Quote of the Month
"For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say farewell. Is a new world coming? We welcome it, and we will bend it to the hopes of man." - Lyndon B. Johnson, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1965
What I’m Reading:
1. Why people use social media even though they hate it
Why you should read it: Writing a research brief for the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute, economists Leonardo Bursztyn, Benjamin Handel, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, and Christopher Roth observe that people use social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram “out of a fear of missing out rather than genuine interest and, as a result, are worse off than if the platforms did not exist in the first place.”
“In many contexts, the individual value from consuming a product or service increases as more people consume it. The more of your peers who join TikTok, for example, the more value you probably see in joining yourself. Building on this logic, it’s possible that products like social media not only offer greater utility to users as their market share grows, but greater disutility to non-users as well. Just imagine being the sole holdout during the TikTok craze. With each friend who joins, you likely feel increasingly left out… Users would be willing to pay $28 and $10 to have others, including themselves, deactivate TikTok and Instagram, respectively. Accounting for consumption spillovers to non-users reveals that 64% of active TikTok users and 48% of active Instagram users experience negative welfare from the products’ existence. Participants who do not have accounts would be willing to pay $67 and $39 to have others deactivate their TikTok and Instagram accounts, respectively.”
“Taken together, these results imply the existence of a “social media trap” for a large share of consumers, whose utility from the platforms is negative but would have been even more negative if they didn’t use social media... [U]sers value TikTok and Instagram 33% and 24% more, respectively, when their peers are on the sites compared to when they are not.”
Why it matters: “This research challenges the standard argument that the mere existence of a product implies positive welfare for its users. This could help reconcile the seemingly contradictory findings in the social media literature of a large consumer surplus coexisting with negative effects on wellbeing. It also suggests a heightened need for regulators to assess whether different products create traps for consumers and whether they generate positive welfare. For instance, large tech companies commonly use tools that might decrease non-consumer surplus, such as increasing the salience of being a non-consumer or tying together messaging apps and social media platforms and thus increasing the cost of not being a user.”
2. Why America and its allies need to take the fight to Yemen’s Houthis
Why you should read it: Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Steven A. Cook writes in Foreign Policy that the Biden administration needs to respond forcefully to the attempt by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants to cut off a key global trade bottleneck.
“Yemen’s Ansar Allah—also known as the Houthis—poses a threat to commercial shipping in the Red Sea. From mid-November through mid-December, the group attacked at least 30 merchant ships in the area, prompting most of the world’s major shippers to reroute their vessels around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. The economic effects of these attacks have yet to be fully realized, but already insurances rates for shipping lines have doubled… Freedom of navigation is a core global interest of the United States. So how is it that the Houthis are getting away with rendering the Red Sea a no-go zone for all but a few shipping lines? It’s ostensibly stunning that the Biden administration has allowed this happen—but in many ways it’s not surprising at all. The hesitance results from the role Yemen now plays in the politics of U.S. foreign policy and prevailing fears the war in Gaza will become a regional conflict—but also from the longer-term trend of Washington having overlearned foreign-policy lessons of the recent past.”
“The civil war in Yemen is not well understood in Washington but has nevertheless been the subject of vehement debate inside the Beltway… Through it all, however, progressives in Congress and a variety of activists tended either to overlook or minimize Houthi responsibility for Yemen’s tribulations. Instead they agitated against American support for the Saudis and Emiratis, which became identified with Trump, his administration, his son-in-law, ‘maximum pressure’ on Iran, and accommodation of Israel. Of course, the Saudi and Emirati governments have much to answer for their interventions, but among some in Washington there was a willful effort to give the Houthis a pass for their part in the destruction of Yemen. That is because the group’s anti-Americanism, hostility to human rights, and own atrocities did not fit the preferred political narrative about Yemen, which had less to do with what was happening in that country than the political battles happening in Washington. It was a dynamic that carried over into the Biden administration and its early decision to reverse Trump’s designation of Ansar Allah as a terrorist organization. For U.S. President Joe Biden to order strikes on the Houthis now—in what would surely be interpreted as an act of war in support of Israel—runs counter to much of what a growing constituency of the Democratic Party believes about Yemen.”
Why it matters: “As a result, if the United States wants to protect freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and its environs, it is going to have to take the fight directly to the Houthis… Many in the American foreign policy community seem to have overlearned the lessons of the recent past. Either that or their analysis begins and ends with the idea that the United States is the problem in the Middle East. The fact remains that, as difficult as the last three decades have been for Washington there, the United States still has interests in the region and freedom of navigation is one of them. To be self-deterred in this instance is to be self-defeating.”
3. How progressive hypocrisy on free speech mushroomed after October 7
Why you should read it: The Atlantic columnist David Frum notes that progressive claims that speech is violence have perversely expanded after October 7 to include the notion that violence is speech.
“Since the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, we have heard many stories of threats to pro-Palestinian free speech in the United States. The Atlantic itself has published some accounts of them. Yet take a closer look, and something else is usually going on. Complaints that pro-Palestine speech has been curtailed again and again turn out to involve violations of norms, rules, and laws that have nothing to do with speech as liberal-minded people would define it. In New York City last week, pro-Palestine demonstrators attempted to disrupt the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. For fear of a repeat of such attacks, yesterday the state of California announced that its tree-lighting ceremony would no longer take place in person, and would be a virtual event… Important elements of our society have shifted from their former claim that speech can be violence to a bold assertion that violence should count as speech.”
“In a marketplace of ideas, ripping down posters you disagree with is wrong. Post your own! But to those who see the world of ideas as a battlefield, ripping down an offending poster is amply justified. Opponents are enemies, not competitors, and enemies are allowed no rights at all. So go ahead, rip down posters of abducted children—and physically attack those who document your actions… The denial of speech rights to those who think incorrectly is not a marginal idea in American life. It commands wide support from some of the most celebrated American thinkers of our day.”
Why it matters: “Everybody should be free to express his or her opinion about the Middle East as an opinion. Everybody should be equally free to express opinions about other people’s opinions, including by exercising the freedom to peacefully boycott or to lawfully refuse to hire. But what the great majority of tolerant and law-abiding citizens are abruptly discovering is that some progressives define their rights as including the power to threaten, coerce, and harm others. This is not behavior that a free and democratic society can accept if it hopes to survive as a free and democratic society. If the public condemnation of their violent behavior comes as a shock to people incubated in progressive spaces, the shock will be a salutary one.”
4. Why campus speech codes should be abolished
Why you should read it: In the New York Times, writer James Kirchick argues that campus speech codes need to be abolished altogether—not further expanded to include brazen anti-Semitism.
“Critics are correct to note the hypocrisy of university leaders who have belatedly come to embrace a version of free speech absolutism that tolerates calls for Jewish genocide after years of punishing far less objectionable speech deemed offensive to other minority groups… But two wrongs don’t make a right. If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry, the solution is not to expand the university’s power to punish expression. It’s to abolish speech codes entirely.”
“Universities have a vital role to play in fostering a culture of free and open debate, and the presidents were right to draw a distinction between speech and conduct. Threats directed at individual students are inconsistent with a university’s goal of fostering a productive educational environment, not to mention against the law… Regardless of our politics, we should all be wary of giving educational institutions even greater power to enforce regulations barring hate speech (a concept with no standing in American jurisprudence), because we are all at risk of falling afoul of them. Many pro-Israel students and activists reveled in [Rep. Elise] Stefanik’s grilling of the university presidents, but what is to stop a prohibition against threats of genocide being used to silence them? Accusations that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza have been issued repeatedly over the past two months. It doesn’t matter that such claims are utterly baseless. Were abstract expressions of support for genocide to be prohibited on college campuses, any student or invited speaker who supports Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas could be accused of enabling genocide against Palestinians and subjected to punishment at the whim of some university bureaucrat.”
Why it matters: “Americans have been justifiably appalled by the open expression of antisemitism at elite universities in the aftermath of Oct. 7. As troubling as this revelation has been, we can confront the problem only if we have the ability to recognize it. By its nature, censorship obscures; how can we deal with the radicalization of the professoriate and the political indoctrination of their charges if we can’t hear what they have to say?… The test for a liberal society is how we deal with that upset, not how we avoid it.”
5. Why we shouldn’t be surprised when academics apologize and cheerlead for far-right violence
Why you should read it: Historian Niall Ferguson recounts the ways German academics and intellectuals cheerled for the Nazis and other far-right political movements to explain how and why so many contemporary American academics and intellectuals who call themselves progressives can cheer on mass murder and rape perpetrated by far-right terrorists like Hamas.
“It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before… [T]he German professoriat [of the 1920s] had a fatal weakness. For reasons that may be traced back to the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich or perhaps even further into Prussian history, academically educated Germans were unusually ready to prostrate themselves before a charismatic leader, in the belief that only such a leader could preserve the purity of the German nationalist project.”
“Today’s progressives engage in racism in the name of diversity. The nationalist academics of interwar Germany were at least overt about their desire for homogeneity and exclusion… Lawyers and doctors, all credentialed with university degrees, were substantially overrepresented within the NSDAP, as were university students (then a far narrower section of society than today). To middle-aged lawyers, Hitler was the heir to Bismarck. For their sons, he was the Wagnerian hero Rienzi, the demagogue who unites the people of Rome… A critical factor in the decline and fall of the German universities was precisely that so many senior academics were Jews. For some, Hitler’s antisemitism was therefore—not unlike woke intersectionality in our own time—a career opportunity.”
Why it matters: “Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich. A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it. The fall from grace of the German universities was personified by the readiness of Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of his generation, to jump on the Nazi bandwagon, a swastika pin in his lapel. He was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 until 1945... The lesson of German history for American academia should by now be clear. In Germany, to use the legalistic language of 2023, ‘speech crossed into conduct.’ The ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ began as speech—to be precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles. It began in the songs of student fraternities. With extraordinary speed after 1933, however, it crossed into conduct: first, systematic pseudo-legal discrimination and ultimately, a program of technocratic genocide.”
6. How the far left embraced October 7 rape denialism
Why you should read it: The Bulwark’s Cathy Young details the ways many on the far left have sought to downplay or outright deny the systematic campaign of rape and sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas during its October 7 rampage in Israel.
“The notion that any talk about the rape of Israeli women by Hamas terrorists is a racist ploy to ‘weaponize’ racism against ‘brown men’ is still quite prevalent in certain leftist and pro-Palestinian quarters of social media. ‘Another white woman just dying to believe brown & black men are rapists,’ a leftist pro-Palestine account tweeted at Ariel Gold, herself a self-described ‘Jewish lefty, social justice & faith activist, Palestinian rights advocate,’ after she tweeted that one could ‘believe women and demand accountability for the sexual violence of Oct7’ while also deploring the deaths in Gaza… Leaving aside the validity of racial classification that defines Palestinians as ‘brown’ and Israelis as ‘white,’ the claim that the use of rape as a weapon of war and terror is specifically associated with ‘brown men’ is easy to disprove. Before the Hamas attack, the most recent, and widely publicized, reports of weaponized sexual violence focused on Russian war crimes in Ukraine after the February 2022 invasion; prior to that war, the biggest international outrage about wartime rape was directed at Serbia over the mass rapes of Bosnian Muslim women, conducted as part of a deliberate ethnic cleansing strategy.”
“…the casual dismissal, by [far left commentator Brianha Joy] Gray and others, of October 7 survivors who say that they witnessed rapes is based on remarkably uncharitable interpretations and strained reasoning. One man’s account of seeing the gang rape and murder of a woman at the music festival is derided by Gray as ‘fetishistic’ because he describes the victim as ‘a beautiful woman with the face of an angel.’ (That mention of the victim’s beauty has elicited far more progressive indignation than a captured woman being mocked as ‘one of the Jewish dogs’ in a Hamas video clip that also includes an apparent rape threat.) Another left-wing commentator, Grayzone News writer Aaron Maté, has discounted the same man’s testimony as unreliable because he also reported witnessing a Hamas terrorist behead another woman with a shovel. It’s not clear why Maté considers this a credibility-busting claim when a confirmed, gruesome Hamas video actually shows a male Thai worker being decapitated with a garden hoe… The fact is that the reality of Hamas’s use of rape as a weapon of terror is confirmed by extensive evidence that is only now beginning to emerge—not only the testimonies of first responders and forensic investigators who have described their harrowing discoveries, but actual photographic and video records.”
Why it matters: “Such mealy-mouthed evasions have prompted some Jewish activists to start a campaign with a bitterly sarcastic slogan: ‘#MeToo unless you’re a Jew.’ One may debate whether the insistence on denying or downplaying Hamas rapes is driven by prejudice against Jews or prejudice in favor of groups perceived as ‘marginalized,’ ‘anti-colonialist,’ or opposed to and victimized by ‘Western imperialism.’ What’s not in question is that this mindset is leading to an appalling moral blindness—the kind of blindness that can make someone think Joe Biden sexually assaulting a woman on his staff is more likely than terrorists on a murder and torture spree raping some of their victims.”
7. Why nuclear power pledges at the recent annual global climate conference are less than meets the eye
Why you should read it: The Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus contends in Foreign Policy that recent pledges at the COP28 conference in Dubai to increase the use of nuclear power face significant, long-standing obstacles.
“Today, nuclear energy is increasingly recognized as a critical climate solution. The European Union, after a protracted battle between nuclear-powered France and anti-nuclear Germany, included some nuclear energy activities in its low carbon taxonomy this year, which allows sustainable investment funds to include nuclear in their portfolios. In the United States, the Biden administration has embraced nuclear energy, including by funding the development of new types of reactors… But when it comes to turning words into actions, the picture is decidedly less rosy. Three weeks before Kerry’s bold announcement in Dubai, the U.S. developer of the first small modular reactor to be licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, NuScale, announced that it had canceled its first reactors, slated to receive close to $2 billion in federal grants, due to rising cost and weak customer demand. Two other reactor projects slated for significant government support will release new cost estimates before the end of the year. These will almost certainly show substantial cost increases as well, mainly due to rising interest rates and commodity prices for steel and other costly construction materials.”
“Other clean energy technologies, such as wind and solar, are subject to rising costs and project cancellations, too. But nuclear energy faces exceptional regulatory requirements that have made it virtually impossible for its developers to properly harness innovation in reactor design, manufacturing, or supply chains... Absent significant regulatory reform and hard commitments from policymakers to build actual reactors, an expansion of nuclear energy globally—especially at the scale that many policymakers, climate scientists, and energy analysts believe is necessary—is extremely unlikely.
Why it matters: “Ultimately, there is no inherent reason that nuclear energy should be expensive. Indeed, nuclear reactors, large or small, based on their basic physical characteristics, should be the cheapest form of energy that we have. Nuclear fuels are denser than any other energy source, which means that fuel represents a tiny share of the cost of producing nuclear energy (unlike power generated from fossil fuels). It also means that a nuclear reactor requires far less material—steel, cement, and other costly inputs—per unit of energy produced than any other energy source. Nor is there any reason inherent to nuclear technology that a small modular reactor should be harder or more costly to manufacture than a large wind or gas turbine… For that to happen, though, policymakers, the nuclear industry, and nuclear advocates alike will have to break with their unfortunate habit of making promises they can’t keep. Instead, they will have to demand policies that are credibly up to the task of revitalizing an industry that the world desperately needs.”
8. Why FTC head Lina Khan has had a rough year
Why you should read it: New York magazine writer Ankush Khardori profiles the no-good year anti-trust wunderkind Lina Khan has had as head of the Federal Trade Commission.
“There was palpable excitement on the left when President Biden appointed Lina Khan, just 32 at the time, to lead the Federal Trade Commission in 2021. She had risen to prominence after writing a 2017 law-review note arguing that Amazon was an illegal monopoly and became a celebrity in the burgeoning progressive antitrust-reform movement, which wants to radically change federal antitrust policy… Things have not gone as planned for the movement or the once-rising star, who has suffered a series of conspicuous setbacks at the helm of the FTC this year. A proposed rule banning noncompete agreements has drawn skepticism from well-regarded observers. A legally dubious effort to rewrite the agency’s merger-review policy has drawn widespread criticism, including from former Obama administration officials and former chief economists at the agency. Worst of all, two high-profile lawsuits against tech giants — one against Meta, the other against Microsoft — flopped in the courts.”
“Khan has become an object of over-the-top derision on the right, but the discontent with her tenure inside the FTC is broader and far less ideologically motivated than her defenders would have us believe — something that became clearer to me after a series of interviews with a number of officials who left the agency after Khan took over and a group of agency alumni who are now in academia. I surveyed them to try to get a better sense of what is actually happening within the agency and how Khan might conceivably improve the situation. The returns were decidedly mixed with concerns about Khan’s leadership ranging from the personal to the political… To my modest surprise, the most common area of concern was Khan’s temperament and management style — a subject that has generally eluded serious media scrutiny but that has vexed career officials since her arrival. In their telling, Khan’s failings in this area explain a lot about what has happened at the FTC this year, including why the agency has been bringing cases with shaky legal underpinnings, why it’s losing those cases, why experienced officials have been leaving, and why the rest of us should care. (The FTC declined a request to interview Khan.)”
Why it matters: “The stakes extend far beyond Khan’s professional ambitions or even the FTC’s current portfolio of investigations and active litigation. Khan’s failure could ultimately prove fatal to a once-in-a-generation movement to dramatically transform government antitrust policy, for better or worse, so that government regulators and the courts block far more mergers and acquisitions throughout the economy. She is not alone in the effort — she has a political and ideological ally at the helm of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division — but things are going just as suboptimally, if not demonstrably worse, over at the DOJ.”
9. What went right in 2023 (aside from Taylor Swift’s spectacular tour)
Why you should read it: Progress Network founder Zachary Karabell lists the ways in which things got better in 2023 for the Wall Street Journal—despite a widespread national bad mood.
“…2023 was a year marked in large measure by movement forward in most of what Americans value in terms of material well-being and marked as well by a surprisingly resilient domestic economy that defied expectations of a recession. In looking at the positive, there must always be the caveat that much has gone wrong. But it says something about our current cultural mood that few seem to feel the need to include the inverse caveat: that there’s much good, if less sensational, news behind the dire headlines of campus unrest, political polarization and global conflict.”
“For Americans, perhaps the most surprising good news of 2023 was on the economic front. Despite the most aggressive Federal Reserve interest rate tightening policy in decades and the end of massive public spending during the pandemic, there was no recession and no rise in unemployment. There is chatter on social media about a ‘silent recession,’ with many Americans feeling that they’re living in a downturn… But those numbers are real: U.S. GDP growth is up a decent 2.6% in 2023, and the unemployment rate is nearly back to its lows of 2019, which was the lowest in generations. It would appear that the U.S. economy produced a rare outcome, a true Goldilocks moment: Interest rates rose and inflation went down without unemployment going up… [W]age gains have been outpacing inflation. Those gains only began to surpass inflation in May of this year, which may be why public attitudes have yet to reflect the shift. As of now, average hourly earnings are averaging an annual increase of 4.2%, versus 3.7% for inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index.”
Why it matters: “Finally, as 2023 ends, there may be an upside to the sour mood of publics around the globe. The gap between pessimistic attitudes and often encouraging data reflects an important social and cultural reality: More people than ever before believe they have a right to a better life and a better future and to have their voices heard. No one expresses deep discontent with how things are if they believe we all just have to accept our lot in life… In the U.S., the belief that hard work will lead to a better life has been eroded, but it has also been expanded over the past decades to include everyone, regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation. Dissatisfaction is the opposite of complacency—and a necessary condition for change.”
Odds and Ends
The only real choice for Time magazine’s 2023 person of the year: Taylor Swift…
How Iron Man and Oppenheimer star Robert Downey, Jr. looks ahead to the “third act” of his life and career…
That one time in 1935 when the U.S. Army Air Corps tried to divert a lava flow in Hawaii by bombing it…
How the Killers’ 2003 song “Mr. Brightside” became the ubiquitous rock anthem of the new millennium…
What did the Crusaders eat? According to Israeli archaeologists, a lot of pork and copious amounts of figs…
What I’m Listening To
“evermore,” the title track from Taylor Swift’s wintry 2020 album.
A nasty live rendition of Prince’s “Gett Off,” from the recently-released super-deluxe edition of his 1991 album Diamonds and Pearls.
“The Hyperspace Jump” off Kevin Kiner’s score for Star Wars: Ahsoka.
Image of the Month
