2026-04-10 18:30:00
大多数时候，我与治疗师见面时，她会处理我生活中某个正在崩溃的方面，比如我无法理性讨论政治，或者个人财务状况。但偶尔，生活显得平淡无奇，我走进咨询室时毫无话题。我曾多次考虑取消这些看似无意义的会谈。如果我感觉良好且无话可说，为什么要花45分钟时间和30美元的共付费用呢？然而，根据两位治疗师的说法，这些看似无聊的会谈其实非常有洞察力和影响力。事实上，与治疗师随意聊聊可以加深你们之间的关系，帮助他们了解你在平静时期的表现，并发现未被处理的问题。纽约市“年轻女性心理治疗”创始人兼临床主管Claudia Giolitti-Wright告诉Vox：“当客户说‘没什么好聊的’时，这些会谈往往并不空洞。它们通常会揭示一些重要的内容。”因此，我从这两次访谈中确信，轻松随意的会谈与充满冲突的会谈同样重要。以下是原因：
治疗师经常遇到这种情况，并知道如何应对
如果你像我一样，经常在会谈开始时为“没什么可说的”道歉，那么请不要担心或感到尴尬。心理治疗师Matt Sosnowsky表示，他经常听到患者这么说，这并不值得大惊小怪。治疗师专门接受过处理这种沉默期的训练。他可能会引导患者分享最近的生活动态，或者针对特定问题进行跟进。对于其他患者，他则会采用更开放的方式，询问工作、整体情绪或人际关系，以推动对话。他强调，你不需要提前准备，也不必表现得像在表演。治疗师知道如何应对。
这些会谈为被忽视的问题提供了浮现的空间
即使你认为自己非常了解自己，或清楚为何寻求治疗，仍可能有更深层、被掩盖或完全回避的问题。当你开始交谈时，即使感觉毫无价值，这些潜在问题往往会浮出水面。有时这些问题会自然浮现，比如Giolitti-Wright所说，人们可能一开始谈论圣诞树，却“最终聊到最深层的困扰”。即使没有这种情况，治疗师也能通过细微的肢体语言、语气和态度变化察觉你可能面临的困难。Sosnowsky称这些线索为“入口”，它们可能是了解你内心负担的切入点，而治疗师会借此深入探讨。
治疗师能提前察觉你可能面临的困境
“谈论无意义话题”的另一个好处是，治疗师可能在你察觉之前发现心理健康问题的早期迹象，例如重度抑郁症或广泛性焦虑症。即使你整体状态良好或症状已缓解，累积的压力可能逐渐改变你的心理平衡。Sosnowsky指出，许多人并不意识到自己正在滑向抑郁状态，尤其是那些症状波动的人。定期会谈，包括看似无成效的会谈，有助于治疗师追踪你随时间推移的细微变化，如从压力感到绝望感，并及时察觉你可能进入困难时期。这可能促使治疗师询问你的日常习惯，例如是否锻炼、睡眠是否充足、饮食是否规律、是否有愉悦的活动等，并讨论如何防止症状恶化。他提到，这些检查有助于你“在抑郁症爆发前采取行动，因为一旦陷入全面发作，治疗会更加困难。”
强化与治疗师的关系对长期治疗至关重要
至少，这些“无话可说”的会谈会加深你与治疗师之间的关系。虽然这可能看起来不重要，但牢固的关系是治疗成功的关键。研究表明，被称为“治疗联盟”的治疗师与患者之间的关系是决定治疗效果的最重要因素。Sosnowsky表示：“可以说，这是治疗最重要的方面，不仅关乎体验质量，更决定治疗的实际效果。”你越亲近治疗师，信任、共情和合作就越强，这将帮助你更开放地交流并实现个人成长。最后，需要注意的是，并非所有会谈都必须有意义。如果你感觉每次咨询都毫无进展，可能需要寻找新的治疗师。但偶尔与治疗师轻松闲聊，比如谈论同事，也说明你正在有效利用时间。并非所有重要的工作都需要费力去做。
Most weeks when I meet with my therapist, she triages some aspect of my life that is actively bursting at the seams — my inability to rationally talk about politics, for example, or the state of my personal finances. But, every so often, life feels uneventful, and I head into sessions with nothing to talk about. On a number of occasions, I’ve considered cancelling these appointments. Why waste 45 minutes of my time and spend $30 on a copay when I feel fine and have nothing to say?
But according to the two therapists I spoke with for this story, these seemingly boring sessions can be incredibly insightful and impactful. In fact, shooting the shit with your therapist can strengthen your bond, help them see how you function during periods of calm, and uncover unaddressed problems. As Claudia Giolitti-Wright, the founder and clinical director of Psychotherapy for Young Women in New York City, tells Vox, “Sessions where a client says, ‘I have nothing to talk about’ — they’re rarely empty. They often reveal something.” So much, in fact, that I left these two interviews convinced that the easy breezy appointments are just as important as the turbulent ones. Here’s why.
If you, like me, often start your sessions by apologizing for “have nothing going on,” consider this permission not to worry or feel awkward. Matt Sosnowsky, a psychotherapist and the founder of Philadelphia Talk Therapy, says he hears this from patients all the time, and it’s no big deal. Therapists are specifically trained to deal with this kind of lull.
“Oftentimes, I’ll just prompt them for an update on what’s been going on,” he says. With clients who are there to work on a specific issue, he’ll follow up on the topics they’ve been working through. With other patients, he’ll keep things more open-ended, asking about work, their overall mood, or their relationships to get the conversation flowing. This is to say: Don’t sweat it if you aren’t prepared. You don’t need to show up ready to perform or impress, says Giolitti-Wright. Your therapist knows what to do and say.
Even if you consider yourself highly self-aware and feel clear on the reasons you’re in therapy, there are almost always deeper, buried issues that you’ve overlooked, downplayed, or completely avoided. As you start talking, even if it feels like you’re saying nothing of value, these underlying issues often rise to the surface. Sometimes these issues naturally bubble up — as Giolitti-Wright says, people will start rambling about, say, how they bought a Christmas tree but then “end up talking about the deepest shit.”
Even when that doesn’t happen, your therapist is trained to pick up on subtle cues — such as shifts in body language, tone, and attitude — that signal you’re struggling with something. Sosnowsky calls these cues “ports of entry.” “Those are often inroads to learn about what you’re carrying that you may not even notice,” he says, and your therapist will likely use that to dig deeper.
For example, if you let out a big exhale while talking about work, Sosnowsky might say, “I noticed that deep sigh, what’s that about?” or ask more targeted questions about your job. Then, you’re off to the races. This creates an opportunity for you to examine something you may not have fully considered yet or have been avoiding altogether, says Sosnowsky.
After all, these simmering problems tend to influence your mood and choices on a regular basis more so than the obvious catastrophes, adds Giolitti-Wright. Tending to them early and proactively can help you and your therapist identify solutions for long-term relief and prevent them from snowballing into larger, more difficult issues.
Many people, myself included, tend to see therapy as a thing to do when you’re dealing with something specific or when there’s an emergency. But that’s a huge misconception, according to Giolitti-Wright. The purpose of therapy is to enhance your daily functioning, improve your quality of life, and ease symptoms like irritability or hopelessness. To do this effectively, your therapist needs to see how you function as a whole person. As Giolitti-Wright puts it, “How you are when nothing is wrong or in crisis is as important as how you are in crisis.”
If your therapist only ever sees you during moments of extreme stress, it can actually be harder for them to provide guidance that effectively addresses and resolves your problems long-term, she adds. By learning about how you move through your day when things are good — and getting a sense of your strengths, your sense of humor, etc. — your therapist can provide personalized advice and spot patterns that may be contributing to recurring challenges.
Recognizing these patterns can reveal deeper, more systemic issues affecting your life, says Sosnowsky. What initially appears to be minor frustration with your new boss, for example, may actually stem from a more general resistance to change. These revelations “often come just from getting to know what somebody’s life is when they’re not completely zeroed in on explaining to you their interpretation of a specific issue,” Sosnowsky says.
One additional benefit of “talking about nothing” is that it may help your therapist pick up on early signs of mental health conditions like major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder. Even if you’ve been doing well overall or your symptoms have been in remission, mounting stressors can gradually shift that balance, says Sosnowsky. Many people don’t recognize when they’re slipping into a depressive state, especially folks whose conditions typically ebb and flow, he says.
Regular appointments, including ones that seem unproductive, allow therapists to track subtle changes over time — like a shift from feeling stressed to hopeless — and notice when someone may be entering a more difficult period. That might lead your therapist to ask about your everyday habits — Are you exercising? Sleeping well? Eating enough? Doing things for pleasure? — and discuss ways to prevent your symptoms from escalating, says Sosnowsky. As he puts it, these check-ins help you “get ahead of the depression because it’s much harder to treat when you’re in the throes of a full-blown depressive episode.” They may also prompt your therapist to conduct an assessment to determine if you may have a mental health disorder that hasn’t been diagnosed.
At the very least, your “nothing to talk about” sessions will strengthen the bond you have with your therapist. While that may not seem all that important, having a strong relationship is absolutely critical. Research suggests this relationship, dubbed the “therapeutic alliance,” is the most powerful determinant of how effective therapy will be for you. “You could argue this is the single most important aspect of therapy, and not only in terms of the quality of the experience, but the actual efficacy of outcomes,” Sosnowsky says. The closer you feel to your therapist, the more trust, empathy, and collaboration there will be, which will ultimately help you open up more and experience personal growth.
One final thing to keep in mind: You don’t want every single appointment to be aimless. If you perpetually feel like you’re spinning your wheels or that your mental health is stagnant, it may be time to look for a new therapist, says Sosnowsky. But, if, every now and then, you feel like you spent $30 to kick back and gossip about your coworkers with your therapist, rest assured that you’re still making good use of your time. Heavy lifting doesn’t always need to feel so heavy.
2026-04-10 18:00:00
美国奥斯汀的住房市场：租金下降与政策改革的争议
近年来，美国许多城市的租金价格出现显著下降，其中奥斯汀的降幅尤为突出。根据Apartment List的数据，奥斯汀过去一年的租金下降了6%，是美国主要城市中降幅最大的。这一变化与该市推行的YIMBY（“我的后院也需要”）政策密切相关，包括简化建筑许可流程、取消停车配额、允许建设附属住宅（ADUs）以及增加住房供应等措施。这些政策被Pew Charitable Trusts的报告认为是推动租金下降的重要因素。
然而，部分经济学家对奥斯汀的政策效果持怀疑态度。他们指出，租金下降可能更多是市场对疫情时期价格飙升的自然反应，而非政策直接导致。例如，约翰·蒙德龙（John Mondragon）等学者认为，住房供应的限制可能并未对整体租金产生显著影响，但承认这些限制在特定社区层面确实存在。此外，像旧金山这样的高房价城市，尽管近年来租金增长放缓，但其住房供应仍严重不足，无法满足需求。
文章还提到，尽管全国范围内租金下降，但住房市场具有高度地域性，不同城市的供需情况差异显著。例如，密尔沃基（Madison）虽然在过去十年中增加了大量住房，但租金仍大幅上涨，说明住房供应不足的问题依然存在。因此，住房供应对价格的影响不容忽视。
尽管存在争议，多数住房经济学家认为，增加住房供应是解决住房负担能力问题的关键。奥斯汀的经验表明，通过政策改革扩大住房供给可以有效降低租金，这为其他城市（如纽约、波士顿、旧金山和洛杉矶）提供了借鉴。文章建议这些城市可以尝试类似政策，如允许公寓建筑无需审批即可建设，并减少停车要求，同时通过严谨的分析评估政策效果。最终，即使没有完全确凿的证据，住房市场中住房供应与价格之间的关系仍是值得深入探讨的重要议题。
Here is one narrative violation in the usual drumbeat of doom that we’re used to hearing about housing in America: The rent, in many cities across the US, is getting cheaper.
After soaring to Covid-era highs, rents have cooled. Last month, the national median rent was down 1.7 percent from one year prior, according to research from the rental marketplace Apartment List. This made it the biggest annual decline since the company started tracking rent data in 2017.
One success story stands out among all the rest: Austin, Texas, where rents dropped by a full 6 percent over the past year, more than in any other large metro area in the US. The Austin area’s median rent, at $1,274, is back to roughly where it was right before the pandemic — which means that, in 2026 dollars, it’s significantly cheaper than it was in 2019.
For the past decade, Austin has been a standard-bearer for the YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movement, passing a barrage of policy changes to make it easier to build new housing, especially new apartment buildings. According to a recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing policy initiative, these reforms are responsible in large part for the sharp drop in rents enjoyed by Austinites over the last several years.
Housing economists overwhelmingly agree that, to bring home prices down, cities need to embrace supply-side reforms that cut away the thicket of regulation that make it oddly difficult to do something as seemingly simple as build an apartment building — an argument that I and others at Vox have echoed many times.
But housing markets are enormously complicated and shaped by many factors; it’s challenging for researchers to measure the exact effects of policies like those rolled out in Austin. Pew’s report certainly provides strong suggestive evidence that the city’s policy reforms made a real difference — but remember that, since around 2022, rents have fallen nationwide, too, and in many other cities quite substantially. So it seems likely that at least some of Austin’s rent decline would have happened anyway, even without its full suite of YIMBY reforms.
How do we isolate the impacts of reforms meant to increase housing supply, figure out which ones worked, and to what extent they worked? Those are questions housing experts are taking up right now, and they’re not merely academic ones. Getting them right is how we will claw our way out of a housing affordability crisis that almost no one doubts exists — even as some disagree over how to solve it.
In the 2010s, a local boom fueled by tech jobs drew hundreds of thousands of new residents to Austin and its suburbs. Following a trajectory familiar to other high-demand cities during that period, Austin’s rents soared — in their case by nearly 50 percent in that period, according to data from the Census Bureau — and single-family home prices climbed even faster. So the city sought ways to rapidly expand its housing supply to meet the surge in demand.
Austin is hardly the only city that has tried to unfetter homebuilding to ease its cost of living. But it is remarkable for the sheer breadth of reforms it’s adopted, Alex Horowitz, project director for Pew’s housing policy initiative, told me — which was one of the most important takeaways from his team’s Austin research. Those reforms have included:
“Not many cities have taken as many different steps as Austin has,” Horowitz said. That matters because passing any single reform — even if it’s a big one, like Minneapolis’s 2018 decision to end single-family zoning — may not spur much home construction if an insurmountable wall of other rules still makes projects infeasible.
As housing advocates have put it to me before, housing is like a door with many deadbolts on it; unlocking just one will not magically open the door for more building. You can legalize triplexes on every single-family lot in America, but if the local zoning code requires every single unit to have two off-street parking spots, the triplex will not get built because there’s just not enough room for all that parking.
Austin’s broad range of policy changes meant that, between 2015 and 2024, the city managed to add 120,000 homes, Pew found — a stunning 30 percent increase in its housing stock. From 2023 to 2024, rents fell especially fast in “Class C” buildings — older, less expensive buildings generally occupied by people of modest incomes. This was a particularly important finding because NIMBYs routinely oppose new-construction “gentrification buildings” on the grounds that they’re unaffordable to all but the affluent. But by the laws of supply and demand, building new homes in an area lowers the cost of housing across the board, including older, cheaper units, a phenomenon that has been demonstrated empirically.
Attacking the city’s housing shortage from so many different angles has also accomplished another thing, Horowitz pointed out. Austin has built an unusually diverse mix of new homes, including not just apartments in large buildings — although those still make up nearly half of the city’s new units because they’re such an efficient way to house people — but also smaller apartment buildings, single-family homes, and townhouses. These varied options give residents more choice in where to live, and also may help retain people in the city as they have families and seek more living space.
But how does Austin’s experience — its steep rise in home prices in the 2010s and early 2020s, and subsequent decline — compare to what’s been happening in other cities?
Here is one interesting observation about Apartment List’s latest analysis — the one that found a striking drop in rents nationwide over the last year:
From 2017 to 2026, the US national median rent grew by about 3 percent per year on average — less than the overall rate of inflation during the same period. The early 2020s run-up in rents ended up being partially canceled out by a sustained (if uneven) decline that began in 2022.
That happened because many metro areas, especially in the Sunbelt, built lots of new apartments in the past few years. “We’ve been going through this big multi-family construction boom,” Chris Salviati, chief economist for Apartment List, told me. “When we started to see rent growth softening over the past couple of years, I think that was expected because we had all these units that were getting completed.” Rents have fallen sharply in cities from Denver to San Antonio to Portland, Oregon.
Looking at that chart, you might even think, “Wait, what housing crisis?” It turns out that many cities and their surrounding areas were perfectly capable of adding new housing to meet the early 2020s’ surge in demand. So were restrictive zoning codes really holding them back in the first place? Rent increases have even moderated over the last decade in notoriously unaffordable markets like San Francisco — since 2017, rents in that metro area have only grown, on average, less than 1 percent per year:
So, are US housing markets not as catastrophically dysfunctional as we’d been led to believe by the housing shortage doomsayers?
A more careful look at the evidence suggests it wouldn’t be right to go quite that far. For one thing, we have not seen as much moderation in the cost of homes for sale as we have in rentals. And housing markets are hyper-local, so nationwide rent averages obscure a lot of regional variation. Plenty of cities have seen rapid recent growth in housing prices that have far outpaced inflation — like Madison, Wisconsin, where I live, where rents have climbed by more than 7 percent per year on average between the beginning of 2017 and 2026:
Coastal superstar cities like San Francisco, meanwhile, were already at a hyper-expensive baseline pre-pandemic because their home prices had been frog-boiling toward unaffordability over the course of decades. That is part of what’s pushed many Americans to move to cities like Austin (and Madison, for that matter) in search of good jobs and greater affordability. And that rents have slowed in the Bay Area is not necessarily evidence that the region has built enough housing to meet demand.
In fact, we know it’s been underbuilding for many years: By the city’s own accounting, San Francisco added 211,000 jobs from 2009 to 2019, creating a need for 154,000 housing units, but it built only 29,500 homes in that period. It’s woefully off track to meet its homebuilding goals this decade, too. So the relatively flat rents in the city may more likely suggest that it has hit an “unaffordability ceiling,” as Salviati put it. “We just hit a point where the market can no longer sustain prices going up by five-plus percent every year,” he said. (And would-be residents of the city are simply pushed to move farther afield.)
Causation is tricky to prove in housing markets, though, and looking at short-term price changes alone can easily lead to misinterpretation. You can have an extremely high-demand metro that doesn’t build much, like San Francisco, that sees plateauing prices because it’s already so expensive that the market can’t bear much more. And you can have a city that builds a lot of new homes relative to its existing housing stock — as Madison has over the last decade — and still sees soaring rents because it didn’t build enough to accommodate all the people who want to move to the area, and still had more room to absorb rent growth. Madison, for example, added 22,472 homes — more than three-quarters of which were apartments in developments with at least 25 units — between 2015 and 2024. That is a lot relative to the city’s size: a 20 percent increase in its housing stock. But it still underproduced what it needed, a shortfall that quickly piles up in the shape of limited supply, high demand, and rising rents.
What’s not in doubt is that housing supply is crucially important in shaping costs. And post-pandemic, many US cities showed an unexpected ability to add enough supply to push down some of the prices that caused Americans so much heartburn around the pandemic years. The relevant question for judging the ramifications of Austin’s housing reforms is not just whether housing got built after they passed or even whether the city’s rents dropped, but whether those things wouldn’t have happened if not for those new laws.
I first became obsessed with that question when, a few months ago, I stumbled on a fascinating (to a weirdo like me) bit of economics drama. Although most experts would tell you that reforming restrictive zoning laws in hot markets like Austin will bring down home prices, a contrarian group of economists recently dared to ask: What if it doesn’t?
In a controversial working paper, those researchers argued that measured housing supply constraints — like zoning codes that ban anything but single-family homes in most US neighborhoods — may not matter much for home prices across US metro areas, actually. One author of that paper, economist John Mondragon, a research adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, cast doubt on the YIMBY narrative about Austin in a LinkedIn post earlier this year.
“The Austin, TX housing supply success story is something of a shibboleth in most housing circles,” he wrote. “Often the large decline in Austin house prices or rents over the last few years is marshaled as evidence. Unfortunately, I do not find this kind of casual look at the data to be very illuminating.”
The working paper has been a lightning rod in the field, drawing formal refutations from economists Michael Wiebe and Salim Furth; the authors published their own responses to those responses, as well as a nine-page document of frequently asked questions. Fully accounting for the dispute is outside the scope of this piece (to understand it, one economist encouraged me to contact a theoretical econometrician, which is like an economist but with even more math). But suffice it to say that as a working paper, it should be taken with a hefty serving of salt.
Regarding Austin, however, Mondragon raises a valid point. The city, like so many others, saw an extreme rise in rents early in the pandemic; that tends to induce developers to build more so they can benefit from high prices. So it’s hard to untangle whether Austin’s construction boom and subsequent rent declines are the result of its new zoning policies, or simply the market’s natural response to pandemic-era price spikes.
Home construction often happens in boom-and-bust cycles like these — developers build lots of housing until the supply glut pushes prices down, which reduces the incentive to build more and often limits how much further prices can be reduced. That’s what appears to have happened in US cities in the last few years, and it’s not unreasonable to think this dynamic was at play in Austin, too. Interestingly, a 2025 post by the National Multifamily Housing Council, a trade association for the apartment industry, made a similar argument about Austin — that its rent drops had more to do with builders responding to price signals than it did with any recent regulatory reforms.
This disagreement matters not just because it’s important to understand what shapes housing affordability, but also because a growing YIMBY consensus in US politics — nationally and locally — is still a fragile one, and it needs to be able to answer challenges and counterarguments, and think carefully about causation. Local policy leaders increasingly agree that there is a relationship between housing supply and housing prices, just like the basic economic forces at play in markets for all kinds of goods. But many communities across the US are still pushed about by NIMBYs who advocate fiercely against allowing more housing construction. Mondragon and his co-authors’ paper was quickly taken up as ammunition by these development opponents.
Meanwhile, a steady drip of other reports, sometimes sloppy, uncontrolled ones authored by non-economists, still downplay the role of housing scarcity in driving high home prices. It’s “a cottage industry of producing anti-YIMBY, low-quality studies,” Ned Resnikoff, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute who recently wrote a response to a few of those reports, told me.
When I raised all this to Pew’s Alex Horowitz, I got the sense that he was annoyed at the suggestion that there’s any real debate here. “The overwhelming majority of academic research papers on this topic have reached the same conclusion, which is that supply influences costs,” he said. “Periodically there is a paper that comes out in a different place, but, I would say, not using conventional economic methods.”
Economists have estimated the importance of supply constraints on housing using a range of methods: If home prices in a city far exceed the cost of building a home, for example, like they do in the most expensive US cities, then that ought to induce developers to want to build more because they stand to profit a great deal. If they don’t build much in spite of this, then that points strongly to the likelihood that supply constraints — regulation, as well as geographic limits — are getting in the way. Researchers have also directly estimated how much regulatory red tape adds to the cost of homebuilding — it’s a lot!
Although the precise forces behind Austin’s recent rent declines have not yet been thoroughly dissected in a controlled, peer-reviewed study, Horowitz said that the evidence from Pew’s case study points overwhelmingly to the effectiveness of the city’s building reforms. The researchers “very explicitly see that a lot of the new homes getting built [in Austin] weren’t previously allowed,” he said. “It just doesn’t take much of a leap to see the causality there.”
The two perspectives may not, in the end, be that hard to reconcile. Mondragon and his co-authors don’t deny that housing supply shapes prices (you’d be laughed out of the field for suggesting otherwise). However you slice it, we need a sufficient supply of housing in order for housing to be affordable. The authors are, rather, unconvinced that constraints like zoning are meaningfully holding back supply. But even that claim, which has been ferociously contested by other housing researchers, is weaker than it appears at first glance because the working paper does acknowledge that supply constraints “almost certainly” matter at the level of individual neighborhoods (the authors argue that those effects don’t show up at the level of entire metro areas).
Ultimately, we need not wait for perfect evidence to be able to speak about what is, to the best of our understanding, likely happening in the American housing market. It seems unlikely to be a mere coincidence that the cities that had the greatest recent rent declines are concentrated in the Sunbelt, which tends to have fewer constraints on building housing than coastal cities. Even within that region, Austin outperformed both in how many homes it added and in how much prices dropped: “Austin is the market that has built the most new multi-family housing per capita by a pretty wide gap,” Salviati said.
Is it possible that all those new homes and lowered rents had nothing to do with Austin’s aggressive push to make it easier to build more homes? Perhaps, and maybe peer-reviewed research will eventually find that Austin’s zoning changes weren’t as big a deal as YIMBYs thought, though my hunch is that they’ll end up mattering quite a lot. In the meantime, there is every reason for New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and their suburbs to try the same experiment in housing abundance that Austin has. They can start with what Horowitz calls the “one-two punch” of policies for improving housing affordability: allow apartment buildings to be built by right in as many places as possible, and reduce parking mandates.
And like any good experiment, we’ll need exacting analysis to know how it’s working. Maybe I’ll call that theoretical econometrician after all — or at least ask my mayor to.
2026-04-10 03:55:00
2026年4月6日，国防部长彼得·赫格塞斯在白宫简报室谈论伊朗冲突。早在特朗普政府对伊朗开战之前，其政策就已经展现出更具攻击性的倾向。特朗普将国防部重新命名为“战争部”，以符合其价值观，而赫格塞斯则承诺贯彻“最大杀伤力”的理念。多年来，赫格塞斯一直主张以无保留的战士精神对抗敌人，2024年他出版了《战士之战：那些捍卫我们自由的人所遭受的背叛》一书。在取得委内瑞拉行动和去年对伊朗核设施有限打击的成功后，赫格塞斯与特朗普开始对伊朗战争充满信心，并展现出不惜代价的强硬态度。特朗普本周早些时候威胁要摧毁整个文明，虽然可能暂时促成停火，但这一策略似乎难以持久。
在今日解释节目主持人塞安·拉梅斯瓦拉姆与《新 Yorker》的本杰明·华莱士-韦尔的对话中，探讨了赫格塞斯和特朗普如何将这一理念付诸实践。华莱士-韦尔指出，赫格塞斯是特朗普团队中唯一与总统一样对战争进展持乐观态度的人，而副总统JD·万斯、国务卿马可·鲁比奥等则态度谨慎或矛盾。赫格塞斯的军事极端主义立场使其在团队中更具影响力，因为他准确把握了特朗普的意图，并成为其政策的代言人。
尽管赫格塞斯的策略可能在短期内有效，但长期来看可能并不明智。此外，赫格塞斯还把战争与宗教信仰联系起来，特别是在军事简报会上呼吁人们为美军祈祷，并将伊朗政权称为“末日般的存在”，这种做法为战争增添了宗教色彩。然而，华莱士-韦尔质疑这种“最大杀伤力”是否是一种可行的外交政策，认为特朗普威胁核战争的行为虽然震慑了部分人，但并未真正实现战略目标。目前伊朗似乎已掌控霍尔木兹海峡，美国的冒险行为也使其许多盟友感到不满。尽管特朗普通过威胁采取强硬手段暂时摆脱了困境，但整体来看，这一系列行动似乎并未带来实质性的成果，更多只是引发了愤怒、轰炸和死亡，其长远影响仍存疑。
Even before the Trump administration went to war with Iran, it was talking differently about its approach to combat.
President Donald Trump relabeled the Department of Defense to something more in line with his values: the Department of War. His Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, promised to deliver on a philosophy of “maximum lethality.” For many years, Hegseth has wanted to unleash an American warrior and fight the enemy, no holds barred. (In 2024, Hegseth authored a book titled The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.)
After notching successes in Venezuela and in last year’s limited strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, Hegseth and Trump began the Iran war confident and with a seemingly unbridled willingness to inflict damage. Trump’s post earlier this week threatening to wipe out a whole civilization may have resulted in a temporary ceasefire, but it seems like that strategy isn’t going anywhere.
Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with the New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells about how that philosophy has been realized in Hegseth and Trump’s first big war. Wallace-Wells explains Hegseth’s need to unleash that warrior ethos at every opportunity and how it might be driving the US’s next step with Iran.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
How is [Hegseth] executing this concept of his?
I’d say a couple of things. The first is, it’s interesting to note, in all of the reporting that we’ve seen from many different outlets, that Hegseth is the only person who’s in the president’s circle who seems as optimistic as Trump does about the progress of the war and the possibilities of the war.
You see [Vice President] JD Vance distancing himself very actively from the war. You see [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio taking an ambivalent position. Gen. [Dan] Caine sees risks as well as possibilities. But Hegseth has been gung-ho the whole way.
His approach to the war, I think, has been that American lethality will deliver whatever the president wants. In the very first hours of the war, you have this massive bombing raid that kills [Iran’s Supreme Leader] Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and then President Trump comes out a few days later and says, in that raid, not only was Khamenei killed, but some of the other senior figures in the Iranian regime who we had hoped might succeed Khamenei [were killed]. Within a day of the war beginning we see 175 people killed in a school in southern Iran, presumably through a targeting error, though we’re still not totally sure exactly what happened there.
In both of these cases, you see a program of unleashed lethality. And I think you can see in both those cases that it undermines the aims of the United States and the stated war aims of the president, both in eliminating some of the potential replacements in the case of the initial bombing, and then also in making it just a little harder to imagine the Iranian public getting behind the kind of uprising that President Trump has said he wants to trigger.
How much of his approach do we think is coming from his own belief in this concept of maximum lethality, and how much of it is so many in his Cabinet just wanting to please the president?
It’s interesting to think of Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth as each representing one idea of the president. Vance represents the sort of nationalism of the president. Rubio represents maybe a more traditional Republican transactional approach. And Hegseth just represents the full military maximalism. And he has become more influential because he has been the one who has, I think, successfully seen what the president wants to do in Iran and made himself the spokesman and enabler of that.
I do think that there’s a pretty good chance that this doesn’t turn out so well in public opinion and the progress of the war. I’m not sure that it’s been a very savvy long-term play for Hegseth, but I think we should remember that Hegseth did not have a political base or role in the world before Trump tapped him. He had never been a senior military commander. He’d served in the military as a younger man. He was the weekend co-host of Fox and Friends.
He owes his position in the world to President Trump. He’s, according to public opinion, now deeply unpopular, as is the war. If we’re thinking just in pure personal terms, it’s not crazy for him to take a shot and try to position himself as the maximalist face of this war. But I do think that there may be real costs for the rest of us.
Another thing that feels significant to this conversation and feels like maybe a companion piece to this idea of maximum lethality is Pete Hegseth is really tying this war [together with] his approach to God.
I would say to a Christian God, even more specifically. He’s specifically asked during military press conferences for people to pray to Jesus Christ on the troops’ behalf.
Another element that matters here is, he’s referred to the Iranian regime as apocalyptic, and together with delivering prayers from the podium where he’s giving technical updates on the progress of the war, it does give an atmosphere of holy war to the whole operation.
Pete’s whole thing is maximum lethality. The president seemed to go even further with his post, the whole world was on edge, and then we got a ceasefire out of it, however tentative it may be. Does that prove something about this concept of maximum lethality as a viable foreign policy?
If you threaten nuclear war, you can spook some people. I think that that’s pretty intuitive, but I don’t know that that really proves anything in terms of foreign policy. We’re looking at a situation where Iran seems like they’re likely to have full control of the Strait of Hormuz, where the regime is still in control, where the United States has alienated a huge number of its own allies around the world with its willingness to play brinksmanship.
In the narrow sense of, Trump had managed to get himself into a real trap and then by threatening enormous lethality, to use Hegseth’s word, he was able to maneuver out — I guess it worked, but it’s really hard for me to say that in any bigger-picture sense this was effective. I have to look back at this whole month and just say, what was this all for? It feels to me like a whole lot of fury and bombs and death, and it’s really hard for me to see a lot that’s come from it.
2026-04-10 00:00:00
2026年4月9日，伊朗安全人员在德黑兰为悼念其父亲阿里·阿亚图拉·哈梅内伊被美以联合空袭击毙40天举行纪念活动时，站在其新任最高领袖穆罕默德·哈梅内伊的巨幅画像下站岗。| 马吉德·赛迪/盖蒂图片社
当前美伊战争的焦点已转向伊朗对霍尔木兹海峡的控制，以至于最初以摧毁伊朗核计划为由的战争目标似乎变得次要。美国政府是否仍将其视为优先事项尚不明确。周三，国防部长彼得·海格塞思强调伊朗核计划仍需被摧毁，而副总统JD·万斯则表示不担心伊朗放弃核浓缩权利。特朗普则称伊朗核计划已被彻底摧毁，尽管这一说法在6月空袭后也曾被提出。伊朗是否仍有制造核武器的途径？如果有的话，美国和以色列能否采取行动阻止？为厘清这些问题，我采访了中东伯明翰学院詹姆斯·马丁核不扩散研究项目的教授杰弗里·刘易斯。刘易斯是核不扩散领域的专家，也是研究伊朗和朝鲜等国核及军事能力的权威开源分析人士。
刘易斯指出，尽管美国和以色列官员坚称伊朗必须交出剩余浓缩铀并摧毁其核浓缩计划，但若伊朗不配合，仅靠武力威胁并不现实。他质疑伊朗是否将所有浓缩铀都藏在伊斯法罕的地下隧道中，以及是否存在其他储存地点。此外，伊朗仍具备制造离心机的能力，且拥有相关技术人才。即便摧毁部分设施，伊朗仍可能迅速恢复生产。他同时提到，巴基斯坦作为停火谈判的中介，拥有强大的离心机计划，这可能是伊朗核技术的来源之一。
关于特朗普称伊朗“核尘”被深埋地下且无法使用的说法，刘易斯认为缺乏证据。他指出，尽管伊朗对隧道入口进行了掩埋，但这些入口已被打开，且美国和以色列的卫星监控能力并不足以实时掌握所有动态。他强调，除非进行持续的无人机监控，否则很难确定伊朗是否在转移核材料。若伊朗开始挖掘隧道，可能会引发一场针对其设施的快速打击。
特朗普威胁“摧毁整个文明”的言论引发了广泛争议，白宫不得不否认考虑使用核武器。刘易斯认为这并非真正的核威胁，而是特朗普惯常的夸张表达，可能指打击桥梁和发电厂等设施。他指出，核武器在打击地下设施方面确实有其优势，但美国尚未使用，且使用核武器将是严重错误。他担忧若美国对伊斯法罕发动核打击，伊朗可能将铀藏入废墟中，从而增加核风险。
在评估伊朗导弹计划时，刘易斯指出五角大楼公布的被摧毁导弹和无人机数量缺乏可靠依据。由于缺乏初始数据，这些估计难以准确。伊朗可能使用了类似塞尔维亚90年代的诱饵策略，使得实际损失难以判断。除非进行地面行动，否则很难确切了解其剩余能力。
刘易斯认为，其他国家可能会从这场战争中吸取教训，即尽快完成核武器开发更为安全。他指出美国曾背叛伊拉克、利比亚和伊朗等国的去核协议，而朝鲜和巴基斯坦则相对安全。因此，他更倾向于成为朝鲜或巴基斯坦的一员，而非伊朗、伊拉克或利比亚。
The focus of the US-Iran war — and now the negotiations over the US-Iran ceasefire — has shifted to Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, to such an extent that the main original justification for the war (destroying Iran’s nascent nuclear program) can sometimes feel like an afterthought.
It’s not clear to what extent it’s still even a priority for the US government. On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth insisted that Iran’s nuclear program would still be dismantled while Vice President JD Vance, who is leading ceasefire talks in Pakistan this weekend, suggested he’s not concerned about Iran forsaking its right to nuclear enrichment. Meanwhile, President Trump has suggested at various points that this is a moot point, since Iran’s nuclear program has been irreparably destroyed anyway. (It should be noted: He made the same claim after the airstrikes on Iran in June.)
Does Iran still have a pathway to a nuclear weapon? If it does, can the US and Israel do anything about it? To help sort through the confusion, I spoke with Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Lewis is an expert on nuclear nonproliferation and a leading open source analyst studying the nuclear and military capabilities of countries like Iran and North Korea.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
On Wednesday, we heard Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, and others insist that Iran must turn over its remaining uranium stockpile and dismantle its enrichment program. They also say it could still be removed by force if Iran didn’t agree. Is that remotely realistic?
It’s realistic if we occupy the country, but short of that, no. The claim we’ve heard is that half the highly enriched uranium is at [the underground tunnel complex in] Isfahan. So, where’s the other half? And if it’s not all at Isfahan, then how many other sites is it at? Is some of it still at Fordow and Natanz? Is it at some third location? What about their ability to produce centrifuges? What about centrifuges they have in storage? What about the people who know how to operate them?
You can set them back by destroying things, immobilizing things, and taking things, but there’s a large group of people who understand how to operate these things. There’s a basic capability that’s in place.
And oh, by the way, the neighbor who has been handling the ceasefire negotiations [Pakistan] happens to have a very large and capable centrifuge program that was the source of Iran’s original centrifuges. So, what’s the plan here, guys?
In his speech last week, Trump said that Iran’s “nuclear dust” — as he called it — was buried far underground and unusable. Is there anything to that claim?
There’s no evidence of that. I mean, we see the tunnels. The tunnels are intact, so it’s not buried. The only burying was the Iranians burying the entrances to protect them, but we’ve seen them open those entrances and access the tunnels. If you put something in a safe in your house, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get to your money, right? You just have to open the safe.
Sure, but given the level of satellite surveillance Iran is under, and the level of US and Israeli intelligence penetration into the Iranian regime, isn’t there a case to be made that it would just be crazy for the Iranians to try to restart their nuclear program now?
The intelligence penetration was real. Is it still real? No one knows that. The surveillance is not anything like 24/7. We’re getting satellite images taken some number of times a day, and there’s some latency. But unless we are operating drones 24/7 over those sites, we’re not going to be able to know for certain unless the Iranians are really slow.
If they were to open up the tunnels, I don’t think it would take them that long to move the [stockpile]. So if we saw them opening up the tunnels, that could cause a race to hit them. But it’s also true that we saw them opening up the tunnels back in September and October, and we didn’t do anything about it.
Just as a broad statement, I’m not as confident as [the US and Israeli governments] are that they know where all the material is. I’m not as confident as they are that they could detect a movement of the material.
On Tuesday, when we saw Trump threaten to destroy a whole civilization, it got to the point that the White House actually had to deny that it was considering nuclear weapons use, and people like Tucker Carlson were calling on officials to disobey nuclear orders. I’m curious what you made of that as someone who considers nuclear risk on a regular basis.
I didn’t think that they were going to use nuclear weapons, and I didn’t interpret that as a nuclear threat. Trump likes bombast, and I took him to mean striking bridges and power plants — which is arguably illegal, and I certainly am morally uncomfortable with it.
But, you know, nuclear weapons would be useful for targeting the deep underground facilities. They would be very useful for these missions. I’m glad that the US has not used them, and I think it would be a terrible mistake to do that. But it does cross my mind that the uranium that I think is not buried in rubble could be buried in rubble if they hit Isfahan with a nuclear weapon, which I don’t want them to do.
There’s still a taboo there, but I don’t know how strong that taboo is.
When it comes to Iran’s missile program, the Pentagon has put out a lot of figures on the numbers of missiles and drones and launchers destroyed, but how much do we actually know about the capabilities Iran still has after being hit for almost 6 weeks?
The problem is, we didn’t have a good baseline for how many launchers, how many missiles, there were [at the outset].
Those kinds of estimates are always a bit of voodoo. We don’t make them on the open source side, because we don’t think we can do it reliably. When you have a factory that’s operating [making drones or missiles], unless you try to count every box that goes in and every box that comes out, it’s pretty hard to know.
It’s also hard to know what you’ve destroyed. I mean, the Iranians are almost certainly using lots of decoys, which the Serbs did in the 90s. That’s not to say that these are all decoys that are getting struck, but until you go in on the ground, it becomes really hard to know.
What lessons do you think other potential nuclear proliferators might take from this war?
That it makes sense to finish that nuclear weapon as soon as you can. I would certainly look at the three countries that disarmed — Iraq, Libya, and Iran — or at least made disarmament agreements; the US double crossed all of them. And then, I would look at North Korea, and they seem to be fine. I’d rather be North Korea or Pakistan than I would Iran, Iraq, or Libya.
2026-04-09 18:30:00
“占领华尔街”示威者于2011年10月3日占据纽约华尔街附近的公园。| 法新社/Getty Images
“高技能”工人的黄金时代正在终结。随着企业不断用机器替代人力，越来越多的专业人士发现自己的高学历不再具有价值，许多人被迫从事低薪工作，而另一些人则只能通过接受更剥削性的雇佣条件来维持其高地位。
关键要点
• 近年来大学毕业生的“隐性失业”（即从事非专业工作）比例低于1990年代。
• 大学毕业生群体因人口结构变化、文化战争等因素逐渐左移。
• 知识型工作者目前状况良好，但未来可能因人工智能而发生变化。
• 随着技能阶层与普通劳动者之间的界限逐渐模糊，高技能工人开始认同无产阶级的政治立场，呼吁结构性变革，而非温和改革。
马克思的预言是否应验？
尽管马克思在1848年曾预言高技能工人将沦为无产阶级，但过去170年资本主义并未完全实现这一趋势，反而创造了更多技能、收入和地位的层次。然而，近年来一些迹象表明，高技能工人可能正在经历类似无产阶级化的现象。
为何大学毕业生左移？
AI可能改变未来
尽管目前高技能工人的经济状况并未出现全面恶化，但人工智能的崛起可能改变这一趋势，使马克思的预言在未来成为现实。然而，当前的左翼政治转向更多源于文化战争和政党认同，而非经济崩溃。
总结
大学毕业生政治左移的现象并非单纯由经济困境驱动，而是人口结构变化、文化议题的极化以及政党认同转变的综合结果。尽管AI可能在未来加剧这一趋势，但目前的经济数据并未显示大规模的无产阶级化，更多是社会和政治因素的推动。
The heyday of the “high-skill” worker is ending.
As corporations find new ways to replace labor with machines, more and more professionals are seeing their vaunted credentials lose their value. Many have been forced into menial jobs — while others cling to their prestigious positions only by accepting ever more exploitative terms of employment.
• Recent college graduates are less likely to be underemployed than they were in the 1990s.
• College graduates have moved left due to demographic change, the culture war, and other factors.
• Knowledge workers are doing fine today, though that could change in the future due to AI.
The class distinctions that once cleaved skilled workers from common laborers are therefore eroding. And as they do, the former are starting to embrace the politics of proletarians: identifying with the masses instead of management — and demanding structural change instead of milquetoast reforms. Today, “high-skill” workers’ declining fortunes are a problem for them; tomorrow, they will be one for the oligarchic elite.
Or so Karl Marx argued in 1848.
The ensuing 17 decades weren’t kind to Marx’s prophecies. Instead of melting every strata of worker into a uniform proletariat, capitalism generated myriad new gradations of skill, pay, and prestige. And rather than immiserating professionals and proles alike, market economies drastically raised living standards for workers in general, and the highly educated in particular (or at least, they did so once leavened with a spoonful of socialism).
Nonetheless, some now suspect that Marx’s predictions may have been less wrong than premature. The steam engine might not have devalued all skilled labor, but artificial intelligence sure seems like it might. What’s more, even before the past decade’s AI breakthroughs, many college graduates were already struggling to find white-collar work, growing disillusioned, and drifting left.
In a recent New York Times essay, the (very good) labor reporter Noam Scheiber argues that the past 15 years of economic change have taken a toll on young college graduates, bequeathing them “the bank accounts — and the politics — of the proletariat.”
In his telling, recent grads feel they were sold a bill of goods. Throughout their childhoods, every authority promised that they could attain a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle, so long as they secured a university diploma. But too many students took this offer. The economy started minting more knowledge workers than white-collar jobs, thereby consigning a historically large share of graduates to unemployment or low-wage service work.
As a result, in Scheiber’s telling, the politics of college graduates have been transformed. In the Reagan and Clinton eras, the highly educated tended to see themselves “as management-adjacent — as future executives and aspiring professionals being groomed for a life of affluence.” Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, university graduates voted to the right of working-class Americans, while holding more conservative views on economic policy.
Now, grads are more likely to identify with rank-and-file workers than their employers. In fact, overqualified baristas, discontented coders, and precariously-employed journalists have spearheaded a boom in labor organizing.
Meanwhile, college-educated voters have become slightly more economically left-wing — and much more Democratic — than those without degrees.
Scheiber acknowledges that these political shifts have multiple causes. But his account of college graduates’ realignment is still largely materialist: The demographic was increasingly “proletarianized” — which is to say, shunted into working-class jobs — and moved left as a consequence.
There’s much truth in Scheiber’s reporting. And in his new book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, he offers keen insights into the radicalization of the overeducated and underemployed.
But his big-picture narrative about college grads’ shifting fortunes and politics is a bit misleading. A variety of forces have been pushing highly educated voters to the left. But a broad collapse in the economic position of the well-educated is not one of them.
Without question, the past two generations of college graduates have faced some unique economic challenges. The cost of a university education has risen sharply since the 1990s, forcing students to shoulder larger debts. And in the cities where white-collar jobs are concentrated, housing costs have soared.
Nevertheless, there is little evidence that college-educated workers have been proletarianized, en masse. To the contrary, by some metrics, graduates are doing better today than they were in the 1990s.
In painting the opposite picture, Scheiber leans heavily on anecdotes. Much of his reporting centers on college-educated workers who are stuck in low-wage service jobs. And he suggests that the fate of these scholarly waiters and well-read retail clerks is becoming increasingly common.
To make this case, Scheiber cites Federal Reserve data on the types of jobs held by “underemployed” college graduates — meaning, graduates whose occupations don’t require a degree. He notes that, among this subset of young grads, the percentage with well-paying, non-college jobs — such as insurance agent or human resource worker — has declined over time, while the share with low-wage jobs has increased.
This is true. But Scheiber’s presentation of the data point is misleading.
Low-wage workers do account for a rising share of underemployed college graduates. And yet, the percentage of college grads who are underemployed has declined over time. For this reason — according to Scheiber’s preferred data set — recent college graduates were less likely to hold a low-wage job in 2023 than they had been three decades earlier.
More critically, throughout this period, the share of recent graduates in low-wage jobs was always tiny. In 2023 — the most recent year in the Fed’s data — just 4.5 percent of young college-educated workers held such positions. Among college graduates of all ages, meanwhile, that figure was 2.2 percent. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s early career as a struggling bartender saddled with student loans is a key part of her political biography, but it’s not the typical experience for the diploma set. Nor has it become more common over time.
Of course, just because a job requires a college degree doesn’t mean it’s well-paid. But college grads’ wages have also trended upward over time. And the gap between the pay of workers with a degree and those who only completed high school has widened slightly since 2003.
Scheiber argues that such wage data obscures as much as it reveals. He concedes that college grads earn much more than working-class Americans “on average.” But he suggests that these averages are skewed by the knowledge economy’s inequalities: If a small minority of workers in tech and finance reap massive pay gains, then the average wage for college graduates can go up, even if most are treading water or falling behind.
And yet, the median wage data tells the same general story as the averages: Between 2000 and 2025, the median college graduate’s earnings rose both in absolute terms, and relative to the median worker with a high school diploma (albeit only modestly).
All this said, Scheiber identifies one indisputably concerning trend in the college-educated labor market: For five years now, the unemployment rate for recent college grads has been higher than the overall jobless rate. This is highly unusual; historically, young grads have had an easier time finding jobs than the typical worker.
Still, it’s important to put this trend in context. Young college graduates remain much less likely to be unemployed than other workers of the same age. And joblessness still afflicts only a small fraction of graduates. In December 2025, the unemployment rate among recent grads was 5.6 percent; among all grads, it was only 3.1 percent.
None of this means that young college graduates have no legitimate grounds for complaint or concern. The point is merely that, in the aggregate, college-educated workers’ economic circumstances have not dramatically deteriorated, even as their political behavior has drastically changed. The “proletarianization” experienced by some college graduates therefore can’t explain more than a small fraction of the demographic’s leftward shift.
So, what can? Why have college graduates become so much more left-wing — in their economic attitudes, issue positions, and voting behavior?
There are many right answers to this question. Here, I’ll just sketch four:
1. The demographics of America’s college-educated population have changed.
“College-educated voters” are not a fixed caste of immortals, drifting through time — backing Calvin Coolidge in one era and Kamala Harris in another.
Rather, that phrase denotes a demographic category, whose internal composition is constantly changing. Over the past four decades, America’s college-educated population has grown less white and more female. In 1980, just 13.6 percent of American women over 25 had a college degree, while just 7.9 percent of Black Americans did, according to US Census data. By 2024, those figures had jumped to 40.1 percent and 29.6 percent respectively. (Rates of college attendance among white and male Americans also rose over this time period, but at a much slower rate.)
This shift surely pushed the college-educated population leftward. Since the 1980s, women have been more likely than men to espouse progressive views on the economy and vote for Democrats in elections. And the same is true of nonwhite voters relative to white ones. Thus, the feminization — and diversification — of the college-educated electorate likely accounts for much of its liberalization.
Put differently: If nothing else had changed about America’s society or economy since 1980, the changing demographics of college-educated voters would have been sufficient to move that population to the left.
2. The culture war led many socially liberal college graduates to become Democrats.
College graduates have been more socially liberal — and cosmopolitan — than less educated voters, since at least the 1950s. In the mid-20th century, however, cultural issues were less politically salient. Republicans and Democrats didn’t have uniformly divergent positions on immigration, feminism, racial justice, or the environment.
But the major parties began polarizing on those subjects in the 1970s. And such issues became increasingly central to our politics in the ensuing decades. In part for this reason, college graduates have been drifting toward Democrats — and working-class voters, toward Republicans — for half a century.
The French economist Thomas Piketty illustrated this trend in 2018. In the following chart, negative values mean that Democrats did better with working-class voters than college-educated ones in that election year; positive values mean the opposite:
In other words, the highly educated’s realignment began long before the (real and supposed) 21st-century economic trends that Scheiber describes.
To be sure, the “diploma divide” widened dramatically in recent years. Yet the inflection point for that shift was not the Great Recession, but rather, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign — which associated the GOP with an unprecedentedly anti-intellectual, authoritarian, and xenophobic brand of nationalism.
And there are other signs that it was the culture war — not economic strife — that drove college graduates toward Democrats.
For one thing, across Western countries, there is a tight correlation between how central social issues are to political conflict and how likely college-educated voters are to support left-wing parties.
For another, the college-educated voters who’ve joined the Democratic coalition in recent years are disproportionately affluent. Of the 57 counties that have consistently moved toward the Democratic Party in all three presidential elections since 2012, 18 have a median household income above $100,000.
The same pattern shows up in individual-level voting data. In 2012, white voters in the top 5 percent of the income distribution voted to the right of Americans as a whole. In every presidential election since 2016, however, rich whites have been more Democratic than those in the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution.
Simply put, Greenwich did not swing toward Democrats because its people were proletarianized, so much as because the GOP was Trumpified.
3. When socially liberal college graduates became Democrats, many adopted the economic orthodoxies of their new coalition.
To his credit, Scheiber acknowledges that the culture war played a big role in college graduates’ partisan realignment. But he suggests that this can’t explain the transformation of educated voters’ economic views.
Which is reasonable. Perhaps, the rising salience of immigration, feminism, and authoritarianism have made college grads more likely to vote Democratic. But why would it have rendered them more pro-labor? Surely, one may think, the latter must have more to do with changing economic circumstances than culture war allegiances.
As I’ll note in a minute, I do think that college graduates’ shifting economic views partly reflect their material challenges.
But it’s also plausible that, to a large extent, the demographic has become more economically progressive because it’s grown more Democratic.
Voters often switch parties on the basis of a few key issues — those core to their political identities — and then take dictation from their new coalition on other subjects. One can see this anecdotally in the evolution of “Never Trump” Republican pundits like Bill Kristol or Jennifer Rubin. Each broke with the GOP over Trump’s authoritarianism and foreign policy views, but subsequently embraced a variety of liberal policy positions.
This dynamic — in which partisanship can drive economic ideology — is arguably visible in some of the polling that Scheiber cites. In his essay, he notes that college graduates are much more likely to approve of labor unions today than they were in the 1990s. And he interprets this as a sign that graduates have stopped seeing themselves as “management-adjacent.”
And yet, in the Gallup survey he references, college graduates were 15 points more likely to support unions than those with a high school degree or less. Meanwhile, Americans with annual incomes above $100,000 were 6 percentage points more pro-labor than those earning less than $50,000.
Notably, this appears to be a novel development. According to American National Election Studies data, college graduates expressed warmer feelings for “big business” than for “labor unions” virtually every year between 1964 and 2012. Then, in 2016, they abruptly became more pro-union than pro-business. By 2024, America’s most educated workers were its most pro-labor.
Conversely, the least educated segment of Americans —– those without a high-school degree —– went from being the most pro-union segment of the workforce in the early 1980s to the least in 2016 (although, they still approved of labor unions by more than big business in that year).
This pattern of support is difficult to explain, if we assume that a voter’s opinion on unions is a reliable index of their (perceived or actual) adjacency to management. On the other hand, if voters’ economic opinions are shaped by both their material interests and partisanship, then the disparities make perfect sense. Labor unions are associated with the Democratic Party. So, as college graduates have grown more Democratic, they’ve looked more kindly on unions. As the “poorly educated” (in Trump’s famous phrase) became more Republican, they became less likely to approve of labor than other Americans.
If true, this would be consistent with a large body of political science data showing that partisans express more sympathy for groups that favor their political party.
4. Millennials and capitalism got off on the wrong foot.
In saying all this, I don’t mean to deny that some college-educated voters have embraced radical, pro-labor politics, in response to material difficulties.
Although recent graduates have not been proletarianized en masse, many millennials did graduate into a labor market scarred by the Great Recession. During our first, formative years as workers, we often struggled to secure well-paying jobs, as a direct consequence of Wall Street’s malfeasance.
Millennials’ earnings and net worths eventually caught up to those of prior generations. But people’s political beliefs are typically forged during late adolescence and early adulthood. The 2008 crisis therefore left many millennials persistently skeptical of capitalism, even when it didn’t render them durably underemployed. The 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests, which crystallized these grievances for many recent graduates, were an important precursor to today’s left-wing activism.
Separately, young professionals in the media and academia have seen a genuine collapse in their economic prospects: It was much harder to earn a middle-class living at a magazine or humanities department in 2016 than it was in 1996. And it is harder still to do so in 2026.
The “ideas” industries comprise a small share of the overall economy. But they exert wildly disproportionate influence over political discourse. Thus, the declining fortunes of aspiring journalists and academics has likely colored the worldviews of other politically engaged millennials and zoomers, even if their own industries are fairly healthy.
This said, these factors probably don’t have that much to do with the movement of college-educated Romney 2012 voters toward the Democratic Party. Rather, the Great Recession — and jobs crises within journalism and academia — help explain why perennially left-of-center subsets of the college-educated electorate have gravitated toward socialism in recent years.
Capitalism still hasn’t turned educated professionals into immiserated proletarians — or unified the working class in opposition to the bourgeoisie.
This may be about to change. Certainly, AI poses a greater threat to knowledge workers’ class status than any previous technological breakthrough. Indeed, many tech CEOs are explicitly promising to put millions of white-collar workers out of a job. So, reports of the college-educated’s economic dispossession — and political mutiny — may prove prescient. But such declarations remain, for the moment, ahead of their time.
2026-04-09 18:00:00
美国俄勒冈州威拉米特国家森林中的北方斑 owl | Greg Vaughn/Getty Images
森林生态系统对环境至关重要，它们为美国提供清洁的水和空气，吸收温室气体，并为濒危野生动物提供栖息地。因此，环保组织强烈反对特朗普政府去年春季提出的扩大公共森林采伐的计划。该计划通过行政命令要求增加采伐，认为不充分利用森林资源会损害经济安全、破坏野生动物栖息地，并增加野火风险。随后，农业部长布鲁克·罗林斯宣布超过一半的森林进入紧急状态，允许USFS（美国森林局）在更少限制下进行采伐。环保组织认为此举是为木材行业提供便利，而特朗普的政策在历史上并未表现出对森林的真正保护意图。
然而，文章指出，采伐并不总是对环境有害。例如，选择性采伐或间伐可以改善森林健康，减少树木间的竞争，增强其抗旱和抗虫害能力，同时降低野火风险。印第安部落曾通过控制燃烧实现类似效果，而自然生态中树木也会因生长而自我调节密度。此外，某些森林（如以针叶树为主的西部森林）依赖火灾维持生态平衡，合理采伐可能模拟这一自然过程。
尽管如此，特朗普的政策面临经济挑战。目前，美国90%的木材来自私人林地，而公共林地附近缺乏足够的采伐基础设施和锯木厂。同时，环境法规（如《濒危物种法案》和《国家环境政策法案》）也限制了公共林地的采伐。此外，当前木材市场需求疲软，美国住房市场因高利率而停滞，部分国家（如中国）也因关税减少进口。若需求回升，私人林地可灵活应对，但公共林地采伐可能需依赖政府补贴，经济回报有限。
特朗普政府还试图废除“无路区规则”（Roadless Rule），该规则保护未被近期采伐的荒野和原始森林。专家认为此举可能对环境造成灾难性后果。同时，政府试图绕过《濒危物种法案》的保护措施，例如通过“上帝小组”（God Squad）推翻对濒危鲸类的保护，以促进木材生产。
尽管森林管理可通过采伐减少野火、虫害等威胁，但特朗普政府的政策已导致USFS（美国森林局）员工和科研设施大幅减少，削弱了可持续管理的能力。专家担忧，当前的环境和资源管理条件正在恶化，未来森林保护面临更大挑战。
The value of forest ecosystems is hard to overstate. Blanketing roughly a third of the US, they supply clean water and air, absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide, and provide homes for imperiled wildlife and a tranquil place for Americans to hunt and fish.
It’s for this reason that environmental advocates widely opposed a plan announced by the Trump administration last spring. In an early March executive action, he ordered his administration to ramp up logging in our public forests, including those managed by the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Failing to “fully exploit” forests for timber, Trump said, weakens our economic security, degrades fish and wildlife habitat, and sets the stage for wildfire disasters.
A month later, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who also oversees the US Forest Service (USFS), declared an unexpected emergency across more than half of the agency’s forests, citing the risk of wildfire, disease, and other threats. The emergency declaration allows USFS to log those lands with far fewer restrictions.
These moves drew unsurprising reactions from environmental groups.
“The Trump administration is brazenly sacrificing our forests and the species that depend on them,” Robert Dewey, former VP of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit conservation group, said last spring after the Trump announcement. “There is no legitimate reason or emergency to justify rubberstamping logging projects.”
Defenders of Wildlife and other organizations called the emergency declaration a gift to the timber industry.
It is indeed hard to see a good intention for our nation’s forests through Trump’s track record. At face value, his administration’s logging push seems like multiple environmental disasters waiting to happen.
Yet there are two important points these concerns tend to overlook, starting out with this: Logging isn’t always the environmental boogeyman it’s made out to be.
Logging is one of those things that seems universally and irrefutably awful for the environment. It brings to mind nightmarish images of giant machinery flattening pristine forests filled with helpless critters, à la movies like FernGully and Avatar. And in some parts of the world — and historically in the US — those images are not far off the mark.
But the reality today is more complicated.
The first thing to know is that many of our public forests are already not in a truly “natural” state. Decades of misguided fire suppression and a period of widespread logging in the wake of World War II produced forests today that are dense with trees of similar age, which makes them prone to intense wildfires and attacks from pests.
While it may sound counterintuitive, selective logging or thinning — i.e., removing some but not all of the trees — can actually make these forests healthier. In thinned-out forests, trees face less competition for water and sunlight, boosting their tolerance to drought and beetles, and fires aren’t as destructive, according to Mark Ashton, a professor of silviculture and forest ecology at Yale University. No one in this country knows this better than Indigenous Americans. Tribes were practicing thinning thousands of years ago using controlled burns, which prevent the buildup of fuel.
Absent a history of industrial logging and fire suppression, forests can thin themselves out on their own; when one tree grows big, for example, its canopy can shade out and kill those around it.
This raises another important point: Logging, and sometimes even clear-cutting, can mimic natural disturbances that shape forest ecosystems. Many Western forests, such as those dominated by lodgepole pine, evolved with fires that wipe out large tracts of trees. The cones of some of those trees only release seeds during a fire. In the right ecosystem, clear-cutting — followed by burning — can mimic this process, while also producing usable timber.
“It’s gotten a bad rap, but, I mean, basically you’re emulating a natural process,” Todd Morgan, a forest industry researcher at the University of Montana, said of strategic clear-cuts.
Of course, slashing trees in one area doesn’t mean a fire won’t just burn them in another. And as fossil fuels heat up the planet and rainfall patterns change, loads of forests are going up in smoke with or without logging. In the age of climate change, clear-cutting is only adding to the existing loss of wildlife habitat — amid an extinction crisis.
Still, logging, when done thoughtfully, isn’t always an environmental disaster. This is to say nothing of the valuable product it also produces: timber. Wood is a renewable material, unlike some of the alternative construction materials, like plastic, most of which still comes from oil and gas. Turning trees into lumber also keeps the planet-warming carbon they store locked up for longer than if they were burned.
Regardless of potential impacts of logging, Trump’s plan to expand timber production on public lands may run into challenges anyway. And the main reasons for that are not as much environmental as they are economic.
A big one is the lack of logging infrastructure near public forests. After World War II — when home-building was booming — the US intensively logged its national forests, the bulk of which are in the American West. Toward the end of the century, however, environmental regulations and a conservation ethic took hold, shifting most logging onto private lands that have fewer environmental protections.
That’s still the reality today: Around 90 percent of all timber currently comes from private forests, including tree plantations, which are concentrated in the southeastern US. As a result, there simply aren’t a lot of operational sawmills near public forests anymore, said Brent Sohngen, an environmental economist at Ohio State University. Many of those forests, meanwhile, are remote and hard to access. “There’s just not going to be an easy route for getting those logs out of the woods into a mill at a cheap price,” Sohngen said.
Yes, companies could always build new mills in anticipation of more logging, but such projects are expensive and only tenable if it’s clear that public lands will remain open to substantial exploitation for years to come. That’s in no way guaranteed, Sohngen said. Policies change from one administration to the next, not to mention from one month to the next in the Trump administration.
“I don’t think there’s enough certainty that [demand] will be there long-term that you will see an increase in infrastructure,” said Chris Wade, a research economist at RTI International, a research organization.
Another obstacle is environmental regulation — laws like the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act that pushed the industry into private lands in the first place. “Whenever someone proposes a timber harvest [in public lands], it’s going to get litigated,” Sohngen says. It’s for similar reasons that opening up Alaska wilderness and ocean to oil drilling has drawn few takers.
But perhaps the largest impediment to logging public lands is due, in part, to knock-on effects from Trump administration actions themselves — and that is that there’s simply not much demand for timber right now.
One reason is that the US housing market is stagnant due to high interest rates, and that market is a key driver of lumber demand. (Those high rates are, in turn, linked to inflation, which is expected to increase more due to the Trump administration’s war on Iran and its upward pressure on oil prices.) Some countries like China are also importing fewer logs from the US, due in part to retaliatory tariffs, further chilling demand, Wade said.
What’s also worth noting is that, should timber demand rise again, private forests can easily ramp up production, Sohngen said. Logging in federal lands, meanwhile, will likely have to be subsidized by taxpayers. In other words, there seems to be little economic incentive or payoff to actually cut more trees on public lands.
Even with these obstacles in place, public lands will likely see a bump in timber harvesting under Trump. Again, there’s a way to log that wood responsibly, but doing so requires smart, experienced people, extensive planning, and resources — things the Trump administration has been clear-cutting with impunity.
Last year, the US Forest Service lost at least 5,800 of its some 35,000 employees (as of late 2024). That includes more than 20 percent of its scientists with PhDs, according to an analysis by Science News. Late last month, meanwhile, the Trump administration announced sweeping changes at the agency — among them, moving its headquarters from Washington, DC, to Utah and closing 57 of its 77 research facilities.
Do you have a story tip or feedback on our reporting? Reach out to [email protected].
“Here’s my worry: Where are all the foresters in the forest service?” Ashton told me last fall, before the recent reorganization. “The whole institution has been gutted. That’s ominous. If you want to manage these forests sustainably, you have to have the knowledge and technical professionalism to do it right.”
Trying to manage forests without staff and research facilities is like “trying to fly a plane without a pilot,” said Martin Dovciak, a forest ecologist at the State University of New York.
At the same time, the administration is also trying to rescind what’s known as the Roadless Rule, which protects vast stretches of wilderness and old-growth forests from logging — those that haven’t been logged in the recent past and often don’t need active management. “It would be really crazy to do timber harvesting there,” Sohngen said. “There would be places there that [logging] would be disastrous for the environment.” And it’s not clear that logging old-growth trees even makes economic sense, foresters told me.
What’s more is that the Trump administration has been attempting to skirt safeguards that ensure logging on public lands minimizes environmental harm. The administration may once again, for example, convene the so-called God Squad — a panel with the power to overrule the federal Endangered Species Act — to sidestep protections for the nation’s most threatened species, should they interfere with logging plans (as it recently did to avoid protections for very endangered whales that happen to share territory with oil extraction in the Gulf of Mexico). “I think it’s on the table,” Wade, of RTI International, said of calling on the God Squad to avoid protections for species in peril.
In response to an email detailing our reporting, a spokesperson for the Forest Service reiterated that active forest management (which includes logging) helps reduce the growing threats of wildfire, insects, disease, and drought. The agency did not address claims that Trump administration policies, and the loss of expertise, would make it hard to manage forests sustainably and in a way that is economically feasible.
A spokesperson for the Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Land Management, similarly told Vox that wildfires and other disturbances have razed vast amounts of forest in the West. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of the Interior is committed to providing opportunities for the timber industry to boost supply chain stability and support local economies, clear dead and dying timber, protect lives and property, and defend communities from the devastation of wildfire,” the spokesperson said.
The White House deferred to the Interior Department when asked for comment.
This is all to say: While logging can be conducted to minimize harm and even benefit forest ecosystems, the Trump administration has shown no sign of making the environment a priority, experts told me.
“I do not doubt that there are still going to be good people left in the agency who are going to try to do the best they can under the circumstances,” Dovciak said. “But the circumstances are getting worse. I really worry about that.”