Noah SmithModify

2025-05-31 17:36:20

Oren Cass, the founder of the think tank American Compass, is probably the leading intellectual voice of MAGA economics. In a recent blog post, he discusses the question of whether economic forces are like gravity. He writes:

[Y]es, the physical world is governed by the laws of gravity. But it is not governed only by the laws of gravity. Indeed, anyone who thought he could reliably predict the motion of bodies with knowledge only of gravity would be something of a moron.

Oh, really? Would such a man be a moron? Then please explain to me how Edmond Halley, using only his knowledge of gravity, and having no understanding of any of the other forces of nature, was able to predict a solar eclipse in 1715 to an accuracy of four minutes:

In 1715…a total solar eclipse was visible across a broad band of England. It was the first to be predicted on the basis of the Newtonian theory of universal gravitation, its path mapped clearly and advertised widely in advance. Visible in locations such as London and Cambridge, both astronomical experts and the public were able to see the phenomena and be impressed by the predictive power of the new astronomy…Wikipedia will tell you that this is known as Halley’s Eclipse, after Edmond Halley, who produced accurate predictions of its timing and an easily-read map of the eclipse’s path. Halley did not live to see the confirmation of his predictions of a returning comet – a 1759 triumph for the Newtonian system – but he was able to enjoy his 1715 calculations, which were within 4 minutes[.]

Cass — who holds a Bachelor’s in political economy from Williams College and a law degree from Harvard, but has no apparent training in physics — confidently assures us that anyone who attempted what Edmond Halley did would be “something of a moron”.

This is the kind of insult that says less about the target than about the person doing the insulting. Before you make confident assertions about a field of study, you owe it to your readers to attempt to understand that field at least a little bit.

A botched physics analogy is harmless enough. But Cass’ main argument isn’t about gravity at all — it’s about economics. And it’s here where his willingness to make grand pronouncements about whole fields of study gets him into real trouble.

Cass’ post is a response to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Matthew Hennessey. Hennessey, in turn, is responding to J.D. Vance’s declaration that markets are a “tool”. Hennessey argues that markets are more like a force of nature than a tool.1 Cass is trying to rebut Hennessey, criticizing market fundamentalism while also taking a swipe at the entire discipline of economics.

Now, I am no fan of market fundamentalism, and I spent my early years as a blogger bashing the field of (macro)economics — often with even more scorn than Oren Cass employs in this post. But I like to think that when I did this, I generally stuck to making specific criticisms about actual economic models and methods.

A lot of econ critics don’t do this. Back when I was at Bloomberg, I used to have fun poking at the grandiose broadsides against economics that periodically appear in British publications like The Guardian or The Telegraph. These critiques tend to repeat the same old nostrums over and over — economics isn’t a science, it doesn’t do controlled experiments, its assumptions are bad, its theories don’t work, people can’t be predicted like particles, etc. etc.

There are grains of truth to these boilerplate critiques, but the people who write them generally haven’t bothered to pay much attention to what modern economists actually do. Here’s what I wrote in a Bloomberg post back in 2017:

[E]conomists have developed some theories that really work. A good scientific theory makes testable predictions that apply to situations other than those that motivated the creation of the theory. Slowly, econ is building up a repertoire of these gems. One of them is auction theory, which predicts how buyers will bid for things like online ads or spectrum rights -- Google’s profits are powered by econ theory as much as by search algorithms. Another example is matching theory, which has made it a lot easier to get an organ transplant. A third is random-utility discrete choice theory, which is used in everything from marketing to transportation planning to disaster preparedness.

Nor are econ’s successful theories limited to microeconomics. Gravity models of trade, though fairly simple in nature, have proven very successful at predicting the flow of international trade.

These and other successful economics theories can be used confidently in a wide-variety of real-world situations, by policy makers, engineers and businesses. They prove that anyone who claims that econ theories will never be reliable, because they deal with human beings instead of atoms, is simply incorrect.

Yes, studying mass human behavior is different than studying the motions of the planets, in a number of important ways. But the intellectuals who loftily declare that economics “isn’t a science” don’t seem like they’ve bothered to think very hard about what those differences are, or when and why they matter.

For example, what do the people who write that “economics isn’t a science” think about natural experiments — the empirical technique that has taken over much of econ research in the last three decades? Do they think that these are always less informative than lab experiments in the natural sciences? And if so, why? What do they think are the strengths and weaknesses of natural experiments relative to lab experiments, and how much can they help us test theories and derive general principles about how economies work?

I suspect that very few of the econ critics have thought seriously about these questions, and that far too few have even heard of natural experiments. Certainly, if they have, they must have some good reason for never mentioning them. And certainly they must have good reasons for never talking about auction theory, matching theory, discrete choice models, gravity models, or any of the other economics theories that prove themselves in the real world day in and day out. Right?

But the screeds in The Guardian or The Telegraph are downright erudite compared to what Oren Cass serves up in his own criticism of econ. Here’s what he writes:

Economics is nothing like physics. Its principles are not generated from repeatable experiments, nor do they hold consistently across space and time. Trusting otherwise is a quite literal example of the blind faith and fundamentalism at issue.

That’s it. That’s literally Cass’ entire criticism of the field of economics in this post. He spends the rest of the post pulling quotes from conservative political thinkers — G.K. Chesterton, Robert Nisbet, Yuval Levin, Roger Scruton, etc. — who urge us to value things like community, tradition, etc., or who assert that markets can’t work without a robust social fabric. Those are interesting things to think about, to be sure, but they don’t bear on the question of what, exactly, Cass thinks is so inadequate about economics.

Cass does not name or criticize any specific economic theories in this post. He cites zero papers and names zero researchers. I looked through a bunch of his other posts about economics, and I almost never found him naming or criticizing any specific theories in those posts, either. In one post, I did find him criticizing the theory of comparative advantage, and he did make one useful, substantive point about it — that comparative advantage can’t explain trade deficits and surpluses. He’s right about that. That’s by far the most substantive, knowledgeable criticism of economics that I could find on his blog.

If Cass is aware of any economic models other than comparative advantage and the basic Econ 101 supply-and-demand model, he plays his cards close to his chest. He doesn’t mention gravity models of trade, which some economists use to try to predict the effects of tariffs (with some success). Nor does he mention Paul Krugman’s New Trade Theory, which implies that countries can sometimes benefit from targeted tariffs against other countries’ national champions (but which wouldn’t recommend the kind of broad, sweeping tariffs Trump has tried to implement).

Neither of those theories is outside the mainstream; both were invented by economists who went on to win the Nobel. Why doesn’t Oren Cass mention them, or grapple with their implications, or use their existence to inform his criticisms of the field of economics? My guess — and this is only a guess — is that Cass is completely unaware that these theories exist, that he has no interest in discovering whether such theories exist, that if he did discover them he would have no idea how to evaluate them, and that even if he did know how to evaluate them he would have no interest in doing so.

A sophisticated understanding of what mainstream economics actually says and does is not useful to Oren Cass’ project, which is to denounce intellectual rivals within the conservative movement. If you want to actually figure out how trade works and what tariffs do, it would help to look at the research literature. If you didn’t get the training needed to understand that literature, it would help to ask some people who did get that training, or at least read a little Wikipedia and ask ChatGPT a few questions.2 That won’t give you all the answers — the world’s best economists don’t even have all the answers — but it would leave you a lot more knowledgeable than you started out, and it would give you a much better idea of where economists are on solid ground and where there are gaps in their understanding.

On the other hand, if all you want is to dunk on Wall Street Journal writers, perhaps all you need is some hand-waving rhetoric about “market fundamentalism” and a vague half-knowledge of one simple trade theory developed 200 years ago.

The real problem with these econ critics — both the lefty writers in The Guardian and the new crop of MAGA defenders — is that their project is fundamentally political. The lefty writers think that if everyone accepts that econ isn’t a science, and that the econ Nobel isn’t a real Nobel, and people aren’t like particles, and so on and so forth, then some sort of lefty ideology — Marxism, or degrowth, or whatever — will flow in to fill the hole left when economics vanishes. The MAGA writers think that it will be Trump’s economic ideas that fill that void instead.

But Matthew Hennessey, the Wall Street Journal writer, got one big thing right: Simply replacing academic theories with your own ideology can win you power, but there are important things it can’t do. It can’t change the nature of what tariffs actually do to the economy. Even if you and your friends and your political allies all shout very loudly that tariffs will restore American manufacturing, and act very scornful toward nerdy academics who tell you it doesn’t work like that, the economic headwinds that tariffs actually create for American manufacturers won’t change one iota.

However limited mainstream academic economics is as a tool for understanding the consequences of your policies, ideology is even worse.

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2025-05-30 15:03:18

In the 2010s, economics discussions went mainstream. Blogs and (especially) social media meant that data-driven, high-level debates about economic issues were no longer confined to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and the talking heads on CNBC. This was a good thing, but I think it had some unintended consequences. One is that a lot of the narratives that made sense in 2012 or 2015 got embedded into the popular consciousness, and have stayed there even though the underlying reality has changed.

One big example of this is wage stagnation. In the early 2010s, lots of people “knew” that American middle-class wages had stagnated since the early 1970s, with only a brief temporary revival in the late 90s. And so naturally, a lot of discussions revolved around how to fix that. But even as we were having those arguments, wages accelerated again. Now, when we look back with the benefit of ten more years of hindsight, the years since the mid-1990s look like a bumpy but substantial increase:

Another big narrative, related to the wage stagnation idea, is that service costs are relentlessly rising in the U.S. economy. You’ve probably seen some version of Mark Perry’s famous “price changes” chart:

This chart tells a simple, powerful story: Services get more expensive, while physical goods get cheaper. Health care, education, and child care went up in price faster than wages, while cars, clothing, electronics, and toys got more affordable.

And the story was compelling because it came with a simple theory to explain it. This was the notion that manufacturing productivity naturally increases faster than service productivity. Conceptually, it seems easier to figure out how to rearrange production processes in a factory, and apply new machine tools, than to figure out new ways to educate kids or take care of Grandma.

And during the 20th century, this principle held true. For example, from 1987 to 2011, manufacturing productivity more than doubled, while overall productivity increased by only 70%:

In fact, if you look on Wikipedia’s page for “Baumol’s Effect”, also known as Baumol Cost Disease, it lists this productivity divergence as an explanation for diverging costs.

If service costs rise relentlessly while manufacturing costs fall, it portends a grim future — one where we have cheap gadgets, but where the big necessities of modern middle-class life are increasingly out of reach. And in fact, that was the story a lot of people were telling in the mid-2010s.

That story led to a certain techno-pessimism. If technology could give us cheap gadgets, but couldn’t make the basics of modern life any cheaper, what good was it? The failure of educational technologies like online education only seemed to drive the point home — it seemed like we’d always just be stuck with a teacher giving lectures on a board to 20 or 30 kids. Though some people dreamed of robot nurses and nannies, these seemed very far from materializing.

It also fed into cynicism about trade. If China gave us cheap gadgets but we were still struggling to pay for health care and education, wasn’t globalization sort of a booby prize? I think we see echoes of that sentiment in the GOP’s willingness to embrace Trump’s tariffs.

On the policy side, rising service costs led to two different big ideas.

First, if technology couldn’t make services cheaper, some people (including myself) reasoned, we should use policy to make them cheaper. Perhaps deregulation was the key — many libertarians blamed rising service costs on a policy of “cost disease socialism” that restricted supply while subsidizing demand, implying that we just had to eliminate the supply restrictions and cut the subsidies and the market would do its thing. Progressives advocated a more statist approach — after all, most other countries have some form of national health insurance, and they all have cheaper health costs than America does, so perhaps government bargaining power was the key to driving costs down. (Personally, I supported doing both approaches in parallel.)

The second big policy idea said that what we want isn’t necessarily for services to cost less to produce; what we want is for services to cost less to the people who consume them. Productivity improvements in the service sector would just throw human beings out of work, as they had done in manufacturing; instead, a future where everyone gets a high-paying job taking care of everyone else sounded pretty good to some progressives.

So how do we make services cheap to consume, but keep using “care jobs” as the future of good-paying middle-class work? Taxes and subsidies were how progressives planned to square that circle. If rich people could be taxed at much higher rates, that money could be used to create higher wages and more jobs for care workers and lower prices for consumers. For example, here’s what Heather Boushey, one of Biden’s most influential economic advisors, told the Aspen Institute in 2021:

“This year has taught us all, across the nation, how the care economy is the foundation of our economy,” Boushey remarked…Boushey reflects on the twin crises of a lack of good care and a lack of good jobs and notes that investing in the care economy creates a positive feedback loop that allows family caregivers to find quality care and care workers to find quality jobs.

Natalie Foster and Amanda Newman wrote that “policy [should] contribute to building a care economy that dignifies the work of caregivers and expands access to quality, affordable care”. Felicia Wong of the Roosevelt Institute endorsed the idea of universal child care as part of a new New Deal.

This idea represented a substantial portion of Biden’s economic plans. The Build Back Better bill — which never made it into law — would have created a national family and medical leave program and a universal pre-kindergarten education, while heavily subsidizing child care and various in-home services. The total price tag would have been in the hundreds of billions of dollars. This big push for service subsidies was mostly defeated in Congress, though some health care subsidies did make it into the (misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act.

In other words, the trend of increasing service costs defined many of our economic debates for a decade. There was just one small problem — by the time we started talking about how to address this trend, the trend had changed.

Health care costs have leveled off

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but what prompted me to finally do it was when Matt Yglesias posted a very nice chart of health spending as a percentage of GDP. Here’s a version of that chart with two different measures of health spending:

Note that “personal consumption expenditures” includes spending on behalf of consumers by the government and by nonprofits, so this isn’t just household spending on health care — it’s all of it.

We also see the same pattern when we look only at hospital services — the item whose cost went up the most on the Mark Perry chart:

So what we see is that until around 1990, health spending rapidly ate up a bigger and bigger portion of our national income. Then the increase slowed down, but it did go up some more until around 2009. But after that, it leveled off; in 2024, Americans didn’t spend a greater percent of their income on health care than they did in 2009. And in fact, the increase since 1990 has been pretty modest — if you look only at the service portion of health care (the blue line), it’s gone up by about 1.5% of GDP over 34 years.

OK, so, this is total spending, not the price of health care. Is America spending less because we’re getting less care? No. In cost-adjusted terms, Americans have been getting more and more health care services over the years:

What’s happening is that although health care prices have still been going up, they’ve been going up more slowly than before. Here are health service prices relative to the overall price level, as measured with the PCE:

You can see that costs level off in 2009, and then actually drop after the pandemic relative to other costs. This doesn’t mean health care got cheaper after 2020; what it means is that health care prices rose more slowly than other prices did.

If you use the CPI (as Mark Perry’s chart does), things look a little different — medical costs keep rising faster than overall costs during the 2010s, but then slow down quite a bit after the pandemic:

Why the difference between CPI and PCE? Two main reasons. First of all, health care itself is a bigger component of PCE than of CPI, while CPI weights housing more heavily instead. So the fact that health care prices have gone up faster than housing prices means that CPI will show a greater increase of health prices relative to the total. Second, PCE tries harder to adjust for quality improvements. Health care has gone up a lot in quality over the years, and this has been hard to capture with traditional price measures. This is from the conclusion of a Brookings literature review from 2016:

Traditional measures of productivity growth in the health sector most likely understate it, because they don’t adjust prices for substitution from higher to lower cost inputs and because they don’t take account of changes in quality over time…The evidence to date suggests that adjusting health care expenditures for changes in quality leads to a significant reduction in the rise in health prices over time, and, indeed, these prices may even have declined relative to other prices.

PCE has this problem less than CPI does, so it shows more of a cost slowdown.

OK but anyway, what we really care about at the end of the day is affordability — i.e., how much health care an average America can buy. A good way of measuring affordability is to look at median income divided by an index of health care prices — in other words, how much health care the typical American can buy with their annual income.

When we look at this, we see that health care got steadily less affordable until around 1990, then leveled off, and now has been getting more affordable since around 2012:

So overall, health care is probably now more affordable for the average American than it was in 2000 — in fact, it’s now about as affordable as it was in the early 1980s. That doesn’t mean that every type of care is more affordable, of course. But the narrative that U.S. health costs just go up and up relentlessly hasn’t reflected reality for a while now.

Why have health care costs stopped going up rapidly? Some credit the cost control provisions of the Affordable Care Act of 2009 (aka Obamacare). This is from 2019:

March 23, the ninth anniversary of the ACA’s passage, presents a good opportunity to examine its legacy on cost control…Fast forward to December 2018, when [the Office of the Actuary of the Department of Health and Human Services] released the official tabulation of health care spending in 2017. The bottom line: cumulatively from 2010 to 2017 the ACA reduced health care spending a total of $2.3 trillion…[H]ealth care spending in 2017 was $2,000 less per person than it was projected to be. And for the 176 million Americans who have private employer-sponsored insurance, their lower premiums averaged just under $1,000 per person.

Another possibility is that Americans just got tired of paying more and more for health care, and started balking at higher prices. People who made excuses for high American health costs claimed that it was just an income effect — that as nations get richer, they simply spend a higher and higher percent of their income on health care. But as I pointed out, at some point this explanation has to fail, because it can’t be true that health care eventually consumes all of a rich nation’s income, to the exclusion of everything else.

It could just be that Americans were willing to pay more for health care as they got richer, up to a point, but that at some point they said “OK, that’s enough.”

Higher education costs have leveled off

It’s not just health care whose costs have leveled off. College tuition is no longer getting more and more expensive every year. In fact, in inflation adjusted terms, tuition has actually fallen since the pandemic:

Here’s another way of visualizing that same data, and you can see that adding in housing and food doesn’t really change the story:

Of course this doesn’t include financial aid (nor does Mark Perry’s chart, nor do official inflation numbers). Financial aid has been going up, especially at private schools. When you include that, it turns out that private four-year nonprofits are actually less expensive in inflation-adjusted terms than they were in the mid-2000s, even without accounting for rising incomes:

For public schools it’s about the same:

In other words, higher education has been getting more affordable for years, and the decrease in affordability in the late 2000s and 2010s was significantly overstated. The popular narrative that college is getting less and less affordable is wrong, and it needs to change.

Why are college costs going down now? It’s basically a story about demand. College enrollment peaked in 2010 and began to fall:

This enrollment decline happened for every age group of students. It wasn’t just because the number of young people in America plateaued, either; enrollment fell as a proportion of young people.

As for why enrollment rates declined, that’s an open question. My own hypothesis is that college costs rose and the college wage premium fell until a market equilibrium was reached.

Our debates about services need to change

It’s not just true that service costs have stopped exploding in America. The narrative that service productivity is stagnant, while manufacturing experiences fast productivity growth, has been flipped on its head since 2008. Manufacturing productivity abruptly flatlined around the time of the Great Recession, while overall productivity has risen:

This implies that service productivity growth has accelerated. And indeed, if you look at specific industries, you see a lot of services where productivity is going up quickly in America:

Now, these changing trends don’t mean that services are cheap and we can stop thinking about service costs. First of all, there are still some services that are getting less affordable over time — most notably, child care. Second, the recent mild increases in affordability for health care and higher education haven’t erased the big cost increases that happened in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s; Americans still pay a lot more for these things than Europeans or Asians do, relative to their incomes. So there’s still probably scope to bring down the costs of health care and college.

But with all that said, the change in the trends in service costs and service productivity mean that our debates about these topics need to change.

First of all, services don’t look as resistant to technological improvement as we once thought. The increased adoption of IT in health care is probably having a big effect. We can probably apply that insight to child care and K-12 education as well. And the introduction of AI into education — and everything else — will probably accelerate the trend even more.

The possibility of technology-driven productivity improvements in service industries also means that we don’t have to resort to expensive subsidies in order to make services both better-paying for workers and cheaper for consumers. Instead, we can encourage technology adoption, and enjoy higher wages and lower prices, just like we did with manufacturing in the 20th century.

(As for where the jobs of the future will come from, it’s looking more likely that professional jobs, rather than care jobs, are the next big thing.)

Falling service costs should also make us more optimistic about capitalism, and about the future of the middle class. For the last decade and a half, a lot of our economic debates have been premised on the idea that the American economy is fundamentally broken, and that life just keeps getting more and more expensive for regular people. That’s looking a lot less true than it did in 2012.

We spent a long time talking about how service costs were eating the world, and I don’t expect that narrative to disappear overnight just because I posted one blog post with a lot of charts. But it’s well past time for our discussions on this topic to start shifting in response to new information.

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2025-05-29 15:43:37

The Trump administration has just paused all visa interviews for all foreign students seeking to study in the United States. This means that until and unless that pause is lifted, the number of new students who can apply to come study in the U.S. is zero. Ostensibly, the pause is a short-term measure that will give the Trump administration time to set up a procedure to vet prospective students’ social media accounts for ideas it doesn’t like; interview scheduling could resume within days, or it could take longer.

This is important because it’s part of a more general attack on foreign students. Trump already forbade Harvard University from enrolling students from overseas, although the action was blocked by a court. This was part of a high-profile confrontation with Harvard over anti-white racial discrimination, but it also reflected Trump’s belief that international students are taking spots that ought to go to Americans. Bloomberg reports:

President Donald Trump said Harvard University should cap foreign student enrollment at 15%, ratcheting up his effort to force policy changes at the elite institution.

“I think they should have a cap of maybe around 15%, not 31%,” Trump said Wednesday at the White House. “We have people who want to go to Harvard and other schools, they can’t get in because we have foreign students there.”

Trump has the same attitude toward college spots that he has toward immigration and imports. To him, everything is just a lump of fixed size — a pie to be divided. In his mind, if you kick out immigrants, the number of jobs doesn’t go down — the jobs just get parceled out to native-born Americans instead. If you ban imports, Americans don’t consume less — they just buy American-made products instead. And if you kick out foreign students, the number of college spots doesn’t go down; American kids just get more.

Of course, Trump is wrong about that, as I’ll explain. But kicking out international students dovetails with a number of other Trump administration priorities. It allows them to strike out at left-leaning universities. It allows them to implement ideological tests for immigrants — something they want to do in general.1 It allows them to reduce the number of foreigners in the country, which they feel strengthens Western civilization.

And for the China hawks in the administration, it allows them to kick out the Chinese, whom they suspect of being spies:

The U.S. will “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday…“Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” he said in a statement. “We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.”

So kicking out foreign students is, in many ways, the perfect policy from the Trump administration’s point of view. The problem is, it’s a terrible policy. But like tariffs, this policy will immediately and needlessly hurt some parts of America, while also leading to a long-term erosion of American competitiveness, innovation, and general economic strength.

There are three basic ways that international students are important for the U.S. economy:

1. Their high tuition payments subsidize the education of native-born American students.

2. The money they spend in America helps keep the economies of small towns and cities going.

3. They are crucial for American innovation and technological strength.

International students subsidize American students, especially at state schools

American universities fund themselves five main ways: 1) government money, 2) alumni contributions, 3) investment income from endowments, 4) revenue from hospitals and other businesses, and 5) tuition. Tuition currently provides about 17.5% of the total overall, and almost a third for private nonprofit universities. Here’s data from 2020:

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2025-05-27 17:16:03

This post does not reflect the views of Chris Best. He is listed as an author because he is included in the video chat portion.

The other day I had a chat with Chris Best, the CEO of Substack, which you can watch above. We talked about the future of the media, focusing on how people share and consume news and analysis. We agreed that X (formerly Twitter) has lost much of its usefulness as the nation’s one-stop-shop for breaking news and discussion, and we discussed some ideas for how Substack might take on that role.

Shortly after we recorded our conversation, X suffered a partial outage. That wasn’t too unusual — outages happen from time to time. What was odd about this time, though, was that I didn’t even notice the outage until after it was already over. X, the app that once consumed much of my waking life, and which enabled my career as an opinion writer for over a decade, has become so unimportant to my information diet that I didn’t even notice its absence.

An important shift is underway in America’s media landscape. Usually, discussions about the media focus either on local newspapers, or on corporate legacy media like the New York Times.1 But during the 2010s, social media — and in particular, the single platform of Twitter — became more important to America’s national information diet than any content creator.

I still remember when I first got on Twitter in 2011 (years later than I should have). Hearing that it was a “microblogging” site, I logged on expecting to find something akin to a smaller version of the blogs I knew; instead, what I found was utter chaos. The feed was a neverending mix of every conceivable kind of content — jokes, news reports, memes, shower thoughts, arguments, links to blog posts, insults, and more. More than Facebook or YouTube or any other social media site, it felt like Twitter opened up the entire world and poured it down your throat — the only comparable event was the creation of the Web itself.

Simply bringing some semblance of order to that firehose feed took years. By then, Twitter had cemented itself as the nation’s town square — it took a hundred million discussions that had been fragmented on forums and chats and comment sections and aggregated all of them into one place. On Twitter it felt like I could meet anyone, get attention from anyone, or be part of any important world event. As an information source it was unrivaled — if I walked down the street and saw smoke, I could do a quick Twitter search and find out within minutes if it was a terrorist attack or a house fire.2

Twitter’s unbeatable advantage over every other discussion platform was its radical openness. On Twitter you could talk directly and permissionlessly to any person in the entire network; if you tagged them, you’d show up in their notifications. Anyone could jump into anybody else’s discussion without permission, and no one had the power to kick them out. There were no walls or separators between communities or conversations. There was no moderation, no filter, no privacy, no built-in hierarchy. It felt like one step closer to a global hive mind.

I believe we have not yet reckoned with the degree to which the unrest of the 2010s was the direct result of this one single discussion platform. A nation that had spent decades dealing with our differences by spreading out and sorting ourselves into like-minded enclaves was suddenly thrown into one small room with each other — and like the characters in Sartre’s No Exit, we found the results rather hellish.

Researchers found that Twitter’s retweet system amplified and rewarded the most sadistic and opportunistic agitators in our society, whose desire to foment social chaos had previously been frustrated by their geographic isolation and their exclusion from traditional media. But research also showed that even normal people had the incentive to act toxic — if you could dunk on someone or make them the “main character”, the platform rewarded you with social status in the form of followers and likes. Cancel culture itself was almost entirely a creature of Twitter — it was fear of being yelled at on Twitter that drove companies and other organizations to accede to the will of mobs demanding that certain of their employees be punished.

But for all its chaotic influence, Twitter was an indispensable tool. It offered conversations about public affairs that were richer, more informed, and more interesting than almost any forum or blog or chat group. It offered unrivaled opportunities to meet people — including famous people — and network. For bloggers, it was the most important way to promote your content. For journalists, it became the universal assignment desk — there was the sense that if something wasn’t happening on Twitter, it wasn’t worth reporting on.

During events like elections, protests, wars, and disasters, Twitter was by far the fastest and best source of up-to-the-second information, because everyone was competing to earn social status on the platform by reporting anything that happened in their vicinity. Twitter was the nation’s water cooler — it let you take the measure of the zeitgeist, gauging the national mood and identifying the most important topics of discussion. Professors would teach you things on Twitter. Young people would shower you with jokes and memes. It was a note-taking app and a soapbox and a chat app and a repository for your shower thoughts. It was the most addicting and absorbing and all-consuming piece of software I’ve ever used.

And now it’s dying.

There’s plenty of data showing a decline in Twitter usage since Elon Musk took over the platform and renamed it “X”. For example:

X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced a 30% drop in usage from 2023 to 2024, according to a study from Edison Research…The data, which is part of a larger study conducted by Edison, said 27% of the total population in the U.S. reported using X in 2022 and 2023, a figure that has decreased to 19% in 2024.

Or:

And:

According to data from SimilarWeb…[I]n the broader leadup to the [2024] elections, X actually continuously shed daily active users. In fact, for the entire month of October, X saw a drop in anywhere from 300,000 to 2.6 million daily active users in the U.S. each day. Since early October, daily active U.S. users have fallen from 32.3 million to 29.6 million, a drop of 8.4 percent…[A]ccording to analysts, it appears like X will continue its decline in 2025.

The standard narrative is that Musk himself drove the exodus, with his right-wing politics, lax moderation standards, platform changes, and constant personal antics. But while that’s part of the story, Twitter’s decline started long before Elon took over. By 2022, the percentage of teens who used Twitter declined from a third in the mid-2010s to under a quarter:

As young people go, so goes the platform. The cultural vitality that I enjoyed in Twitter’s early days — the jokes, the memes, the slices of daily life — gradually vanished after around 2014. I’m not sure why this happened. It may be because the platform’s tone turned darker and more aggressive after the invention of the quote-tweet. It may be because people learned the hard way that jotting down your shower thoughts on the most open of all platforms could lead to dire personal consequences if the wrong mob happened to see your tweet and go after it.

Or it may simply be that the platform’s format was played out, and that young people moved on to something newer and more interesting, as they tend to do. But either way, the result was a generation that grew up viewing Twitter as a niche community rather than as the global “town square”. The site gradually became MySpace for Millennials.

In any case, the drop in Twitter users won’t necessarily hurt Musk, who recently had his AI company xAI buy X for somewhere in the ballpark of the same price he originally paid for the platform. And the acquisition may even be worth it — xAI may be able to get its money back from the repository of training data that X already possesses. But fewer users degrades the network effects that make a platform like Twitter important. Metcalfe’s Law works both ways — as the size of a network drops, the biggest losses in value come the earliest.

X has many core use cases, but each of these is becoming weaker by the day. It’s no longer the place for intelligent conversation — many of the smartest users have left the platform, so that replies are dominated by activists, trolls, and bored people tossing off rote statements as they wander by. And bots, of course — lots and lots of bots.

The user exodus has also made X much less useful for gauging the national mood — or even seeing what the country is chattering about today. The fact that the decline is concentrated among particular groups — progressives, the young, minorities, etc. — means that the platform is less representative of the country. That, in turn, makes X less valuable to journalists as their “assignment desk”, because plenty of important and relevant things just aren’t getting discussed on the platform.

X is still useful as a messaging app — many of the connections forged in Twitter’s heyday are still active, and there are plenty of people I only know how to contact through X’s direct messages. But as those people check their X accounts less and less, the messaging function is slowly degrading as well.

Musk also made two key changes to the platform that have undermined its former use cases. In early 2023, X started defaulting its users to a “For You” tab that shows a TikTok-like algorithmically generated feed, instead of a feed created by the people you follow. You can toggle over to the old-style “Following” feed, but lots of people don’t. Second, Musk deprecated external links — any tweets that link to articles, videos, or other websites outside the platform are suppressed in the “For You” feed.

These changes have made X much less useful as an aggregator of interesting news and information from around the internet. People still post links, but they put them in follow-up tweets, so that what you mainly see are the initial tweets — simply paragraphs of original text with no link. This also makes X a much worse place to promote your own work.

But perhaps most crucially, these changes are a big part of why X is no longer the place to get breaking news. During the recent conflict between India and Pakistan, it was actually very difficult to find reliable timely information on X; instead, I found myself going back to the real-time update pages on CNN and other traditional content websites, and being more satisfied with what I found there.

I think it’s actually pretty interesting and subtle to understand why X is less useful for breaking news. In the old days of Twitter, there was a social incentive for everyone on the platform to A) report in real time on anything that was happening around them, and B) boost other people’s real-time reports. Social media is basically a game where people try to gain status, and on Twitter you could get attention, follows, and likes by being a source that other people read in order to stay apprised of fast-breaking events. So everyone did it.

Now that incentive is eroding. The new algorithmic feeds won’t necessarily show people news about new events; instead, it often tends to display tweets about topics they’ve demonstrated interest about in the past. The deprecation of external links means that if you share a source for your breaking news, your tweet will be suppressed; therefore most factual, well-informed tweets about a fast-breaking event will look no different than random rants. And in general, X’s shrinking user base and diminishing levels of engagement mean fewer new followers to capture.3

As X users lose interest in reporting anything and everything that goes on around them (and boosting each other’s reports), the platform’s core function disintegrates — it’s no longer the first place you go to get breaking news. More than any other reason, that’s why I personally have been spending a lot less time on X recently.

But if X is no longer the place for breaking news, that presents other platforms with the chance to step up and fill that role. I’m sure this is possible — a world where 2000s-era update pages on www.cnn.com are the best we can ever do for breaking news, even in the age of social media and AI, sounds wildly unrealistic.

One possible contender is Substack. This platform has already become the best place for analysis of news, having resurrected and supercharged the blogosphere. Why not breaking news too?

In fact, this is the topic of my video chat with Chris Best at the top of this post. Our basic idea is that while Substack probably can’t replicate the “citizen journalist” magic of 2010s-era Twitter, it probably can set up a new kind of blog dedicated to real-time breaking news updates — indie versions of the CNN real-time update pages. And Substack can probably use its superior distribution tools — daily email digests, the Twitter-like Substack Notes tool, and maybe some new tools for aggregating breaking-news feeds — to do much better than the legacy media.

So that’s the basic idea. It wouldn’t get everyone in the world involved in reporting, like the old Twitter briefly did. But it could gather, amplify, and aggregate a whole bunch of on-the-ground reporters and human news aggregators. That might be the next best thing — and unlike the ephemeral magic of old Twitter, a Substack-style approach to breaking news might be sustainable in the long term.

In any case, I think the replacement of Twitter/X by Substack and other more purpose-built tools will be a good thing for society. As I always say, the internet wants to be fragmented; having one single town square doesn’t work in the physical world, and it doesn’t make sense in the digital world either. All of America (and much of the rest of the world) came together in one place in the 2010s, and that one place was Twitter. But with discussion now shattered into a kaleidoscope of Discord channels, group chats, subreddits, and smaller Twitter-like services like Bluesky, Mastodon, Substack Notes, and Threads, we have a chance to be individuals again — liberated from the hive mind that was trying to absorb us.

Nor do I expect any of the Baby Twitters to replicate what existed in 2018. I’m glad Bluesky exists, but I don’t think it’s going to conquer the world and become our one single town square:

Instead, what I think is happening is that people are realizing that this kind of radically open discussion app is not actually that great of a way to participate in the internet. It had a surprisingly huge number of advantages, and made some magic in its day, but it’s just too susceptible to bad actors. Some people will still enjoy the dunk apps, but a lot of people will filter away to more private discussions, and to calmer, less performative analysis on platforms like Substack.

The Age of Twitter destroyed the old age of legacy media so fast that the world almost missed it happening. Now that age looks to be ending, before we even understood what it meant. Fortunately, I’m optimistic that the next thing will be better.

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2025-05-27 04:22:08

I really enjoy Substack’s chat feature! Today Matt Yglesias joined me for a wide-ranging discussion about politics, policy, technology, and other fun stuff. We didn’t do Q&A, but next time we will!

Here were my key takeaways from the chat:

• Electric technology (batteries and motors and some other stuff) is incredibly important, and will eventually take over. But almost no one in America seems to realize how important it is. Fortunately, I think I have fully electric-pilled Matt.

• As a result of no one realizing how important it is, our politics around this technology are very stupid. American conservatives have decided to make opposition to this technology a culture-war issue, while progressives view it only through the lens of climate and often allow their NIMBY instincts to prevail.

• Back in 2021-22, I thought that the Biden administration’s focus on climate was good because it would persuade progressives to support industrial policies for electric technology. In the short term I was right, but in the long term Matt was probably right to be somewhat skeptical of this approach. It helped cement conservative opposition to the technology, because painting everything in terms of climate instead of in terms of economic growth, American power, abundance, etc. made it feel to many people like a culture war issue instead of an economic one. (Of course climate change is also an economic issue, but most people don’t see it that way.)

• Elon Musk has been trying to sell the right wing on electric technology, but he has so far failed to make inroads, much as Trump failed to sell the right on vaccines.

• Matt and I agree that America’s complacency toward Chinese competition stems from a certain inward-looking arrogance; Americans think our country is the whole world, and that our domestic market is all we need.

• Matt and I both came of age during the fight against the George W. Bush administration, and we had lots to say about the parallels and the differences between that era and this one.

• I pointed out that whereas the Boomer generation got their happy hippie “peace and love” anti-war movement at the same time that they got leftist rage and riots, we Millennials got these two things at different times. In the 2000s and early 2010s we got the anti-Iraq War and gay marriage crusades — peace and love. But in the mid to late 2010s we finished our peace and love arc, and we got riots and angry leftist extremism. This made it hard to find something positive and constructive to get enthused about in the late 2010s.

• Matt pointed out that the gay marriage battle was won so quickly that the center-left and far left didn’t have much time to actually learn to cooperate.

• Matt and I both lament the fact that Barack Obama’s presidency was judged more on his race than on his actual ideology. Obama was a basically conservative Black guy who could have convinced conservatives that Black American leaders are essentially bourgeois and sort of conservative. Instead, they freaked out, over-interpreting Obama’s offhand comments to paint him as some sort of radical Black-nationalist. And this caused the left to veer toward racial pessimism, fueling an appetite for very negative views of America itself among progressives.

• I argue that although America’s racial discussion has gotten very toxic and bad, we’re sort of moving toward a new paradigm where White people are just another minority group. That could ultimately facilitate the development of an inclusive, overarching American national identity that goes beyond race.

• I also think that the backlash against wokeness is overdone, and the changes in national identity and representation that it engendered could ultimately help create a post-racial American identity — as could the Trump administration’s efforts to sue on behalf of White people under the Civil Rights Act.

• Matt sees a parallel to religious issues. He says that in his youth, he didn’t think Christianity deserved the same protections as other religions did, but now, seeing that Christianity has become a minority religion, he has changed his mind and thinks it does deserve the same consideration as Orthodox Judaism, Islam, or any other religious minority.

• Matt and I agree that everyone should read Richard Alba on race. It’ll make you more of a racial optimist!

• The discussion then shifts to politics, and the woes of the Democratic party, which is still far less popular and effective than it ought to be.

• Matt thinks Democrats focus too much on the identity of their candidates, and that they’re just sitting there waiting for a charismatic Obama-like savior figure with the right identity background. He thinks that paradoxically, many Dems are now too afraid of running women and minorities, because they managed to convince themselves that Kamala Harris lost because of her race and gender.

• I point out that in the Bush years, Democrats managed to capitalize on Bush’s many failures — civil liberties violations, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and the financial crisis — to retake power in 2006 and 2008 and to build a modern progressive movement while doing it. Now that Trump is screwing things up — tariffs, the debt, the quasi-alliance with Russia, and so on — Dems should be able to do something similar. And yet this time they seem mired in self-doubt and internal disputes, while nationally their popularity is totally in the gutter. Why? (I don’t think we ever arrive at a completely satisfying answer to this question.)

• Matt thinks that in the 2000s, Democrats still had a lot of popular cred from Bill Clinton’s popularity, and from the fact that Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000. Right now, a lot of Americans have a sour memory of Democrats from the Biden administration, which makes it harder for Dems to win back credibility with the American public.

• I bring up George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry in 2004, which included a popular vote victory. Matt thinks Kerry did better than economic fundamentals would have predicted, and that Kerry was a good candidate. But in any case, I remain optimistic that Trump’s 2024 mandate can be reversed like Bush’s 2004 mandate was.

• Matt argues that deficits are going to be a big issue, and that Democrats need to get themselves back into Bill Clinton-style deficit-cutting mode, and that this will be very difficult after a decade and a half of fiscal profligacy. I agree, but I think the pivot will be aided by Americans’ natural aversion to the idea of deficits.

• I argue that Biden’s industrial policies were good, and not actually very expensive, and that we should therefore preserve industrial policy even as we do austerity overall. Matt counters that everyone in the Democratic party thinks that their particular issues are of great importance, and that it’s someone else’s priorities that need to be cut.

• I point out that the way Dems could get away with the “expand everything” strategy in the past was that economic conditions allowed it. The New Deal enjoyed a massive capacity overhang due to the Depression, while postwar liberalism and 90s/00s liberalism benefitted from productivity booms. Right now we are suffering from inflation, which makes the macroeconomics of typical Democratic governance a lot harder.

• Matt points out that Democrats lack a strong leader who can simply tell the party which policies to prioritize. This is in contrast to the Republicans, who do have a (very) dominant leader who has chosen to spend his political capital on personal corruption and weird stuff like cozying up to Russia, while letting deficits explode and letting American technology flounder.

• Matt thinks that this is a great time for “idea entrepreneurs” in the Democratic party to get their ideas out there and help define the upcoming battle against Trumpism.

• Matt and I discuss whether the donor class or the staffer class has more real power within the Democratic party. Matt thinks it’s the donors who ultimately win.

• I ask Matt whether Democrats still think that they’re the country’s true majority party. He answers that they’re beginning to realize that they’re not, and that right now what we’re seeing is “the bargaining stage of grief”, as Dems are forced to abandon their illusions and begin rebuilding and fighting back.

Anyway, this was a great chat! We plan to do more of these in the future, and maybe get some other writers involved as well. Happy Memorial Day!

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2025-05-25 17:42:56

We have a Statue of Liberty on the East Coast; why not build a Statue of Justice on the West Coast? Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay would be the perfect place to build it. In fact, I’m not the first to think of this; it was suggested in 1963 and rejected. But it’s never too late! Now if we can only find someone to build it for us…

Anyway, some readers have been disturbed by the recent pessimistic turn in the tone of my blog posts. While there is admittedly lots to be pessimistic about, especially on the economic front, I decided to do a brief roundup of purely optimistic news.

But first, podcasts. Here’s an event I did with the folks at Coral Capital in Tokyo, about my new book, and about Tokyo’s potential as a tech hub:

And here’s an episode of the “Just Asking Questions” podcast, in which I explain why I went too hard on the libertarians:

And here’s an episode of Econ 102, in which Erik and I discuss various topics that I’ve covered recently in my blog:

Anyway, on to the roundup of optimistic news!

1. More YIMBY victories

A surprising number of online pundits seem to think that the YIMBY movement is some kind of perennial failure — a hapless bunch of political naifs that stumbles around making enemies and losing battle after battle. I have no idea why they think this, since in the real world, the YIMBY movement keeps gaining support and racking up legislative victories.

For example:

• The Texas legislature looks very likely to pass a bill that will allow housing in areas previously reserved for commercial uses. The law prevents cities from using various anti-development measures in these cases.

• California is close to passing one or two major bills to weaken CEQA, the state environmental permitting act that has been one of the biggest barriers to construction.

• Texas, Colorado, and many other locations are advancing single-stair reforms, which will allow apartment buildings to be built much more compactly, thus increasing housing density in urban areas.

• Cities like Dallas and Santa Monica are enacting YIMBY reforms — basically, upzoning and eliminating burdensome regulations.

A lot of people really don’t like the idea that politics could be rational, nonpartisan, and goal-oriented — that instead of shouting on social media, rioting in the street, vilifying the enemy party, or making extremist proposals to “widen the Overton window”, Americans could simply come together through the regular democratic process and implement sensible reforms that help large numbers of people. They expect U.S. politics to just be one giant screeching Twitter battle forever.

But at some point, “let them eat memes” simply doesn’t satisfy. America doesn’t have nearly enough housing, and YIMBYs are the people who are finally doing something about that. No wonder it’s making progress.

2. America is still calming down

One thesis of mine that gets a ton of pushback is that while America’s politics and policy have gotten dumber and more chaotic, the American people as a whole are calming down from the burst of unrest that lasted roughly from 2014 to 2020.

In fact, I think my thesis is holding up well. Violent crime, which surged in 2020, has been plunging all across America:

[C]rime appears to be falling all over America. Jeff Asher, an analyst who compiles a real-time crime index from agency-level records, reckons that this year is on track to be the least murderous nationwide since the 1960s.

Here’s a chart of how much murder has fallen in select cities since 2020:

What about the mass shootings that seemed to happen on a regular basis in the late 2010s? Those are down too:

As of May 10, there have been four shootings in the United States in which four or more victims died this year, compared with 11 at the same juncture last year. It’s the lowest incident count over the first four months of a year since at least 2006, when researchers started the Mass Killing Database, which is maintained by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University…The drop builds on year over year data, which shows that mass shootings declined from 39 in 2023 to 30 in 2024…

Last year, three mass killings involving firearms occurred in public settings — at a market in Fordyce, Arkansas, a commuter train outside Chicago, and a high school in Winder, Georgia. That was down from a record of 10 the previous year. So far this year, thankfully, there have been none.

Fewer Americans are protesting, too. In 2016 and 2017, Trump’s election was met with massive nationwide protests, which were the biggest in U.S. history up til that time — until they were eclipsed by the even bigger George Floyd protests of 2020. But Trump’s victory in 2024 has prompted few protests, and in general the streets of America are pretty quiescent. Even the Palestine protests, which were already much smaller than Black Lives Matter or the Women’s March, have dwindled. Meanwhile, right-wing brawlers have all but disappeared from America’s streets.

Yes, there have been a few spectacular and grisly acts of political violence in America recently, such as Elias Rodriguez, the Palestine activist who gunned down two people at a Jewish event in Washington, D.C. But this parallels the experience of the 1970s and 1980s; as general unrest fell and most people walked away from the activist movements of the late 60s, the few activists who remained tended to be more extreme, both because of a selection effect and because the extremists had fewer moderates around to restrain them.1

So while America’s leaders are causing institutional chaos and making radical policies, the country itself continues to feel steadily less unsettled than a few years ago. Ages of unrest don’t last forever.2

3. The Age of Miracles continues

I haven’t talked as much about techno-optimism in the past year, but I do think we’re still in the middle of a remarkable efflorescence of new technologies. One type of tech I don’t discuss much is biotech, but this is really making big strides. Recently, genetic engineering was used to rewrite an infant’s DNA and save the infant’s life:

Doctors say they constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a deadly metabolic condition…The rapid-fire attempt to rewrite the child’s DNA marks the first time gene editing has been tailored to treat a single individual, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine…The baby who was treated, Kyle “KJ” Muldoon Jr., suffers from a rare metabolic condition[.]

Note that this isn’t the standard “superbaby” type of gene editing that’s a staple of sci-fi; instead of creating a new human with altered DNA, it’s rewriting the DNA of an existing human being. Perhaps that means there’s hope for you and me!

In other news, pig-to-human organ transplants are now a reality, cancer vaccines are making rapid progress, cancer rates themselves are falling, and the new GLP-1 weight-loss drugs appear to have benefits beyond simply fighting obesity.

In general, I’m dismayed by the actions of America’s current leaders in the biotech space — defunding the National Institutes of Health, restricting mRNA vaccines, etc. But the march of progress will be hard for a few boneheaded policies to stop. We’re still living in an age of miracle and wonder.

4. We’re making real progress in educating kids

Education often seems like one of the most intractable problems in the world. You can find any number of studies showing that spending per pupil has increased year after year, with little effect on student achievement. (In fact, spending more does yield results, but they’re small.) The stagnation of test scores in the U.S. has prompted some Americans to believe that there’s just nothing to be done, and that we’ve hit the ceiling in terms of how well we can teach people. A burst of enthusiasm in the 2010s for new educational technologies like online classes ended up fading, as it became clear that these didn’t help (or even made things worse).

But there are still a few glimmers of hope. First of all, some U.S. states have been successfully applying tried-and-true education methods — phonics education, targeted help for kids who are struggling, etc. — to raise literacy rates and test scores. And most of these states are Republican-led red states! Here’s a good post about the trend:

The Education Daly

Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

Painting the Deep South as an embarrassing cultural backwater is one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice among elites. It’s not just tolerated - it’s venerated…

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24 days ago · 121 likes · 27 comments · Tim Daly

And here are some excerpts:

In 2003, only the District of Columbia had more fourth graders in the lowest achievement level on our national reading test (NAEP) than Mississippi. By 2024, only four states had fewer…

Black students in Mississippi posted the third highest fourth grade reading scores in the nation. They walloped their counterparts in better-funded states. The average Black student in Mississippi performed about 1.5 grade levels ahead of the average Black student in Wisconsin. Just think about that for a moment. Wisconsin spends about 35 percent more per pupil to achieve worse results.

Mississippi has fellow southern stars. Louisiana was the only state to fully erase pandemic learning loss among fourth grade readers. It ranked in the top five for all four NAEP grades/subjects in the demographically adjusted results. Alabama was the only state whose fourth graders beat their pre-COVID performance in math. In years past, notable gains have been posted by Florida, Tennessee and Texas…

This spring, Paul Peterson and Michael Hartney showed that red states (as defined by 2024 presidential election votes) are overtaking their blue counterparts academically. In 2019, blue states had higher average NAEP scores on all four major tests (4th and 8th grade reading and math). By 2024, red states had taken the lead in three of the four.

And here’s a good chart:

Meanwhile, new technology might finally be about to ride to the rescue. Studies have consistently shown that the most effective education method, by far, is one-on-one intensive tutoring. But tutoring is very hard to scale up to the whole populace, because tutors are very expensive.

AI has the potential to change that. A good enough AI can act like a personal tutor for every child in the world — a technology right out of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. A team of World Bank researchers recently tested out AI tutors in Nigeria, and found very big effects:

Using a randomized controlled trial, the program deployed Microsoft Copilot (powered by GPT-4) to support first-year senior secondary students in English language learning over six weeks…The effect on English, the main outcome of interest, was of 0.23 standard deviations. Cost-effectiveness analysis revealed substantial learning gains, equating to 1.5 to 2 years of ’business-as-usual’ schooling, situating the intervention among some of the most cost-effective programs to improve learning outcomes.

That’s a really huge effect! Obviously we’ll have to wait for replication, but it’s incredibly promising. Tried-and-true methods like the ones Mississippi is using can only go so far. If we’re going to make education better than it has ever been, AI is probably the answer.

5. What the good kind of nationalism looks like

Right now Americans are watching the MAGA movement hurt U.S. manufacturers with tariffs, damage American science with funding cuts and immigration restrictions, and threaten the country’s fiscal future with blowout deficits. Gallingly, this self-harm is all being done under the name of nationalism and love of country. No wonder there are people out there who view “nationalism” as a dirty word.

But I think Ukraine’s experience in the face of Russia’s attempted conquest offers us an alternative vision of nationalism. Ukraine’s version of nationalism has united the country in mutual defense, instead of tearing it apart with internecine conflict as Trump’s variety has. And unlike MAGA “nationalism”, Ukrainian nationalism has focused on building up the country’s economic and technological strength, instead of tearing up research institutions with ideological purges.

Ukrainian war reporter Illia Ponomarenko recently had some thoughts on how the war has rallied Ukraine around a shared love of their nation:

You know what the single most profound, far-reaching effect of Russia’s war against Ukraine is?…Ukraine has finally learned to truly respect itself…We are a nation that, in just a few years, built from scratch a capable army…To stand up to [Russia] in the biggest war of our time, Ukraine has been sustaining World War I-scale mobilization and made revolutionary breakthroughs in military innovation…Today, Ukraine possesses one of the most capable armies in the world, with cutting-edge, real-time experience in modern warfare—able to resist an enemy that is vastly superior…

We have preserved a democracy and a brutally competitive political life…We’re no longer a patchwork “post-Soviet country,” split between a “Russian-speaking southeast” and a “Ukrainian-speaking west.” We are a united nation. A person from Dnipro and a person from Lviv now share the same values, the same mission, the same grief, the same culture and history — and the same enemy…People from Kharkiv fight the Russian invader just as fiercely as those from Ternopil…And Russia has suffered devastating defeats and drained its once-vast Soviet stockpiles of weapons and ammunition…

You can’t imagine how often we still find ourselves saying to each other, half in disbelief: “Can you believe this? Who would’ve thought our poor Ukraine was capable of this?”

Ukraine is much smaller than Russia, but its tenacious nationalism and its technological ingenuity have effectively stalemated the bigger aggressor — at least, for now. Ukraine’s drone manufacturing industry has exploded, allowing Ukraine to almost entirely halt Russian advances despite an overwhelming manpower disadvantage. Meanwhile, Russia’s economy is suffering.

Ukraine shows that nationalism can be a blessing rather than a curse. Americans who like the idea of one unified nation, fighting and struggling together for a common purpose, should look to Ukraine, not to MAGA.

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