2025-11-21 19:00:00
鱼类是否具有感受能力？这一问题长期以来受到争议，因为人类对鱼类的认知存在偏见。历史上，西方哲学将鱼类视为低级、无意识的生物，如亚里士多德的“自然阶梯”理论将鱼类置于生命等级的底层，而柏拉图则称鱼类为“无知的深渊”。然而，近年来科学研究表明，鱼类拥有复杂的社会关系、认知能力以及长期记忆，甚至能使用工具。例如，清洁鱼能识别镜子中的自己，而三文鱼在受到酸液刺激后会表现出回避行为和社交变化，这些现象被视为主观痛苦的证据。
尽管如此，关于鱼类是否能感受疼痛的争论仍未结束。科学家指出，疼痛是一种主观体验，而当前的实验方法（如电击、注射酸液等）可能过于侵入性，难以证明鱼类的意识。部分研究者认为，应通过观察鱼类的行为和动机，而非仅聚焦于疼痛本身，来理解它们的需求。例如，科学家提出鱼类可能有社交联系、愉悦感甚至恐惧情绪，但这些仍需更严谨的实验验证。此外，意识研究本身存在哲学争议，科学无法完全解释意识的起源和本质，因此需谨慎对待鱼类是否具有意识的判断。
文章最后强调，尽管人类可能永远无法完全理解鱼类的主观体验，但应以更开放的态度看待它们的意识。将鱼类视为具有感知能力的“同类生命”，有助于推动动物福利政策的完善，并促进公众对鱼类的共情。这不仅是科学问题，更是伦理和哲学的反思。
What must it feel like to be a fish — to glide weightlessly through the sea, to draw breath from water, to be (if one is lucky) oblivious to the parched terrestrial world above?
Maybe you suspect there isn’t much to fish — and you could hardly be blamed for it. For centuries, Western natural philosophy maligned sea creatures as primitive, dim-witted, perhaps not even conscious. It’s a prejudice that goes back at least as far as Aristotle, whose scala naturae ranked fishes near the bottom of the hierarchy of existence. According to Plato, fish were characterized by “the lowest depths of ignorance.”
• Fish are often dismissed as alien and simple, which makes it easy to overlook the true complexity of their lives and the massive numbers in which we use them.
• Whether or not fish can feel pain remains surprisingly contested, because subjective experiences are very hard to prove.
• The keys to understanding the evidence that fish feel pain, and why some scientists remain skeptical.
• How clashing paradigms have shaped the way we understand animal consciousness, from the Scientific Revolution to the present.
• Why “can fish feel pain?” may be, in the end, the wrong question.
This story is part of a series supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare.
And so it remains today: Humans use fishes in far greater numbers than we do land animals — for food, for amusement as pets, and more — but our species shows strikingly little interest in what these experiences might be like for them. We even use fish as bywords for stupidity and poor brain function, like the proverbial goldfish mind that resets every three seconds — a myth fabricated out of thin air.
But I should speak for myself. Although I’m professionally obsessed with the ethics of our relationships with nonhuman animals, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit I’ve given little thought to the massive class of animals that we call fish. I’ve hardly written a word about the hundreds of billions killed — quite brutally — by the commercial fishing and fish farming industries every year, nor much considered why it is that aquatic animals are treated as an afterthought to those who live on land.
Fish are hard to empathize with. They lack facial expressions we can readily understand, their bodies are scaly and cold to the touch, and although they make plenty of sounds to communicate with one another, we generally can’t hear them. Their entire world — built on senses and signals that we land-bound creatures cannot access — is as alien to us as ours no doubt is to them.
“We know very, very little about their day-to-day lives,” Becca Franks, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University, told me. “Rather than seeing that big blank murky fogginess as a mystery that is waiting to be unveiled…there’s a cultural expectation that their lives are simple and not interesting.”
In recent decades, however, our aperture on marine life has widened tremendously. Scientific advances have increasingly shown that we’ve misjudged fish. They have complex social relationships and cognitive abilities, maintain long-term memories, and use tools. Octopuses — invertebrates with even more genetic distance from humans than fish — have become international celebrities for their intelligence. The more we attempt to look into the minds of animals farther and farther from us on the evolutionary tree, the more we discover how much we’ve been underestimating them.
Yet even as it has shed new light onto the piscine creatures that populate most of our planet, the science of fish minds has been mired in debate over a startlingly, deceptively simple question: Can fish feel pain?
It might sound weird that a capacity as basic as pain is still contested in animals who can distinguish between individual human faces and migrate thousands of miles. But the question remains unsettled because pain is a subjective feeling that science cannot prove definitively. And so, even as experimental evidence that fish experience pain has accumulated over the last quarter-century, some prominent skeptics continue to doubt it.
The great fish pain debate shows us how scientific knowledge is shaped not just by linear progress, but also by historical contingency, cultural biases, philosophical roadblocks, and internal ethical paradoxes. And it reflects back a story about us humans — our endeavor to find sentience in our fellow creatures, and our countervailing impulse to deny morally important qualities in them.
Perhaps nowhere are these competing tendencies more evident than in our attempts to understand fish, alien as they are to our warm-blooded, mammalian selves.
Most accounts of what we know about pain in fish go something like this: Until very recently, it was widely believed that fish don’t feel pain, or much of anything. There’d been little empirical work on the question. Then, in the early 2000s, a group of University of Edinburgh researchers — Lynne Sneddon, the late Victoria Braithwaite, and Michael Gentle — transformed how we see fish.
They discovered that fish have nociceptors, or neurons that send signals to the central nervous system when an animal is injured. Nociceptors are considered necessary for experiencing pain, just as photoreceptors are for vision, but on their own, they aren’t sufficient — the animal needs to be able to perceive pain in the brain. So Sneddon and the team, along with other researchers after them, ran behavioral experiments designed to figure out whether fish really feel pain — whether their nociceptors aren’t just reacting reflexively to noxious stimuli, the way a human involuntarily pulls away after touching a hot stove microseconds before feeling any pain.
Over and over again, the findings have pointed to yes. Goldfish and trout prodded with needles showed not just reflexive responses, but also activity in parts of their brains associated with higher processing. When rainbow trout were injected with painful substances, like acetic acid or bee venom, their respiration rates spiked, their appetites dropped, they rocked back and forth, and they rubbed the affected areas against the gravel and walls of their tanks, like pressing your tongue against a sore tooth. In other experiments, trout injected with acid altered their social behavior and diminished their fear responses to predator cues and novel objects, findings that, the scientists believed, suggested the fish were directing attention to the pain and away from normal behaviors. Goldfish avoided swimming to parts of their tanks where they received electric shocks, sometimes even (depending on their hunger levels) forgoing food.
In the decades following World War II, scientists had increasingly begun studying animal well-being in the novel field of animal welfare science, as food production industrialized and the public grew concerned about the treatment of animals in the meat industry. But before Sneddon started her work on fish pain in the late ’90s, fish had mostly been ignored by the field; the focus had been on land animals like chickens, pigs, and cows. “At that time, even vegetarians would say, ‘Oh, I eat fish because they don’t experience pain,’” Sneddon, now a professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, told me. “You even hear it in the Nirvana song,” she said, where Kurt Cobain drones, “It’s okay to eat fish, ’cause they don’t have any feelings.”
Darwin’s ideas belong to an intellectual lineage that takes animal feeling for granted, as a constitutive part of what it means to be an animal.
Sneddon and other scientists like her do this work because they care deeply about aquatic animals and hope their findings can inform animal welfare policy, from which fish are so often excluded. Still, when I first learned about this research, something about it unsettled me. I found the idea that we needed to inflict painful, extremely invasive experiments onto fish — including not just pricking them and injecting them with acid, but also surgically opening their heads to place electrodes before killing them at the end — in order to prove they feel pain to be ethically self-defeating. Sneddon told me she’s had “guilt dreams” where she was the one being injected with acid. Were there not less harmful ways to ask questions about the capabilities of fish?
And, surely, I thought, this was not the first time that scientists had ever thought about fish pain, nor the only way one could think about it. Although the history of Western thought is littered with disparaging ideas about aquatic life, we have a rich corpus to draw from for alternative ways of understanding the natural world and the experiences of fish. Charles Darwin, for example, wrote in The Descent of Man that “the lower animals…manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery.” He did not wonder about whether fish feel pain, Becca Franks, the NYU professor, told me, “because he assumed that they did. He didn’t find it to be surprising. He spoke easily and fluently about animal emotions across the animal kingdom.”
And even in modern science, Franks points out, land animals, unlike fish, have not been put through an intensive battery of experiments to test whether they can feel pain; researchers start from the assumption that they do. “Nobody’s done these tests with chimpanzees,” she said, nor has anyone felt obliged to set up a comparable research program in chickens to confirm whether their pain is real.
But with fish, “their inferior status is evident even in arguments designed to grant them greater moral standing,” Franks and a group of co-authors wrote in a chapter of the book Animal Dignity. “Fishes, but not other vertebrates, are repeatedly asked, in increasingly elaborate experiential designs, to prove that they can feel pain.”
Darwin’s ideas belong to an intellectual lineage that takes animal feeling for granted, as a constitutive part of what it means to be an animal. “He said animals must feel pain, because it is an alarm system that alerts them to danger and stops you from injuring yourself,” Sneddon said. But to understand why the fish pain debate remains a debate, we have to understand another, competing tendency that has shaped our view of animals since the Scientific Revolution: the idea, associated with the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes and others, that animals are akin to machines without thought or feeling.
“Debates around fishes’ ability to feel pain,” scientists Georgia Mason and J. Michelle Lavery wrote in 2022, “are essentially debates about consciousness.” The sensation of pain, after all, requires an animal to be conscious — to have something that it’s like to be them. Sentience, a more specific form of consciousness, refers to an animal’s ability to have positively or negatively valenced feelings, like pain and pleasure.
Science is still far from understanding how and why consciousness arises, how widespread it is across our planet, and what the content of conscious experiences is — what it’s like inside the mind of, say, a fish that evolved to navigate a world so different from our own.
“On the one hand is the brain, a tangible lump of tissue that can be handled, weighed, measured, sliced and publicly examined. On the other are our conscious experiences — vivid and all-consuming but private and known only to the one person experiencing them,” biologist Marian Dawkins wrote in 2017. “How the two are connected is still so unknown to us that to say that there is something mysterious and almost magical about it seems entirely appropriate.” That means the scientific methods we have cannot prove that an animal — or even a human — is conscious.
Descartes, one of the fathers of modern science, helped codify the divide between the physical and the mental. He “split mind from matter, arguing that they are totally distinct: Only humans have mind,” as Vox’s Sigal Samuel has put it. And he crystallized a premise now embedded deep in the foundation of modern science: that science is responsible only for the objective examination of things that can be independently verified, which almost by definition excludes subjective experiences.
Today, scientific approaches to animal minds land somewhere between the Cartesian and the Darwinian views. Most scientists, like most modern people generally, do not actually believe, as Descartes likely did, that animals are unfeeling automata. For the animals who are closest to us — like the baby pigs who cry out when they’re castrated on factory farms, or even the chickens bred to grow so big they struggle to walk — the capacity for pain is not seriously in doubt. But scientific consensus has not extended that courtesy to fish. And because consciousness is, at bottom, a philosophical question, whether or not fish possess it can be debated endlessly.
Some scientists argue that fish lack parts of the brain that they believe are necessary to feel pain, particularly the neocortex, a brain region that only mammals have. This is a minority view, dismissed by most experts who have researched pain perception in fish, who point out that there is no good evidence to believe that fish brains must process pain in the same way mammalian ones do. Birds also lack a neocortex, and even in humans, pain processing is distributed across different parts of the brain. We don’t understand either consciousness or the brain enough to claim that lacking a particular brain architecture forecloses the possibility of feeling pain. And it’s worth noting here that this very critique of fish pain, according to Franks and co-authors Jennifer Jacquet and Troy Vettese, traces back to fishing interests, who, reacting to the rise of animal welfare laws, helped create a research agenda disputing fishes’ capacity for pain.
Because consciousness is, at bottom, a philosophical question, whether or not fish possess it can be debated endlessly.
Most experts in the field now do believe fish feel pain. But a more thoughtful, more serious challenge to the evidence comes from Georgia Mason, a behavioral biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, who, in 2022, co-authored a review of the fish pain literature that became a touchstone in the field. She and co-author J. Michelle Lavery called for tougher evidentiary standards in fish pain research, arguing that many of the types of pain tests that have been used in fish can also be passed by non-conscious subjects, like humans in unaware states and animals whose spines have been disconnected from their brains.
Decerebrate rats and chicks, for example, or animals who have had their forebrain function removed and are used as non-conscious comparators (controls) in consciousness debates, still show strikingly affective behavior, including licking or biting at injuries and vocalizing. If unconscious animals can do that, the authors argue, then a fish rubbing at their injuries is not very strong evidence of consciously felt pain.
In Mason’s estimation, existing fish pain research consists of “more opinion than hard empirical work that was directly relevant to how fish feel,” she told me. “Faced with the question, ‘How do you know this shows sentience?’ I think a lot of researchers just start hand-waving at that point.” She and her co-author propose ideas for experiments that they argue could more convincingly show that consciousness, rather than just reflexes, are involved in a pain response.
But Mason doesn’t believe that fish don’t feel pain — just that we haven’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they do. She thinks we should take a precautionary approach, treating fish as though they’re capable of pain and suffering until higher-quality evidence comes in. “I really think that’s the right thing to do,” she said. That contrasts with the preferred approach of other prominent fish pain skeptics, who argue that giving fish the benefit of the doubt could lead to animal welfare regulations that imperil the fishing industry and undermine food security.
Despite the inherent limitations of consciousness research, the Cartesian split that quarantined private experiences from science, Mason and plenty of other researchers like her believe that rigorous experimental designs can convincingly approximate consciousness. “We don’t have a perfect marker of being sentient,” she acknowledged. “We’re never going to know for sure. And the trick is to try and close that inferential gap so it’s as small as it can possibly be, so that really you have to do elaborate backflips to argue that an animal isn’t sentient.”
On a personal, human level, Mason said, she has felt the pull of recognition and connection to nonhuman animals, including fish. “Watching free-living fish in the wild on a reef, I think you can immediately be convinced that of course they’re conscious,” she said. “But the question is: Is that feeling tapping into something real, or are we just tricking ourselves?”
Here is another way of thinking about fish. Although there’s a common misconception that fish are primitive, in evolutionary terms — because humans, along with every living animal species, are descended from aquatic ancestors — the fishes alive today are nothing like the fish we’re descended from. Fish have not stood still but have continued to evolve and speciate, just as the lineage that would become humans did. “There has been ample time for fishes to evolve complex and diverse behavioural patterns as well as the cognitive hardware that goes with it to match the diversity of ecological niches they occupy,” wrote Australia-based ecologist Culum Brown.
Part of the confusion stems from the very language we use. To even talk about “fish” as one undifferentiated mass impoverishes our understanding of them; it would be as sweeping as lumping all land animals into one category. There are just as many (and possibly more) fish species as there are land vertebrates, and at least as much diversity among fishes as there is between toads, ravens, lions, and gorillas.
Fishes are, to state the obvious, very different from us. But there’s no reason to assume that evolving to live in the watery realm that covers most of the Earth has necessarily made them less conscious or cognitively complex. Cleaner wrasse fish can recognize themselves in a mirror, a finding that Mason calls “amazing and mind-blowing — it gives you goosebumps.” As Vox contributor Garrison Lovely wrote, “guppies have friends, salmon probably jump for fun, monogamous convict cichlid fish exhibit more pessimistic behavior after a breakup, and Japanese puffer fish make flirtatious art.”
Franks suggests there are more productive routes than trying to get to the bottom of the consciousness question. “We don’t even understand how this works in humans,” she said. Rather than ask “is there a light on or not?” inside fishes’ minds, we might ask what different species of fishes want, what motivates them, and what interests them by observing their behavior and simulating the actual contexts in which they live.
“The more that we can fill that out in its rich complexity rather than on one single narrow track, the better it is for fish and for our understanding,” Franks said. It might also make the general public more likely to empathize with fish than do depressing, undignified experiments where they’re repeatedly wounded or made to flee electric shocks.
Mason, too, suspects that if we’re trying to figure out our ethical duties to fish, or to any animal, pain may be too narrow a question. “You could have no ability to feel pain but still a completely different type of sentience,” she said, like an animal that feels terrible in the presence of a strong magnetic field. It’s possible to imagine a species that “can’t feel pain, but can feel terror or other negative affective states that we humans can’t imagine.”
We’ll maybe (probably) never know what it’s like to be a fish. Which is kind of sad, but there’s something thrilling about it, too. The countless ways of experiencing the universe, far beyond our terrestrial comprehension, is our planet’s grandest mystery. If consciousness is unknowable, then we must decide, rather than determine, who ought to be treated as if they can feel. That leaves us to do what humans already do so well — to see a life unlike our own and recognize a fellow subject.
2025-11-21 06:15:00
2025年11月13日，唐纳德·特朗普在白宫东厅与卫生与公众服务部部长罗伯特·F·肯尼迪 Jr. 握手。| Heather Diehl/Getty Images
本文出自《Logoff》每日通讯，旨在帮助您了解特朗普政府的动态，而不让政治新闻占据您的生活。欢迎订阅。
欢迎来到《Logoff》：美国疾病控制与预防中心（CDC）最近在其网站上修改内容，暗示目前尚无科学共识表明疫苗会导致自闭症（实际上并非如此）。这一变化引发了CDC职业员工的不满，标志着该机构在特朗普政府领导下逐渐偏离基于证据的公共卫生指导方针。与此同时，围绕卫生部长罗伯特·F·肯尼迪 Jr. 和食品药品监督管理局局长马丁·马卡里之间的权力斗争也在展开，这场斗争涉及政府的医疗政策和疫苗政策。尽管肯尼迪和马卡里在多数问题上公开立场一致，但有报道称他们之间的影响力争夺正日益激烈。
他们为何争斗？部分原因可能是管理风格的冲突。但更深层次来看，这种动态是：肯尼迪作为一位没有医学背景的反体制外人士，主张更激进、更快速地改变公共卫生政策；而马卡里则是一位前约翰·霍普金斯大学外科医生，倾向于更加谨慎和渐进的方式。
特朗普对此有何看法？这是个大问题，也是最难回答的。特朗普态度不一致，有时会批评肯尼迪过于反疫苗。但他在白宫活动上也曾发表过关于疫苗中铝含量的长篇言论。此外，疫苗问题并不是特朗普的首要关注点，这导致了权力真空，肯尼迪和马卡里都在试图填补。
这为何重要？肯尼迪与马卡里的较量有助于我们理解特朗普政府目前的疫苗政策：相较于以往任何一届政府，他们更加反疫苗，但又没有采取更激进的措施。他们希望安抚“让美国再次健康”联盟，同时又不完全疏远更支持疫苗的选民和制药行业。但如果肯尼迪占据上风，他可能会加快推行以反疫苗为导向的政策改革。
好了，现在是时候关掉新闻了…… NPR最新推出的Tiny Desk Concert，邀请了Goo Goo Dolls乐队，非常精彩，您可以点击此处收听。希望您喜欢，感谢您的阅读，祝您有一个美好的夜晚，明天我们再见！
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 CDC is leaning into anti-vax rhetoric, suggesting in a recent change to its website that there is no fixed scientific consensus on whether vaccines cause autism (they do not).
What’s the context? The change, which has been met with dismay among career CDC staffers, cements the agency’s pivot away from evidence-based public health guidance under the Trump administration.
It also comes as a larger power struggle, centering on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, is unfolding over the administration’s health care agenda and vaccine policy. While Kennedy and Makary have been publicly aligned on most issues, news reports suggest that their battle for influence is heating up.
Why are they fighting? Part of the problem may be clashing management styles. But dig a little deeper, and this appears to be the dynamic: Kennedy, the outsider anti-institutionalist with no medical background, is pushing to go bigger and bolder and faster with changing public health policy, while Makary, a former Johns Hopkins surgeon, is moving more deliberatively.
What does Donald Trump think? This is the big question — and the hardest one to answer. Trump is inconsistent and has at times chided Kennedy for being overly anti-vaccine. But he also delivered an extended rant about aluminum in vaccines during a White House event. On top of that, the issue isn’t a top priority for him, which creates a power vacuum that both Kennedy and Makary are trying to fill.
Why does this matter? The Kennedy-Makary tug-of-war helps us make sense of the Trump vaccine agenda so far: They’re more anti-vaccine than any prior administration, but they have also hesitated to take bigger swings. They want to appease the Make America Healthy Again coalition without fully alienating more vaccine-friendly voters or the drug industry.
But if Kennedy wins out, he could hit the accelerator on overhauling vaccine policy in his anti-vax image.
NPR’s latest Tiny Desk Concert, featuring the Goo Goo Dolls, was such a treat, and you can listen to it here. I hope you enjoy, and as always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2025-11-21 03:32:29
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2025-11-20 20:30:00
最近，我在购买今年第一件圣诞礼物时，结账页面上出现了这样的提示：“是否要将此次购物分成四笔免息分期付款？”这种以较小金额换取更快获得心仪商品的诱惑力很强，以至于美国一半的消费者计划在假日购物中使用所谓的“先买后付”（BNPL）服务。同一项调查还显示，四分之一的千禧一代和Z世代人群经常使用Affirm和Klarna等分期付款服务。这些年轻人正面临就业困难、学生贷款逾期和食品价格上涨等压力，这或许解释了为何DoorDash与Klarna合作后，人们开始通过贷款购买外卖，导致借贷行为更加普遍。
随着美国经济中 affordability（可负担性）成为主要议题，今年的假日购物季显得尤为不同。虽然商品价格普遍上涨，但BNPL服务的普及使得更多人能够负担起原本无法支付的购买。然而，特朗普政府放松了对这一灰色金融行业的监管，使消费者更容易陷入意外费用和债务漩涡。一些人甚至警告，当前的脆弱局面正逐渐演变为类似次贷危机的早期阶段。
Nadine Chabrier指出，目前BNPL贷款机构无需评估消费者是否具备还款能力，且允许同时申请多笔贷款（即“贷款叠加”），这可能导致过度借贷。根据Lending Tree的调查，超过40%的BNPL用户在过去一年中出现过逾期付款，而20%的人同时持有三笔或更多贷款。此外，四分之一受访者表示曾为购买食品使用BNPL贷款。
值得注意的是，并非所有BNPL贷款都是免息的。Affirm和Klarna的利率最高可达36%（Klarna实际为35.99%）。尽管远低于高达600%的现金贷款利率，但仍高于零。此外，BNPL债务正逐渐成为独立的金融产品。例如，Elliott Investment Management最近以65亿美元购入Klarna的债务，而Affirm截至6月已发行近120亿美元的证券化债务。TechCrunch的一篇文章指出，BNPL公司通过将高风险债务分割后出售给投资者，制造出复杂的金融工程，掩盖了实际风险。这种模式与次贷危机颇为相似。
尽管如此，Chabrier认为目前还不能断言存在危机，因为对BNPL借贷规模的了解仍不充分。但《纽约时报》杂志的一篇文章指出，BNPL行业已构建出一种狂热的消费文化，使用户深陷债务漩涡。因此，在今年的假日购物季开始之际，建议消费者仔细阅读条款，或避免使用“先买后付”服务，以免陷入困境。本文也发表于User Friendly通讯，欢迎订阅以获取更多相关内容。
The other day, I went to buy my first big Christmas gift of the year, and there it was, on the checkout page: Would I like to split this purchase up into four easy interest-free payments?
Parting with a smaller amount of money to get something you want sooner is a compelling offer. So compelling that half of all shoppers in the United States plan to use so-called “buy now, pay later,” or BNPL, services for holiday shopping this year, according to a PayPal survey. The same survey showed that one in four millennials and Gen Z-ers use payment options like Affirm and Klarna on a regular basis. These are the same young people who are having a hard time finding a job, struggling to pay overdue student loan bills, and dealing with rising food prices. That might be why it felt so dark when DoorDash announced a partnership with Klarna earlier this year, ushering in an era where people are taking out loans to pay for their takeout.
As affordability becomes the dominant issue in American politics, the holiday shopping season feels different this year. Everything is more expensive, sure. But with BNPL options being offered by everyone from fintech startups to major banks, it’s also easier than ever to finance purchases you couldn’t otherwise afford. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has taken some of the guardrails off this shadowy lending industry, leaving consumers more vulnerable to unexpected fees and endless debt. Some are even warning that the precarious situation is starting to look a lot like the early days of the subprime mortgage crisis that led to the Great Recession.
“BNPL lenders are not currently required to […] determine whether consumers can afford their BNPL loans,” said Nadine Chabrier, senior policy and litigation counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending. “There are currently no checks and balances on borrowers taking out multiple BNPL loans at the same time, which may lead to overextension.”
If you’ve seen The Big Short or simply followed along as history unfolded, this sounds pretty concerning. Before I get too carried away with warning of an imminent economic crisis, however, let’s review how these little loans work.
In the industry’s early days, you were mostly likely to come across a BNPL option on the checkout page of an e-commerce website, probably one selling luxury goods. The option to pay in installments, often with zero interest, made it easier for consumers to pull the trigger on high-dollar items, so stores were quick to adopt the feature. The lenders would make their money by taking a small cut of the purchase price, and they would also charge the consumer fees for late payments.
Venture-backed fintech startups led the charge. Affirm, founded in 2012, helped take BNPL mainstream and Klarna joined the market in 2015. The pandemic supercharged the industry, and the dollar amount borrowed skyrocketed from $16.8 million in 2019 to $180 million in 2022, according to a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) report released that year. The average loan at the time was $135.
One big problem, as Chabrier pointed out, is that BNPL lenders typically don’t have to check to see if you can afford to take out a loan, and it’s possible to take out several at once, a practice known as “loan stacking.” These factors might explain why late payments are so common. More than 40 percent of BNPL users say they made a late payment in the last year, up from 34 percent last year, according to a Lending Tree survey. Meanwhile, more than 20 percent say they’ve had three or more loans going at once, and a quarter of people surveyed said they’ve taken out a BNPL loan to buy groceries.
This is a good time to highlight the fact that not all of these loans are interest-free. Both Affirm and Klarna say their interest rates can go as high as 36 percent (Klarna’s actually tops out at 35.99 percent, but it’s fair to round up). That’s still much lower than payday loans, which can get as high as 600 percent, but it’s a lot higher than zero.
Now back to the looming financial crisis. Until very recently, most BNPL loans weren’t reported to credit agencies, which meant there was very little visibility into who was borrowing and at what rates. During the Biden administration, the CFPB tried to regulate the industry by issuing a rule that would treat BNPL lenders like credit card companies, but the Trump administration rescinded that rule earlier this year. Around the same time, the company that makes the FICO score, a measure of how likely someone is to pay back a loan, said that it would introduce a new type of score that took BNPL debt into account. Those scores can currently only be seen by lenders, however, not consumers.
The BNPL industry remains largely unregulated at a national level. All that consumer debt, meanwhile, is becoming a financial product of its own. Elliott Investment Management just made a deal to buy $6.5 billion worth of debt from Klarna, as the fintech company expands its business into larger, longer-term loans for consumers. Affirm had sold nearly $12 billion worth of securitized debt as of June.
In a recent TechCrunch piece, Connie Loizos explained what BNPL companies are doing in bleak terms: “Slice up risky consumer debt, sell it to investors who believe they understand the risk profile, and create layers of financial engineering that obscure where the actual exposure lies.”
Again, it sounds a lot like the subprime mortgage crisis. It’s unclear if we should be using such big words for what’s happening at this moment, though.
“It would be premature to say there is a crisis,” Chabrier told me. “While it’s possible, we do not know enough about the scope of BNPL borrowing to say such a thing.”
What we can say, on an individual level, is that BNPL is getting more dangerous. The industry “has built a delirious new culture of consumption — and trapped users in a vortex of debt,” according to a New York Times Magazine feature on people who just started shopping, missed the fine print, and got in real trouble.
As this holiday shopping season kicks off, read the fine print. Or better yet, don’t buy now or pay later. The US economy may thank you for it.
A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!
2025-11-20 20:00:00
许多成年人希望避免与他人的孩子接触，比如在飞机上、家中、水疗中心或商业渔船等场合，他们可能不愿与孩子同处。然而，普通民众在非私人企业或地方政府的场所，很难自行设立“禁止儿童”的规则。婚礼就是这样一个罕见的例外，一些新人开始要求将孩子排除在外，有的较为礼貌，有的则较为直接。人们不愿带孩子参加婚礼的原因多种多样，可能是想让朋友彻夜狂欢，或让宾客尽情享用开放式吧台，或者不想让孩子目睹鸡舞的激情场面，又或者是为了避免仪式中的干扰。由于成年人曾经都是孩子，他们往往爱管闲事且爱发表意见，因此难以避免对无儿童婚礼的评论。而有一小部分人，无论是否受邀，总会思考是否需要例外，或对禁止儿童参加婚礼提出抱怨。这种对规则漏洞的探讨引发了热烈的争论，有人建议：也许新人应提供儿童照看服务？或者规定仅禁止儿童，而不包括新生儿？或者认为自己的孩子是例外？对此，一些人进行了有力的反驳：就待在家里吧，找人照看孩子。当然，不是。这种争论往往让成年人的讨论变得杂乱无章，因此我开始思考，是否忽略了最重要的声音——那些直接受到无儿童婚礼影响的孩子们。他们是否想要参加婚礼？是否认为自己被歧视？是否甚至知道什么是婚礼？了解他们的想法或许能帮助双方更理性地看待“无儿童婚礼”的议题。在父母的帮助下，我采访了几位孩子：8岁的Ronan、5岁的Rafi（Rafaella）和同样5岁的Ellie。他们是否知道婚礼是什么？Ronan说：“知道。” Rafi说：“知道，就是人们结婚的时候。” Ellie说：“知道，你可以穿漂亮的衣服。”他们是否愿意参加婚礼？Ronan说：“也许，要看是谁的婚礼。” Rafi说：“是的，我想看人们结婚。” Ellie说：“是的，因为看起来挺有趣的。”如果成年人举办婚礼或聚会并说“禁止儿童”，他们会有什么感觉？Rafi说：“难过。” Ellie说：“难受。我不喜欢成年人不让小孩参加。”你们觉得成年人无聊吗？Ronan说：“他们在工作时很无聊。” Rafi说：“不，他们不无聊，因为他们每天都可以拍照。”如果你们是唯一一个在无聊的成年人聚会中出现的孩子，会去参加还是直接离开？Ronan说：“我会直接离开。” Rafi说：“没有其他孩子？不，我会离开聚会，和朋友们待在一起——我爱他们。” Ellie说：“我会逃跑，去找其他孩子玩。”为什么？Ronan说：“我会感到尴尬，不想谈论这件事。” Rafi说：“我想在聚会上笑，笑很重要。”需要指出的是，孩子们有时会因未亲身体验而误判情况。但根据这次调查，孩子们似乎确实喜欢婚礼和被邀请的概念。他们也倾向于相信成年人可能并不无聊。不过，如果他们是唯一的孩子，这种愉悦感会急剧下降。成为一群成年人中唯一的未成年人，他们并不希望这样的场景。我的调查结果与成人礼仪专家的建议一致，他们认为新人有权决定婚礼是否允许儿童参加，一旦做出决定，就不应有例外，因为这可能传递偏袒的信号，引发更多不满。作为相信新人有权自由安排婚礼的人，我认为无儿童婚礼应保持无儿童状态。新人想要这样，参加婚礼的人如果不想来，也可以选择不去。而真正受到规则影响的孩子们，如果他们是唯一的孩子，也不希望参加，无论父母怎么说。
There are many places where adults would prefer not to be around other people’s children. Seated next to or in front of them on airplanes, their homes, spas, commercial fishing vessels; these places range far and wide. But there are few places where regular citizens, outside of private business and local governments, can impose a no-child rule themselves.
One of these rare spaces is weddings.
Some people getting married are now asking, some more politely than others, to leave kids out of their special day. There are plenty of reasons why some wouldn’t want children around. Perhaps it’s because they want their friends to party late into the night. Maybe they want their guests to fully take advantage of the open bar. What if no one wants children to witness the violent, erotic thrill of the chicken dance?
Or maybe the couple simply wants to avoid interruptions during their ceremony.
Naturally, because adults — who were all children at one point in their lives — are nosy and opinionated, they cannot help but give their thoughts on a child-free wedding. A smaller portion of those people, whether they’re invited to said nuptials or not, cannot help but think of needed exceptions to and complaints about prohibiting children from a wedding that isn’t theirs. As it often happens online, a discourse (derogatory) was born. Some of the debate’s talking points included:
Perhaps the couple should provide babysitting or some kind of child care to invitees? What if the rules only apply to children and not newborns? What if my child, who is not like other children, is the exception?
This brand of loophole-hunting evoked spirited defenses: Just stay home. Find someone to watch your child. No, of course not.
With so many adults turning the debate into a cacophony of jumbled thoughts and jagged replies, I wondered if we were missing key voices in the squabble, the people affected most by a child-free wedding: children themselves. Do they want to go to weddings? Do they believe they’re being discriminated against? Do they even know what weddings are?
Knowing how they feel and what they believe might help both sides parse the no-kids debate. With the help of their parents, I interviewed a few kids to get to the bottom of this: Ronan, who is 8, Rafi (Rafaella), who is 5, and Ellie, who is also 5.
Do you know what a wedding is?
Ronan: Yes.
Rafi: Yes, it’s when people get married.
Ellie: Yes, you get to wear a fancy dress.
Would you ever want to go to a wedding?
Ronan: Maybe. Depends whose wedding it is.
Rafi: Yeah, I think I want to see people get married.
Ellie: Yeah, because it seems kinda fun.
Let’s pretend that a grown-up had a wedding or a party and they said, “no kids allowed.” How would that make you feel?
Rafi: Sad.
Ellie: Bad. I don’t like when grown-ups don’t allow kids.
Do you think grown-ups are boring?
Ronan: When they’re working, they are.
Rafi: No because, they don’t do any boring stuff. Like, they get to take pictures every day.
If you were the only kid at a (boring) grown-up party, would you go or would you skip it altogether?
Ronan: Skip the grown-up party altogether.
Rafi: No other kids? No. Skip the party and hang out with my friends — I love ’em.
Ellie: I’d run away and play with other kids.
Why?
Ronan: I’d be embarrassed. I don’t want to talk about it. Oh, wow.
Rafi: I like laughing at parties.
It’s important to acknowledge that children are sometimes known to misjudge situations before they experience them. (A crucial part of growing up is witnessing the world not live up to your expectations.) But based on this extensive and extremely scientific survey, it does seem like children do in fact enjoy the ideas of a wedding and being invited. And it seems like kids also give grown-ups the benefit of the doubt when it comes to being boring. It’s pertinent to note, though, that the enjoyment value they see drops precipitously if they’re the only kid present. Being the only human being under 10 in a gathering full of grown-ups — which may well be the exact situation if they’re brought to a child-free wedding — is not a scenario they desire.
This all-around agreement among my survey group is affirming to me. It also aligns with the advice from adult etiquette experts at The Knot and Emily Post who say that the couple should have the final say. They also note that once the child-free decree is sent, no exceptions should be made, because it signals favoritism and creates the potential for even more feelings.
As someone who believes that whoever is getting married is allowed to do whatever they want at their wedding, and that whomever is invited is always allowed to say no and not attend, a child-free wedding should be child-free. The people getting married want it. The people going want it — if they really don’t, they are allowed to stay home. And the people affected by the actual rules, the children themselves, don’t want to be there either if they are the only kids there — no matter what their parents say.
2025-11-20 19:30:00
2025年9月9日，美国蒙特雷帕克的一家超市。| Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
在上任第二个任期之前，前总统唐纳德·特朗普于2024年竞选时承诺将大幅降低几乎所有商品的价格。“如果我当选，我将立即降低价格，从第一天开始。”他说。而在重新上任后的几个月里，特朗普表示：“经济状况很好，股市现在比上任时更高。”然而，普通民众——那些不在政府内部的人——并不一定这么觉得。
关键要点：
尽管如此，特朗普最近提出了一些应对生活成本的方案，包括向低收入和中等收入纳税人发放2000美元的支票，以及一项可能包含50年期房贷的住房计划。然而，美国经济编辑卡特里娜·拉姆佩尔（Catherine Rampell）认为，总统不太可能真正降低整体物价。她告诉《Today, Explained》节目主持人诺埃尔·金（Noel King）：“整体物价水平，也就是整个经济中所有商品和服务的价格，基本上不会下降，这是有意为之的。”
拉姆佩尔和金讨论了通货膨胀、通货紧缩、跟风消费等话题。以下是他们对话的节选（已删减并简化）：
“我是个非常节俭的美国人，我非常关注价格，但我几乎记不起成年生活中价格有显著下降的时期，除了2008年金融危机期间，那时房价真的非常低。这似乎在说，价格可能不会真的下降？”
“确实如此。虽然个别商品的价格可能会波动，比如在石油精炼厂关闭时，油价和汽油价格可能飙升，但一旦精炼厂恢复运营，价格又会下降。同样，像禽流感这样的供应冲击也会导致鸡肉和鸡蛋价格上涨，但一旦鸡群恢复，价格又会回落。因此，虽然某些商品的价格会波动，尤其是易受供应冲击影响的能源和食品，但整体物价水平几乎从未下降过。”
“你今天花的钱比一年前、十年前、二十年前都多。但当政客们在竞选时，他们总是说：‘我会让生活更负担得起。’这中间的差距是什么？为什么我们会相信政客说‘我要让生活更负担得起’，即使我们知道一年后价格可能还会上涨？”
“这可能是因为人们不自觉地认为物价会下降。特别是疫情前的生活，人们记得那时候物价更低。因此，他们会觉得要求官员让物价回到过去是合理的。但如果你告诉他们，实际上美联储的目标是整体物价上涨2%，而不是下降，这并不明显，而且是合理的。大多数美国人并不太在意，因为物价增长缓慢，他们有时间去适应。如果年均物价增长2%，这在很多年里都不会让人感到痛苦，尤其是因为工资增长通常至少和物价增长一样快。”
“最近不同的是，我们在疫情后经历了非常突然的通货膨胀。因此，人们最近经历的低价仍然记忆犹新。拜登曾说经济很好，但对很多人来说，这并不真实。特朗普也声称在他的任期内物价会下降，但同样并不属实。这是否意味着总统在让我们‘不要相信自己的眼睛’？这是否是导致美国人对物价感到愤怒的部分原因？”
“我认为是的。你可以对公众说很多谎话，但人们会看到自己的银行账户变化，也会看到在杂货店结账时的价格变化。因此，当他们自己在支付账单时，很难欺骗他们。”
“当然，当拜登说经济很好时，确实有很多积极因素。就业市场非常强劲。但人们并不关心这些，因为他们即使有工作，生活成本也在上升。”
“另一个方面是，即使在拜登任内，工资和物价都在上涨，但人们在心理上对这两者有不同的感受。当你拿到加薪时，你会觉得这是你努力工作的结果，是老板认可你的表现。而通货膨胀则像是你被剥夺了工资的实际价值。这在一定程度上是真实的，但另一方面，部分工资上涨也是因为员工要求更高的薪资来弥补通货膨胀。”
“我确信，特朗普和拜登都希望降低物价，对吧？”
“是的。如果他们能做到，那将非常成功。问题是，任何一位美国总统真的能整体上让我们的生活更便宜吗？”
“总统办公桌下并没有一个可以调低物价的旋钮。而且，他们可能并不真的想要这么做。因为当物价下降时，也会带来很多负面影响。有时，当某些明显的价格下降时，可能意味着经济出现了其他严重问题。例如，特朗普最近承诺要让汽油价格回到每加仑2美元，这比现在低很多。你知道上一次汽油价格是2美元是什么时候吗？”
“不，什么时候？”
“是2020年春季。哦天哪，那会儿我们正经历全球大流行，人们停止上班，工厂关闭，各种企业对能源的需求减少，因此燃料需求下降，汽油价格也变得便宜。”
“如果整体物价水平下降，不只是像汽油这样的单一商品，这通常意味着经济状况非常糟糕。这基本上意味着整个经济都在打折销售。消费者停止消费，企业则试图通过降价来吸引消费者。如果你看到价格下降，你可能不会急于购买，因为担心明天会更便宜。这就会形成一个自我强化的循环：人们看到价格下降，就推迟消费，消费停滞，价格进一步下降。这有时被称为‘通缩螺旋’。”
“我们曾在大萧条时期见过这种情况，日本在90年代也出现过，希腊在债务危机后也出现过。这并不是我们希望经济进入的模式，即使物价只是微幅增长或接近零增长。这就是为什么美联储将通胀目标设为2%，而不是0%或更糟的负增长。因为一旦物价开始普遍下降，经济可能会陷入困境。”
“我最近读了一篇《纽约时报》的文章，采访了一对夫妇。他们买了一套房子，利率很高，不得不放弃假期和外出活动，更加精打细算。我心想，这不就是生活本来的样子吗？我们总是希望有更多的钱，但似乎没有。我们是否应该改变对价格和负担能力的看法？”
“每个人对固定金额的钱都有不同的选择，而且很容易评判他人的选择。但确实，我们所有人都生活在某种限制之中。这并不意味着说‘大家都过得更好，而我却不能’是不合理的。这种感觉确实令人沮丧。但政策制定者有责任确保人们在羡慕邻居、觉得自己贫穷的同时，也能获得我们认为是人类基本需求的东西。”
Before his second term, then-former President Donald Trump ran a campaign in 2024 promising to lower the prices of pretty much everything. “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down. Starting on day one,” he said.
And in the months since retaking office, Trump has said, “The economy’s doing great. The stock market’s higher now than when I came to office.” But regular folks — people outside of the administration — aren’t necessarily feeling as great about things.
Electricity prices are up 11% since January. Groceries are up about 2.7% from last year as of September, with items like coffee up almost 21% and ground beef up 11.5% in the past year. And there hasn’t been nationwide relief for housing expenses either.
Trump is showing us all something that former President Joe Biden had already proven: It’s really difficult to lower prices, have a productive economy, and satisfy voters. (Indeed, his approval rating is at the lowest point of his second term, largely driven by costs.) Still, Trump has recently offered some ideas to help out with the cost of living, including a $2,000 check for lower- and middle-income taxpayers and a housing plan that could include 50-year mortgages.
Can the president of the United States really lower prices? Catherine Rampell, the economics editor at the Bulwark and an anchor on MS NOW, says it’s not likely. “The overall price level, so like, in aggregate all of the things across an economy — that basically never comes down,” she told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “And that’s by design.”
Rampell and King discussed inflation, deflation, the pressure of keeping up with the Joneses, and more. Below is an excerpt of their 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.
Catherine, I am a very cheap American. I pay very careful attention to prices, and I don’t remember prices ever coming down in any significant way in my entire adult life other than during the great financial crisis, where I remember you could, like, get a house for real cheap.
It feels like that is saying something: that maybe prices don’t just come down?
Yeah, that’s pretty much accurate. To be fair, prices of individual things can fluctuate. You mentioned housing when there was a big housing bust. For example, if an oil refinery goes offline, oil prices, gasoline prices might shoot up. And then once that refinery comes back online, the prices might go down.
Same thing for other supply shocks like bird flu: Bird flu happens; all the chickens die. Chicken prices go up; egg prices go up. Once those flocks are replenished, then you start to see prices come back down again.
So it’s not as if there’s no such thing as, like, fluctuation for individual products, particularly really volatile things that are vulnerable to supply shocks like energy and food, but the overall price level — in aggregate, all of the things across an economy — that [number] basically never comes down. You are spending more today than you did a year ago, than you did 10 years ago. than you did 20 years ago.
And yet when politicians are out on the campaign trail, the thing that they will say again and again — no matter what level of office they’re running for is, “I am going to make life more affordable.”
What exactly is the disconnect? Why do we believe a politician who says, “I’m gonna make life more affordable” when we also sort of know that a year from now things will probably be a little more expensive?
I think it’s partly that it’s just not intuitive. People remember life being cheaper. Particularly pre-pandemic life. They remember it being cheaper. And so it seems like a reasonable thing to ask of your public officials, whether elected officials or those at the Federal Reserve, let’s say: Why can’t things go back to the way that they were?
And if you explain to them, well, actually the Federal Reserve is targeting an overall price increase of 2% and not a negative — none of this is obvious to anyone, and that’s reasonable. Most of the time, Americans don’t really care, because price growth is so slow that they have time to adjust, right? If we have a 2% average price increase year over year, which we had for many, many years, it doesn’t feel that painful, particularly since your wages are probably going up by that much or more.
So life feels about as affordable as it did a year before or two years before, or five years before. What’s different recently is that we did have this very sudden surge in inflation in the several years following the pandemic. And so the lower prices that people had recently experienced were still very fresh in people’s memories.
You remember President Biden telling us that the economy was great. That was not true for a lot of people, for millions of people. President Trump says, “Prices in my administration are going down.” That is also not true.
Is the president telling us, “Don’t believe your eyes?” Is that part of what is contributing to Americans being so ticked off about prices?
I assume so. You know, you can lie to the American public about a lot of things. But they see what’s happening in their bank account. They see what’s happening when they get rung up at the grocery store. So I think it is harder to pull the wool over people’s eyes when they are actually paying their own bills.
Now, to be fair, when Biden was saying the economy was good, there were a lot of good things happening in the economy. The job market was really hot. The economy contains multitudes. But people didn’t really care about the fact that there were plentiful jobs to be had, because they had a job and their life was still getting less affordable.
The other thing that I want to flag here is that even as wages were going up and prices were going up [under Biden], I think psychologically people experienced those things differently. When you get a raise, you think it’s because you earned that raise, right? You did something really meritorious at work. Your pay went up because your boss recognized it. Or maybe you even changed jobs, and your pay went up when you changed jobs. And that was due to your own gumption and hard work. Whereas inflation is something that happened to you — that robbed you of the full value of that pay raise. And that’s partly true, but it’s also partly not true in the sense that part of the reason why wages were rising is that employees were demanding higher pay to compensate for higher inflation.
I’m sure that both President Trump and President Biden would’ve liked to bring prices down, right?
Oh yeah.
It would’ve been enormously successful. The question is, can any American president really just overall make life cheaper for us?
There is no dial under the Resolute desk that allows them to turn prices down.
Dang.
Although I’m not sure that they would’ve really wanted to. Because look, when you have prices go down, it has lots of negative consequences too. Or oftentimes, when you do see some very salient price go down, it might be because something else bad is happening in the economy. As an example of this, Donald Trump lately has been promising that he’s going to get gasoline prices down to $2 a gallon again, which would be quite a big decline from where they are today. Do you know the last time gas was $2 a gallon?
No, when?
It was in spring of 2020.
Oh God. Okay. Don’t wanna do that again.
Exactly. What was going on in spring of 2020? Well, there was a global pandemic. People stopped driving to work. Factories shut down. Businesses of all kinds needed less energy. There was a lot less demand for fuel. And because there was less demand for fuel, that meant fuel was cheaper; gasoline was cheaper.
So if the overall price level is going down — not just one really salient good like gasoline — that often means an economy is very sick. It basically means that everything is on a fire sale. Consumers have stopped spending, and everyone, every business out there is trying to cut their prices to lure consumers back in. And if you are a consumer and you see prices already falling, you don’t want to be the chump who is like, “I’m gonna buy something now only to see it get cheaper tomorrow.”
What happens is this becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. People see prices falling, they hold off on spending, consumer spending grinds to a halt, and prices get lower and lower and lower. This is sometimes called a deflationary spiral. We saw a version of this during the Great Depression. We’ve seen versions of this in Japan, for example, in the ’90s, [and] in Greece during the Greek debt crisis and thereafter.
This is really not a good pattern [that] you want the economy to get into — where prices are falling or even when they’re just imperceptively hovering around 0% growth. That’s why the Federal Reserve is targeting a 2% pace of inflation rather than 0%, or heaven forbid, negative. Because again: If you get into that negative price growth, if prices are actively falling across the board, you can really end up in a dark place economically.
I was reading an article in the New York Times over the weekend, and there was this couple interviewed. They bought a house, their interest rate was high, and they were saying they’ve had to give up vacations and outings and budget more carefully. And I thought, Is that not just life?
Is it not just that we constantly wish we had more money and we don’t? Should we be changing our mindset a little bit around prices and affordability?
You know, different people make different choices about what to do with a fixed amount of money, and it’s very easy to judge other people’s choices. But yeah, we all live within some constraints. That doesn’t mean it’s not reasonable to say, it feels like everybody else is getting ahead and everybody else can afford a home and a vacation, and I can’t. And that’s really frustrating.
But it’s also up to policymakers to ensure that people — aside from side-eyeing their neighbors and feeling poor — that they do feel like they can get the things that we think are the basic needs of humanity.