2025-12-10 07:22:49
2025年7月31日，美国总统唐纳德·特朗普在白宫罗斯福房间的签署仪式上与教育部部长琳达·麦克马洪交谈。| 安娜·莫尼马克/盖蒂图片社
本文出自《Logoff》，这是一份帮助您了解特朗普政府动态，同时避免政治新闻占据您生活日常的每日简报。点击此处订阅。
欢迎来到《Logoff》：乔·拜登总统学生贷款计划的最后残余部分即将结束。发生了什么？特朗普政府于周二同意终止拜登时期的学生贷款减免计划——“SAVE”计划，以解决由一群共和党州检察长提起的诉讼。该协议仍需获得美国密苏里东部地区地方法院的批准。
“SAVE”计划是如何运作的？该计划约有700万名参与者，是拜登政府于2023年推出的收入驱动还款计划。它提供了比其他计划更低的月供（甚至可能为零），并为贷款减免提供了更快的途径。
背景如何？该计划原本就因共和党通过的税收法案——特朗普的“一个大而美丽的法案”——而面临终止。根据该法案，借款人需在2028年夏天前转至新计划；周二的决定大幅缩短了时间表，但尚不清楚教育部将何时要求借款人更换计划。
接下来会发生什么？更多的混乱。在周二达成协议之前，“SAVE”计划就已经陷入法律纠纷，借款人开始转向其他计划，但据《华盛顿邮报》报道，由于申请积压，这一过程进展缓慢。而“SAVE”计划的结束也将给数百万美国人带来新的财务负担，尽管全国医疗费用预计会上涨，且选民仍将生活成本列为首要问题。
好了，是时候结束今天的简报了。这是我的新Vox同事韩娜·西奥带来的一则美好头条：人们其实比你想象的更友善。具体来说，人们往往对我们有更高的好感度，而我们却低估了他人对善意举动的欣赏程度。韩娜写道，这提示我们应更积极地在日常生活中与他人互动；人们可能会比你预期的更友善地回应你，而你和他们或许都会因此更快乐。
感谢阅读，祝您有一个美好的夜晚，我们明天再见！
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The last vestiges of President Joe Biden’s student loan plan are on their way out.
What just happened? The Trump administration agreed Tuesday to end a Biden-era student loan forgiveness plan — Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE — to resolve a lawsuit brought by a coalition of Republican state attorneys general. The agreement will still need to be approved by the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.
How did the SAVE plan work? SAVE, which has about 7 million enrollees, was an income-driven repayment plan that the Biden administration introduced in 2023. It provided lower monthly payments than other plans — potentially $0 per month — and an expedited path to loan forgiveness.
What’s the context? The plan was already on its way out after the Republican tax law, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, passed earlier this year. Under that law, borrowers would have had to move to a new plan by summer 2028; Tuesday’s decision condenses the timeline significantly, though it’s unclear exactly when the Department of Education will require borrowers to change plans.
What’s next? More confusion. The SAVE plan has been tied up in court long before Tuesday’s agreement and borrowers have been starting to shift to other plans, but the Washington Post reported that that process has been slow thanks to a backlog in applications.
The end of SAVE will also mean a new financial burden for millions of Americans, even as health care premiums are set to rise across the country and voters continue to register the cost of living as a top issue.
Here’s a wonderful headline from my new Vox colleague Hannah Seo: People are nicer than you think. Specifically, there’s often a “liking gap” — we think people feel less positively about us than they actually do, and underrate how much they might appreciate a kind gesture. The takeaway, Hannah writes, is it’s worth putting yourself out there more in your day-to-day; people will probably react better than you expect, and you and they might be happier for it.
Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2025-12-10 05:45:00
锂曾经几乎被忽视，仅少量用于医药和强化玻璃中，并在上世纪90年代因涅槃乐队的一首同名歌曲而短暂走红。如今，锂重新成为焦点，被称为“白色黄金”。这个绰号源于过去十年锂价格的大幅上涨，2022年时每吨价格接近7万美元（相比之下，1991年涅槃乐队发行《Lithium》时，锂的价格约为每吨4200美元，仅为当前价格的约6%）。由于全球电动汽车的兴起以及锂离子电池在笔记本电脑、手机和太阳能板等领域的广泛应用，锂的消费量激增：目前全球人均锂消费量是1990年代的近28倍。
尽管美国是全球第二大锂消费国，但其锂矿开采量不足全球供应的1%。锂不仅驱动着我们的电子设备，也推动着清洁能源的未来。为解决国内锂资源短缺问题，美国政府于2025年10月批准了22.6亿美元的贷款，支持加拿大公司Lithium Americas在美国内华达州北部开发泰克帕斯（Thacker Pass）锂矿，这是美国发现的最大锂矿。截至目前，内华达州仍是唯一在国内开采和提炼锂的州。
然而，这项重大投资可能来得太晚。一方面，尽管需求增长，地球上的锂资源并不短缺，2022年锂价高点后仅两年，锂价就降至每吨1.4万美元，随着全球新锂资源的出现。更重要的是，锂供应链中的真正瓶颈并非开采，而是提炼。中国已经在电池制造领域领先数十年，目前提炼了全球70%以上的锂。在本视频解释中，我们将探讨锂如何推动内华达州及其他地区的“白色黄金热”，美国能源部对泰克帕斯的投资是否值得，以及采矿鬼镇和繁荣与萧条周期的历史能否为我们揭示这种关键资源的未来。
Lithium used to be almost an afterthought — found in small quantities in medicine and tempered glass, and peaking in pop culture fame in the ’90s thanks to an eponymous Nirvana song. Today, the metal is back in the spotlight with a new identity: “white gold.”
That nickname, coined over the past decade, stems from lithium’s extraordinary price spike, soaring to nearly $70,000 per metric ton in 2022 (for reference: In 1991, when Nirvana released “Lithium,” the mineral sold for about $4,200 per metric ton, roughly 6 percent of its recent peak). The boom was hard to ignore, even for billionaire Elon Musk, who suggested on X that Tesla “might actually have to get into the mining & refining directly at scale.”
Fueled by the global rise in electric vehicles and the proliferation of lithium-ion batteries in everything from laptops to phones to solar panels, lithium consumption has skyrocketed: globally, people now use nearly 28 times more lithium per capita than in the 1990s. After China, the US is the world’s second-largest consumer of lithium, yet it mines less than one percent of the global supply. And lithium isn’t just powering our devices, it’s powering a future in clean energy.
To rectify this lack of domestic lithium, the US government approved a $2.26 billion loan in October 2025 to Lithium Americas, a Canadian company developing Thacker Pass in northern Nevada, the largest lithium deposit ever discovered in the United States. To this day, Nevada remains the only state that both mines and refines lithium domestically.
But this major investment may have come a little too late.
For one, despite the growing demand, Earth is actually in no short supply of lithium, and the price of this mineral dropped to $14,000 per metric ton just two years after the 2022 high, as new lithium resources became available worldwide. More importantly, the real bottleneck in the lithium supply chain isn’t mining — it’s refining. And China is already decades ahead in the battery-making process, refining over 70 percent of the lithium in the world.
In this video explainer, we’ll explore how lithium is fueling the “white gold rush” in Nevada and other parts of the country, whether or not the US Department of Energy’s investment in Thacker Pass will pay off, and what the history of mining ghost towns and boom and bust cycles can tell us about the future of this critical mineral.
2025-12-10 04:15:53
2025年12月5日，在哥伦比亚的玫瑰城（Villa del Rosario），人们步行穿过国际西蒙·玻利瓦尔边境桥。与此同时，一些被委内瑞拉拘留的哥伦比亚公民的家属封锁了桥梁，要求释放亲人。| 施内德·门德斯/AFP via Getty Images
在整个委内瑞拉，居民们都在思考他们还要等待多久。委内瑞拉经历了由尼古拉斯·马杜罗领导的严重十年经济和政治危机。如今，随着美国干预威胁的出现，委内瑞拉人正经历着焦虑和不确定的循环。这场对峙会持续多久？谁会取代马杜罗？在这些疑问的同时，他们仍然需要支付生活必需品的费用、去上班并努力维持日常生活。
安娜·范妮莎·埃尔罗（Ana Vanessa Herrero）是《华盛顿邮报》的调查记者，目前驻扎在加拉加斯。她是一位土生土长的委内瑞拉人，在报道期间一直与当地社区交流。她向主持人诺埃尔·金（Noel King）讲述了委内瑞拉的日常生活、居民的想法以及他们如何为可能的战争做准备。以下是对话的节选，已对内容进行删减和润色。完整播客中还有更多内容，欢迎收听《今日解析》（Today, Explained），可在Apple Podcasts、Pandora和Spotify等平台收听。
美国一直在攻击船只，指控这些船只从委内瑞拉运送毒品。委内瑞拉人对此有何反应？人们的反应并不统一。例如，在苏克雷（Sucre）这一海岸地区，人们感到害怕，担心自己也会成为攻击目标。但在苏克雷以外的地区，情况完全不同。因此，委内瑞拉人并没有把注意力放在这些海上袭击上，而是更关注经济问题。现在每个人都有创伤后应激障碍（PTSD），都在为可能再次经历2016、2017或2018年那样的困境做准备。在那些年里，委内瑞拉经历了超过百万倍的恶性通货膨胀，这深深烙印在人们的记忆中。如今，外交紧张局势虽然重要，但只是讨论的一部分。大多数人更关心的是是否能有足够的钱买食物。每一次威胁都会影响市场和所有投资。但请记住，经济在过去一年中开始出现一些微小的改善，这得益于街头的现金流动和一些小规模投资。这并不意味着经济正在繁荣，但确实有一些变化。然而，现在任何拥有资金的人在投资时都感到不安，因为他们不知道明天美国是否会袭击委内瑞拉。没有这笔钱，人们如何生存？因此，人们正试图保存现有的资金，以防万一。这种行为正在影响日常经济活动。
我理解为什么在更广泛的经济危机背景下，关于海上船只的故事显得微不足道。不过，我仍想问另一个问题：特朗普最近表示美国可能会在委内瑞拉发动地面打击。委内瑞拉人是否害怕地面战争？请明确，我的结论是基于与当地许多人的交谈得出的。当然，我并没有和所有人交谈过。从我采访的人和参与的小范围对话来看，他们确实担心会发生什么。有些人认为这可能是一次针对现任委内瑞拉政治领导人的精准打击，而另一些人则认为美国可能会直接入侵委内瑞拉。但有一点是大家一致认同的：如果发生任何事，他们相信这将非常迅速。这不会是一场持续五年的战争，因为委内瑞拉并没有足够的资源来对抗美国。战争的后果将是马杜罗政权的终结。我还没有听到有人拒绝这个想法，这很有趣。事实上，由于政府对民众实施了审查和骚扰，没有人敢公开表达意见。但在私下交流中，人们确实表示他们不希望发生战争，但这是最后的手段。人们之所以不拒绝这个想法，是因为他们希望马杜罗下台。然而，目前看来，马杜罗下台的可能性似乎不大。马杜罗展现出惊人的生存能力，不仅成功应对了来自美国的外部压力，还经受住了国内反对派的挑战。现在，马杜罗的支持者比以往更加团结，他们将美国视为外部敌人。马杜罗长期以来一直声称他们的敌人是美国，但过去从未有过真正的威胁。现在，这种威胁变得明显，证明了他的说法是正确的。他的追随者们说：“现在我们看到了敌人，我们将团结在你身边，保护胡戈·查韦斯的遗产。” 这是政府所使用的叙事，但我看不到其他民众会接受这种说法。
当特朗普发出针对委内瑞拉的威胁时，人们是如何反应的？他们是否在囤积食物？是否在其他方面做准备？这取决于当天的情况。例如，如果特朗普在社交媒体上发布消息，称委内瑞拉的领空将关闭，人们会立即购买更多食物和水，互相交谈，试图联系认识的人以获取更多信息。但如果整体氛围是和平的，人们虽然能感受到紧张，但实际并未发生任何事情，或者至少我们不知道有什么事情发生，他们就只是努力过好每一天。人们仍然去上班，我们并没有看到人们疯狂地涌向超市。即使他们每周会囤积一些食物，也不会出现像2016年那样的混乱场面。由于信息极度匮乏，人们只是说：“今天我买点食物，如果什么都没发生，我就吃掉它。”
马杜罗在这一切中扮演什么角色？他知道自己面临来自美国的威胁，会如何应对？在内部，我们并不清楚发生了什么，但马杜罗试图在圣诞节期间展现绝对的和平与欢乐。他甚至表示，这是全国性的命令，让人们整周庆祝，以向美国和世界展示他们并不担心任何事。他声称这是一场心理战，他们过去已经成功应对过。他相信，至少从他展示的情况来看，如果他坐下来等待，一切都会过去。他过去也这样做过，因此这是他的策略。
Across Venezuela, residents wonder how long they’ll be waiting.
Venezuela has experienced a severe decade of economic and political crisis, led by Nicolás Maduro. Now, as the threat of US intervention looms, Venezuelans are going through a cycle of anxiety and uncertainty. How long will this standoff last? Who would replace Maduro?
In the meantime, they still need to afford groceries, go to work and try to keep their lives moving.
Ana Vanessa Herrero is an investigative reporter with the Washington Post and based in Caracas. She’s a native Venezuelan and has been speaking with her community throughout her time reporting there. She tells host Noel King about daily life in Venezuela, what residents are thinking, and how they’re preparing for a possible war.
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.
The US has been attacking boats, alleging that these are drug traffickers bringing drugs from Venezuela. How are people in Venezuela responding to these attacks at sea by the US?
The reaction is not a unified reaction. The situation, for example, in Sucre, the coast region where all the boats are allegedly coming from, they’re scared. They don’t feel safe that they’re not going to be attacked somehow. But outside of Sucre, the situation is absolutely different. So Venezuelans are really not focusing on the attacks, on the vessels, but focusing on the economy.
Everyone has PTSD right now. Everyone is getting ready just in case we’re going to have to suffer like in 2016, 2017, or 2018 again. In those years Venezuela experienced hyperinflation of over a million percent. And that is well deep inside our memory.
Now the diplomatic tension is not as important, it’s a little part of the conversation. Most of the conversation revolves around if I’m going to have enough money to buy food. And every threat affects the markets and affects all investments.
But remember the economy was collapsing and last year it started seeing some small changes for the better. Those were because of the cash flow on the streets and because of small investments. It doesn’t mean that the economy was thriving, but we did see some changes. But now every person who has some money to invest is really insecure of doing so because you don’t know if tomorrow the US attacks Venezuela. How can you survive without that money? People are trying to save the money that they have just in case something happens and that is affecting the day-to-day economy.
I can understand how the story of the men in boats becomes small given a broader economic crisis. I wonder about something else though. President Trump recently suggested that the United States might start land strikes in Venezuela. Do people there fear a land war?
Just to be clear, my conclusions come from the many conversations I’ve had with people here on the ground. But, of course, I haven’t spoken to everyone. From the people I’ve interviewed and small conversations I’ve been part of, they do fear something is going to happen. Some of them think it’s going to be like a small precise attack against some of the Venezuelan political leaders that are now in power. Others think that they might come in and attack Venezuela on the ground.
“Because of the censorship and the harassment that the government has put upon the population, no one dares to speak up.”
But everyone agrees on one thing: If any of those happen, they do believe it’s going to be really quick. This is not going to be a war that is going to last for five years because Venezuela doesn’t really have what they need to fight against the US. And the aftermath of that would be the end of Maduro’s regime. I haven’t heard anyone rejecting the idea and that is really interesting. The thing is that because of the censorship and the harassment that the government has put upon the population, no one dares to speak up. But in small conversations you can definitely hear that no one wants this, but it’s a last resort.
The people that you’ve spoken to, are they not rejecting the idea because they want Maduro out?
Well, ultimately, yes, most people would like Maduro to resign, but we know so far that probably that’s not going to happen. Maduro has shown amazing skills and ability to survive all the attacks that he has suffered from abroad and inside of the country. Definitely from the side of the Maduro supporters, now more than ever, they’re unified. They have the sense of an external enemy.
Maduro has been saying this for a long time: Our enemy is the US. But there was never a threat. Now, there’s a palpable threat that proves him right. And his followers are like, “Okay, now we do see that enemy and we are going to gather around you to protect the legacy of Hugo Chávez.” This is the narrative that the government has been using, but I don’t see this happening for the rest of the people.
When Trump makes these threats about Venezuela how are people reacting? Are people stockpiling food? Are they preparing in other ways?
It depends on the day. If President Donald Trump writes on social media, for example, as he did, that the airspace is closed, to get out of Venezuela. You’re definitely going to see people buying more food, more water, talking to each other, trying to call people who know people to see if they know something.
But if the general climate is peaceful, where you can feel the tension, but really nothing is happening, or at least we don’t know something’s happening, people are just trying to live their daily lives. People are still going to work. We are not seeing people running to the supermarkets whatsoever. Even if they do stock up on food weekly, it’s not pandemonium. It’s not something that you’re going to see on TV people lining up in the supermarkets like they did in 2016 to get something. The information is so scarce that people are just, “Okay, today I’ll buy food. Then if nothing happens, I’ll just eat it.”
Where is Maduro in all of this? How is he behaving knowing that these threats are coming from the US
Internally, we don’t really know what’s happening, but Maduro is trying to show absolute peace and joy during the Christmas celebrations. He actually said that that was a national mandate for people to party all week long because his followers needed to show the US and the world that they’re not worried about anything.
He claims this is just a psychological war that they’ve survived in the past. He has survived past pressure, not only from the US, but internally from the opposition. And he believes that, at least this is what he’s showing, if he sits down and waits, this is all going to go away. And he has done that in the past. So that’s his strategy.
2025-12-09 20:30:00
你可能经历过这样的情况：在派对上，一个陌生人开始和你交谈。此时，你可能觉得自己并不像想象中那么聪明或有魅力，难以应对对方的笑话、观点和机智的评论。事后你可能会想：“他们肯定觉得我是个十足的傻瓜。”但研究表明，他们可能并没有这么想。这种现象被称为“喜欢的差距”，即人们普遍认为自己不如他们喜欢自己。类似的“社会预测偏差”也影响着我们的社交生活。我们常常低估他人对我们的同理心，以及他们愿意帮助我们的程度。这些偏差在与陌生人或熟人互动时尤为明显，甚至可能持续数月，影响友谊的发展。这些对他人态度的悲观看法也会阻碍我们与他人建立联系。
心理学家吉莉安·桑德斯托姆（Gillian Sandstrom）指出，我们对他人持怀疑态度，实际上是在损害自己。如果我们认为别人不会欣赏我们的赞美，我们就不会去赞美；如果我们觉得朋友不会因为我们的联系而感到高兴，我们就不会主动联系他们。这种心理会让我们变得紧张并退缩，从而减少快乐和增加恐惧。我们似乎在暗示他人不喜欢我们，这可能让我们疏远他们，降低建立联系的可能性，并阻碍新友谊的形成。桑德斯托姆说：“如果你不相信别人会善待你，你就不会向他们展现脆弱，只会停留在表面。”这会形成一种自我实现的预言：如果你认为别人不会帮助你，你就会以一种暗示你不期待善意的方式行事，结果他们真的不会帮助你。这种循环会强化我们的疑虑，最终削弱我们与他人联系的意愿。
此外，当我们被负面新闻包围时，阅读和听到关于人们负面特质的故事，会降低我们对他人的善意预期，使世界看起来更加危险。这会让我们不愿意寻求帮助或主动帮助他人，从而错过许多社交机会。而我们知道，这些社交机会对我们的幸福有直接影响。
为了改变这种悲观看法，桑德斯托姆认为，唯一的办法就是让人们去做那些让他们感到害怕的事情。比如，经常与陌生人交谈、给予赞美或联系老朋友，当他们发现这些行为是被积极接受的，他们的看法就会开始改变。但如果没有持续的练习，人们很容易忘记这些经验。
心理学家拉拉·阿金（Lara Aknin）则建议，我们不必真的把钱包丢掉，而是要创造机会去验证他人是否真的像我们想象的那样友善。因为如果数据是正确的，那么人们往往会比我们预期的更加友善。
所有亲密关系的建立都始于一次勇敢的尝试。桑德斯托姆说，要建立联系，我们需要敞开心扉，展现脆弱，寻求帮助并提供帮助。如果你能鼓起勇气相信对方会比你本能上认为的更加友善和开放，那么你就能打开更多连接的机会。毕竟，她说：“总得有人先迈出第一步。”
It’s probably happened to you: A stranger starts talking to you at a party. In this moment, you’re not nearly as clever or charming as you hoped you’d be, and you struggle to volley with the anecdotes, opinions, and witticisms lobbed your way. At the end of it, you come away thinking, “They totally thought I was a complete idiot.”
But research shows, they probably didn’t. In a phenomenon dubbed the “liking gap,” people consistently tend to like you better than you think they do. All sorts of other “gaps” — or “social prediction errors,” as experts would call them — govern our social lives. We consistently underestimate everything from people’s empathy toward us to how willing they are to help us. These patterns are strongest when we interact with strangers or acquaintances but can persist for many months into a friendship. They permeate relationships with all kinds of people, from classmates to roommates and coworkers. This pessimism about other people’s attitudes towards us also has consequences, like undercutting our own willingness to connect with others.
One particularly stark example of this misjudgement is how likely people think it is that a random stranger would return your dropped wallet to you. This question is often used in surveys as a measure of social trust, says Lara Aknin, a professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University who studies social relationships and happiness. When you take people’s responses and compare them to the results of real-world “wallet drop” studies, where researchers drop or leave wallets in public spaces and observe the rate of return, Aknin says, “Wallets are returned way more than people expect.”
In one of the most well-known wallet drop studies from 2019, researchers followed more than 17,000 “lost” wallets containing various sums of money in 355 cities across 40 countries. They found that “in virtually all countries, citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money” — a result virtually no one predicted.
We misjudge not only other people’s altruism or empathy, but also how they’ll react to our overtures. Other research shows that people consistently underestimate how happy someone will feel after we show them a random act of kindness, pay them a compliment, or shoot a message just to get in touch. This all starts at a pretty young age, too. One 2021 paper found that the liking gap begins appearing in children as young as 5, and research from 2023 showed that children as young as four underestimate how much another person will appreciate an act of kindness.
To some, these may feel like pretty minor points — who cares if people enjoy our compliments more than we think they do? But experts say that these misperceptions of others can be a big obstacle to forming connections, especially in our purported loneliness epidemic.
We doubt others at our own cost, according to Gillian Sandstrom, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Sussex. If we don’t think someone will appreciate a compliment, then we won’t give it. If we don’t think a friend will be happy to hear from us, we won’t reach out. “We get nervous, and then we turn inwards,” Sandstrom says, “and so we’re less happy and more fearful.” We behave as if others don’t like us, possibly shutting them out, hurting our chances of connection, and curtailing any possibility for building new friendships. “If you don’t trust someone will be tender with you, you won’t get vulnerable with them, and you’ll just stay at surface level.”
“It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she adds — if you don’t think someone will help you, you’ll behave in a way that signals that you don’t expect kindness from them, and then they really won’t help.
The cycle reinforces our doubts, and over time it “undercuts our willingness to reach out and engage with other people,” says Aknin. After all, people generally try to hew to norms and behave according to how they think most people behave. It doesn’t help when so many of us are inundated with bad news, reading and hearing stories that highlight people’s bad qualities. That “reduces our expectations of other people’s kindness” and makes the world feel like a riskier place, she says, one where you maybe don’t want to ask for help or extend a hand.
And so, “we’ll miss social opportunities,” she says, “which we know by and large to have a pretty direct impact on our happiness.”
To hammer the point home, Aknin points to the World Happiness Report, which she helps to produce every year. For the 2025 report, researchers assessed how various factors — including unemployment, doubling your income, or believing that it’s “very likely” that your lost wallet will be returned to you — impact self-reported life satisfaction. More than any of the variables they looked at, believing that others will return your wallet to you was most strongly linked with greater well-being, an effect that was almost eight times larger than for doubling your income. The message is clear: Trust in other people and happiness go hand in hand.
One theory behind these persistent underestimations is that people are “naturally super driven to stay connected to the group, and super vigilant for signs of rejection,” says Vanessa Bohns, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University. “We get super cautious about putting ourselves out there because we don’t want to take social risks,” she says. “But we forget that other people are also driven by those same concerns.”
Insecurity — or at least self-consciousness — about our competence, charisma, or likability plays a big role in how we misjudge our interactions. Research shows that we tend to assess our role in conversations by how competent we were, whereas other people tend to focus on our warmth or how nice we seemed.
In the case of giving and receiving compliments, we can all probably think back to a time when someone said something nice out of the blue, and how warm and happy we felt, Bohns says. But in times when we’re about to give a compliment, “we lose all perspective about what it feels like to be in the other role — we’re so focused on how awkwardly we’re going to deliver that compliment, the fact that maybe we’re interrupting them, or that maybe they don’t want to be approached by us right now.”
So how do we beat back the pessimism and stop underestimating others? The research so far says there’s no easy answer, says Sandstrom. You can tell people about the data and teach them that people enjoy interactions with you more than you’d predict, but that doesn’t tangibly change people’s attitudes or behaviors.
“The only thing that’s really worked is just making people do the scary thing,” Sandstrom says. When people regularly exercise the muscles of talking with strangers, paying compliments, or reaching out to old friends, and see that they go well and are received kindly, then their outlooks start to change. But without regular practice, it’s easy to forget.
“You don’t need to drop your wallet and see if it’s returned,” says Aknin, “but give yourself opportunities to be proven right or wrong about people.” Because “if the data are right, people will be kinder than we expect.”
All close relationships start somewhere. And that process requires you to open up, be vulnerable, ask for help, and offer it, says Sandstrom. And if you can muster up the bravery to go ahead and trust that the person you’re talking to will be kinder and more open than you instinctively feel, that can open up a lot more opportunities for connection. After all, she says, “somebody has to go first.”
2025-12-09 19:45:00
2025年12月2日，国防部长彼得·海格塞思（Pete Hegseth）与国务卿马尔科·鲁比奥（Marco Rubio）及总统唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）一同参加内阁会议。| Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
后现代哲学家让·鲍德里亚（Jean Baudrillard）在1991年曾著名地提出，海湾战争实际上并未发生。他并非指没有实际战斗，而是指真实事件与世界通过24小时有线电视所看到的精心编排的呈现完全不同。如今，美国针对委内瑞拉的军事部署似乎也遵循类似的叙事逻辑，这些行动往往与实际发生的事件关系不大。
例如，总统特朗普上周在自己的社交媒体平台“Truth Social”上发表了一项极具戏剧性的声明：“请所有航空公司、飞行员、毒贩和人口贩子考虑，委内瑞拉上空及周边地区将完全关闭。”据《路透社》报道，美国官员对此表示惊讶，并称他们并不知情有任何美国军事行动在执行关闭委内瑞拉领空的命令。实际上，美国并未采取任何措施来实施这一“关闭”，而是在几天后有一架遣返移民的航班降落在委内瑞拉。
此外，国防部长海格塞思援引“战争迷雾”（fog of war）来为9月份美国对委内瑞拉的致命袭击辩护，称该袭击中，据称在第一次打击中无害的幸存者被后续打击误杀。然而，“战争迷雾”通常指的是战斗中的不确定性，很难理解为何它适用于那些目标不可能对袭击者构成威胁的情况。
尽管特朗普政府中有鹰派人士多年来一直希望采取行动迫使委内瑞拉总统尼古拉斯·马杜罗（Nicolás Maduro）下台，但当前军事部署和相关空袭行动的名义是美国正遭受来自委内瑞拉“毒枭恐怖分子”所推动的致命毒品的威胁。一些立法者为9月份的袭击辩护，称其“可能拯救了数万美国人的生命”，这与特朗普的说法一致，他声称“每击沉一艘船，就能拯救25,000名美国人生命”。
然而，这些数字只有在所涉毒品为致命合成阿片类药物芬太尼（fentanyl）时才合理。美国缉毒局（DEA）表示，一公斤芬太尼可能致死50万人。特朗普曾多次表示这些船只主要运送的是芬太尼。但事实上，这些船只几乎不可能携带芬太尼，因为芬太尼主要通过陆路从墨西哥进入美国，通常由美国公民运输，而非来自南美的快艇。假设这些船只确实运载毒品，那更可能是可卡因，而可卡因的致命性远低于芬太尼。尽管可卡因每年也会导致数千名美国人因过量使用而死亡，但大多数毒品可能正运往欧洲。
对于美国人来说，包括特朗普的支持者，这并不令人意外。因为特朗普政府在早期曾将中国、墨西哥（不太可信的是加拿大）指责为芬太尼危机的根源。无论如何，委内瑞拉是毒品转运的重要节点，但并非主要生产国。因此，将其视为解决美国毒品危机（无论是芬太尼、可卡因还是其他毒品）的关键，似乎并不合理。
如果军事行动的依据建立在混乱和矛盾的前提之上，这也不足为奇，因为就连实际目标也不明确。此外，政府将委内瑞拉的“太阳帮”（Cartel de los Soles）指定为外国恐怖组织，并将马杜罗本人列为该组织的领导人。然而，“太阳帮”实际上并不是一个真正的贩毒集团，而是委内瑞拉人用来指代参与各种犯罪活动的高级军事官员的术语。这一指定似乎旨在为军事行动构建政治理由，但并不具备法律效力。
特朗普并非唯一制造这种“不真实感”的人。获得诺贝尔和平奖的委内瑞拉反对派领袖玛丽亚·科里娜·马查多（María Corina Machado）最近因传播特朗普反复提及的无根据指控而受到批评，即马杜罗政府干涉了2020年美国大选。随着对情报操纵的指控和政权更迭的呼声日益高涨，委内瑞拉局势被比作2003年伊拉克战争前的氛围。但与当时推动伊拉克战争的证据相比，特朗普政府在委内瑞拉问题上的证据却少得多。
另一个关键区别是，即使美国最终对委内瑞拉发动空袭或试图推翻马杜罗，也不太可能像伊拉克战争那样展开长期的地面入侵。美国在该地区部署的军事力量并不适合这样的行动。
因此，美国仍有可能对委内瑞拉境内的毒品实验室或反政府武装营地进行象征性的空袭，然后转向其他问题。这种局势更像是一个受伊拉克战争历史训练的AI模型所生成的情景，而非现实的再现。
截至目前，美国船只袭击已造成近90人死亡，这些生命是真实的。如果地面袭击开始，委内瑞拉平民和美国军人也将面临风险。每年因毒品过量死亡的美国人也数以千计，而生活在马杜罗日益崩溃的独裁统治下的民众同样真实。然而，与最近的其他军事行动相比，这种军事部署似乎带有一种不真实的氛围。
The post-modern philosopher Jean Baudrillard infamously argued in 1991 that the Gulf War did not take place, by which he did not mean that no fighting had actually occurred, but that the real events were something entirely separate from the carefully choreographed presentation the world saw thanks to the novel phenomenon of 24-hour cable news.
It’s tempting to wonder what Baudrillard would have made of the current US military buildup targeting Venezuela, a campaign that often appears to be driven by narratives with only a tangential relationship to actual events taking place.
Take, for instance, President Donald Trump’s dramatic announcement on his Truth Social platform a little over a week ago: “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”
As Reuters reported, US officials “were surprised by Trump’s announcement and unaware of any ongoing U.S. military operations to enforce a closure of Venezuelan airspace.” The US not only took no actions to affect the “closure” of Venezuelan airspace; a migrant repatriation flight from the US landed in Venezuela just a few days later.
Or take Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s invocation of the “fog of war” to justify the deadly US strike in September, in which defenseless survivors of an initial strike were allegedly killed by a follow-up. “Fog of war” is a phrase that generally refers to uncertainty in the midst of combat, and it’s hard to understand how it would apply to a situation where the targets could not plausibly be a threat to those firing on them.
While there are Trump administration hawks who have wanted US action to force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from office for years, the ostensible justification for the military buildup in the Caribbean and the related ongoing campaign of strikes against alleged drug boats is that the US is under siege from deadly narcotics pushed by the Venezuelan “narcoterrorists.”
Lawmakers have defended the deadly US strike in September, saying it “probably saved thousands of American lives.” This echoes Trump himself, who has claimed that “Every boat we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives.”
These numbers would make some sense if the drug in question were the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl: The Drug Enforcement Administration claims that one kilogram of fentanyl has the potential to kill 500,000 people. Trump has explicitly said on several instances that the boats were carrying “mostly fentanyl.”
But these boats are almost certainly not carrying fentanyl, which is almost entirely shipped into the US overland from Mexico, often by US citizens — not on speedboats from South America. Assuming these boats really are carrying drugs, which has been disputed in some cases, it’s almost certainly cocaine, which is hundreds of times less deadly. Cocaine also causes thousands of overdose deaths in the US every year, though most of what’s moving on these boats is likely headed for Europe.
This shouldn’t come as much surprise to Americans, including Trump supporters, given that the administration spent much of its early months blaming China, Mexico, and (less credibly) Canada for the fentanyl crisis.
In any event, Venezuela is a major transhipment point for narcotics, but it’s not a major producer of them. The idea that it’s the key to solving America’s drug crisis (fentanyl, cocaine, or any other drug) doesn’t make much sense.
If the case for military force is based on confusing and contradictory premises, that would make sense, given that it’s not always clear what the actual target is either.
Adding to the sense of a virtual buildup is the administration’s decision to designate Venezuela’s “Cartel de los Soles” as a foreign terrorist organization, naming Maduro itself as its leader. “Cartel de los Soles” is not actually a cartel or even really an organization. It’s a term used by Venezuelans to refer to the cadre of senior military officials involved in a range of criminal activities. But the designation appears to be part of an effort to build a political case for military action, though it actually conveys no such legal authority. The administration has also claimed, contradicting its own intelligence agencies, that Maduro is in control of the criminal gang Tren de Aragua.
Trump is not the only one contributing to a sense of unreality. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was criticized recently for amplifying baseless claims, repeated by Trump, that the Maduro government meddled in the 2020 US election.
With accusations of the manipulation of intelligence and growing momentum for regime change, the Venezuela situation has been compared to the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war. But there’s been far less effort to produce evidence for the Trump administration’s narrative around Venezuela than there was to sell evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The other key difference is that even if the US ultimately does launch strikes inside Venezuela, or even seeks to oust Maduro, there’s little chance of a protracted Iraq-style ground invasion. The forces the US has deployed to the region simply aren’t set up for that. There’s still a strong possibility that the US will launch some demonstrative airstrikes against drug labs or rebel camps in Venezuela and then move on to the next issue. It feels less like Iraq war redux than the sort of thing an AI model trained on histories of the Iraq war era might produce.
The lives of the nearly 90 people killed so far in US boat strikes are real, as are the Venezuelan civilians and US service members who would be put at risk if strikes on land begin, as are the thousands of Americans killed by drug overdoses every year and those living under Maduro’s crumbling dictatorship. But in contrast to other recent military actions, there’s a sense of unreality about this buildup.
2025-12-09 19:30:00
美国正在变老。从1960年到2024年，65岁以上美国人的比例翻了一番，从9%上升到18%。而且，美国未来的人口老龄化趋势还将持续。根据人口普查局的预测，未来十年内，美国的老年人口将首次超过儿童人口。到2060年，65岁以上的人口预计将占总人口的四分之一。这种人口结构的变化将成为21世纪美国社会的决定性特征，影响到美国生活的方方面面。但其政治影响可能尤为深远且直接：2024年，65岁以上的人口已占美国选民的29%。由于老年人的投票率极高，他们一直对政治具有不成比例的影响力。然而，过去由于人口比例较小，他们的政治力量受到限制。现在，这种限制正在逐渐减弱。这可能对美国年轻一代构成问题。美国的公共政策长期以来对年轻人不利。按国际标准，美国的福利体系对有孩子的家庭的支持非常有限，而对退休人员却提供了大量福利。而且，这些针对老年人的福利项目在未来几十年很可能会消耗越来越多的联邦预算，这可能导致年轻美国人面临更高的税率或借贷成本，同时挤占了对他们的需求投入的资金。与此同时，美国的住房政策也偏向于老年人，而非租房者。随着老年人选民政治影响力的增长，这些不平衡可能会进一步加深。而且，已有迹象表明，这种趋势已经显现。随着选民年龄结构的变老，经济政策也变得更加不利于年轻人。这种向“老年统治”（gerontocracy）倾斜的趋势不仅损害了千禧一代和Z世代的利益，还威胁着美国整体的繁荣。
各州政府正在加重对年轻人的税收负担。近年来，美国多个州政府将税收负担从老年人转移到年轻人身上。在某些情况下，这种对老年人的偏袒是明确且有意为之的。自2022年以来，德克萨斯州、科罗拉多州、爱荷华州和宾夕法尼亚州都削减了针对65岁及以上老年人的房产税。与此同时，许多州开始免除退休收入的税收。例如，密苏里州、堪萨斯州、内布拉斯加州和西弗吉尼亚州取消了对社会保障福利的征税，而爱荷华州则取消了对55岁以上居民所有形式的退休收入的征税。这些措施的主要目的并非救助贫困的老年人，因为联邦法规已经保护了贫困退休人员免受收入税的影响。这些广泛的免税政策主要惠及高收入群体。例如，一项对伊利诺伊州退休收入税收减免的分析发现，收入超过17.5万美元的家庭获得了60%的税收减免好处。其他州的免税政策也显示出类似的结果。此外，除了对老年人的税收优惠外，还出现了对所有现有房主的房产税削减趋势，这通常会以年轻家庭的代价来惠及富裕的老年人。目前，对房产税的反对情绪非常广泛。德克萨斯州尤其激进，2023年减少了180亿美元的房产税。其他如佐治亚州、北达科他州、怀俄明州、内布拉斯加州和爱达荷州也实施了不同程度的房产税削减。未来可能还有更激进的改革：佛罗里达州州长罗恩·德桑蒂斯曾提出一项计划，旨在取消该州的房产税。选民老龄化并不是引发这一减税趋势的唯一原因。主要原因是新冠疫情后的通货膨胀，这导致了房主的税收负担增加，因为房价上涨使得房产的名义价值也随之上升。然而，政策制定者关注这一成本问题，很可能反映了老年人不成比例的政治影响力。尽管许多千禧一代房主从房产税削减中受益，但整体而言，年轻人从这些措施中获得的好处较少，承担的代价却更多。原因很简单：美国79%的老年人拥有自己的住房，而35岁以下的人群中只有39%拥有住房。房产税削减对房主的益处大于对租客。如果房产税削减不需要用其他税收来弥补，这不会成为年轻人的问题。但通常情况下，它们确实需要资金支持。长期来看，降低房产税通常意味着州政府要么提高销售税和所得税，要么削减政府服务。无论哪种方式，年轻人都将承担更大的负担。工作年龄的人支付的所得税比退休人员多，而且他们更可能有孩子，而孩子的教育系统依赖于房产税收入。由于资金限制，一些地方政府已经开始削减对公共教育的投入。2019年至2023年间，美国每周只上四天课的学区数量从650个增加到近900个。与此同时，一些最近的房产税削减政策明显偏向长期房主，而非首次购房者。例如，2024年，佐治亚州和阿拉巴马州都限制了房主每年房产评估价值的涨幅。随着时间推移，这些政策可能带来严重的不平等后果。这在佛罗里达州的政策中得到了很好的体现。在佛罗里达州，房产的可征税价值每年最多只能增长3%，无论其市场价格如何变化，只要当前房主继续持有。由于佛罗里达州的房地产价格近年来大幅上涨，这一政策导致长期房主和新购房者在相同房产上的税收负担出现巨大差异。根据土地政策研究所的一份报告，2024年，一个年轻的家庭购买迈阿密公寓的房产税，将比一位自2006年以来一直居住在该公寓的老年人多出三倍。
美国的福利体系长期忽视了年轻人。正如之前所述，美国的福利体系对有孩子的家庭支持非常有限。2021年，美国仅将国内生产总值的0.6%用于儿童及其家庭的福利，远低于经合组织（OECD）平均的2.3%。而同年，美国在公共养老金上的支出占GDP的7.2%，略低于OECD平均的8.5%。这种差距部分源于美国整体人口比其他富裕国家更年轻。即使立法者没有改变任何政策，过去四年联邦预算中的年龄偏见也会加深。婴儿潮一代进入退休阶段，加上医疗保健成本的上升，已经足以增加对老年人的支出比例。但国会通过扩大对老年人的社会福利，同时削减主要惠及工作年龄美国人的项目，进一步加速了这一趋势。拜登政府并未有意造成这一结果。在民主党国会的支持下，2021年他设立了针对有年幼子女家庭的新月度福利。但白宫仅找到政治意愿来资助该计划一年。相比之下，拜登却推动了对老年人福利的永久性扩展。2024年底，国会通过了一项法案，实际上提高了对公职人员的社会保障支付，每年成本接近200亿美元。这项法律解决了现有福利体系中的一个细节问题：许多公职人员并不缴纳社会保障税，因为他们有自己的养老金计划。因此，他们通常不会在领取公共养老金的同时获得全额社会保障福利，即使他们在退休前曾在私营部门短暂工作过。2024年的法律改变了这一状况，使公职人员能够同时领取养老金和全额社会保障福利。许多分析人士批评这种安排不公平。他们认为，那些没有在每张工资单上都缴纳社会保障税的工人，不应该获得与那些一直缴纳的人相同的福利。同时，向已经领取公共养老金的工人提供全额福利，可能会削弱社会保障计划的渐进性，并加速其信托基金的耗尽。然而，令人惊讶的是，国会共和党人支持了这项法律。这表明：共和党人支持了一项主要惠及民主党支持的公职人员的福利计划，而该计划在许多技术专家看来过于慷慨。很难想象保守派会支持一项惠及65岁以上人群的提案。然而，特朗普的共和党却普遍支持针对老年人的明确社会支出。在特朗普执政期间，共和党人放弃了对社会保障和医疗保险的削减，并为老年人创造了新的税收优惠，即使他们同时大幅削减了主要惠及65岁以下人群的项目。当然，共和党今年通过的减税政策是以大幅削减医疗补助（Medicaid）支出为代价的，这将对许多老年人产生负面影响。但医疗补助主要惠及非退休人员，而特朗普的削减重点针对的是中年群体，他们中许多人将因医疗补助的新工作要求而失去保障，而这些要求并不适用于老年人。因此，特朗普的政策在社会经济层面的影响更为严重，而不仅仅是代际层面。由于他的医疗补助削减，所有年龄段的低收入美国人将更难获得所需的护理服务。他的食品券削减也将使贫困人群更难维持基本生活。他的政策实际上是从穷人那里拿钱，转而给予中产阶级和富裕阶层。然而，过去四年政策的制定也使美国的福利体系更加偏向老年人。
美国的经济冲突并非完全夸大。大多数年轻人终将变老，因此，所有年龄段的美国人对政府维持强大的医疗保险和社会保障福利都有共同利益。从原则上讲，这些福利并不一定需要以牺牲对年轻人的社会支出为代价。如果美国对富人和中产阶级征税，降低医疗提供者的过高收费，并实施促进经济增长的改革，那么我们有可能在维持慷慨的福利制度的同时，为年轻父母提供育儿津贴，扩大失业者的失业救济，确保全民医疗保障。但目前的美国社会契约并非如此。美国当前的安排包括：
这种体系的受害者并不全是年轻人，受益者也不全是老年人。然而，有理由担心美国选民老龄化会加剧政治经济体系的弊端。毕竟，老年人相对不受这些不平等和低效的影响。在各国中，老年人选民往往更关注自身的狭隘物质利益，而忽视对儿童的支出和经济增长，同时反对自由移民政策。部分原因在于此，意大利和日本等比美国更年长的国家，都经历了缓慢增长和严重偏向老年人的公共支出。
美国仍有可能保持年轻的心态。尽管老年人在选民中的比例正在稳步上升，但未来几十年，大多数选民仍会是65岁以下的人。老年人的影响力不仅来自于人数，还来自于他们更高的政治参与度和组织能力。年轻人理论上也可以效仿长辈，为自身利益组织起来。例如，“支持本地住房”（Yes in My Backyard，简称YIMBY）运动就是一个例子。该运动主要由年轻租户组成，全国各地的YIMBY组织都反对那些偏袒房主而忽视租户的分区政策。YIMBY的核心目标——增加住房供应并使其更实惠——将惠及所有年龄段的租户，并使整个美国更加繁荣。然而，严格的住房建设限制对年轻人的负担更大。因此，如果没有YIMBY的动员，美国在变老的过程中很可能会采取更加严格的住房政策。相反，近年来，美国各地的市政部门已开始简化住房建设的流程。如果年轻选民能够以类似方式为自己的广泛物质利益发声，美国的政治经济体系或许能够优雅地“变老”。本系列内容由Arnold Ventures基金会资助。Vox对本报道的内容拥有完全的自主权。
America is getting old.
Between 1960 and 2024, the share of Americans over 65 doubled — from 9 percent to 18 percent. And the US will only grow grayer in the coming years. Within a decade, America’s seniors will outnumber its children for the first time in history, according to Census Bureau projections. By 2060, those over 65 are expected to comprise about one quarter of the population.
This demographic transition will be a defining fact of the 21st century, shaping nearly every part of American life. But its political implications are liable to be especially profound — and immediate: Seniors already accounted for 29 percent of the US electorate in 2024.
Older voters have always exerted disproportionate political influence, due to their exceptionally high turnout rates. Historically, however, seniors’ power was limited by their small share of the population. Now, that constraint is steadily loosening.
This could be a problem for America’s rising generations. US public policy has long disfavored the young. By international standards, our welfare state offers meager support to families with children, even as it provides robust benefits for retirees. And the latter programs are likely to consume an ever-larger share of the federal budget in the coming decades, a shift that could burden younger Americans with higher tax rates or borrowing costs, while crowding out new spending on their needs. Our nation’s housing policies, meanwhile, privilege (disproportionately older) homeowners over renters.
Seniors’ growing electoral clout could deepen these imbalances. And there are signs it already has. As the electorate has aged over the last few years, economic policy has grown even more tilted against the young.
This drift towards gerontocracy — government of, by, and for the old — doesn’t just undermine the interests of millennials or zoomers. It also threatens the prosperity of America as a whole.
In states across the country, governments have recently shifted tax burdens away from older generations and toward younger ones.
In some cases, this elder bias is explicit and intentional. Since 2022, Texas, Colorado, Iowa, and Pennsylvania have all slashed property taxes specifically for homeowners 65 or older. At the same time, a slew of states have begun exempting retirement income from taxation. Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and West Virginia ended taxes on Social Security benefits, while Iowa abolished the taxation of all forms of retirement income — from 401(k) withdrawals to pension benefits — for residents over 55.
The principal function of these measures is not to rescue cash-strapped seniors from poverty. Federal rules already shield indigent retirees from income taxes. Broad exemptions deliver the bulk of their benefits to the affluent. An analysis of Illinois’s long-standing tax breaks on retirement income found that households earning over $175,000 collected 60 percent of the benefits. Research into the distributional implications of other states’ exemptions has yielded similar findings.
And tax policies that explicitly favor the old are only part of the story. There has also been a broader turn against property taxes on all existing homeowners — a shift that tends to benefit affluent seniors at younger families’ expense.
The present rebellion against property taxation has been remarkably widespread. Texas has enacted especially steep cuts, reducing property taxes by $18 billion in 2023. But less sweeping reductions have passed in Georgia, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Idaho, among other places. And more ambitious reforms may be in the offing: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has floated a plan to eliminate all property taxes in his state.
The aging of the electorate did not singlehandedly kick off this tax-cutting trend. Rather, the primary trigger was post-COVID inflation, which raised homeowners’ tax bills by increasing their properties’ nominal value (if the price level goes up, the market value of your home typically will too).
Nevertheless, policymakers’ focus on this dimension of the cost-of-living crisis likely reflected seniors’ disproportionate political influence. Although plenty of millennial homeowners have benefited from property tax cuts, younger Americans as a whole stand to gain less — and lose more — from such measures than older ones do.
The reasons for this are simple. Nearly 79 percent of US seniors own their homes, while only 39 percent of Americans under 35 do. And property tax cuts deliver larger benefits for homeowners than for renters.
This wouldn’t be much of a problem for younger generations, if property tax cuts did not need to be paid for. But they generally do. In the long run, maintaining lower levies on property typically requires states to either charge higher sales and income taxes or pare back government services. In either case, younger Americans will disproportionately bear the burdens. Working-age people pay more in income taxes than retirees, and they’re also more likely to have young children, whose school systems rely on property tax revenue. Funding constraints are already leading some municipalities to scale back their commitments to public education. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of US school districts in session only four days a week jumped from 650 to nearly 900.
Meanwhile, some recent property tax cuts massively favor longtime homeowners over first-time buyers. In 2024, Georgia and Alabama both capped the amount that a homeowner’s assessed property value can rise in a given year. Over time, these policies can have radically inequitable consequences.
This is well-illustrated by Florida’s longstanding cap on assessment growth. In the Sunshine State, a home’s taxable value cannot rise by more than 3 percent annually, no matter how much its market price has changed, so long as its current homeowner maintains possession. Since much of Florida’s real estate has appreciated at a far faster pace, this policy has opened up a massive gap between how much longtime homeowners and new buyers must pay in taxes for the same properties. According to a report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a young family purchasing a Miami townhouse in 2024 would owe three times as much in property taxes as an older neighbor who’d been occupying an identical unit since 2006.
As state lawmakers were tilting tax codes in seniors’ favor, Congress was shifting social spending in the same direction.
As already noted, America’s welfare state has long given short shrift to young families. In 2021, the United States spent just 0.6 percent of its GDP on benefits for children and their parents — far below the OECD average of 2.3 percent.
That same year, America spent 7.2 percent of GDP on public pensions, placing it only a bit behind the OECD average of 8.5 percent. And this disparity is partly attributable to the fact that America is younger than the typical rich country.
The federal budget’s age bias would have deepened over the past four years, even if legislators hadn’t changed a single policy. The baby boom generation’s drift into retirement — combined with the healthcare sector’s climbing costs — would have been sufficient to push up the share of spending dedicated to seniors.
But Congress accelerated this trend by expanding social benefits for the old, while cutting spending on programs that primarily benefit working-age Americans.
The Biden administration did not intend this outcome. With the aid of a Democratic Congress, it established a new monthly benefit for families with young children in 2021. But the White House only found the political will to fund this program for a single year.
By contrast, Biden oversaw a permanent expansion in elder benefits. At the end of 2024, Congress passed a bill effectively increasing Social Security payments to public-sector workers, at an annual cost of nearly $20 billion.
This law addressed a nuance in the pre-existing entitlement system: Many public sector workers are not subject to Social Security taxes, as they pay into their own separate pension plans instead. For this reason, they traditionally did not receive full Social Security benefits in addition to their public pensions, even if they worked briefly in the private sector before retirement. The 2024 law changed this, enabling public-sector workers to collect both their pensions and full Social Security benefits.
Many analysts decried this arrangement as unfair. In their view, a worker who did not pay into Social Security with every paycheck should not receive the same benefits as one who did. And providing full benefits to workers who are already receiving public pensions may undermine the progressivity of the Social Security program, while accelerating the exhaustion of its trust fund.
Nevertheless, in a striking testament to older voters’ political clout, congressional Republicans supported the law. Which is to say: The GOP increased welfare benefits for an overwhelmingly Democratic constituency (public sector workers are left-leaning), in a manner that struck many technocratic experts as excessively generous. It is hard to imagine conservatives getting on board with such a proposal, were its beneficiaries younger than 65.
Yet Trump’s GOP has largely embraced social spending that is explicitly earmarked for seniors. Under Donald Trump, Republicans have forsworn cuts to Social Security and Medicare — and created new tax benefits for the old — even as they’ve made large spending cuts to programs that primarily benefit Americans under 65.
To be sure, the GOP did finance its regressive tax cuts this year with large reductions in Medicaid spending, which will adversely impact many older Americans. But Medicaid primarily benefits non-retirees. And Trump concentrated his cuts on prime-age Americans, many of whom will lose coverage due to Medicaid’s new work requirements, which do not apply to seniors.
The president’s policies are most lamentable for their socioeconomic implications, not their generational ones. As a result of his Medicaid cuts, more low-income Americans of all ages will struggle to secure the care they need. And his food stamp cuts will make it harder for the impoverished to feed themselves. His agenda has, in effect, taken from the poor to give to the upper middle class and wealthy.
Yet it is also true that the past four years of policymaking have left America with a welfare state even more heavily weighted towards seniors than it had been before.
The economic conflicts between the generations should not be exaggerated. Most young people plan to get old someday. Americans of all ages, therefore, have an interest in their government maintaining robust Medicare and Social Security benefits. And there is no reason in principle why such entitlements must come at the expense of social spending on the young.
If the United States raised taxes on the rich and middle-class, forced down our medical providers’ exorbitant payment rates, and enacted growth-enhancing economic reforms, then we could plausibly sustain generous entitlement benefits while creating a child allowance for young parents, expanding unemployment benefits for the jobless, and guaranteeing healthcare coverage for all.
But this is not our current social bargain. Rather, America’s present arrangement entails:
The losers of this system are not uniformly young, and the winners aren’t universally old. Nonetheless, there is reason to fear that the graying of the US electorate will reinforce our political economy’s pathologies. After all, seniors are relatively insulated from its inequities and inefficiencies. And across countries, older voters tend to prioritize their narrow material interests over both spending on children and economic growth, while also opposing liberal immigration policies. Partly for these reasons, democracies older than the US — such as Italy and Japan — have suffered from tepid growth and wildly age-biased public spending.
America isn’t necessarily doomed to continue on its present trajectory.
Although seniors’ share of the electorate is steadily growing, the vast majority of voters will remain under 65 for decades to come. Older Americans owe their influence not merely to sheer numbers, but also to their higher rates of political engagement and organization. The young could theoretically choose to follow their elders’ example and organize in defense of their own interests.
The Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) movement offers a case in point. Composed largely of young renters, YIMBY organizations across the country have agitated against zoning policies that privilege homeowners over tenants. YIMBYs’ fundamental aim — to make housing abundant and affordable —would benefit renters of all ages and make America as a whole more prosperous. Nevertheless, tight restrictions on homebuilding impose greater costs on the young than the old. Thus, absent YIMBYs’ mobilization, America was likely to adopt more restrictive housing policies as it grew older. Instead, municipalities across the country have made it easier to build homes in recent years.
If younger voters stand up for their broader material interests in a similar fashion, America’s political economy just might age gracefully.
This series was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.