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The Supreme Court’s debt-relief ruling is a blow to President Joe Biden—and to the millions of people who expected that some of their loans would be forgiven. The Biden administration is quickly moving to its Plan B for relieving student debt, but little about this process will be quick.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Google isn’t grad school. Zombie Twitter has arrived. A radical idea for fixing polarization Compostable plastic is garbage.

Biden’s Plan B

The way President Biden talked about debt relief was vivid, almost epic: When he announced his sweeping student-loan debt-relief plan last August, he said in the West Wing, “People can start to finally crawl out from under that mountain of debt.”

Almost a year later, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that his plan could not move forward. This ruling is a blow to Biden—and to the millions of people who were reshaping their lives and their spending habits around the expectation that their loans would be forgiven. “I don’t think that people are properly understanding how difficult this payment restart is going to be from a logistical standpoint” for borrowers, my colleague Adam Harris, who covers higher education for The Atlantic, told me.

Biden’s initial debt-relief plan relied on the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, or the HEROES Act. That law gives the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify” federal-student-loan provisions after national emergencies (President Donald Trump previously used it to pause loan repayment at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic). But last week, the Court determined that the 2003 law did not give Biden the authority to cancel debt. Chief Justice Roberts invoked the “major-questions doctrine,” which dictates that Congress must clearly authorize action on issues of major economic and political significance. (In a striking dissent, Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether the decision was constitutional. “At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent,” she wrote. In exercising authority it does not have, she concluded, the Court “violates the Constitution.”)  

Biden’s administration moved quickly to Plan B (and beyond). The Department of Education released a statement on Friday saying that it had already initiated a new rule-making process to open up different paths to push through debt relief, including using the Higher Education Act of 1965, which contains a provision giving the secretary of education the authority to “compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand.” It also announced other changes that would cut borrowers some slack, including a more affordable repayment plan and a year-long “on-ramp” to repayment.

Many advocates wanted Biden to use the Higher Education Act as the basis for debt relief in the first place. Braxton Brewington, the press secretary of the activist group Debt Collective, told me that his group has been “pushing” for Biden to use the HEA. “What we would love to say more than anything is that the Biden administration did everything they could,” he added.

One challenge that comes with pivoting to the HEA is that it needs to go through the negotiated rule-making process, which is likely to be long and drawn-out—“We’re talking several months at minimum,” Adam told me, and maybe up to 18 months. The desire for a quicker process may be one reason the Biden administration turned to the HEROES Act first, he said, though the main reason the Biden administration did things this way is that it thought it had broad authority under HEROES to provide debt relief. (Some Supreme Court justices agreed, Adam noted.) Asked for comment, the Department of Education sent a link to a press conference where Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona echoed that point, saying, “We believe that the HEROES Act pathway was quicker and we had the authority to do that.”

And a new debt-relief plan that uses the HEA instead of HEROES may face similar legal challenges. Jed Shugerman, a Boston University law professor who has written for The Atlantic, told me that, in his view, such a plan would be “dead on arrival” at the Supreme Court. He said that the Court had made this clear both in commentary surrounding the case and in the legal rule that it applied in Nebraska v. Biden. “The rule puts such a thumb on the scale against executive action that it precludes the Higher Education Act from being the basis,” he told me. (At the press conference last week, Bharat Ramamurti, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, said, “We think that the pathway that we’re choosing here, the Higher Education Act, is available even with [the major questions] doctrine in place.”)

Shugerman added, however, that it’s “perfectly appropriate” for the Biden administration to challenge the Court’s ruling while also pursuing other avenues to push through debt relief. He suggested that the Biden administration could simultaneously invite individual debtors facing hardship to apply for relief through a settlement process. That would take time, he said, and the plan may still face court challenges—but at least it would not be “simply raising similar problems that the Roberts Court identified.”

Shugerman had long been skeptical that using the HEROES Act to pass student-loan relief would make it past the Court. In The Atlantic last year, he argued that the Biden administration’s framing of debt relief as a COVID-era emergency measure, when in reality it was a much broader initiative, made it likely to fail. “That COVID is not the real reason for such a sweeping program is a serious legal problem,” he wrote.

Taking a bold stance on student debt could be politically useful for Biden and Democrats in the lead-up to 2024. Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me, “If President Biden cares about motivating young people, motivating communities of color, and motivating working people in general who are saddled with student debt, this is a really smart issue to keep leaning into and increase the volume on.”

All of this work may take time, potentially even bleeding into the next presidential race and administration. And broader issues in higher education persist: “Supporting students on the front end going to college and helping them get through would be preferable to having them accrue this large amount of debt” in the first place, Adam Harris told me.

Taken together, he said, the debt-relief ruling and the Court’s ruling on race-conscious college admissions last week tell us that “the Court does not adequately account for the broader history of higher education in these decisions.” He added that it “simply does not think about the weight that history has and continues to play.”

Related:

Biden’s student-debt rescue plan is a legal mess. Biden’s cancellation of billions in debt won’t solve the larger problem.

Today’s News

President Trump’s personal aide Walt Nauta pleaded not guilty to federal charges in the classified-documents case. The president of Belarus claimed that the Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has returned to Russia, despite a previous peace deal where he had agreed to house Prigozhin in Belarus. Meta unveiled Threads, its competitor to Twitter, yesterday. More than 30 million users signed up on the first day.

Evening Read

Samuel Aranda / Panos Pictures / Redux

In France, Nihilistic Protest Is Becoming the Norm

By Thomas Chatterton Williams

Last September in Paris, I attended a screening of the Netflix feature Athena, about an apocalyptic insurrection following the videotaped killing of a teenager of North African descent by a group of men dressed as police. The unrest begins within an isolated French hyperghetto and blooms into a nationwide civil war, a dismal progression that no longer seems entirely far-fetched. To log on to social media or turn on the TV in France over the past week was to have been transported into Athena’s world.

Late last month, an officer in the Parisian banlieue of Nanterre shot Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan descent who was driving illegally, after he accelerated out of a traffic stop. His death has triggered days of violence that have convulsed the country and at times verged on open revolt. Groups of disaffected youth have incinerated cars, buses, trams, and even public libraries and schools. Roving mobs have clashed with armored police; giddy teens have ransacked sneaker and grocery stores; frenzied young men have filmed one another blasting what look to be Kalashnikovs into the sky.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

Yesterday evening, I read a lovely appreciation of Robert Gottlieb, the legendary editor who died last month at the age of 92, in The New York Review of Books. The essay, written by Daniel Mendelsohn, recalled some delightful stories of years of friendship. But what I found especially moving was the way he highlighted Gottlieb’s roving curiosity. “Although Bob had a first-class formal education,” Mendelsohn writes, “he was ultimately self-taught in the way that many people who are voracious and indiscriminate readers in their formative years are self-taught: because he sampled everything for himself firsthand, his relationship to books and, later, to all culture was wholly unfiltered by received opinion or ‘theory’ or schools of thought. As a result, he was utterly without intellectual or cultural prejudice—not at all a bad model for an aspiring critic.”

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The goal of “How to Build a Life” is fairly simple: to bring the world of academic social-science research to a wide audience, using my academic training to translate sometimes-esoteric scholarship into practical happiness lessons. In the course of this project, I find my task is as likely to be combatting poor or incomplete advice that people have read on the internet as giving solid counsel based on scholarship and science. The web is full of self-styled experts in my field who claim to have the One Weird Trick that will change your life completely.

And not just in my field. The internet has fed a huge reservoir of good information, but it has also created an explosion of nonsense: technical-sounding nutrition advice about a new dietary supplement that miraculously stimulates the body to convert fat into muscle, financial jargon pushing dubious investment tips, health guidance that promises a miracle treatment your physician doesn’t know about. As my own doctor once told me, his greatest challenge these days is “undoing the handiwork of Dr. Google.”

[Tim Harford: What conspiracy theorists don’t believe]

Some of what people see is straight-up fake news—predatory attempts to swindle consumers. But much of the bad advice on the web actually originates in a psychological phenomenon called “the illusion of explanatory depth.” Understanding this illusion can make you a better consumer of knowledge, as well as less likely to promote bad information yourself.

In 2002, two psychologists noticed in experiments that when people are first exposed to technical information, they usually overestimate how deeply they understand it. The researchers asked graduate students to read basic descriptions of how eight common mechanical items worked: a speedometer, a zipper, a piano key, a flush toilet, a cylinder lock, a helicopter, a quartz watch, and a sewing machine. Then they asked the students to rate their understanding on a 1–7 scale. The average self-rating was about 4.

Next, the researchers asked the participants to re-rate their knowledge after being prompted to explain clearly how the items worked in their own words (without simply parroting what they had heard). The students were also quizzed on the information and had to compare their own understanding with a true expert’s. Nearly every participant’s self-rating dropped at these stages, with the average falling to as low as about 3 at one point. In other words, the participants initially felt as if they had more expertise than they really did.

The phrase illusion of explanatory depth was what researchers dubbed their finding. The phenomenon is similar to the famous Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people with low levels of skill in an activity tend to overrate their competence. One explanation for this is “hypocognition,” that people don’t know what they don’t know.

We all exhibit this tendency. When you first hear an explanation intended for a layperson of string theory, you aren’t aware of the immense quantity of technical scholarship behind the physics; you just feel that you “get it” and experience a surge of intellectual power. But when you yourself have to explain something as complex as the structure of a Bach fugue, or hear an expert in the field actually go deep on such a subject, you realize that you have barely skimmed the surface.

Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.

The overconfidence of people laboring under the illusion of explanatory depth can lead to the spread of misinformation. As researchers have shown, when a person’s confidence is highest though their actual knowledge is low, they become very believable to others—despite not being reliable. And the more inaccurate people are—or perhaps the more they want to believe the validity of their perception—the more they tend to be swayed by their own underinformed overconfidence.

This explains the problem of internet experts and those who rely on them: Practically everywhere you look on the web, you can find technical information of dubious accuracy. This is not necessarily because we are being deliberately lied to—although plenty of that is going on there too—but because the internet is a free, democratic platform. This very freedom and accessibility causes many people to succumb to the illusion of explanatory depth, confidently sharing their newly acquired expertise in some technical information gleaned from reading a single article or watching a couple of videos.

The two ways we fall prey to the illusion are as consumers and as producers. The plight of the consumer of misinformation is the hardest to address, because it isn’t always easy to know when someone is a true expert or just flush with false confidence. The key question to ask is, Does the source of this technical assertion have a genuine technical background? If the answer is no, proceed with caution.

If you’re hearing from a nonexpert who is relying on the work of researchers, consult the original sources if you can, to make sure that they are reliable and not cherry-picked to make an argument favorable to the research author’s biases. A good rule of thumb is that if a piece of technical information seems too good to be true, it probably is. And that generally applies to any promise of a simple, easy solution to a problem that has been around forever.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How smart people can stop being miserable]

The second condition—being a supplier of bad information—is easier to treat. Just remember: Google isn’t graduate school. Learning about novel ideas is a thrill, and indeed many researchers believe that interest itself is a positive emotion—a source of pleasure rooted in the evolutionary imperative to learn new things. Cruising the web in search of interesting things is great fun. But beware your own susceptibility to the illusion of explanatory depth. If you think you understand something technical and complicated after cursory exposure, you might be able to put the knowledge to good use in your life, but you almost certainly don’t understand it well enough to hold forth on the topic.

I have written here about people with insufficient expertise in a technical field who inadvertently pass on bad information. But I’d be the first to acknowledge that experts can give bad information as well. This is especially true when it comes to predictions about the future, an endeavor in which experts tend to be right only a little more often than a coin flip. But experts can also be wrong about what is right in front of them—falling prey like anyone else to groupthink, social convention, politics, threat of community disapproval, and cultural fads. I try to remind myself of this fact every day.

No matter whom you are taking advice from, think for yourself and never entirely suspend your skepticism. No one has perfect knowledge or insight; everyone has biases and blind spots. And if you are the expert, remember that there really is One Weird Trick that solves a lot of problems: It’s called humility.