restructure the conversation to be about whether the deaths, injuries, and mental trauma of the troops were worth enduring in order to liberate the world and the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein. This would push each group to actually argue about the things that were being mentioned in the "support the troops" conversation, forcing clash on each piece of that argument (how many casualties should we expect and how much good or bad do we think will come from ousting Hussein in a land invasion) and a clash on how to weigh these two pieces against each other.

But instead, in the discourse I was able to consume at the time, people could never get past the semantical question of what the phrase "support the troops" should be understood to mean, with each side seeming to think that, so long as they can define the phrase to be compatible with their preferred course of action, they are actually making a good argument for that course of action.

When I studied analytical philosophy in college, I read some papers that had found an interesting way around these kinds of word games. I don't remember the precise content of these papers now and can't be bothered to try to figure out where this approach came from, but the method was this: whenever an argument features two people using a key word in different ways, just split that word into two new words, with one assigned subscript 1 and the other assigned subscript 2. Then, from there, just use the subscripted words to disambiguate the conversation.

So, in the case, of "support the troops," what we would do is say that, for the purposes of this argument, support₁ the troops will be defined as approving of what the troops are doing while support₂ the troops will be defined as protecting the well-being of the troops. Once subscripted in this way, war proponents can clearly say that they support₁ the troops while war opponents can say that they do not support₁ the troops but do support₂ the troops.

Dropping a subscript like this to short circuit a semantical debate struck me at the time, and even now, as extremely clever and, in a way, really funny. It identifies the ambiguity that is masquerading as argumentative clash and then blows up that ambiguity without actually taking a position on what the "real" definition of the disputed word should be. This makes it very frustrating for people who are prone to linguistic moves in debates because, every time they make a move like that, you simply drop a subscript on the word they are doing that for and neutralize their rhetorical strategy.

Sadly, dropping a subscript never caught on in the broader world of argument, even it seems within philosophy. But personally I'd like to proliferate it. So many of the arguments we have revolve around word meaning debates that people don't recognize as word meaning debates and being able to simply drop a subscript and move on to the substantive clash (if there even is any) would be such a nice discourse tool.