Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

May 1, 9 a.m., was once the hour of chaos in New York City. In a tradition dating back to colonial days, leases all over the city expired precisely at that time. Thousands of tenants would load their belongings on carts and move, stepping around other people’s piles of clothing and furniture. Paintings of that day look like a mass eviction, or the aftermath of some kind of disaster. In fact, that day represented a novel American form of hope. Mobility, or the right to decide where you wanted to live, was a great American innovation. But lately, that mobility is stalling, with real consequences for politics, culture, and the national mood.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor and the author of the new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum explains how, over the decades, several forces combined to make it harder for the average American to move and improve their circumstances. And he lands at some surprising culprits: progressives, such as Jane Jacobs, who wanted to save cities but instead wound up blocking natural urban evolution and shutting newcomers out.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

I have moved many times in my life: across continents, across the country, back and forth across D.C., which is where I live now. And I didn’t think much about it. I just chalked it up to restlessness—until I read Yoni Appelbaum’s new book, which is also the March cover story in The Atlantic. The book is called Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

Appelbaum argues that there is and always has been something quintessentially American—and also, quintessentially hopeful—about moving. In the 19th century, Moving Day was, like, a thing—a holiday celebrated across different American cities at different times, when everybody would just up and move. To quote Appelbaum: “Nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a single day.”

But moving isn’t happening so much anymore. As Appelbaum writes: “Every year, fewer Americans can afford to live where they want to.” So what happens to a country—geographically, culturally, politically, and, in some ways, psychologically—when mobility starts to stall?

[Music]

Rosin: Can you read this from your intro, these couple of sentences?

Yoni Appelbaum: “The notion that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they happen to be born—is America’s most profound contribution to the world … The fact that it is now endangered is not just a problem for housing markets; it’s a lethal threat to the entire American project.”

Rosin: Okay. Let’s start with the second half: Why is mobility the thing that defines the American project?

Appelbaum: It is the thing that defines the American project, because it was the first thing that anyone who got here from Europe noticed. People would come to the United States and gawk. They saw this as either our greatest asset or our great national character flaw. But they were amazed at how often Americans moved. And they were particularly amazed that the Americans who were moving were not moving out of desperation, that Americans tended to be doing okay in one place and to still want something more for themselves—want something better for their children—and to move someplace else in pursuit of it.

Rosin: And you’re not just describing something geographic. You’re describing something psychological.

Appelbaum: Yeah. I’m talking about an attitude that Americans believed that they could change their destinies by changing their address, that they could move someplace new and do better than they were doing. And also—and this is the second half of the answer—Americans believed that they were not defined by the circumstances of their birth. That was the great gift that mobility gave us. And that had really profound implications that took me a while to unravel.

Rosin: Right. Because it’s not just about geography. It’s not just about money.

It’s about a sense of yourself as having infinite possibilities. Like, you could just move and move. You weren’t class-bound in any way.

Appelbaum: Here’s the thing about American individualism: We are individuals, in the sense that we have the ability to construct our own identities, but we define ourselves by virtue of the communities that we choose to join.

Throughout the world, communities tended to choose their members. Even in the early United States, in the colonial era, if you tried to move in someplace, you could be warned out. The town had the right to say, Hey. You may have bought property here. You may have leased a building. You may have a job. We don’t want you here. And not surprisingly, they disproportionately warned out the poor. They warned out minorities. Really, American communities, for the first couple hundred years of European settlement, were members-only clubs.

And then in the early 19th century, there’s a legal revolution. And instead of allowing communities to choose their members, we allow people to choose their communities. You could move someplace and say, I intend to live here, and that was enough to become a legal resident of that place.

Rosin: So just in numbers, can you give a sense of where we are now? What’s the statistic that shows most starkly the decline in mobility now?

Appelbaum: In the 19th century, as best I can calculate it, probably one out of three Americans moved every year.

Rosin: Every year?

Appelbaum: Every year. In some cities, it might be half. In the 20th century, as late as 1970, it was one out of five. And the census in December told us we just set a new record, an all-time low. It’s dropped over the last 50 years to one out of 13. It is the most profound social change to overcome America in the last half century.

Rosin: It’s so interesting, because if you told me that someone moved that many times in a year, I would not associate that with upward mobility. I would associate that with desperation and problems.

Appelbaum: For a long time, that’s exactly what historians thought too. There was this guy, Stephan Thernstrom, who set out to investigate this, and thought what he had discovered, in all this moving about, was what he called the “floating proletariat,” right? Here was evidence that, in America, the American dream was chimerical. You couldn’t actually attain it. There was this great mass of people just moving from one place to another to another.

And several decades later, as we got better data-mining tools, we were able to follow up on the floating proletariat and find out what happened to them. The people who had stayed in one place, Thernstrom saw—they were doing a little better than they had before. But when we could track the people who had left, it turned out, they were doing much better, that the people who relocate—even the ones at the bottom of the class structure—across every decade that historians can study, it’s the case that the people who move do better economically. And this is really key: Their kids do better than the people who stayed where they were.

Rosin: It’s like Americans are, in their soul, psychological immigrants. Like, that we behave the way we think of immigrants behaving, and the more robustly we do that, the better off Americans are. The most evocative image that you draw is something called “Moving Day,” from an earlier era. I had never heard of that. Can you paint a picture of what that is?

Appelbaum: We’ve got these wonderful accounts of Moving Day from people who came over, more or less, just to see it. By law or by custom, in most cities and in most rural areas, all unwritten leases expired on the same day of the year. And this actually gave renters an enormous leg up in the world in most times, in most places, because it meant that an enormous number of properties were potentially available to them. They could go back to their landlord and say, If you want me to stay for another year, you gotta fix the leaky sink. Or they could try someplace better.

And they would all pile their possessions down at the curb. First thing in the morning, they’d hire a cart to take them across town or down the lane, and then they would push past the family that was moving out of some other apartment or townhouse or home. As they were taking their stuff out, they’d be moving their stuff in. But between sunup and sundown, a quarter, a third, half of a city might relocate. And there are these descriptions of trash lining the gutters as things fell out of the carts or there wasn’t room for it in the new apartment, and people would go scavenging through the gutters, trying to find, out of the trash, their own treasures.

It was raucous and wild, and respectable Americans always looked down on it. And yet, for the people who participated in it, it was a way to have their home be kind of like an iPhone or a car: You keep the one you have for a year or two, and then you trade up for a newer model.

Rosin: So upgrades. Now, where is this happening? Is this happening in cities of a certain size, in immigrant communities? Like, who is doing all this chaotic moving?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s one thing that really upset the upper crust.

Rosin: And who are they? Let’s define all the sides. Who are the respectable Americans?

Appelbaum: The respectable Americans are those of long-standing stock who are trying very hard to impress the European cousins. And they are appalled that this defect of their national character—that people don’t know their place. They don’t know their station. They’re always moving around looking for something better for themselves, and they write about it in those kinds of moralistic terms.

But the people who are participating in it, it’s very broad. I mean, when you’re talking about half the city moving, what you’re talking about is activity that’s as much a middle-class and upper-middle-class activity as it is a working-class activity. As long as you are adding a good number of fresh new homes to the market every year, pretty much everybody who moved could move up, because the wealthy were buying brand-new homes that had just been erected.

But they were vacating, you know, homes that were a few years older or apartments that they were moving out of, and those became available to the upper-middle class, right? And you’d get a chain of moves. You can trace this, you know, a dozen, 15 moves, one family succeeding another, succeeding another—and everybody moving up to something a little bit better than they had the year before. And, you know, just like an iPhone or a car, they’re chasing technological innovation. One year, you move into a new apartment, and it’s got running water. And, you know, two years later, the water runs hot and cold, and it’s a miracle, right? So everybody is constantly moving up in the world as they constantly relocate.

Rosin: So there are decades of massive amounts of mobility. It’s considered respectable enough. And then, at some moment, a few forces start to slow this all down. So can you tell the story of what happens in Lower Manhattan?

Appelbaum: Yeah. It’s sort of a sad story when you look closely at it. Lower Manhattan, the Lower East Side, is like no place that’s ever existed before or since. It is so dense. People are living in tenements at a sort of rate per acre, the way demographers measure this, that is multiples of any place in Manhattan today.

Rosin: Do you remember the numbers? Because I think they’re extraordinary. Maybe I’m just remembering this from going to the Tenement Museum, but when you actually look at the density numbers, they are just hard to get your head around.

Appelbaum: Yeah. I think it’s, like, 600 per acre. It’s really, really, really high. There’s no place in Manhattan today that’s even a third as dense, even though the buildings are now much, much taller. So they’re really squeezed in there. And reformers are appalled. And there are real problems with some of these, you know—what they’re really appalled about, it turns out, is less the housing conditions than the presence of so many immigrants, with their foreign ways, foreign religion, foreign languages, weird foods, odd smells, right?

They’re looking at this, and they are not happy that this is invading their city. They’re not subtle about it. They’re quite clear that they think that apartments are themselves degrading. This is the original progressive era, and there’s a tight intertwining between the reformers and government, and they move fluidly among them.

Rosin: Wait. Like, who is the “they”? Are we talking about city planners? Just, this is a really interesting moment. So I just want to—because it’s unexpected, this part of the history.

Appelbaum: Lawrence Veiller is sort of Mr. Tenement Reform. He’s the guy who will write most of the reports, who’ll serve on the commissions, who’ll move in as the first deputy commissioner of the Tenement Office when New York creates one. Like, he is both a government official and a reformer, and that was pretty typical. They move fluidly among these jobs. And he is the guy who really goes on a crusade against tenements.

And maybe the most remarkable moment in my research was stumbling across a speech he gave at a conference, where somebody had asked, How do you keep apartments out of your city? And he says, Well, you know. The problem is: If you put it to a vote, you can’t keep them out of your city, because people actually like living in apartments. They serve a useful function. So what you have to do is solve it the way I’ve done it in New York: You call it fire-safety regulation. And you put a bunch of regulations on the apartments that make them prohibitively expensive to build. But be careful not to put any fire-safety regulations on single- or two-family homes, because that would make them too expensive. And as long as you call it “fire safety,” you can get away with keeping the apartments and their residents out of your neighborhoods.

And it’s one of those moments where, you know, you just sort of gape at the page, and you think, I can’t believe he actually said it. I was worried, maybe, I was reading too much into some of the other things that he’d said. But here he is straightforwardly saying that much of the regulatory project that he and other progressives pursued was purely pretextual. They were trying to find a whole set of rules that could make it too expensive for immigrants to move into their neighborhoods.

Rosin: So we’re in a moment of just resistance to tenements and apartments and crowdedness. How does this, then, become encoded? What’s the next step they take?

Appelbaum: You know, the problem with building codes is that, ultimately, there are ways around them. People are developing new technologies. It’s not enough to keep the apartments back. It’s not enough to pen the immigrants into the Lower East Side.

And there’s a bigger problem, which is that the garment industry in New York is moving up Fifth Avenue. And on their lunch breaks, the Jewish garment workers are getting some fresh air on the sidewalks, and this infuriates the owners of the wealthy department stores on Fifth Avenue, who say, You’re scaring off our wealthy customers. And they want to push them out. They try rounding them up and carting them off in police wagons. They try negotiating with the garment-factory owners. But, of course, these workers want to be out on the sidewalk. It’s their one chance for fresh air, and it’s a public sidewalk. So there’s a limit to what they can do, and they finally hit on a new solution, which is: If you change the law so that you can’t build tall buildings near these department stores, then you can push the garment factories back down toward the Lower East Side.

Rosin: You know, anytime you step into the history of the technical and possibly boring word zoning, you hit racism.

Appelbaum: You know, the thing about zoning, which is sort of the original sin of zoning—which is a tool invented on the West Coast to push the Chinese out of towns and then applied—

Rosin: —in progressive Berkeley! That’s another thing I learned in your book, is how Berkeley, essentially, has such racist zoning origins.

Appelbaum: It’s a really painful story, and zoning, ultimately, is about saying there are always laws, which said there are things that you can’t do in crowded residential areas. But zoning was a set of tools, which said, Some things are going to be okay on one side of the tracks and not okay on the other. And given that that was the approach from the beginning, it was always about separating populations into different spaces.

And so New York adopts the first citywide zoning code. And at first, this is spreading from city to city. The New Deal will take it national.

Rosin: And what does—the zoning code is not explicitly racist? What does it actually say in the government documents?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s the brilliance of the zoning code. The courts have been striking down explicit racial segregation. But if you wrote your ordinance carefully enough and never mentioned race, you could segregate land by its use. You could figure out how to allow in some parts of your city only really expensive housing, or in other parts of your city, you could put all of the jobs that a particular immigrant group tended to have.

Rosin: Like the Chinese laundromat on the West Coast. Like, No laundromats. That’s the famous one.

Appelbaum: Exactly. That’s the original zoning ordinance: We’re gonna push all the laundries back into Chinatown. And if you push the laundries into Chinatown, you’re pushing their workers into Chinatown. So there were ways to effectively segregate—not foolproof, but effectively segregate—your population without ever having to use any racial language in the ordinance, and so it could stand up in court but still segregate your population.

Rosin: Okay, so we have zoning laws, we have government complicity in kind of dividing where people live, and then we have someone who comes in as a supposed savior, particularly of Lower Manhattan. Maybe not a savior, but someone who appreciates the diversity in the city as it is, and that’s Jane Jacobs. And you tell a very different story of the role she plays in all of this, which really brings us to the modern era. So can you talk about who she is and what role she played in transforming Lower Manhattan?

Appelbaum: Yeah, it’s a little heartbreaking sometimes to look closely at your heroes and find out that the story you thought you knew is not the one that actually played out. Jane Jacobs was a woman who saw clearly what it was that made cities great, at a time when almost nobody wanted to recognize that.

She saw the diversity of their populations, of their uses, the way that people mixed together as being not, as the progressives had it, something that needed to be corrected with rational planning, but as a strength that needed to be recognized and rescued and reinforced. And she stood tall against urban renewal, against the notion that the way to save cities was to knock them flat and to rebuild them with all the uses very carefully segregated out.

And she wrote this brilliant book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that laid out these principles, and she saved her own neighborhood from urban renewal and became, in the process, sort of the patron saint of urbanism. And her great lesson that she took from all of these experiences was that you needed to empower individuals with a deep appreciation of urban life, with the tools to stop governments. And that was the gospel that she preached. And in many ways, it was necessary at that moment, at the peak of urban renewal. But what she didn’t understand at the time—maybe couldn’t have understood at the time—was that she was going to create problems that were even worse than the problems that she was trying to prevent.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: how Jane Jacobs inadvertently contributed to the stuckness of America.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay, so here we have Jane Jacobs. She moves into—what street was that that she moved into?

Appelbaum: She moves into 555 Hudson Street.

Rosin: Okay, she’s on Hudson Street. That’s an amazing place to live. What had been all around her was—who was living there at the time? It wasn’t other people like her.

Appelbaum: No, it mostly wasn’t. She and her husband are two working professionals in Manhattan who are able to pay all cash for a townhouse on this block that is mostly filled with immigrant families. And it’s changing at the time. She’s not alone in coming in, in that way.

But it’s mostly been a neighborhood of immigrants, the children of immigrants. It’s got tons of street-front retail, and she writes about this beautifully, which activates the street front. The eyes on the street keep them safe during the day. She writes about the intricate ballet of the sidewalk as people dodge around each other, and people each pursuing their own tasks are able to live in harmony, in concert. She writes about this block absolutely beautifully, even as she is killing all of it.

Rosin: So if we freeze her there, then she’s a heroine of the city who appreciates it in all its diversity. So then what happens? How does the tragedy begin?

Appelbaum: You know, I tracked down the family that was in that building before she bought it. It was a man named Rudolph Hechler. Two of his adult children and his wife were working in a candy store on the ground floor. So they were renting, living above the shop that they operated, and that shop was everything that Jacobs says make cities great. It was a place where you could go and drop your keys if you’re going to be out for a while, and your kid could come pick them up and let themselves into the house. It was a place where you could just stop and talk to your neighbors.

It was the kind of thing that Jacobs praised, but when she buys the building, she gut renovates it. She tears out the storefront. She turns it into a single-family home. She rips off the facade of this historic building and replaces it with modern metal-sash windows. She so thoroughly alters the appearance, presents a blank front to the street, where before there’d been a lively storefront, that when they eventually, at her urging, historically landmark the block, they find that the building that she lives in has no historic value whatsoever.

And so here, you have somebody who has written this ode to the way people are living around her but buys a building within it and changes it to suit her own family’s need—which was a reasonable thing, I should say, for her to do under the circumstances—but then landmarks the block, which prevents people from building new buildings in the way that that block had always had. So there’s a couple buildings right next to hers that have been torn down and turned into a six-story apartment building before she moves in. But her changes make it so that nobody can do that again. And if you’re not building new buildings to accommodate growth, what you’re going to have in response to mounting demand is rising prices.

Rosin: So the counterfactual history with no Jane Jacobs—I understand that this is imaginary—is what? You just build bigger, taller apartment buildings that more people can afford to move into, and you maintain it as a mixed neighborhood, which is partly immigrant, partly young professors?

Appelbaum: Yeah, the counterfactual is that her neighborhood and other urban neighborhoods throughout the country continue to do what they had done right up until about 1970, which is that they evolve. Sometimes the buildings get taller; sometimes they get shorter. I lived in a neighborhood once that had seen lots of buildings have their top stories shorn off when demand had fallen.

Cities morphed; they changed. And yes, in response to mounting demand, you would have had to build up. You have to make space for people to live in cities if you want to continue to attract new generations and give them the kinds of opportunities that previous generations have had. But she did not want that. And in fact, almost nobody ever wants that, which is a real challenge.

Rosin: And is this aesthetic? Is it just that it’s historic preservation? Is it just about: People arrive at a place, and they have an aesthetic preference, and that’s what ends up freezing change? Like, that’s what ends up preventing change?

Appelbaum: Well, let’s go back to the beginning of the 19th century, when we get this legal change, which says, You can just move someplace and establish residence. The reason that states make that change is because they are looking around at communities, and they see that communities individually are walling themselves off to new arrivals, even though, collectively, it is in the interest of the individual states and the United States to let people move around.

They take that right away from communities. They recognize that if you let communities govern themselves, they will always wall themselves off. Change is really hard. It is uncomfortable. Even if a lot of changes leave you better off, while you’re going through them, you may not welcome them. And if you give communities the power to say, We’re going to pick and choose what we allow. We’re going to pick and choose who can live here, then those communities will almost always exercise that power in exclusionary ways.

And this is even worse: The communities that exercise it most effectively will be the ones that are filled with people with the time and the money and the resources and the education to do that. And so you’ll separate out your population by race, by income. That’s what happens. That’s what was happening in the United States when we opened ourselves up to mobility. And we reversed that, and for a long stretch, we were this remarkable place where people could move where they wanted.

And as we’ve switched that and given the tools back to local communities to make these decisions, the communities are behaving the way that local communities have always behaved, which is with a strong aversion to change and a disinclination to allow the interests of people who might move into the community to trump the interests of those who are already there.

Rosin: And I guess the communities who are less willing to see themselves that way, because it goes against their sense of themselves, or progressive communities—like people who are interested in historic preservation, who say they love cities, who are interested in urban renewal—like, those are not the same people who think of themselves as complicit. I mean, your subtitle is accusatory. It’s like, “breaking the engine of opportunity.”

Appelbaum: It is, and it’s led to a lot of uncomfortable conversations with friends. But when I look out at the country, what I see clearly is that the people who believe that government can make a difference in the world, the people who believe that through laws and collective action, we can pursue public goods—they want government to do things like preserve history, protect the environment, help historically marginalized populations. Well, they create a set of tools to do this. They’re inclined to see government use those tools. When, invariably, those tools get twisted against their original purposes and get used, instead, to reward affluence, it is the most progressive jurisdictions where this happens to the greatest extent.

I’ll give you a statistic from California that blew my mind, which is that for every 10 points the liberal vote share goes up in a California city, the number of new housing permits it issues drops by 30 percent.

Rosin: You talked about how this changes our framework on certain things, like a housing crisis—that we tend to say there’s a housing crisis, but that isn’t quite right.

Appelbaum: Yeah. We talk a lot about an affordable-housing crisis, but what we’ve got is a mobility crisis. And the distinction is twofold: One, there’s a lot of cheap housing in America. It’s not in the places where most people want to live. Housing tends to get really, really cheap when all the jobs disappear. I would not recommend relocating large numbers of Americans to those communities. Their prospects will be pretty bleak. You want the housing to be where the opportunities are rich. And so if all we’re trying to do is make housing affordable, without an eye on where that housing is located, on what kinds of opportunities it opens up, we’re pursuing the wrong solutions.

We also often—and this is the other side of it—create solutions. If we think of it as an affordable-housing problem, you can do something like build a lot of new public housing. But we’ve never in this country managed to build enough public housing to meet demand. Usually, if you manage to get in, it’s like a winning lottery ticket. Why would you ever give that up? Which is to say that you are stuck in place. You are tied to the place where you happen to be lucky enough to get the rent-controlled apartment, to get the public-housing unit, to get your voucher accepted after months of fruitless searching. And then you’re really disinclined to leave, even if staying in that place puts you and your family at all kinds of disadvantages.

And so if we have policy that’s focused on allowing people to live where they want, rather than policy that’s simply focused on affordability, we’re likely to return not just the kind of social and economic dynamism that have made America a wonderful place to live, but we’re also likely to return the sense of personal agency.

Rosin: Okay. Last thing: In reading this book and having this conversation, what struck me is that, essentially, you’re making a defense of America—its rootlessness, America’s infinite choice. And right now, those two things—our rootlessness and our infinite choice—are things which we think of as cursing us. The words we often use now are loneliness, lack of community, bowling alone—however you want to call it. We talk a lot about our spiritual collapse as related to the same mobility and rootlessness that you describe as a positive force in the book. And I wonder how you’ve talked about that or reconciled it.

Appelbaum: If you take a graph of when Americans joined a lot of clubs—the Bowling Alone graph, right, where Americans belong to a lot of voluntary associations and when they didn’t—and you match it against the graph of when Americans have moved a lot and when they haven’t, they line up really well, and they line up in a surprising way.

When we’re moving a lot, we’re much likelier to build really vibrant communities. When you leave someplace and start over, you’re gonna go to church on Sunday to try to find friends and build connections. Or if church is not for you, maybe you go to the local bar. Maybe you join the PTA. It depends on the phase of life that you’re in. But when people relocate, they tend to be much more proactive in seeking out social connection. Over the course of time, we fall into familiar ruts. We tend not to make as many new connections. We tend not to join as many new organizations. And people who have been a resident for a long time in a place—they may list a lot more things that they belong to, but they’re less likely to be attending them, and they’re less likely to add new ones.

The peak of American communal life comes during our peaks of mobility. When we’re moving around a lot, we’re creating a really vibrant civil society that was the envy of the world. And over the last 50 years, as we’ve moved less and less and less, all of those things have atrophied. And there’s one other side, too, which is: It’s not just about measuring the health of voluntary organizations. If you’re moving a lot, you’re giving yourself a chance to define who you want to be, to build the connections that are important and meaningful to you, as opposed to the ones that you’ve inherited.

We know something about how that works psychologically. People who are trapped in inherited identities tend to become more cynical, more embittered, more disconnected over time. People who have the chance to choose their identities tend to be more hopeful. They tend to see a growing pie that can be divided more ways, and therefore they’re more welcoming of strangers and new arrivals. They tend to be more optimistic. And if you restore that dynamism, it doesn’t mean that you’ve got to leave behind your inherited identities. It means that committing to those inherited identities becomes a matter of active choice too.

And so the United States, traditionally, was a country that was much more religious than the rest of the world, because people could commit to those faiths that they were adopting or sticking with. Americans were expected to have a narrative of, like, Why do I go to church? It wasn’t something which was really comprehensible to somebody who came from a country where everybody had the same faith. You didn’t have to ask yourself, Why am I Muslim? Why am I Catholic? In America, you always did.

And so our faith traditions tended to be particularly vibrant. So it’s not some sort of assault on tradition. I’m not advocating that we dissolve our social ties and each new generation negotiate new ones. I’m saying, the thing that has made American traditions very vibrant, the thing that often made American immigrants more patriotic than the people in the lands they left behind, and American churchgoers more religious than they had been in the old world was precisely the fact that they got to choose.

And even committing to your old traditions and your inherited identities became a matter of active choice, and something that was much more important to folks. And so you got the vibrancy both ways—both the new affiliations that you could create, the old traditions that you chose to double down on. But it all stemmed from individual agency. You have to give people the chance to start over so that their decision to stay is equally meaningful. If you choose to stay, that’s great. If you feel like you’ve got no choice, that’s really terrible.

Rosin: All right. Well, thank you, Yoni, for laying that out and joining us today.

Appelbaum: Oh, it’s a pleasure.

[Music]

Rosin: Thanks again to Yoni Appelbaum. His book, again, is Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Whether over creationism or gender identity, bitter political fights have sprung up around what sorts of ideas should be taught in public schools. Education is often touted as a tool of social mobility meant to help students access well-paying jobs, but these curricula battles indicate that many adults view it as a tool for inculcating future citizens with a particular viewpoint.

How can an institution that carries so much of our collective expectation to equalize mankind also bear some of the marks of an indoctrination factory? On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I speak with Agustina Paglayan, a professor of political science at UC San Diego whose new book, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education, conducts a rigorous historical analysis of why public education spread.

“The expansion of primary education in the West was driven not by democratic ideals, but by the state’s desire to control citizens,” Paglayan argues. “And to control them by targeting children at an age when they are very young and susceptible to external influence and to teach them at that young age that it’s good to respect rules, that it’s good to respect authority.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: You’ve probably heard the name Horace Mann. He was a 19th-century reformer who championed the abolition of slavery, the rights of women, and, most famously, the American public-school system.

As Adam Harris wrote for The Atlantic, Mann “sought to mold a certain kind of student: conscientious, zealous, inquisitive.”

Agustina Paglayan would probably add another word: obedient. Agustina is a political scientist at UC San Diego. Her new book, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education, argues that the roots of the world’s modern education systems were based not on progressive ideals but on a desire to suppress unruly populations.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

Public education is largely seen as a progressive enterprise meant to provide opportunities to those who could not afford an education on their own, but its roots may have been anything but. Beginning with Prussia in the mid-1700s, Agustina looks at the curious timing of when countries invest in their education systems and finds that investment comes in response to political elites witnessing threats to their political power.

I still believe that public education, as Horace Mann put it, can be the great equalizer of the conditions of man. But after reading Agustina’s book, I’m not sure policy makers were seeking to make it so. And troublingly, modern reformers may be more interested in indoctrination than education.

Agustina, welcome to the show.

Agustina Paglayan: Thank you very much, Jerusalem. I’m very happy to be here.

Demsas: Happy to have you. So every single time I have a conversation with someone about education policy, whether on this show or in real life, I’m sort of struck by the selection-effect issues of having education conversations with policy makers and policy wonks, because, almost universally, they’re people who liked school and liked learning, and they’re people who probably, in some ways, thrived or at least managed to overcome difficulties that they had in school.

And then they’re the people who then go on to have these conversations about, What’s wrong with schools these days? and, What’s going on here? I was one of those weird kids who would get FOMO about sick days. (Laughs.) I assume that you’re also in this class of people. You have a Ph.D. and, I guess, never quit school. Do you think about how your relationship to education affects your research?

Paglayan: Absolutely. I always think not just about how my personal experience but everyone’s personal experience shapes their research. I will say your intuition is correct.

I was a straight-A student all along. But I also had, for better or worse, the benefit of having many siblings, some of whom dropped out of high school. And so within the confines of my family, I had exposure to those inequalities that we see in society more broadly. And that inequality that I observed, even within my family, was something that was always a source of curiosity for me, particularly, as you were saying, you and I—we were straight-A students.

Demsas: Not straight-A, but I won’t co-opt that. I liked school. (Laughs.)

Paglayan: Okay. And I didn’t need much support to do that. But what I saw was that some of my siblings who needed more support from school in order to do well—they weren’t getting that support. And so that was always something that was a little troubling for me to try to understand: Why is it that those who get more easily distracted, those who maybe have more behavioral problems or more difficulty concentrating, they’re not getting the support they need? That’s what schools are supposed to do and who they are supposed to be helping the most. At least, that’s what I grew up thinking.

And so that always was at the heart of my interest in education. I mean, the other really relevant piece of what drove me to study education, in terms of my personal experience, is just that I grew up in a family where education was the most important thing. And my mom, in particular—she sacrificed a lot to be able to afford one of the best schools in Argentina, which is the country where I grew up. We didn’t have health insurance for a while. There were a lot of different things that she sacrificed along the way. And so I grew up with this sense that education is the most important investment you can make in order to live a life that is not just a prosperous life but a life with individual autonomy, where you can pursue your dreams, if you want.

And then what I started seeing as I started working on education—I worked both at the World Bank, helping with education reform in different countries, and also at Stanford University Center for Education Policy Analysis—as I started getting to know more about education systems, I started noticing, well, we have these ideas about how education is supposed to be about improving living standards, promoting individual autonomy, etcetera. But education systems worldwide are not living up to that promise.

And so that was also something that led me to be further interested in education systems and figuring out this puzzle, which began as a family-specific puzzle, but then I started observing these broader patterns cross-nationally.

Demsas: Do you still believe that education holds all those values that you did growing up?

Paglayan: I think education certainly has the promise to accomplish that. I don’t think education systems were designed to accomplish that, and I think that’s a big part of the explanation why they don’t live up to that promise.

Demsas: I want to situate us in the history of the rise of state-led primary education. Before reading your book, I think I hadn’t really taken in the short timeline that we’re talking about here, just over the course of, like, 200 years. I’m hoping you can talk to us—like, when did this start? Where did it start? Give us sort of a historical grounding.

Paglayan: Yes. So you’re right. This is a 200-year history—very short in human history. Historically, what we had was that the education of children was left entirely to families and churches. And it’s in 1763 that Prussia became the first country in the world to create a compulsory primary-education system.

And that sort of is the first instance of a state-regulated primary-education system. And Prussia, in that time period, also happens to transition from being a backward economy to being one of the most developed and, particularly, a military and world power. And so there are many countries around the world who are trying to figure out: What did Prussia do? How did Prussia accomplish this major transformation?

And what they observed as they traveled to Prussia—and you have people from all over, from Horace Mann traveling to Prussia, to the education reformers in Latin American and in France and other parts of Europe—and what they observe when they go to Prussia is, well, the one thing Prussia has that no one else has is this primary-compulsory-education system. And so that sets off a set of reforms in other countries or, at least, debates about how, if you have a primary-education system, you can consolidate political authority if it is the government that’s in charge of regulating what’s being taught in schools and then using that regulation to ensure that children are being taught to obey the state and obey its laws.

But as I pointed out, it began in 1763. I would mark that as a really important date with Prussia. And then what you see progressively is the U.S. and Canada and continental Europe following Prussia successively at different points in time, followed by Latin America toward the end of the 19th century. And then much later, you see Asian and African countries sort of following suit. So the timing of the different countries varies in terms of when they push for primary education. And that’s one of the things that I examine in the book, is, Well, why are they doing it when they are doing it?

Demsas: How did parents react to this? It seems pretty rapid, over the course of maybe a generation, where you’re not expected to have any kind of regular interaction with state institutions, to, all of a sudden, You need to send your 5-year-old to a state-run public school. How do they react to that?

Paglayan: We don’t have a lot of evidence on how parents directly reacted. What we do have evidence on is what politicians perceived was the parents’ reaction. And the perception that politicians had was primarily that parents really did not like this, because the schools weren’t teaching their kids anything that was particularly useful. And those children were used to contributing to the household income. They worked in farms. They worked in factories. And so, suddenly, you were withdrawing a form of labor that contributed to the family’s economy.

And so the parents resisted that at first. Or at least, again, that was the perception that governments had, that there was this resistance. And that’s why, then, governments passed compulsory-schooling laws, to say, Okay, even if you don’t like it, you need to send your children to school, because we have this project that we want to carry out.

Demsas: I know we’re talking in generalities now, and I know from reading your book, you’ve collected a lot of data to be able to speak in these averages, and there’s a ton of heterogeneity that’s underlying a lot of this that I’m just going to pin for our listeners here.

But in general, when we’re talking about compulsory public education, are you saying that these states would send police officers to require that? Would they levy fines? How much state capacity did they really have to require this? Or was it just that people kind of just follow the law for other reasons?

Paglayan: So as you pointed out, one of the things that I document in the book is the different sets of penalties and provisions that were put in the law to encourage parents to comply with compulsory-schooling provisions. And so in some countries, what you had was the threat of fines, and sometimes it’s just the threat itself that was sufficient to encourage low-income parents to send their kids to school. You didn’t have to really have everyone fined. It was just the existence of those fines.

It was the creation of school inspectorate systems that was very heavily in charge of monitoring school attendance. So states also created this monitoring tool through hiring and deploying school inspectors to monitor whether children were attending school and identify parents who were not complying. So this system in and of itself was something that encouraged parents.

And then the other thing that was also used was not just fines but, for example, in the context of Prussia, if you wanted to get religious confirmation, you had to send your kid to school. Otherwise, they couldn’t get their religious confirmation. And so that was another way to induce parents.

Demsas: So you mentioned this before, but the question under investigation is: Why did the west lead in expanding mass primary education? What were the reasons for that expansion and the motivations underlying that shift? Before we get into your explanation, I want to run through the traditional theories and talk them through, and talk through how you were able to discard those with your research.

You mentioned a few of them in your book: democratization, industrialization, interstate wars, assimilation of immigrants. Can you walk us through these theories and why you don’t see them holding water?

Paglayan: Yes, so all of the theories that you just mentioned, I examine in the book, and I rule out only after looking at the evidence. And so let me start with democratization.

So there was a big literature that argued that the expansion of primary education in the west, and around the world, was driven by the spread of democracy—that once lower-income people became enfranchised, they wanted primary education, and governments, who now needed to win elections with votes from lower-income individuals, responded by expanding primary education.

And so to test this theory, one of the things that I did was to compile information about when governments began to regulate primary education. And also, how much access to primary education was there prior to a country becoming democratic for the first time?

And so the two things that I found there was, first, that the creation of state-regulated primary-education systems (as defined by the passage of the first primary-education law that regulates the curriculum, regulates when you need to attend school, regulates who can become a teacher, all of these things that are regulated by these primary-education laws), these laws are passed well before a country transitions to democracy for the first time—on average, a hundred years before. So that’s the first piece of evidence to rule out the democracy argument.

Demsas: And what’s your data sample? What countries are you looking at, and are you just independently doing all this research, or are there data sets that already exist?

Paglayan: No.

Demsas: Oh, wow.

Paglayan: Yeah. I did all of the information gathering. So I started with Europe and the Americas, and I used a collection of roughly 80 different books, dissertations, and secondary sources, primarily to locate the year when these laws were passed and then to locate the actual laws, because the book also analyzes the content of the laws, the curriculum, the teacher training-and-recruitment policies, and so on. But I started with the secondary sources first, and sometimes there’s discrepancies, so you have to sort of figure out who’s correct here.

Demsas: A big theme of the show is just how laborious all data collection actually is and how it’s the main part of most research. (Laughs.)

Paglayan: Yeah, it takes a little bit of an obsessive personality to enjoy the task, actually.

Demsas: So essentially, you’re plotting this first year as, like, Year Zero and then also plotting at what year democratization happens and seeing whether those things are actually happening one after the other. And you just don’t see any relationship at all?

Paglayan: Well, the relationship you see is that it happens way before democracy. And then the other thing that I also look at is, Okay, maybe they just passed laws, but they didn’t do much in the form of providing primary education to people. This was just paper but not much in the form of implementation.

And so to get at whether that was the case, the other thing that I did was to construct a data set with primary-school enrollment rates for European and Latin American countries going very far back in time, farther back than any other previously existing data set. And what I looked at is, Okay, when you get to a country’s first transition to democracy, what was the prior level of enrollment in primary education? Are we talking 20 percent? Are we talking 30 percent? And no, we’re talking an average 70 percent enrollment. So enrollment in primary education was already very high prior to democratization.

And the other thing that I also find—and this isn’t in the book; it’s in a separate article that I published—is that democratization itself didn’t lead to further increases in primary education. And this is totally consistent with theories that argue that democracy responds to a majority of people. Well, a majority of people already had access to primary education, so they didn’t want a further expansion. And you don’t see, therefore, democracy expanding primary education further, even if you still have 30 percent or 40 percent of people in some countries left out of primary education.

Democratization doesn’t do much. And the origins of primary education are nondemocratic origins. They preceded the arrival of democracy. So that’s one piece of evidence that the book provides.

The other argument is on industrialization. So here, the argument was that the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy created a need for skilled and docile workers. And industrialists themselves were demanding that the state create this docile and skilled workforce by setting up primary school systems. And this isn’t something that I have studied on my own. There are other people who’ve studied this, and I build on their work, and some of the primary sources that I collect are consistent with these arguments. The first thing you notice is that industrialists often opposed, at first, the expansion of primary education by the state.

Demsas: You’re taking away their workers.

Paglayan: Exactly. [It’s] for the same reason that the parents opposed it. Children were working, and industrialists thought, Yeah, you’re taking away our workers. That’s going to reduce the size of the workforce, and that’s going to increase salaries, so we don’t want that.

The other thing is the timing of industrialization versus the timing, again, of these laws that are passed. And you don’t see a consistent pattern of industrialization or the beginning of industrialization preceding the creation of these systems. I think a nice example is the contrasting experiences of Prussia and England. So Prussia created, as we were talking about earlier, the first compulsory primary-education system regulated by the state while it was an agrarian country. And on the flip side to that is that England, which was the leader of the Industrial Revolution, was one of the last countries in all of Europe to create a primary-education system. By 1850, England was the country in Europe with the lowest level of access to primary schooling, even though you had already had almost an entire century of industrialization.

Demsas: Okay, so we’ve run through democratization and industrialization, and then there’s also interstate wars.

Paglayan: Yes, so interstate wars is, again, an argument people have made that countries developed their primary-education systems in response to military competition and, in the context of that military competition, a desire to form a large, trained, and loyal army—and also to inoculate citizens from external invasion or attempts to capture the country’s territory. So the idea is, Well, if I teach you to be patriotic, and a foreign power comes and tries to seduce you, well, I’ve taught you to be patriotic, and you’re not gonna be seduced by those attempts.

And again, the evidence, if you look at what happens with access to primary education after interstate wars, you are seeing that the occurrence of interstate wars leads to an expansion of access to primary education, which is what you would expect if interstate-war arguments were correct. You don’t see that.

What you see in the western world is that during interstate wars, there is a big drop in enrollment, and after the end of the interstate war, there is a recovery but not new expansion of enrollment. It’s just a partial recovery of the drop that took place during the period of the interstate war.

Demsas: Largely, what you have done in falsifying the democratization, the industrialization, the interstate wars—and also, you talk about the idea that assimilating immigrants also does not fit with the timing. Like, you don’t see large waves of immigration coincide with the creation of expanding primary education to the masses. Largely, your objections are with ones of timing, and those are ones I think are really easy to grasp.

But with democratization, I have a harder time buying that you can pinpoint exactly when that begins. Of course, as you know, democratization is not a simple, binary yes or no. It’s a process that happens and exists even within very autocratic regimes. Amartya Sen had a very famous and provocative argument that democracy is a universal value. And he points to various historical examples of democratic deliberation and norms around public reason outside of the normal Greek, western tradition throughout history.

Obviously, that doesn’t prove anything about whether democratization causes education, but it makes me less certain about our ability to say, Democratization does not play a significant role in pushing for more education, because it’s possible that there were just natural reactions to the fact that people were demanding more things, or there were riots happening all the time, and that creates a response within the state to provide educational resources.

Paglayan: Right. So I think you’re absolutely right that you could have, even within the context of a regime that is still a nondemocratic regime, a response to the masses that is driven by what we would consider relatively democratic ideals. And in order to get at whether that’s what’s going on, one of the key things that we need to do—one that I do as part of the book—is to look at: What are the political arguments that are being used by politicians when they are choosing and defending the creation of primary-education systems?

And so if there was an effort to address societal demands, what you would see is that kind of language. And you don’t see that. You see language along the lines of, The masses don’t want to send their children to school, but this is something that’s going to be beneficial for the state for its own sake, for its stability and the consolidation of political authority. And so we’re going to create these systems. We’re going to force parents to send their kids to school, even if they don’t like it.

So you don’t see this demand. And likewise, one of the things that I look at is: Are civil wars, then, leading to an expansion of primary education? Because civil wars or, as you said, riots, rebellions—there are different types of internal conflicts that I discuss in the book. Are these episodes of internal conflict leading to an expansion of education because people are asking for it? And that’s maybe part of the reason why they’re rebelling, is they want an improvement in their living standards.

Well, when you look at what politicians are saying after these episodes, and they’re talking about, Okay, what’s the goal of education? it’s not to improve living standards. It’s to teach obedience, to teach submissiveness to the state’s authority. And so it’s in the arguments that are being made by political elites who are setting up these systems, and it’s in the content of the laws themselves, also—What is the curriculum that’s being taught? How are the teachers being trained? and so on and so forth—that you see that the intention is not driven by democratic ideals. I think that’s the collection of evidence, in my view, that helps realize that there’s an authoritarian route in education systems.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: the real roots of western education, according to Augustina.

[Break]

Demsas: So I think it’s a good time for you to give us your thesis, because I do think there’s a pretty-convincing refutation of many of these traditional explanations, and people are probably left wanting more now.

Paglayan: Sure. So what the book argues, essentially, is that the expansion of primary education in the west was driven not by democratic ideals but by the state’s desire to control citizens and to control them by targeting children at an age when they are very young and susceptible to external influence, and to teach them at that young age that it’s good to respect rules, that it’s good to respect authority—with the idea in mind that if you learn to respect rules and authority from that young age, you’re going to continue doing so for the rest of your life, and that’s going to lead to political and social stability and, in particular, the stability of the status quo, from which these political elites who are using primary education benefit from.

So that it’s essentially a social-control argument about the origins of primary education and an indoctrination argument about the origins of these western primary-education systems. And by indoctrination, I do want to clarify that I’m following the definition from the dictionary, because the term indoctrination has all kinds of connotations, especially in the United States. But the dictionary defines indoctrination as the process of teaching someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.

And so from that standpoint, you can teach someone to accept, uncritically, that an absolutist regime is the best thing that could happen to you. Or you could also teach someone to accept, uncritically, that democracy or republican institutions are the best form of government.

And what makes it indoctrination is not the content of what’s being taught. It’s that the process of teaching these beliefs occurs without allowing, or much less encouraging, critical thinking. There’s no room for students to question, Oh, but why are you saying that republican institutions or absolutist regimes are the best way to structure political life? So there’s this emphasis on using education to instill a set of beliefs about: These are the existing political rules. This is how society is led by the state, and you should accept that as the right thing.

The other core argument of the book is about when exactly governments are likely to turn to education for this indoctrination and social-control and instilling obedience purposes. And that’s another key part of the book, which is to show what we were talking about earlier, that these efforts to use education as a form of indoctrination are particularly likely to intensify when political elites experience social unrest and mass protest against the status quo that these elites benefit from.

So these episodes of mass violence against the status quo generate a lot of fear among political elites who benefit from that status quo. And that fear is what leads political elites to then forge a coalition that supports, Okay, let’s invest in primary education, because clearly what we’ve been doing so far, whether it’s repression or trying to appease people with material concessions—that’s not sufficient. We just had this mass revolt or rebellion or insurrection or protest, etcetera. That tells us that what we’ve been doing is not sufficient. We need to do something new. And that’s when they either choose to invest for the first time in primary education or reform the existing education system that they have to better tailor it to the goal of obedience.

Demsas: Your book is called Raised to Obey. It’s a great title, and it’s also, I think, a very apt, succinct way of describing your thesis here. But I think that the natural question that rises is, you know: There is a desire to repress the peasantry and the citizenry of countries that have largely been authoritarian for hundreds of years. What changed about the capacity or the tools that they were using in advance that made compulsory education necessary to repress the masses? Because I can imagine someone listening to this and going, Okay, so it’s another tool in order to maintain social order, but isn’t there something interesting about the fact that it all kind of just develops in a short, 200-year time span?

Paglayan: Yes, and what happens is the Enlightenment. We have sort of this myth that the Enlightenment promoted ideas of individual autonomy and using reason to make decisions, as opposed to superstition or religion. And there’s a lot of truth in that, but during the Enlightenment, conversation and ideas that circulated around mass education, specifically, which is distinct from education for elites—the idea that took form during the Enlightenment on mass education was that mass education could be used by states to instill obedience and to consolidate the authority of the state.

And so what you see is this moment of change in ideas. It’s sort of a new idea that emerges that We didn’t have, before, any notion that the state could or should be involved in the education of children. And its people like Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and Voltaire and Kant who are saying, Well, the state has an interest of its own to educate children so that they will learn to obey the sovereign and its laws. And you get kind of these ideas in the 18th century or so becoming very pervasive in terms of circulating among elites.

Now, the ideas on their own are not sufficient for then political rulers to implement those ideas. And that’s where the role of internal conflict and social protest against the status quo becomes a catalyst for elites to say, Oh, okay. We’ve heard that maybe we could use mass education to instill obedience, but we know that’s a costly endeavor. We have to hire a lot of teachers.

So they only agree to turn to education after they experience a situation that tells them, Okay, the tools you’ve been using—repression, material concessions—those are no longer sufficient. And so that diagnosis is what then leads them to education. But you’re right that this is based on a necessary condition, which is the existence of these ideas, which occur primarily around the Enlightenment.

Demsas: Talk to me a little bit about your evidence for this here. I know you’ve talked a little bit about the research you’ve done into how elites were talking about creating public-education systems. But I assume that there were many instances of upheaval that were happening throughout hundreds of years of human history, and even over the course of this time period that we’re talking about here, when the Enlightenment ideas were in place. There were many instances of upheaval happening and concerns from elites that they were maybe losing power.

But not all of these countries choose to engage in expansion of primary-education systems after every single one of these things. So is there something particular about the upheavals or the rebellions that cause elites to change their minds here? Are you able to kind of code all of the specific types of rebellions that occur? How do we know that these things are causal?

Paglayan: So there are three different things that I want to say in response to this question, which was at the heart of my concern in studying how these instances of upheaval affect or not affect education efforts by the state.

So one of the core concerns is, as a social scientist, you don’t want to start cherry-picking the upheavals that do lead to the expansion of primary education, because that’s just like, Yeah, you’re cherry-picking the cases that meet your theory or support your theory, but there could be all these other upheavals that also take place that don’t lead to education reform.

And so what I did to get around that issue of cherry-picking is just use civil wars as a way of testing systematically whether one type of internal conflict that has been coded by other social scientists, its timing, and has been coded across countries over time for centuries—whether that type of internal conflict is associated with an expansion of primary education.

And that’s what I find, is that when you look at civil wars and expansion of primary education, both before and after a civil war, what you see is that in countries that experienced a civil war, there is a rapid acceleration of primary education following the civil war that you don’t observe in countries that in the same time period did not experience a civil war. So the civil war is leading to further expansion of primary education above and beyond what you would expect in the absence of civil war. And so that’s one of the pieces of evidence that the book provides.

There’s also specific cases that I look at that are not using nationally aggregated data but subnational data to further look at this argument. So in the context, for instance, of thinking about the case of France or the case of Chile or the case of Argentina, what I also examine is: When you have a form of internal conflict that is followed by an education reform, is the implementation of that education reform and the construction of schools being targeted specially to those areas that are perceived by the government to constitute a threat to its social order and stability?

And so, again, that’s another piece of evidence that I find, that yes, indeed, what you’re seeing in the aftermath of these episodes of social conflict involving mass violence against the status quo is that the state not only decides to create a national primary-education system and expand access to primary education, but it’s particularly targeting or specially targeting the expansion of primary education to those areas where the rebels had rebelled against the status quo.

And then this brings us back to your question: Well, but maybe it’s doing that because the rebels were asking for education or asking for an improvement in their living conditions. And they’re responding by providing education for that reason, not for social control. Which is then why I have to look at, Okay, is that what the education system is designed to accomplish? And it’s not.

And then the other thing that I discuss in the book considerably is: Not all kinds of internal conflict are likely to lead to the expansion of education for indoctrination purposes. So if you think, for example, of the context of England, one of the things that I talk about in the book is that England did have episodes of political instability. You had civil wars in the 17th century. You had mass strikes in the 19th century.

But what you have in the context of England is that—while these ideas of the Enlightenment that circulated in Prussia and continental Europe, around, States should use education for consolidating authority by instilling obedience in future citizens—in England, the ideas that exist about mass education are different. And people in England have more of a concern that if you educate people, that’s going to lead them to be more empowered and to become more rebellious, if anything.

And so one of the things that the book says is that for episodes of social unrest to lead to mass-education efforts for indoctrination purposes, well, elites have to believe that education can indeed indoctrinate people. If elites believe that education is going to empower them, as they did in England, they’re not going to respond to strikes or civil wars by expanding education. And so that helps explain in the case of England, for example, why it lagged behind.

And then there’s other conditions that also need to be in place. You need a minimum level, for instance, of fiscal capacity and administrative capacity to be able to roll out these plans. In the context of Mexico, for example, throughout the 19th century, there were all kinds of civil wars. And those civil wars led to a lot of laws that tried to create an education system that was focused on instilling obedience. But that could never be implemented, because there were no resources to do it.

Similarly, in the case of France after the French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror, there is an effort to pass laws to use education for indoctrination, but the state’s treasury is completely decimated, so they can’t implement that. So there are some conditions that need to be in place.

The other thing that also needs to be in place is that you need elites to come to the conclusion that the existing tools failed to contain the disorder, that a new type of approach is needed. So if you have a situation where you have a mass upheaval, but repression succeeds in quashing those rebels relatively quickly, then I would not expect that to be a situation where you turn to invest in education, because the existing tools worked. So it’s really in those contexts, where the masses are perceived as predisposed to violence and also elites believe that the existing tools are insufficient to address that violent predisposition—that’s when you turn to education.

Demsas: I’m very persuaded by your argument. But I think there’s another theory I want to run past you.

I’m a Protestant, and so I’m forced to ask, like, in my bones: What about Protestantism? There’s a great paper by Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann in QJE. They use county-level data from late-19th-century Prussia to figure out whether Protestantism led to better education and higher economic prosperity.

They essentially look at how close a given county was to Wittenberg. Wittenberg is where that story of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of Castle Church happened. Apparently, whether these were nailed or pasted or even posted on the church doors is up for debate by historians, but I choose to imagine him nailing the theses to the door for dramatic Protestant effect.

The economists find a strong effect of distance from Wittenberg on literacy, which they say largely explains the Protestant lead in economic outcomes. Luther himself also called for boys’ and girls’ schools so they could read the Bible, have that kind of personal relationship with God that defines Protestantism against Catholicism.

So I can imagine a story that Protestantism, the development of Martin Luther’s ideas, and the push to develop these schools as a tool of religious education—that this sort of literacy leads to the development of schooling. And then you see the diffusion from Prussia to other countries, because, as you mentioned earlier in our episode, people were going to Prussia and going, like, Why are you so much more prosperous than us, better than us? And they are seeking to just copy things that feel distinctive. What’s wrong with that theory?

Paglayan: I know the paper by Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann that you’re mentioning. I know it very well. I teach it in one of my courses on historical political economy, and I think they are definitely on to something.

It is the case, as you are articulating, that in Prussia, the Protestant elites played an important role, as well, in pushing for mass education. Now, what you have in Prussia is a situation where Protestants had been pushing for mass education for their own religious goals. And then what you then have is, in the 1740s and 1750s, a situation in which you have peasant revolts in the countryside.

And at that point, the king says, Well, we need to do something to contain these peasant revolts and prevent them from recurring in the future. And the king’s advisers tell him, Well, we should use mass education to teach obedience to the state and its laws. And the king turns to Protestants, who have been providing mass education, to get their support on how to repurpose this Protestant education into an education that’s going to help the king’s goal of consolidating his political authority.

And the Protestants, in this process, they give up some of their power to shape education. And in exchange for giving up that power, they get more resources. So for example, they get resources to fund a normal school, which is in charge of training teachers in Berlin. And the state says, Well, we’re going to give you a monopoly right over the training of these teachers, but the schools are going to be supervised by a state authority and no longer by the priests themselves. And the curriculum of the schools and the normal schools, as well, is going to be set by the state itself, not by the church.

So there’s ways in which the Protestant church gives up power in order to get more resources to do some of its projects and reach more people than it had in the past. Now, of course, that’s the story in Prussia. There’s other countries where you also have a legacy of Protestantism, and Protestantism doesn’t really do much there to expand primary education. But in the context of Prussia, I think you are absolutely right that it played a role, but it’s just not sufficient to explain why, then, the state took over this function.

Demsas: This show is about questioning popular narratives, and I think that the idea that mass primary education was expanded by the west as a tool of social control—I think that’s a pretty controversial claim to a lot of people. But I’ll often gut-check my sense of what a popular narrative is with various sources. I’ll look at polling, or I’ll ask various experts in the field or, you know, read books and papers.

One thing I did when preparing for this interview was to just ask my fiancé, who’s not in education at all—he’s a software engineer—why he thought the spread of mass education happened first in the west. And I’m not joking—he immediately walked over to our bookshelf and pulled out a copy of Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish.

You mentioned this in your book, but some sociologists, like Foucault, have argued that schools are a tool of social control. The argument goes, you know, many modern institutions—like schools but also, hospitals, factories, and the military—they use confinement, and they normalize meticulous examinations of the body and routines in order to subjugate citizens to the state. Do you view your argument as essentially in line with that school of sociological thought?

Paglayan: I do. I think that one of the contributions of the book is to reinstate that way of thinking about education. So Foucault wrote a lot, as you pointed out, on different ways of disciplining individuals, one of which, according to him, was schools. But Foucault also lost a lot of traction in sociology. There were sociologists who criticized him as providing a very cynical interpretation of history. There were also sociologists who said there was essentially no evidence, systematic evidence, whatsoever for his arguments.

And so I think one of the contributions of the book is to provide a wealth of evidence that Foucault’s work didn’t have, that’s cross-national, that’s across two centuries, showing that indeed social-control goals were at the heart of governments’ efforts to regulate and expand primary education.

And I think the other place where I think I depart from Foucault is in putting an emphasis, in the case of my work, in the role that the state played in creating schools for this disciplining purpose. He talks a lot about how schools discipline students, monitor their behavior, create norms of what constitutes good behavior and what constitutes deviant behavior. There’s a lot of that in Foucault, but what he doesn’t really talk much about is how this function of the school was something that the state itself created and used for its own sake of consolidating political authority.

Demsas: I want to bring us to modern day, because I think a lot of people may find it easier to buy that this expansion of mass education happened in the 1700s, 1800s, even early 1900s as a tool of social control but may find it harder to stomach that that’s what’s happening now.

So much of expanding education is seen as a liberal, even progressive value. It’s seen as a way of empowering people, and even if it was the case that it was the intention hundreds of years ago, at this point, obviously, schools are a democratizing force. They’re a liberalizing force. They’re an empowering force.

So you cite research that talks to, you know, people in developing countries about why they want to expand education and find something that surprised me a lot. So could you tell us about that?

Paglayan: Yes. So these days, it is absolutely true that if you ask a politician why they want to provide education, they’re going to tell you, Well, to promote economic development, to reduce poverty and inequality. In public, that’s what they’re going to say, because to say, We want to provide education to create docile and obedient citizens, would be political suicide, right? So usually that’s not what they’re gonna say.

So what this group of researchers at the Center for Global Development did was to try to get policy makers—they surveyed 900 policy makers across developing countries—to try to get them to reveal their true motive for providing education, without these policy makers knowing that’s what they were revealing.

And so what they used was these forced-choice experiments, where they essentially gave policy makers the option to choose between two different sets of education systems. And what they had was, for example, in Scenario A, an education system that promotes 90 percent docile citizens or dutiful citizens, 10 percent skilled workforce, and 30 percent literate individuals—I don’t remember the specific details, but that’s one scenario. And then another scenario is, instead of 90 percent dutiful citizens, it’s 30 percent dutiful citizens, 90 percent literate workforce.

And essentially, what you’re doing is for people to see, Okay, what do you prefer? Do you prefer 90 percent dutiful citizens or 90 percent skilled workforce? Do you prefer 90 percent dutiful citizens, or do you prefer 90 percent literate population? without them realizing that’s what they’re doing. And what they saw, by having many different pairs of comparisons and having these policy makers choose between these pairs, was that, by far, forming dutiful citizens was the goal that they prioritized over these other options.

Demsas: I hear you talking about this, and you can’t help but think about the current education-reform movements in the United States. I think that they’re pretty cross-pressured, though, because I tried to think about how I would apply your theories to this kind of modern instantiation of it, and you see cross-pressures within the movement.

On the one hand, Republicans in many states have successfully pushed for decentralization efforts, like allowing the use of public dollars to send your kids to private, religious institutions, homeschooling, places where it’s actually quite difficult to, like, instill control about how people are teaching their children or what they’re learning. But then you also see this desire to eradicate certain books or reaffirm certain ideas about American history, about how racism functioned, about what it means about American identity really in reaction to, you know, the 1619 Project. You see that both in primary [education] but also throughout education, including higher education, like in Florida. How do you think about this? Do you still see this kind of education as a tool of social control?

Because, basically, there are two ways I can read this. One is that there’s a wing of the Republican Party that sees education as a tool of social control that they can continue to use to reaffirm certain ideas about America and what ideas people should believe, whether it’s about gender or race or other things. And on the other hand, there’s a wing in the Republican Party that believes that education is clearly a liberalizing force, and so, We need to decentralize and undermine this sort of public institution.

Paglayan: That’s a very good point. So let me take a few steps back.

So the first thing I’ll say is that when I think of all of the efforts that the Republican Party has made since September 2020 with the creation of the patriotic education commission, or 1776 Commission, at that time, and then all of the subsequent state laws in Republican-controlled states to prohibit the teaching of so-called divisive concepts, such as the idea that there’s institutionalized racism, and all of the book bans that you were just describing—all of these I see as just another example of this pattern that the book identifies, which is a cross-national and a centuries-old pattern of politicians responding to mass protest against the status quo by turning to education to teach children that the status quo is actually okay. To the extent that Republicans are using public education, they want to ensure that public education is repurposed for the sake of teaching kids that the status quo is okay.

And they’re doing this precisely after the Black Lives Matter protests, because that was a set of protests that were nationwide. And that sort of ignited a fear of what the country would look like if we were to reform the institutions that these elites benefit from. Now, I think you’re also right that there are some, and a not small portion within the Republican Party, who say, Well, better yet, let’s get rid of public education, and let’s try to have more education in the hands of parents and religious institutions providing education.

But I think there’s also a realistic sense that you can’t just get rid of public schools. So they’re doing both things at the same time to try to, in some ways, shift enrollment away from public schools but, also, reform public schools so that they serve this specific agenda. The one thing I’ll say, though, Jerusalem, is that we talk right now about how they want to use education to instill a specific set of political and moral values, and that the Republican Party wants to do this.

But in my view, the issue is: Liberals are also doing this. I haven’t really seen much effort on the part of liberals in rethinking education systems and saying, Hey. Yeah, we’re still teaching the Pledge of Allegiance in many states to 5-year-olds. They’re repeating, I swear allegiance to the U.S. flag and to the republic for which it stands. And these are 5-year-olds who don’t know how to write their name yet, much less know what the republic is that they’re swearing allegiance to. What does that even mean?

So there is a lot of continued, persistent use of education to teach a lot of norms, to teach the norm, for instance, that in the U.S., if you want to express discontent, you do it by voting. You don’t do it by protesting. And if you want to protest, it has to be a peaceful protest. That’s a norm. The idea that republican institutions are the best form of government—again, that’s an idea, but it’s not taught in a way that encourages critical thinking.

And I hear a lot of liberals right now saying, Yes, and we shouldn’t teach critical thinking. We should indoctrinate for democracy. And so they’re kind of complicit in some ways. They want to teach a different set of ideas than conservatives, but they still want the education system to serve their own political agenda and teach a specific set of norms, instead of thinking, How can we use education to actually encourage critical thinking? And so that’s something that I also wanted to bring up as part of this conversation.

Demsas: Yeah, I guess we’re coming a little bit full circle from this episode here, where, because maybe I had a unique experience of school or a less-common experience of school—I don’t know—I feel like I learned critical thinking in school. I feel like I was able to get pushback or things like that, but I think there’s a lot of people who have been doing a lot of writing in the tradition of Foucault and others about how that is not the common experience at educational institutions.

Paglayan: Yes. Exactly. And the reality is that the lower the level of income of the student, the more the school tends to be focused on disciplining than on promoting critical thinking. So that’s the other thing, because I talked to some friends or colleagues who tell me, Yeah, but the school that my kid goes to—yeah, the school your kid goes to serves affluent people. And that’s not the group of people that politicians are concerned about disciplining: It’s the people who are at the bottom who need to be taught to stay in their place, to be happy with what they have, and so on. So that’s also relevant here.

Demsas: Well, I think that’s a great place to ask our final question, which is: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper?

Paglayan: So I’ll say that, historically, I’ve been someone who was very focused on my intellectual development and thinking that my brain and my mind are crucial for my well-being. And investing in that is crucial for my well-being. And over the course of time, I’ve come to see that my body is also really important and that, oftentimes, it’s really taking care of acknowledging how I feel in my body that’s more important to figuring out what I really think for my well-being.

And so that’s been sort of a bit of an evolution in trying to not to separate the body from the mind experience, and certainly trying not to prize the mind over the body, which is what I used to do.

Demsas: I have had a very similar experience. Maybe it’s just, like, you’re getting older or whatever, but you have to get eight hours of sleep. And if you’re thinking about yourself in terms of, like, Well, I could have just continued reading. I could have continued doing more work. I could do more prep for this interview, or I could have written more.

I also just think the research is getting pretty definitive here about things like stress and not taking care of yourself in that way having serious impacts down the line, in a way that’s really kind of conflicting with advice you get as a kid, which is just, like, Put everything you can. Sleep four hours a night. Neglect all these things about self-care in order to advance your intellectual pursuits. So I feel very similar.

Paglayan: Exactly.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Agustina. I really enjoyed having you on the show.

Paglayan: Thank you very much, Jerusalem. I loved talking with you.

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Rob Smierciak composed our theme music and engineered this episode. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Neko Case is best known as a lead vocalist for the Canadian indie-rock band the New Pornographers and a solo career that doesn’t quite fit any genre (“country noir” and “odd rock” are two labels she has suggested). Her songs feature unusual protagonists, many of whom are animals, and critics and fans have been puzzling over her lyrics for years. Recently, Case published a memoir, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which suggests possible source material for her vivid and sometimes alarming imagination. In the memoir, she writes mostly about her experience growing up as the child of teenage parents who, in her telling, never came around to wanting a child. And about finding an alternative home in the music scenes of the American Northwest and Canada.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Case about men, music, her own sliding sense of gender, the impossibility of being a musician in the age of streaming, and most important, how not to suffer for your art. After a lifetime of thinking about her parents, she also has good advice on when not to forgive.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Just a quick note: This episode contains some cursing that you might not usually hear on this show.

Neko Case is one of those musicians that people have really strong personal attachments to, especially indie music lovers of a certain generation. Like, I know two people who have named a child after her.

Neko Case is a lead vocalist of the indie-pop collective the New Pornographers, and she’s also had a long solo career. But what’s most distinct about her are her lyrics, which are often oblique. Like, a song seems to be about a car crash, but maybe it’s really about incomplete grief. You have to listen a few times before you get closer to it.

[“Star Witness,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: And then there are lots of times when Case seems to be writing about herself, but it’s not entirely clear.

[“Things That Scare Me,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Last month, Neko Case peeled back some of the mystery. She’s written a memoir called The Harder I Fight the More I Love You, which shares part of the same title as one of her albums from 2013.

She writes about growing up poor and neglected. Her parents were teenagers when they had her, and her guess is that neither of them ever wanted a child. By the end of her sophomore year in high school, she asked her mom for emancipation. She writes: “She couldn’t sign it quickly enough; she didn’t even have to think it over.”

And so Case hid a lot behind her music.

[Music]

Rosin: One of my favorite scenes is you as a kid in the school library. Like, you remembered that the beanbags were corduroy. The image was so perfect. It was such a perfect image from that era. And you were hiding out with your headphones on. I think you mentioned listening to “Atomic,” by Blondie.

Neko Case: Over and over and over and over, like only a neurodivergent ADHD kid can do.

Rosin: Right. Right. (Laughs.) Like, just a million times. Do you have words for what that was like for you? Because it felt like, Okay, that’s the moment that she discovers the power of music. In a movie, that would be the scene in which you discover what music is for and what it does to you.

Case: Music was always just there. And I took it for granted, but I also leaned really heavily into it. I did not make a connection that music was something I would want to do or I would do, because I was just a girl. And I did not make a connection between myself and Blondie, or myself and the Go-Go’s. I just knew I really loved them.

Rosin: So why did it take so long, do you think, for you to open your mouth and sing? You played in bands, but you didn’t really sing for a while.

Case: Well, I was raised to be female in the United States of America so, you know, I wasn’t raised with a lot of self-confidence.

Rosin: So what was the point where you were like, Oh I can do this?

Case: It wasn’t so much deciding I could do it. It was just that I couldn’t help but to do it, because the desire was so intense.

Rosin: Now, the desire is the desire to make music, to write music, to sing? What was the desire?

Case: Even just to sit near it. Anything. Anything I could have.

Rosin: In the book, you complain about your voice. You write that it was neither pretty nor powerful. And that’s—

Case: Oh that’s not a complaint.

Rosin: It’s not a complaint. Okay, okay, okay.

Case: No, no, no. It’s not powerful, and it’s not pretty. Like, those are things that—you know, I wish it were powerful. I don’t care that it’s not pretty. I very much enjoy hearing women singing in ways other than being pretty. And singing is an incredible physical feeling. It’s like your mouth is a fire hose, and you can twist your insides and make a powerful thing come out to the point where your feet levitate ever so slightly off the floor.

[“I Wish I Was the Moon,” by Neko Case]

Case: It gets so physical. It is so athletic, and there’s nothing else like it.

[“I Wish I Was the Moon,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: Well, even in this just few minutes that we’ve been talking, you describe a little journey from a point where the world gives you a set of expectations and tells you, you can and can’t do things. And you seem to sort of find your way out of that, either through your voice or how you experience music, or even the way you write about institutions. Like, you write the country-music institution was limiting in some ways.

Case: Oh it’s straight up misogynist and racist and hateful. We don’t even have to sugarcoat that one. The current country-music scene of radio music in Nashville is absolutely heinous. And I watch young women try to get in there, and I love them so much, and they’re trying, and I’m like, Don’t even bother. Let that thing die. That thing is poison. Come over here. Let’s make the other thing.

Rosin: And is the other thing, like, you inventing your own genres? You’ve given them names over the years that are—“country noir” or “odd rock,” and things like that. Like, is that the way out? Is that what you tell women?

Case: I think that what it is, is the gatekeepers of country music are absolutely terrified that it might evolve, whereas the gatekeepers of rock and roll don’t have a problem with evolution. But there’s something very white supremacist about how country music works. And they’re really, really dialing down on it now.

Rosin: So you don’t mean just then. You’re talking about then, and now there’s a resurgence. Because there was a great moment—

Case: I think it’s worse now. I think it’s far worse now than it has been in a long time.

Rosin: I mean, there was a good moment for women—it was a brief good moment for women in country music.

Case: There have been a couple.

Rosin: Yeah.

Case: Sometimes, people are so talented that they’re undeniable, and not even the gatekeepers can keep them out.

Rosin: Well, it’s good Beyoncé made that country album then.

Case: We’re lucky to have Beyoncé doing a lot of things. That’s all I’m saying.

Rosin: That’s true. That’s true. (Laughs.) I think reading your memoir, for me, changed how I heard your music, and I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing or not the intended thing. Is that something you explicitly thought you were doing? At times, I almost read it like, Oh this is a key to some lyrics, and I wasn’t sure if that was correct or not correct.

Case: I tried to not give away the songs as much as possible. Like, there was a couple times where I kind of went into them, but I don’t like to ruin songs for people. You know how you will hear the lyrics of a song one way, and then you find out it’s not the lyric that you thought it was, and then you’re like, Oh. It’s not as good anymore?

If you think you know what a song’s about, and it makes you feel connected emotionally to it, and it becomes a little chapter heading in your life, you don’t want to ruin that for people.

Rosin: Yeah. But I don’t know if it’s ruin it. I think it’s just complicate it. I’ll give you an example—and maybe just indulge me, and you can walk me through the process. I’m the listener. You’re the singer. When I read the book title, of course, I immediately thought of your 2013 album—

Case: Yes.

Rosin: —The Worst Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, for obvious reasons. Because of the song “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” which has run in my head for 10 years—

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: —which starts with the kid at the bus stop, and then the perspective is quickly shifting, so it’s hard to keep up with who’s the you and who’s the me.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: And then that kind of devastating line about, “My mother, she did not love me.”

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: In your mind, is that line related to the book in any way?

Case: Well, that song was a real event. I was really at a bus stop in Honolulu, fleeing Hawaii. And I saw it happen, and I just felt so helpless.

Rosin: You felt helpless to protect the kid?

Case: Yeah. But the kid, also, was being very resilient, and she was entertaining herself. She was very spunky and cute. And her mom was just an asshole.

Rosin: I mean, reading your book, I did think, Oh that line resonated with Neko for a reason, because of struggles with your own mother. Do you mean for people to read the memoir that way?

Case: Well, I mean, I told the story. I just—I’ve never written a book before, and I didn’t set out to write a memoir. I wanted to write fiction, but it was at the height of the pandemic, and Hachette said, We’ll pay you to write a memoir, though. And I was like, Okay. A memoir it is. And that’s not a complaint or, you know, they didn’t hold my heels to the fire or anything. I just thought, Okay, well, it’ll just be a little challenging, because, you know, talking about yourself or writing about yourself to yourself isn’t the most exciting thing ever.

You spend a lot of time with yourself. So I don’t think of myself as like, Oh people are really going to want to know this. So I mean, that’s one of the reasons I tried to pick more interesting stories from childhood that were scenes, maybe, of good things, too, because I didn’t want it to just be, Oh poor me, especially because it’s not unusual. It’s most people’s experience.

I mean, my situation with my mother is pretty bizarre. But neglect or abuse or things like that—those are most people’s experiences. Or growing up really poor—that is most people.

Rosin: I think your experience is actually pretty unusual.

Case: Yeah. It’s pretty damn weird.

[Music]

Rosin: “Pretty damn weird” it is.

When Case was in second grade, her father told her that her mother had died of cancer, which was surprising because Case didn’t even realize she was sick. And then a year and a half later, her dad said to her one day: I don’t want you to think your mom’s a ghost, but she came home.

As Case recalls in her memoir, the story was that her mother had had terminal cancer and gone to Hawaii to recover but didn’t want Case to see her so ill. And Case—who, remember, was a little kid—believed her. She had her mom back. She was happy.

It only occurred to her later—after many, many years and another disappearing act from her mother—that she might never have been sick in the first place.

Rosin: It’s one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever heard. I mean, it is a little shocking and hard to forget. And I’m not sure if you knew that or recognized it in that way.

Case: I didn’t know that until I was in my early 20s, and I told somebody I knew that my mom faked her death. And then they were like, That’s the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, and I was like, Oh yeah. That is actually pretty weird, isn’t it? But you know kids. Kids just think what’s happening to them is what happens. So it didn’t occur to me.

Rosin: So where did it register for you? Because now I see that what I am assuming about that song isn’t actually how you move through the process. I just assumed you had that in your head when you wrote the lyrics, “She did not love me.”

Because that lyric is haunting, even the way you sing it and the pacing of it. I just assumed you had that in your head, but maybe you didn’t. Maybe you just had it in your subconscious somewhere.

Case: It’s in me all the time. And, you know, it’s just not my fault.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Case: She didn’t love me. And it’s just the fact.

[“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: When you work out memories and pains in song, is cathartic a banal word to use here? Does it do something for you to work it out and learn?

Case: Only in a super-nerdy, kind of neurodivergent-slash-Virgo way where I’m like, Oh! I’m taking all the things, and I’m organizing them in this box. And so now I can put this box over here like a hard drive, so my brain has more room in it. And it’s all color-coded, and I know where it is. That’s, like, Virgo organization.

Rosin: Interesting.

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: Because I feel like one glib way to read a memoir like this is, Oh from family trauma and a mother who didn’t love you comes immense creativity. How wonderful! What’s wrong or right about that interpretation?

Case: Well, the mythology of people needing to suffer to make beautiful things or just art or creative things, in general, is not true.

Rosin: You mean they don’t need to suffer? Because it feels like, reading this book, your suffering is related to how you think and work through things and organize things.

Case: No. If I had had a supportive upbringing, I would be able to read music and play instruments and would probably be a lot further along. You don’t need that.

Rosin: So to you, it just feels like pure baggage. It’s, like, a thing you’ve had to tolerate, but you could have been a singer some other way.

Case: Oh it’s an absolute trunk of shit.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Case: The things that I admire about myself are despite those things. You know, like, I still am a trusting person. I still really want to see the good in people, and sometimes I will make mistakes and trust people I shouldn’t. And I could beat myself up about that, or I could just go, No. You still want to believe people are good. And I think that’s a more important quality than whether or not you’re wily enough to spot a jerk a mile away—you know what I mean?

Rosin: Yeah, I was more thinking, like, you had this life, and you had to escape this life and find your family elsewhere, and you had a huge, strong motivation to do that, and so you found music.

Case: Yes.

Rosin: But that’s just another way of saying trauma made you a great musician.

Case: No. Music is the only thing that never let me down. But trauma did not make me a great musician. I am a journeyman, at best, and, you know, I’m broke. I don’t know—I think great musicians do other things.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wait. Did you just say you were broke?

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: Do you mean financially broke or personally broke?

Case: Financially broke.

Rosin: Really? How is that possible? I think your fans would be shocked.

Case: The confluence of my house burning down, COVID, and streaming—those three things together.

Rosin: Wow.

Case: And I cannot catch up.

[Music]

Rosin: When we come back—more with Neko Case on politics, on forgiveness, and a recent experience with a friend’s death that she said felt like getting on the spaceship to go to the moon.

Case:  I felt absolutely unafraid. And I was seeing an actual moment of grace in life, and I couldn’t believe it.

Rosin: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: I wanted to ask you about gender, because the way you write and sing about gender is very much the way a lot of people talk about gender now. And I’m curious how you have watched the evolution of how people inhabit and think about gender, like in your lyrics to “Man”—

[“Man,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: —you don’t mean that literally. What do you mean by “I’m a man”?

Case: I do mean it literally.

[“Man,” by Neko Case]

Case: I mean, I am of the species. I am a man. Like, whatever’s going on downstairs doesn’t matter. I have all my faculties. You can call a female or a male lion a lion, and they’re still a lion. I’m a man in that same way.

And I am so thrilled and proud and excited by generations younger than mine who are not backing down from who they think they are and the idea that they get to be who they are. That has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever witnessed, and it has given me so much more insight into myself because I never felt like a girl or totally a guy. I’m more of a gender-fluid person.

Rosin: And when you say it’s taught you so much about yourself, what do you mean? Because in the book, there is one way in which you very much inhabit the experience of a woman of that generation, just at the hands of careless and arrogant and brutal men, like a teacher, older brothers, fellow musicians. And then there’s a sense, I imagine, of being trapped in that.

So what have you learned about yourself in this era of gender fluidity? How do you think about yourself?

Case: As neither. I am neither. I still call myself she/her. I’m used to it. It doesn’t bother me. And partly because the world hates women so much, I will not abandon it. I just won’t. But I also understand that the world hates gender-fluid people and trans people, LGBTQ people, and I understand the importance of not abandoning that, either.

Rosin: So you see the world as making some cultural progress and how we think of what’s a man and what’s a woman in some corners, but not a lot of progress politically or socially.

Case: Politically, we are fucked. Socially, I don’t think what the president and his people represent, represents the American people. I don’t believe that Americans, in general, have a hatred or a problem with people who are not white, who are LGBTQ, who are immigrants. I just don’t think they do.

Rosin: To shift away from politics, since we get a lot of it over here in D.C., although this is related, the thing—

Case: Well, I mean, a human being’s right to be is—I mean, that’s just everyday life. Like, politics and everyday life just—they just aren’t separate, not that I want to talk about politics, specifically. Because I just refuse to be afraid.

Rosin: Do you feel like that’s something you found at this age? Because you’ve said there are times in your life where you haven’t had self-confidence, you’ve been depressed, or you’ve kind of lost your mind, even, in one section of the book. Is it easier to not be afraid now?

Case: Well, I have really benefited from menopause. And a lot of people who menstruate who don’t anymore have said the same things about, you know, the hormone shift. Like, you don’t care anymore what people think of you.

And also, I just came from seeing one of my best friends die. And sitting with her body for four days as—you know, she was an organ donor, and she had a massive aneurysm. And her partner just heroically did CPR, and then the paramedics came and kept her pulse going and got her to the hospital, and they stabilized her, despite the fact that she had no brain activity.

And you cannot be an organ donor unless you die on a respirator in the hospital. Like, it’s very, very specific. And then you have to wait for all the tests. There are barrages of tests that happened to make sure that you’re healthy and that your organs can really save someone else’s life and not be rejected. And so we spent days just with her and talking about her life and what a selfless person she was. And we joked a lot about how she was going to work, even in death. She was all about service.

And then the day came. Right on the way to the OR, what they do is they do a thing called an “honor walk.” And we went down what seemed like miles of corridors behind her hospital bed, behind the doctors. And the corridors were lined with doctors and nurses and hospital staff honoring her. And it seemed like one of those movies where you see the people going down the corridor in slow motion to get into the spaceship to go to the moon or whatever, and everyone’s saluting them, and it seems so important. And I think I actually saw that in real life.

And I just thought, All those things that I worry about and the injustices—we are so right to fight for them. And I was there watching this incredible thing happen, and these beautiful people from all over the world—many of the doctors are immigrants—and it was a mix of people of all colors from all over the world and all different cultures. And I felt so utterly galvanized against the fear and so utterly galvanized in that joy is the way forward.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Case: Loud-ass, exuberant joy.

Rosin: I mean, one of the things I took most from your book is how you write about forgiveness. It’s related to this. I mean, you definitely acknowledge the beauty of forgiveness, but then you say this other thing, and you could read this in a lot of different ways, which is the “trust your contempt” paragraph. Do you remember that? You don’t have the book in front of you, right?

Case: I don’t. But I do talk about this, occasionally.

Rosin: Yeah. Dissect it if you can. If something doesn’t stir anything but contempt in you, then there’s a reason. Don’t canonize your contempt, but don’t ignore it.

This is the part that I love. It’s so good: “Sometimes bad things are just senseless brutality that finds you. You do not deserve or ask for these things. They are not always teaching you a lesson.”

Where would you say you are—you know, you have a lifetime of songs; you have this memoir; it sounds like you have friends—on this path? Is it different for different people? Like, forgiving members of your family, people who have hurt you in the past?

Case: Oh yeah. I mean, relationships with people are all very different, and some are very complicated, and some are not.

Rosin: So you would say you’re at different places with different people?

Case: Oh yeah.

Rosin: What about your dad? I was curious about him because he plays a kind of shadow role in the book, not quite with the extravagant cruelty of your mother. Maybe neglectful—maybe—is the right way to read that.

Case: I have a lot of compassion for my dad and a lot of sadness because I feel like his development was arrested completely. And he had to be an adult man and head of the family and all these things, and he was just a kid inside. And he didn’t know how to handle it. He maintained it with drugs and drinking for a long time, but then it catches up with you.

And the kind of pain from that—he didn’t use what happened to him to manipulate anyone. His forward path was genuine. He wasn’t doing a great job, but he was also a 19-year-old kid when he had me. And he didn’t want me, but he ended up with me.

Rosin: Yeah. And ended up raising you.

Case: Not really.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right. Ended up housing you under the same roof.

Case: Sometimes.

Rosin: Sometimes. Yeah, there was that moment when you guys reconnect over a car. You speak car talk with each other—

Case: Yeah.

Rosin: —which is very familiar to me. I come from a family of mechanics and car people. And so I found that very peaceful. It was a tiny second of peace in a very rocky journey.

Case: Yeah, it was nice because when I was a little girl, I would have loved to have had him show me how to do things, because he was always fixing the car or the truck or whatever, and it would have been nice to have been included. I mean, when I was a kid, I thought he wanted a boy, and I thought he was really disappointed. But he just didn’t want any kid.

Rosin: You know, I’ve just been nonstop listening to your music to prepare to talk to you and sort of tuning into the different moods of different albums. And I wonder, from you: What’s the song you wrote when you were happiest? Or even when you listen to it now, it makes you happy. Like, it just makes you feel good.

Case: Probably “Hold On, Hold On.” It’s melancholy, but it feels very much like I am in charge of myself. And I make good decisions in it.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: So it’s, like, a song that makes you feel like all of this pain and trauma—like you can handle it.

Case: Partially. It’s a moment of actually seeing yourself clearly. It doesn’t mean the moment’s going to last.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Case: I think I also partly feel that way because I wrote it with the Sadies, and I have such a loving relationship with them. And it’s always made me feel good to play it. And my dear friend Dallas Good passed away a couple of years ago, way too young. And so now it takes on a new sort of heaviness, but it’s a heaviness that feels good to carry somehow.

[“Hold On, Hold On,” by Neko Case]

Rosin: Thanks again to my guest, Neko Case.

[Music]

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Genevieve Finn fact-checked.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Every personal detail is a tell. From your choice of college major, to the industry you work in, to the company within that industry—each decision is part of a sorting phenomenon populating certain workplaces with Democrats and others with Republicans.

We’re socialized to not talk politics at the office to avoid polarizing issues that could break norms of professional behavior. But according to a new study from two Harvard researchers, that norm may have obscured a startling partisan divide at the workplace: Republicans and Democrats are sorting into different fields of study, industries, and companies.

Workers aren’t just pawns in this partisan sorting; they’re actively choosing it, although perhaps subconsciously. As the study authors Sahil Chinoy and Martin Koenen found, “The median Democrat or Republican would trade off 3% in annual wages for an ideologically congruent version of a similar job.”

“Is [3 percent] big or small?” Chinoy asks. “It’s less than something like health care. It’s sort of actually comparable in magnitude to some of these softer amenities, things like having a relaxed versus a fast pace of work, for example, or having training opportunities at work. People seem to care similarly about the ideological nature of the job.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: I have a bit of a weird job for several reasons, but for one: Many of my colleagues’ varied ideological commitments are pretty clear due to the nature of our work.

But I was curious about what workplaces look like in less overtly political places. Do people often know the political opinions of their colleagues and bosses? Could work be a place for the healthy mixing of people with different partisan identities?

Probably not. At least, that’s what I take away from a new paper called “Political Sorting in the U.S. Labor Market,” which argues that political segregation is extremely common in the workplace. According to the authors, “a Democrat or Republican’s co-worker is 10 percent more likely to share their party” than what you might expect based on where their workplace is located.

Why? Well, it’s largely because workers are opting into college majors, jobs, industries, and companies that correspond with their partisan identities. Republicans are more likely to have studied business, finance, engineering, and technology, while Democrats are more likely to have studied the arts, social sciences, and the humanities.

Industries themselves are therefore more likely to have employees of one party rather than the other, but even within industries, companies are attracting one party’s adherents over the other.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is Sahil Chinoy, who co-authored this paper while finishing up his economics Ph.D. at Harvard. Sahil himself is on the job market, I’m sure headed to one of those ideologically diverse workplaces so common in academia.

Sahil, welcome to the show.

Sahil Chinoy: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Demsas: So before you conducted your research project, did you think that workplaces were more or less segregated than other areas of life, like neighborhoods, schools, etcetera?

Chinoy: I think somewhat less. We’ve all heard this idea that there should be, quote, “no politics at work.” And I think I took that to heart and thought the workplace might be a uniquely important site where there’s less partisan or political segregation than some of the other environments that we inhabit, like schools and certainly neighborhoods. There’s a lot of attention paid to partisan segregation, particularly across space, across neighborhoods.

And I do think that I thought that the workplace would exhibit less sorting than that. How much less? I don’t know. I certainly thought that it can’t be the case that it’s perfectly even.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, it’s like when you’re young, and you’re in, like, K-12 or something, it’s the time of your life when you’re repeatedly kind of interacting with people you didn’t choose to be interacting with. It’s your teachers, other kids at school.

And when you grow up, work is basically one of the only times when you’re being forced to go anywhere that you are not actively choosing who you’re going to be interacting with. Obviously, there’s a ton of segregation that comes from where people are in school.

But I think the fact that, like, this is arguably the only place that adults are interacting with people that they’re not opting into on a regular basis—that leads people to kind of feel like, Oh this is probably, like, the most generative space for reaching people across the partisan aisle.

But you do not find this. So walk me through your paper. What did you do to investigate whether workplaces were segregated by party?

Chinoy: Yeah. So just one point on that. I think that’s exactly right. I think the idea here is, like, people have less ability to choose who their co-workers are compared to other people that they interact with, and that’s what generates segregation.

I will note, though, that—it’s kind of funny. When I bring this point up to academics and to professors, there’s sort of the one group, I think, that doesn’t really see this. They’re like, What do you mean? We can perfectly choose who our colleagues are.

Demsas: (Laughs.) That’s, in fact, the whole point.

Chinoy: That’s what hiring is. That’s the whole point. But I think generally, yes. I think that’s the idea.

So we’re sort of starting with this basic premise that, you know, maybe the workplace is less politically segregated than some of these other environments—not such a hard question to pose or to ask. I think it’s just a hard question to answer.

And it’s a hard question to answer, I think, primarily because of a data constraint. We have very high-quality and large-labor-market surveys in the U.S., but they don’t ask questions about politics or partisan affiliation. And we have large and high-quality political surveys, but they usually don’t ask questions about where exactly people work. And even if they did, they’re large, but they’re not large enough to really capture who is working with whom.

And so the starting point of this paper is really to say we have this pretty, to some extent, obvious question: To what extent do Democrats work with Democrats and Republicans work with Republicans? And how are we going to answer it? And the way we answer it is by combining two sources of information: On the one hand, public LinkedIn profiles—so scraped LinkedIn profiles that list where everyone works and some other characteristics about them, often where they went to college or their educational background. And we combine that with administrative voter records.

And so in the U.S., who you vote for is not public. But in 30 states and the District of Columbia, which party you register with is public. And so we combine those two sources of information, and that lets us see who is working with whom and everyone’s party affiliation. And that’s how we can quantify the magnitude of this partisan segregation at work.

Demsas: So you find that “a Democrat or [a] Republican’s co-worker is 10 percent more likely to share their party than expected based on local partisan shares.” Can you just unpack that finding? What does that mean?

Chinoy: Yeah. So the idea is: We want to benchmark the share of your co-workers who share your party affiliation against what we might expect. And so, you know, to give you a concrete example, say you are a Democrat, and you work at Google in Mountain View, then a high share of your co-workers are fellow Democrats. I think it’s something like 55 percent in our data. So that’s, you know, a relatively high share of Democrats. But what should we actually expect? Should we benchmark that against the share of Democrats in the U.S. as a whole?

And so our baseline measure takes that sort of realized share of co-partisans—so the 55 percent of Democrats that share your workplace—and divides it by the share of Democrats in your local labor market, which we operationalize as a commuting zone. Commuting zones are sort of aggregations of counties that are precisely designed to capture these kinds of commuting patterns, who could reasonably share your workplace.

And it turns out—I’m going to forget the exact number, but you know, it turns out—that share is quite high for Google in Mountain View. So you’re a Democrat at Google Mountain View—your co-workers are 6 percent more likely to share your party affiliation than you would expect based on the local shares of Democrats and Republicans. And then we generalize that for everyone. We do that for every person in our sample, tens of millions of people, and that’s how we arrive at that 10 percent number.

Demsas: This is, I think, a really great way of putting it, because, obviously, someone’s going to say, you know, Okay, Google—you’re in California. You’re in Silicon Valley. This is just a high-Democrat place, so are you just, like, looking at, basically, that there is geolocation sorting that’s already happening? And you’re saying it’s not just the fact that, like, there are locational differences in partisanship. It’s that even taking that into account, workplaces are even more segregated based on party than you would expect just by, like, walking around and taking a random sampling of people who live in the commuting zone that Google is in.

Chinoy: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And, you know, I can compare against the national shares, and if I do that, that number is 20 percent. It’s twice as high as the baseline statistic that I quoted for you earlier. And that’s a meaningful number, too, but what sort of intuitively accords with people’s sense of how to measure partisan segregation? It’s probably comparing against the local environment. And that’s why that 10 percent number is kind of our preferred estimate.

Demsas: How does this compare to the level of partisan segregation that we observe in other places? We know, for instance, that there’s partisan segregation happening in schools or in dating markets and churches and stuff like that. Is the workplace the most segregated based on party in America, or is this in line with other places?

Chinoy: Yeah, so it’s hard to answer this directly for every other social environment or every other group of people. I can tell you a couple things. So one is: I think a natural comparison is residential partisan segregation. This is something that people study a lot, right—the extent to which Democrats live on the same block as Democrats, and Republicans live next to other Republicans. And so we can sort of compare what I told you—that 10 percent number, that overexposure ratio—against partisan segregation across neighborhoods.

And you can define neighborhoods in different ways. One way to do it is a zip code. And when we do that, we find that partisan segregation at work is pretty similar. So, like, a little bit less than but overall pretty similar to partisan segregation across zip codes. We can go one step further and say, you know, maybe the zip code is a little bit bigger than what you have in mind when you think of neighborhood-level sorting. And so we have individual addresses in our data, and so we can say, you know, You have 15 co-workers. Let me figure out how many of them share your party affiliation, and let me look at our sample of the 15 people who live closest to you and figure out how many of those people share your party affiliation.

And when we do that, we find that workplace-level segregation, workplace-level overexposure ratio is a little bit less pronounced than that sort of nearest neighbor level of segregation, but still pretty similar, not so different. It’s not orders of magnitude different. So that’s kind of why we say that it’s a little less pronounced than residential segregation as a whole but still pretty sizable.

This isn’t in the paper, but we can also look at colleges. That’s the other thing that we can really observe well in our sample, and when we do that, we find that colleges are less segregated along party lines than our workplaces.

Demsas: Wow.

Chinoy: And sorry—that’s college cohorts.

Demsas: Wait. Sorry. Can you break that down? College cohort—you mean, the people who went to your college and then are in the class of 2017 as well?

Chinoy: Exactly. Yes.

Demsas: Okay, so that group, the people who went to my college and are in the same class as me, are less segregated than my workplace? Well, maybe not me, in particular, but on average.

Chinoy: Yeah. And I think a lot of that is just the size of these groups. College cohorts are quite big compared to workplaces, which tend to be relatively smaller. And so there’s a little bit more room for that kind of political diversity in college cohorts. And so the extent to which you think that’s an apples-to-apples comparison, I think it is up for debate because of that size issue.

Demsas: So you’re not going to take the hard position that colleges are more open than workplaces in America? (Laughs.)

Chinoy: I wouldn’t say they’re more open, but certainly you’re in this group of people that, for many people, is quite large and might include people from diverse geographic backgrounds. That’s also something that happens at colleges.

Demsas: So is this a function of income or racial or gender segregation? Like, how much of this can be explained by the fact that our workplaces are segregated by factors that are correlating with partisanship but are not partisanship, in particular?

Chinoy: Yeah, that’s a great question, I think a natural question. I think it is important to note, though, that overall, like, what is the phenomenon of interest? It’s partisan segregation without differencing out all of those other background characteristics, right?

And I think that there’s an analogy to gender segregation at work. You know, to what extent is gender segregation at work driven by different occupational choices? The different occupations that men and women sort into or are sorted into—that’s sort of an interesting question. At the end of the day, that’s part of the phenomenon of interest. That’s part of what creates segregation at work. And so I think a similar thing applies here.

That said, we can do, I think, the kinds of exercises you have in mind, where, instead of benchmarking just against the share of Democrats and Republicans in your local labor-market area, in your commuting zone, we can additionally incorporate information about those co-workers in predicting their partisanship.

And so what I mean is: If we knew not just where your co-workers lived, in terms of which commuting zone they live in, but also their exact year of birth and their gender and their race—things which are, as you know, very correlated with partisanship and politics in the U.S.—would we still be surprised that Democrats disproportionately work with Democrats, and Republicans disproportionately work with Republicans? So these are pretty fine predictors, right? We actually interact [based on] year of birth and gender and race. So for me, you know, an Asian male born in 1995 tends to be registered with the Democratic Party at a particular rate. We can incorporate that information and say, Is it still the case that we see this partisan sorting?

And we find that, indeed, that explains some segregation but certainly not all of it. And we can add even more predictors, so not just the education level of everyone, whether they went to high school or college or have a postgraduate degree—again, something that’s highly correlated with partisanship—but also the exact college that they went to. And we can show there are partisan differences across schools.

And we can incorporate that information as well. We can incorporate not just the exact college that you went to but what you studied when you were there. And there, again, we see large gaps in the college major choices of Democrats and Republicans, which I think actually is independently quite interesting also. So college and major and then industry and occupation—we can incorporate all of these predictors, and we still find that a Democrat or Republican’s co-worker is about 4.3 percent more likely to share their partisanship than we would expect. So we bring that ratio down from 10 percent to 4.3 percent. All of these things clearly matter, but they don’t explain all the segregation that we see.

Demsas: I think that’s really significant. I think when I first saw your abstract, I was like, Okay, well, is this just like, Black people are Democrats, and women are Democrats, and men are Republicans, when we’re looking at averages?

And seeing that significant difference even without that—and I mean, I take your point well that looking at partisanship is relevant, even if it is the case that race and gender are playing into that. Like, that overall partisanship still tells you something about workplaces in America.

But I also want to ask, because I think in your paper that you’re seeing more heterogeneity for different income bands and educational attainment, that there’s a different level of partisan segregation for people who make more money or for people who have, you know, graduate degrees or college degrees.

Can you tell me about that? What’s going on there?

Chinoy: Yeah, so that’s exactly right. You know, the 10 percent number that I was quoting for you before is an average across everyone in our sample. We can see what that looks like among subgroups and, in particular, we can see what that looks like among subgroups defined by education and by income.

When we do that for education, we see something pop there, which is that people with postgraduate degrees, people who are more highly educated, tend to be in workplaces that are more segregated. And there’s a little bit of something going on for high-school graduates versus people with bachelor’s degrees, but really where it tends to stand out the most is people with a postgraduate education.

Demsas: It’s you, Sahil. You’re causing all our problems.

Chinoy: (Laughs.) I mean, yeah, like, kind of, though, right? And you can think of stories why this might make sense. Maybe these people have more of an ability to choose an employer that really aligns with their ideological interests in a way that isn’t true for other groups of workers. I can’t say for sure why.

Demsas: Or they’re more motivated, right? Like, you might be more ideological or partisan.

Chinoy: Totally. Also true. And, actually, on that point, when we subset to people who have made campaign contributions and might be more politically motivated or politically interested kind of in the way you were describing, we also see that those people are experiencing more segregation at work, particularly the people who donate to very liberal or very conservative candidates.

And then you also asked about income. And here we see a little bit less of a clear pattern, actually. So the gradient seems more pronounced for education than for income. There’s a bit of a technical point here, which is that we don’t know someone’s exact income in the LinkedIn data. You don’t put them on your LinkedIn profile, mostly. So we infer it from where people live, based on the block group that they live on, and so you might worry that’s sort of an inexact measure of income, but the education measure we have is more specific. We try to do some things to alleviate that concern.

Overall, we stand by the idea that the gradient is stronger for education than for income.

Demsas: But for income, higher-income people are more likely to have a more-segregated workplace?

Chinoy: Barely, among our sample. And our sample is people who have LinkedIn profiles, and so that’s a higher-income slice of the population than the overall workforce. And among that sample, we don’t see too much in terms of the highest-income people among them experiencing more segregation than the lowest-income people.

Demsas: This is a bit afield from your specific paper, but I remember there being a lot of talk about how diverse workplaces were more creative, and I think that literature is actually kind of more mixed, so I don’t know how good that literature actually stands up. But there’s a lot of talk about how having kind of ideological diversity, background diversity, etcetera can make for more creative teams. Does your research look at whether these sorts of workplaces, you know, have any impact on productivity? Do you have thoughts on whether that would play out, given other research you’ve looked at?

Chinoy: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think that’s the next paper I want to write.

Certainly, there are countervailing forces here. It’s probably bad for, you know, workplaces to have 100 percent people who think a certain way. That seems not optimal. It also seems like you probably want to be able to get along with your co-workers to some extent. And, you know, if partisanship and political affiliation is a measure of that, then, probably, a little bit of homophily might actually be productive. So my speculation is that there would be a bit of a U shape there. I don’t know for sure. I think that would be super interesting to study.

I think that where people do study this question, specifically, is among corporate leaders. It’s been, like, historically, a little bit easier to get information about the political affiliation and donation behavior of executives and board members, and so people have focused on that. There is one paper that basically claims that increasing political polarization of corporate America is not in the financial interest of shareholders. I’d have to remember exactly what they study in that paper, but I think they’re looking at the alignment between corporate executives and their boards, the political alignment, and looking at what happens when they leave.

Demsas: Yeah, we can put that paper in show notes for people to take a look at if they want.

There’s another paper—also, we’ll put that in the show notes—from Christopher Rosen last January [2024], and they found that employees experience negative affect after overhearing political conversations at work. Essentially, the effects are amplified when employees think their co-workers are less similar to them. So you’re more negative when you overhear someone who’s a Democrat, and you’re a Republican having kind of a conversation. And they’re attenuated when you overhear someone who has your viewpoints or you feel like it’s aligned with your ideological or partisan goals.

And so that seems pretty straightforward there, and I agree, these countervailing forces here feel difficult to sort out, particularly because an individual firm’s goal might be to increase the amount of good feelings that people within their company feel, but an industry or our goal as a society to try to create the most productive companies might be to have a lot more frictions happening in the workplace for the societal benefits that might bring.

It’s also like, the incentives are also countervailing here. There’s not really an incentive from workplace leadership, maybe, to try and make their workplaces more diverse in ideology, which I feel like is why there was such a push to try to find productivity benefits from ideological diversity—to try to incentivize this kind of corporate shift. But it seems rough.

Chinoy: I think that’s a good point. And I think the other thing I would add is that the conversation we just had is kind of focused on the interests and the efficiency and productivity of companies and workers. We also might have a social interest in partisan mixing and people who don’t think the same way politically interacting with each other.

Again, this is the kind of thing that, on its face, seems right. Like, we probably want people to interact with people who don’t think like them. Actually saying why that is good, politically, is not terribly obvious. Is it going to reduce support for, like, political violence or things like that? Probably not.

I think people have shown that people don’t generally believe in that kind of thing anyways. But you know, the extent to which I think mixing between Democrats and Republicans is good for our politics, I think that’s sort of another reason to be interested in this issue.

Demsas: Yeah, I want to emphasize for listeners, we’re not saying that, like, all these workplaces—and you’re not finding that all these workplaces—are 100 percent Democrat or 100 percent Republican. It’s just more likely to be. And so people might look around and say, I know the conservative at my job, and it’s like, Yeah, you know the conservative at your job.

So I think what you just said kind of segues into another finding in your paper, which is that there’s a persuasive aspect to this too. Just to tell you my prior, I feel like if I was constantly surrounded by very right-wing people at my job, I would probably only become more left-wing. But I do think that maybe your paper indicates that that effect is not the same for everyone—or maybe I’m just wrong about myself. Maybe I would be persuaded. But tell me about that finding. What did you see?

Chinoy: Yeah, so the story there is mixed. I don’t think what you’re saying is wrong about yourself. So the idea here is: What could explain political segregation? Well, one channel that could explain political segregation is sort of this conformity effect. People become like their co-workers, like their workplace over time. If I end up in a workplace with a lot of Democrats, I might be more likely to affiliate with the Democratic Party, and sort of vice versa with Republicans.

This has been shown, actually, with neighborhoods, and so people tend to adopt, to some extent, the partisanship of their neighbors or the people that they live around. And so we were interested in whether something similar could be happening at work. I’ll spare you the details of exactly how we estimate this, unless you want me to get into it, but the basic finding is that we find that the workplace can causally affect people’s partisan affiliation but only for people who don’t start out as committed Democrats or Republicans.

And so you’re not really getting people to change their mind. I think that’s kind of consistent with, perhaps, the story that you were telling about yourself. But people who start out as either independents or who start out as not registered with a particular political party, we find that moving to a workplace where the co-workers are more Democratic or more Republican tends to make those individuals more Democratic or more Republican, on average.

So there is some evidence of a little bit of an effect of the workplace on an individuals’ partisan politics or party affiliation. It’s not as big as in the case of neighborhoods, and so it seems like this channel has less power to explain the segregation that we see.

And in particular, the timing of this is kind of interesting. It looks less like the case that people switch to a new workplace and then adopt the politics of that workplace, and rather the case that people update their own party registration and then move to a compatible workplace, a co-partisan workplace. And that’s what kind of leads us to think, like, maybe it’s less the case that people are picking up the politics of their workplace and more the case that people are selecting jobs or workplaces, in part, based on politics or things correlated with their own party affiliation. And that’s the direction that we go in the paper.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: how firms use partisan language to appeal to Democratic versus Republican job seekers.

[Break]

Demsas: What is driving this, I think, is a very useful thing to spend some time on now. I could theorize a bunch of different streams by which partisan sorting shows up, like word of mouth and recommendations, or it might be driven through partisan networks, or Democrats are more likely to be academics, and Republicans are more likely to be petroleum engineers or business owners or whatever. And when you’re able to drill down into how people are sorting, what part of the employment timeline is this actually coming up in?

Chinoy: Yeah, that’s right. So it’s not a straightforward answer, in the sense that certainly it’s the case that we can see in our data that Democrats and Republicans are choosing different schools and majors and occupations and industries. And so, clearly, all of that matters. It sort of limits the available workplaces and the kinds of people that you could even possibly interact with at work. That is something we can account for statistically when we measure segregation. I kind of described how we did that earlier, and we still find that there’s residual segregation.

So what is explaining that residual? There are a couple of different ideas. And I think the two probably main ones are workers selecting partisan or compatible workplaces, or it’s some kind of employer-discrimination channel, where employers are hiring people of a particular party or want things correlated with a particular partisanship, partisan identity.

And we focus on worker selection in this paper, kind of for the reason that I mentioned, that suggestive timing of when people are moving to co-partisan workplaces after sort of updating their party registration. And we focus on the worker-selection channel. And we try to say, you know, Is it the case that workers are actually selecting jobs based on something related to their political identity and something related to how they perceive the politics of the company?

We do this in a survey, and sort of the key question, I think, to begin studying this is, you know, What do workers actually know about a company when they choose whether or not to apply for a job there? It could be the case that segregation is driven because Democrats, you know, want to work at companies with more Democrats, but, like, is that something you really know when you apply for a job? You don’t know that it’s 60 percent Democrats versus 40 percent or something like that.

And so to study this, we look at our big data set that we’ve assembled of all these companies and shares of Democrats and Republicans who actually work there. And we look at how these companies are signaling. We look at the language that they used to describe themselves, and we see how that correlates with partisanship, with the shares of Democrats and Republicans who are actually at that company. And we actually find that there’s quite a bit of signal here, that the Democratic companies are advertising themselves in a way that’s quite different from the Republican companies, even within the same industry.

And a lot of the actual signaling language probably won’t surprise you. It’s words related to the environment and diversity and community for the Democratic companies, and sort of the absence of those for the Republican companies. But the fact that these signals kind of come through so clearly in our data kind of leads us to study the extent to which this can drive sorting. And I’ll pause there for a second, but I can tell you more about that.

Demsas: I would like to talk more about that because I saw the ideological signals and company descriptions, and this is on LinkedIn, right? So how are Democratic firms versus Republican firms describing themselves?

Chinoy: Yes, exactly. So, again, I want to emphasize this is all within industries. So we’re not just comparing, you know, nonprofits, which tend to have more Democratic employees, to, say, energy companies or oil-and-gas firms, which tend to have more Republican employees. This is saying, Take two firms within the same industry. Look at the text that they use, the words that they use on LinkedIn to describe themselves. And we find empirically that there are these words that are quite correlated with the partisanship of the employees.

And again, it’s a lot of the kind of bundle of things related to ESG practices and things related to diversity initiatives and things that are related to more subtle, perhaps, things, like, We’re a company that really emphasizes community and teamwork among our co-workers—that tends to be empirically more Democratic—versus, We’re a company that really emphasizes customer service and efficiency and excellence. That tends to actually be more correlated with companies that have more Republicans, which maybe wasn’t necessarily obvious to me.

Demsas: Yeah. I saw this other paper come out recently by Erika Kirgios and her co-authors that looks at whether communicating measurable diversity goals attracts or repels historically marginalized job applicants. It’s a bit orthogonal to the broader conversation, but I think it plays into this part of your paper quite well.

They look at whether “adding a measurable goal to a public diversity commitment,” like, instead of, quote, “We care about diversity.” You might say, like, We care about diversity and plan to hire at least one woman or racial minority for every white man we hire. And they look at whether that impacts application rates from women and racial minorities. They find that it increases application likelihood among those groups by 6.5 percent, without sacrificing candidate quality. Interestingly, it’s mostly driven by white women. I’m not even sure that the racial-minority finding is statistically significant, though they do find that it’s positive.

I think about this in relation here to whether there are different subgroups that are more motivated to find a job with more of their co-partisans at work and how that changes with racial and gender—different subgroups. I don’t know if you have thoughts on that.

Chinoy: Yeah, that’s interesting. There’s a lot of interesting work studying how these kinds of job ads affect who applies. The other big one I alluded to before is about ESG practices. And there’s another case, I think, where you can think of ways to make that, like, verifiable. You could say that this company actually has some particular ESG designation.

And I think what is maybe interesting about our survey and our paper is that we actually aren’t signaling anything that is explicitly verifiable. There’s no stamp associated with, you know, a company that is more pro-Democratic or more pro-Republican. And yet, this sort of matters. And yet, job seekers clearly seem to pick up on these things and care about them.

Demsas: I think someone listening to this might feel like, Okay, is this just a function of this current moment right now? Like, overt partisan politics in the workplace is much more commonplace in recent years. And this prevailing narrative about, like, Politics shouldn’t be discussed at work. You know, Politics, religion—you know, leave that outside the workplace. That’s kind of an older view of the workplace.

When exactly were you conducting this? And do you have any sense of whether or not this is just, like, a 2017–2022 moment?

Chinoy: Yeah, it’s a great question. So to answer the question, our LinkedIn data is a snapshot from 2022, and our voter-file data, which we’re kind of using to track how people’s party affiliation changes as they move from workplace to workplace, starts in 2012. And so it’s covering, you know, a more recent time period, for sure.

The question of, Can we measure how this is changing over time? I think it is super interesting and a little bit hard, in the sense that you can see in our LinkedIn data, where everyone was working in 2010, but then you worry, Who are the kinds of people who have gone through and listed where they worked in 2010? And so you worry about selection, and so I find that kind of a hard question to answer.

I think that there’s suggestive stuff. So, you know, if you ask people in surveys if they’re willing to leave a job over political differences, you’ll find that it’s the case that young people are much more likely to say that. Now, was that true in 1962? I’m not quite sure. But that sort of points in that direction. You find that in other countries—in Brazil, for example—that this kind of political assortative matching has been increasing over time. You find that among corporate boards, again, this kind of thing has been increasing over time.

And so I think there are a lot of sort of suggestive indications that this might be something that is more pronounced today than it was a couple of decades ago. It’s really hard to say for sure, though.

Demsas: Yeah. It’s funny, too, because part of what’s happened over this time period, at least in the United States, is that our parties have become much more sorted on ideology. And so in the 1950s or whatever, there were a lot more conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, and that has changed significantly over time. And now most people who are ideologically liberal have sorted into the Democratic Party, so it becomes kind of difficult to measure this if you’re looking at just partisan measurements. Like, maybe there was more partisan diversity at workplaces in 1962, but ideological diversity was still really low, and people were still sorting. So I think there’s quite a difficulty with measurement there.

Chinoy: That’s a good point. It makes me sort of think of one other point, which is that for a smaller set of our sample, about 10 percent of our sample, we can measure their donation behavior. And so there, we can actually look at sort of a within-party measure of sorting. We can say, Is it the case that the more liberal Democrats, as measured by who they’re actually donating to, are sorting into workplaces with more Democrats, and vice versa for Republicans? And there, we also find pretty strong patterns. So there is an extent to which this exists even within party.

Demsas: Another question I have is about, like, obviously 2022—pretty tight labor market. So workers had tons of choice and ability to sort based on a bunch of different amenities. And I wonder if you think that this kind of sorting happens less in a high-unemployment environment. So, you know, God forbid, when there’s a recession at some point, or there’s a period of high unemployment, do you expect this kind of ideological sorting to go down?

Chinoy: Yeah, so I think the answer is yes. And I think that, again, that would be a pretty cool follow-up paper. I think that’s something that we can probably study directly in the data that we have.

I think that one piece of evidence here is, you know, how important are these kinds of what we call “ideological amenities” or “partisan amenities”? How much are these characteristics about a job—how much do workers value them, relative to other things that they might care about in a job? Our survey is designed to precisely measure the quantitative trade-offs people would make for these kinds of ideological amenities, you know, trading off against wages. It turns out to be about 3 percent of their salary.

Demsas: (Laughs.) That’s wild.

Chinoy: Is that big or small? I think it depends on your priors. But, you know, it’s certainly way smaller than what people would pay for health care or, you know, some of these sort of more—

Demsas: How do you measure that? How do you know someone’s willing to trade 3 percent of their salary?

Chinoy: Yeah. So this is kind of what I was getting at before. We pick up these ideological signals in the way these companies describe themselves. We use them to generate synthetic job ads. We want to ask workers in a wide range of occupations and industries about these different kinds of jobs. How do we do that without me sitting down and writing, you know, 10,000 job ads?

This turns out to be exactly the kind of thing that ChatGPT is good at, a large language model is good at. We can give it these kinds of ideological signals that we find, in our data, are correlated with companies with more Democrats and Republicans. We can give it a particular occupation and industry, and it’ll come back with a job ad that does emphasize these signals or doesn’t emphasize these signals, and then we ask workers about them in an online survey.

We ask them to explicitly make choices between these companies that are framed in different ways, and we vary the wages associated with these job ads, and that’s how we can sort of capture the strength of this trade-off. And so that’s where we get this 3 percent number. Is it big or small? It’s less than something like health care. It’s sort of actually comparable in magnitude to some of these softer amenities, things like having a relaxed versus a fast pace of work, for example, or having training opportunities at work.

People seem to care similarly about the ideological nature of the job. Of course, the difference is that our ideological amenities are precisely designed to split Democrats and Republicans. You know, Democrats care about the liberal one, and Republicans care about the other one. Whereas, Democrats and Republicans care similarly about, say, a relaxed pace of work. And so those other amenities can’t generate segregation, but the stuff that we study and design actually can generate segregation.

Demsas: I’m not surprised that people would trade off a little bit on wages in order to feel more comfortable at work with their ideological co-partisans. But I wonder if you were to tell people, Hey—your revealed preference is that you would sacrifice, like, X thousand dollars a year. Do you actually want to take that trade? With remote work, for instance, they’re doing these experiments now where people are like, Yeah, I will take a pay cut in order to be able to be fully remote. I wonder if people would explicitly say, Yes, in order to be at a more Republican firm, I will give you $3,000. I wonder if that’s a self-conception problem that we might run into if you made that explicit.

Chinoy: Yeah. So certainly we’re asking people in the survey to kind of make these trade-offs explicitly. You know, it’s job A or job B, and it’s $3,000 or not. I will say, also, that in the observational data, we don’t know individuals’ wages directly.

Again, that’s the problem I mentioned. People don’t list their salary in their LinkedIn profile, but we do know something about where they live and their occupation and their industry. We know what college they went to. And so we can take similar Democrats and Republicans—similar in terms of their demographics and where they live, and in terms of what exact college they went to, which is a pretty good measure of education or perhaps labor-market skills—and find that the Democrats are consistently choosing occupations and industries that pay less than the Republicans. And so there’s certainly some evidence, or some suggestive evidence, that there’s some trade-off that people are making between fit with the workplace, or their job more generally, and the actual salary associated with that job.

Demsas: There’s Gallup polling from February of last year that asked about U.S. employees’ experience with political conversations at work. And conservatives were much more likely to say that they had a discussion with co-workers about politics: 60 percent of conservatives versus 48 percent of liberals. That is contrary to, at least, my expectations. I’d expect parity, or maybe liberals would be doing it more. I don’t know why I had that expectation, but I was surprised.

It makes me think that maybe there’s some sort of mobilization aspect happening here, if conservatives are saying, in 2024, that they’re having conversations with co-workers about politics, and then, all of a sudden, conservatives win a trifecta. I don’t know if that’s playing into it.

Chinoy: That’s interesting. That probably goes against my priors a little bit too. I think I would have expected liberals or Democrats to be having more of these conversations at work. That’s interesting.

I think that, certainly, studying mobilization—it’s actually not clear to me, right? If you’re part of the majority group at your workplace, and then everyone’s like, Hey, let’s go vote for our guy, for our candidate. Is that actually going to make you more likely to turn out? Or is there some sort of backlash effect if you’re a minority and you say, you know, I really hate all these conversations I’m having with my co-workers. I’m going to go try to vote them out of office, or something like that? It’s not super clear to me what direction that goes in. I think that it is a great question.

Demsas: I’m revealing a lot about my psychology in this episode, going, like, Well, if I had 60 percent people who disagreed with me, then I’m definitely gonna go vote, you know? So maybe that’s not the average experience for people. (Laughs.)

Chinoy: Well, to tie this back, again, I think we find these, like, pretty heterogeneous effects on partisanship for people who start out as committed, versus not. And so I think there’s some sense in which maybe people who are younger and who are susceptible to political influence might adopt the politics of their workplace and perhaps turn out, and then people who already have a particular ideological stance or particular partisan attachment might be motivated to turn out as a backlash against the prevailing politics of the workplace. I’m not sure. I think that’s an interesting question.

Demsas: So we mentioned a couple times—I mean, you’re on the job market right now. You’ve mentioned academia a bit. I mean, have you seen any of this playing out in your own field? Like, this kind of sorting?

Chinoy: Yes. And I think that one fascinating thing, I think, is the sorting across college majors, which is something that we can see—sorting across colleges but also across college majors. And we can see this explicitly in our data. It turns out that economics is pretty much in the middle, which, when I tell economists, makes them very happy that it’s a discipline that doesn’t necessarily lean so far one way or another.

But certainly, higher education leans to the left in our data. Certainly, elite colleges lean to the left in our data. Certainly, many academic disciplines lean to the left in our data. And so I guess for lack of a more sophisticated answer, if you’re looking for a place with a good deal of partisan segregation, looking at universities is not a bad place to look.

Demsas: The mechanisms are interesting because you have this self-sorting. You lean a lot on people choosing these sorts of majors that are kind of correlated with their partisan identities or may help shape their partisan identities. And then they choose workplaces and things like that, and colleges, and down the line, etcetera.

But is there any impact that you can find on the employer side of selection? Like, I don’t know if you’re experiencing this at all, too, but there’s some level to which, when you’re in a job interview, they’re trying to suss out if you’re a good fit for the company. And part of that fit, I assume, might be ideological or partisan.

Chinoy: I think that’s absolutely right. And so I think that just isn’t the main mechanism or the main channel that we study in this paper, honestly, because we have to choose something. And so we focus on the worker side. Again, there’s evidence—from Brazil, in particular, there’s a paper looking at employer, you could call it, discrimination. There are audit studies in the U.S. looking at callback rates for résumés that signal whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, and there’s some evidence for that as well. So yes, I do think that kind of employer-selection story is certainly part of what’s going on.

Demsas: I think your focus on the employee side is actually really interesting, because I think it raises questions about allowing this kind of free choice, how that can lead to, maybe, societally suboptimal ends. There’s a new paper in the American Political Science Review from Jon Green and several of his co-authors that looks at demand for echo chambers.

And we think about echo chambers, and we’re like, Oh man, social media. It’s such an echo chamber. We’re talking about it as if it’s kind of imposed on us. And their intro of that paper has something interesting. They argue that “networked curation processes lead information consumption on social media in particular to be more politically homogeneous than [this] empirical literature has thus far suggested. However, this is more a reflection of democracy than a threat to democracy—a product of individuals engaging with information, and each other, on their own terms.”

Essentially, people are choosing to follow certain people. They follow creators. They follow influencers. They follow their friends. They follow people that make them feel good about themselves. There was this big outrage recently. I don’t know if you noticed—people were following the VP account on Instagram and then were shocked to realize that they were now following J. D. Vance, and now a mass unfollowing happened. And it’s like, you had curated your Instagram feed to be people you wanted to follow, and all of a sudden you see, like, J. D. Vance being inaugurated on your feed, and you’re like, How did I get on here? What’s going on?

And it’s an interesting question about—in previous generations, people went and they bought a newspaper, and you couldn’t just choose to take the parts of the newspaper that you wanted. You had to take it all. And you don’t do that anymore. So I don’t know if you have thoughts on that. Or should you want to change this, are there even ways to change this?

Chinoy: Yeah. I think that’s a really good point and interesting question: Is partisan segregation bad? Should we be worried about it? I think it is a very important, interesting question.

I will note that when labor economists study racial and gender segregation at work, they have a different set of motivations in mind. They have equity motivations in mind. These are protected categories. We really are worried, in particular, about differences in pay between groups doing the same work, whereas I don’t think we have the same equity motivations for being worried about Democrats and Republicans at different workplaces.

Demsas: DEI for conservatives in the academy is a very controversial conversation. (Laughs.)

Chinoy: Exactly. Yeah. So without going there, I think that we have different motivations to study partisan segregation at work versus these other forms of segregation.

I think that—and this is kind of getting to a conversation that we had a little bit earlier—it’s probably good that people get to do what they want and put themselves in workplaces where they feel happy and where the organization kind of aligns with their goals. It’s probably good that people work with co-workers who they get along with. It probably makes them, to some extent, more productive. Does it make the actual firms more or less productive? I think that is an open question, and certainly one that factors into this calculus about whether we think this is ultimately helpful or harmful.

And then, of course, I think the other really hard question to answer, which we talked about before, is: What does this do for democracy generally? Should we think that it’s bad that this place where we thought that partisans might be mixing more than other environments actually isn’t going to provide that kind of kind of mixing? What are, exactly, the consequences of that lack of contact between people who don’t think the same way? I think it is a hard question to nail down. I think we have this intuitive sense that probably it’s not so good if we really segregate ourselves politically. But actually quantifying or measuring and thinking about, What are the effects of that? I think is still an open question.

Demsas: One note of hope I might relay here is that—I thought about this in the context of my job, which is, obviously, not the average job in the United States, but I come into contact, in the context of my work, with people who don’t work here, all the time.

So for instance, I might come into contact with people who I’m interviewing, who are different from me, when I’m walking down the street, doing man-on-the-street interviews. But if I also conceptualize other jobs—if you’re in the service industry and you’re a restaurant worker, maybe all your co-workers behind the bar are on the same team as you, but you’re serving customers and talking to them and interacting with them, and that may also lead to a lot of that cross-partisan contact.

I think it’s both difficult—impossible, maybe even—and undesirable from a business perspective to be able to even do that sorting. Obviously, at some level, businesses do this, right? Like, if you have a rainbow flag in the window or something, you’re signaling to people. But, you know, in general, most jobs force you to interact with people outside of your workplace. And that sorting may happen much less in that context. So you could think of, like, your workplace as your home, versus, you know, when you go outside, and then you’re like, Okay, well, I’m interacting with people who are different than me, but I have a place to go back and, you know, dish with my co-workers about how rude they were.

Chinoy: Yeah, so I think that studying the extent to which different occupations interact with customers or with the public and whether that sort of has some bearing on these effects on political views, I think would also be interesting. When they say the workplace is a context for this kind of cross-cutting discourse, I think what they usually have in mind is, like, with fellow co-workers. But certainly, you’re right that those aren’t the only people that you interact with in the context of work. And so that would be super cool to study.

Demsas: Well, that’s a great place for, I think, our final question, which is: What is an idea that you once thought was a great one but ended up only being good on paper?

Chinoy: So I thought about this a bit, and if you’ll forgive me, I think I’m going to mention another academic paper, which is related but not exactly the same. So one thing that I’m super interested in, as someone who’s interested in politics and demographics and data, is the extent to which these demographic characteristics, some of which we’ve been talking about, are really predictive of politics and party affiliation and things like race and gender and age.

And I think what is tempting, then, is to say, There are these strong correlations that exist between politics and demographics. We know something usually about demographic trends in the U.S., whether a particular racial group is growing, whether people are becoming more educated, on average, or not. And so using that to make predictions about what’s going to happen to politics and to elections, I think, is really tempting.

This is the idea that, you know, people are becoming more educated, on average, and more-educated people tend to vote for Democrats, and so the Democrats are going to do better in the future. There are various versions of this argument, and it’s quite tempting to make, but it turns out it doesn’t really work.

There’s a paper by one of my advisors, Vincent Pons, as well as Jesse Shapiro and Richard Calvo where they test this. So they look at the correlation between politics and demographics in a particular election. They say, If these correlations were the same in the next election and we sort of just tracked the evolution of demographics from election to election, how good would that prediction be? And it turns out that it’s quite bad. It’s sort of worse than just guessing that it’s gonna be 50–50, Democrat or Republican.

And I think that sort of goes to show that—it’s kind of interesting that these demographic correlations are so strong in the moment. But also, these trends are kind of slow moving, and politics responds kind of quickly, and parties respond to where they see their electoral advantages.

Demsas: Demographics are not destiny.

Chinoy: Yeah, I could have just said that, and I think I probably would have gotten the same point across. But this is a longer way of saying that.

Demsas: No, it’s great. We’ll put the papers in the show notes as well. But thank you so much, Sahil. This was fantastic.

Chinoy: Thanks for your time.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Sometime on Tuesday evening, the USAID website was taken down and replaced with what looked like a beta page from the internet of the 1990s. There were no affecting photos of American government officials distributing food and medicine overseas. Instead, a box of text explained that nearly all USAID personnel would be placed on administrative leave, globally. With administrative assistance from Elon Musk, President Donald Trump seems to have wiped out the world’s largest donor agency in just a few days. It was a radical act, but maybe not as politically risky, in the domestic sense, as other plans in the grand project of dismantling the federal government. USAID has important beneficiaries, but most of them are not Americans and live overseas.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we discuss where Trump and Musk seem to be headed and the obstacles they are likely to encounter in the future. What happens when Trump starts to face challenges from courts? What happens when Musk goes after programs that Americans depend on, particularly those who voted for Trump? What new political alliances might emerge from the wreckage? We talk with staff writer Jonathan Chait, who covers politics. And we also talk with Shane Harris, who covers national security, about Trump’s campaign to purge the FBI of agents who worked on cases related to the insurrection at the Capitol.

“I think that will send a clear message to FBI personnel that there are whole categories of people and therefore potential criminal activity that they should not touch, because it gets into the president, his influence, his circle of friends,” Harris says. “I think that is just a potentially ruinous development for the rule of law in the United States.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Today is the deadline for some two million federal employees to decide if they want to type resign in response to the now infamous “Fork in the Road” email. The email, of course, is one in a list of things that Elon Musk, empowered by President Trump, has been doing in order to “disrupt” the federal government.

Donald Trump: We’re trying to shrink government. And he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better.

Rosin: For example: gain access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system—

News anchor: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly granting Elon Musk’s DOGE team access to the federal government’s payment system, which handles trillions of dollars in payments.

Rosin: —dismantle USAID, of which Trump is not a fan—

Trump: And we’re getting them out. USAID—run by radical lunatics.

Rosin: —and neither is Musk.

Elon Musk: If you’ve got an apple, and it’s got a worm in it, maybe you can take the worm out. But if you’ve got actually just a ball of worms, it’s hopeless. And USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple. And when there is no apple, you’ve just got to basically get rid of the whole thing.

Rosin: All of these efforts are unusual, maybe even unprecedented, norm-breaking—even for Trump. But are they unconstitutional? And could they fundamentally change the character of the country?

This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

[Music]

News anchor: At the FBI, some agents have started to pack up their desks as fears of mass firings grow.

Rosin: In the second half of the show, we’re going to focus on a special case inside the government, which presents a different set of potentially history-changing problems—the FBI—with staff writer Shane Harris.

But first, we are going to discuss what’s at stake, more broadly in this overhaul, with staff writer Jonathan Chait, who covers politics for The Atlantic.

[Music]

Rosin: Jon, welcome to the show.

Jonathan Chait: Thank you, Hanna. I’m delighted to be here.

Rosin: So, Jon, of all the unorthodox things that Trump has authorized Elon Musk to do with the federal government, which one strikes you as pushing constitutional limits the most?

Chait: Attempting to eliminate or cut spending for agencies that have been authorized by Congress. This is just a totally revolutionary step in terms of the structure of our government. And it’s kind of shocking, to me, how far he’s been able to go, and how much permission he’s received from the Republican Party.

Rosin: And is there another time in history when a president tested this limit between what Congress authorizes and what the president can do with that? And how has it worked out in the past?

Chait: That’s a great question. You had a struggle with Andrew Jackson over the Bank of the United States. That was a real constitutional struggle between him and his enemies as to how much power the president had vis-à-vis Congress and whether the president had just total authority to do what he wished. And Andrew Jackson was sort of known for pushing the boundaries of the office to or past their limits, and saying if the Supreme Court ruled against him, he would just do what he wanted, anyway. He did the same thing with his attempts to ethnically cleanse Native Americans to take their land. He just fundamentally didn’t care if he had authority from Congress.

That’s the kind of struggle we’re, I think, heading into right now. And Richard Nixon tried a smaller version, I think, of what Trump is doing now. He basically said, Congress has authorized certain kinds of spending, and I’m just going to impound it. But the Supreme Court ruled against him, and Congress passed the Impoundment [Control] Act that formalized the fact that Congress has this authority, and the president doesn’t, and if Congress authorizes spending, with very limited exceptions, the president has to carry it out. And if the president objects to certain forms of spending that Congress enacted, he has to persuade Congress to pass a law to change it.

Rosin: Got it. Okay. So that’s the line we’re working with. So it’s the Impoundment Act. It’s been defined by the Supreme Court. Can we talk about examples of, say, how far an administration can go in resisting a previous administration’s policies, but not pushing against this constitutional line? What would be something we’ve seen before? And what would prompt what people would refer to as, say, a legal or constitutional crisis?

Chait: Just in the big picture, the executive branch has been asserting more and more authority, over decades, as Congress has gotten more and more dysfunctional. The use of the filibuster has risen. Congress has gotten less and less able to fulfill its constitutional obligation to really direct national policy the way the Constitution imagined it. And so the executive branch has really kind of filled in this gap in a lot of ways. So you’ve seen presidents of both parties creatively exerting their authority.

You had Trump doing this with immigration, where he, you could say, couldn’t or just barely even tried to get Congress to fund the wall that he wanted. So he just basically redirected funding from the Pentagon to the border by calling it an emergency. And Trump is doing the same thing with tariffs.

Now, Congress basically ceded the president emergency authority to declare tariffs for various national-security emergencies, thinking that this would just be used in the case of something like a war or an international conflict, but it let the president decide what an emergency is. And so Trump can just say, well, an emergency is whatever he wants, and that’s on Congress.

And Biden has kind of pushed the limit in a lot of ways, I think most controversially with student loan forgiveness, where the executive branch has control over student loans, and so Biden just kind of forgave those loans on a kind of sweeping basis. Now, he was challenged legally. But when you’re in power, your party has a pretty strong incentive to interpret executive power in the most sweeping way.

So there’s a way in which both parties have really been engaged in this, but I really think what Trump and Musk are doing now has totally breached the walls of normal and is just turning the Constitution into a farce.

Rosin: Okay. So the reason that’s true is mostly because of appropriations? Because from what you’ve said, presidents are pushing this line constantly. So what are they doing that doesn’t just break norms or traditions, but actually is pushing into constitutional crisis?

Chait: Article I of the Constitution, which is really just, like, the guts of the Constitution, says that Congress has authority over spending.

So Congress establishes an agency. Congress sets its spending levels. And throughout our history, with the exception we’ve described for Nixon, which was slapped down, the presidents have to follow that because that’s the law, right? Now, the president has a role in that. The president can veto some of these laws. If Congress proposes spending that the president doesn’t want, the president can veto it, and then Congress can override it, or Congress can make a deal with him. But whatever emerges from that is the law, and the president has to follow the law.

Rosin: Okay. And does the Trump team have any creative arguments for how to get around this Impoundment Act?

Chait: So far, Elon Musk is just operating in this totally chaotic legal gray zone. So his first target has been the United States Agency for International Development. And one thing they’ve made this argument is that, Well, that was just established by an executive order by the president, John F. Kennedy, 1961, so it can be ended by an executive order. The problem is: After it was established by executive rule, it was later established by Congress. Congress voted to make the United States Agency for International Development an agency.

So after Congress established the United States Agency for International Development, it had the force of law. And so saying, We’re going to eliminate this agency, is just a violation of the law. It’s pretty simple.

Rosin: Okay. I can see the argument. So can we play out both scenarios? The first scenario is: The courts push back on Trump. You know, they enforce the Impoundment Act. They say, You cannot do this. You can’t end USAID. Elon Musk has to stop roaming around the federal government and making these decisions that violate this constitutional balance of power. What happens then? Does it call Trump’s bluff?

Chait: It might, but I wouldn’t count on it, for a couple reasons. Number one: Musk is moving much faster than the legal system can move. And it’s a lot easier to destroy something than it is to build something. So once you’ve basically told everyone they’re fired, and they can’t come to work, they can sit and wait for the courts to countermand that while they’re losing their income and their mortgage is going under, or they could just go find another job somewhere.

Rosin: I see. So it’s just, like, facts on the ground change, so that even if the legal reality doesn’t budge, you’ve already disintegrated the actual infrastructure.

Chait: You lose the institutional culture. You lose the accumulated expertise. And by the time the courts have stepped in, rebuilding it is difficult to do, even if the president wanted to. And obviously, they’re not going to want to anyway. Second of all, it’s not totally clear that they’re going to follow the law, that the law has any power over them.

I mean, remember: Donald Trump established on the first day of his administration that he believes that people who break the law on his behalf can get away with it when he pardoned the entire—or commuted the sentences of the entire—insurrectionists, right?

Rosin: Yeah.

Chait: So Elon Musk knows full well that if he violates the law, Trump is going to have his back. So I think that’s also shaping the behavior of everyone involved in this episode.

Rosin: Right. So it sounds like you pretty strongly believe there is no brake to this. b-r-a-k-e. There is no stop to this. I was thinking that maybe the courts or something to, you know, put some hope in to stop this. But it sounds like no.

Chait: Well, in the long run, the courts can have an effect by saying, You don’t have the authority to eliminate this agency. It still exists, meaning that when the Democrats win back the presidency, if that ever happens, it’ll still be there, and then they can actually rebuild it.

Rosin: So in other words, in that scenario, there’s temporary dismantling, but the balance of powers remains in place, is affirmed by the courts, and things get slowly rebuilt.

Chait: Right. Although, you know, you’ve lost all your talent, you’ve lost your institutional memory, and then you’re probably rebuilding this agency from scratch.

And keep in mind, USAID is just the test case. I think they’re just picking on the most politically vulnerable agency. It deals with foreign aid, right? So most of the people affected by this right now are mostly living in other countries, who won’t get, you know, drinking water and food. And people are going to starve and die of diseases, but they’re not going to be Americans. They can’t vote, so they’re politically weak and vulnerable.

So that’s the target that they’ve picked to establish this principle that the presidency can pick and choose what spending is real and what isn’t. So then they’re going to start to go on to do domestic targets. But then, I think, once they’ve started attacking domestic targets, then they’re going to start dealing with political blowback in a way they’re not facing when they’re going after foreign aid.

Rosin: I see. So that’s a different political—so if that starts to happen, if we enter a period where you have people who have stake in this in the U.S., can you see any interesting alliances that could come out of that moment?

Chait: It’s really hard to see where they’re going, because Elon Musk is not proceeding from an accurate map of reality.

So to just explain what I mean by that, he said that he wants to cut—first he said—$2 trillion from the fiscal-year budget, from one year. Then he revised it down to $1 trillion. So right away, you know, when you’re just picking these random round numbers, you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about. But he said, like, basically, there’s a trillion dollars in just, you know, waste and improper payments—and there just isn’t. There’s nothing close to that by even the most expansive possible definition. So Musk thinks he’s going to just go through the budget and find waste, and just kill it and add up to a trillion dollars. And he’s obviously not.

So the question is: What happens when his fantasy starts to run into reality? Does he start to just attack social-welfare programs and end payments of food stamps and Medicaid reimbursements and programs like that to people? Does he realize that he didn’t know what he was talking about and he’s in way over his head? We don’t know how it’s going to go, but I think that is the question you’ve got to answer before you start to figure out what the politics look like.

Rosin: Right. And there’s also military budgets. Like, if you think where the giant spending is, you’re running up against budgets that will face a huge amount of resistance if you slash them in the way that he’s slashed other things.

Chait: Right. Yeah. If they start going after the Pentagon, I think you, obviously, cut pretty deeply into the Republican coalition pretty fast. I even think they’re probably starting to accumulate small amounts of domestic political targets with USAID, right? They cut off funding to a Lutheran charity, but, you know, those are midwestern religious conservatives who are operating those programs who are being targeted. Now, most of the money is going overseas, but you’re still hurting people in the United States of America. And I think that pain is going to start to spread more widely if they keep going.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so you’re describing a realistic scenario in which this whole operation does encounter resistance. There are many policy researchers—on the left, even—who have argued that the government does, in fact, need an overhaul and, more specifically, isn’t equipped for a digital age. Is there a chance that in all of this, you know, Elon Musk could usher in a more efficient, tech-friendly kind of government?

Chait: Yeah, well, that was the initial hope that some people who specialize in government reform were hoping for. Jennifer Pahlka is an expert in what’s called “state capacity,” which is just the ability of government to function and to bridge the gap between its ambitions and its actual ability to meet those ambitions.

And part of that is fixing the way government hires and fires people.

But the problem is: Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be interested in that in any way whatsoever. He’s just holed up with a bunch of engineers who don’t seem to have any expertise in government or state capacity whatsoever. And they’re just finding programs that people within this kind of right-wing bubble in which he resides think sound radical and just, you know, saying, Delete it! Delete it! and getting cheers on social media for it.

It’s just so completely haphazard. There doesn’t seem to be any interest in actually making the government, you know, operate better.

Rosin: Yeah. And I suppose Twitter did not become a better, more profitable, you know, smoother-functioning company after Elon Musk took it over. It just became a kind of tool of the culture war—like, an effective tool of the culture war.

Chait: Right. It became smaller, less profitable—jankier, but more conservative.

Rosin: Right, okay. All right. One final thing. So project far into the future. Let’s say that your blowback scenario is real. What political alliances can you see reforming? Like, if you had to predict a political realignment some years down the road that includes a reaction to everything that’s going on now, what does it look like?

Chait: Well, the Trump coalition has really been built on winning multiracial, working-class voters back from the Democrats—and those voters are disproportionately to the right on social policy—and they’ve exploited some of those progressive stances on social policy that the Democratic Party has adopted over the last decade, but they’re still relatively to the left on economics. Maybe they don’t believe in government, in the abstract, but in the specific, they really rely on programs, like nutritional aid and Medicaid, Obamacare.

And every time the Republicans have gone after those programs, their coalition has splintered. That was really a major element in killing George W. Bush during his second term. He decided to privatize social security, and that was a major cause of the decline of his popularity that made him politically toxic, along with the Iraq War and Katrina, social security privatization.

You know, you could see a version of that happening with Trump, but I wouldn’t take for granted that it’ll play out that way because we live in a different world in a lot of ways.

[Music]

Rosin: Thanks again to Jonathan Chait.

After the break: Donald Trump also has his eyes set on the FBI. We hear from The Atlantic’s Shane Harris about what that might mean.

[Break]

Rosin: Shane, welcome to the show.

Shane Harris: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Sure. So the president asked the FBI to turn over the names of every agent who worked on the Capitol riots. What do you read into that request?

Harris: Well, I think you don’t even have to read that closely between the lines. You can just read the lines as they were sent in the order that we now have seen publicly, that went from the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, of course, who had been one of Donald Trump’s lawyers as a private citizen, telling the acting director for the FBI, Look—we want the names of these people because they believe in the words that he has put, that they can no longer have trust that these FBI employees will implement the president’s agenda faithfully.

So what they are saying is that these are individuals who they don’t think are on board with Trump administration policies. And then of course, you know, we can do a little bit of inference, which is, you know, why would he go after the people who investigated January 6 and his role in it? Which was, by the way, the biggest FBI investigation in the country’s history. You know, these are the agents who interviewed and ultimately gave evidence that created the charges for the Capitol rioters—who were sent to prison, who Trump then later pardoned and who are now free—who investigated his own activity around January 6 and efforts to impede the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration.

So these are the FBI agents who did that case. And you know, what Trump is making very clear here is that, you know, he wants to identify them. He doesn’t trust them. He doesn’t trust the leadership that oversees them, and either wants them removed or moved, or we’ll see what the disciplinary action is. But some of them, he’s actually said he wants them fired immediately. He’s made pretty clear how he feels about these people and why he’s going after them, I think.

Rosin: Now, that must have landed in a very particular way at the FBI. You know the agency better than I do. As far as I understand it, I mean, you are assigned a case; you work on that case. So how have leaders in the agency responded to that request?

Harris: I think it’s been really interesting. I mean, there’s been this mixture from people I’ve talked to of: On one level, people are not surprised that Donald Trump went after FBI personnel, because it was expected that he would go after senior-leadership-level type people. I mean, he had essentially pushed out the FBI director, Christopher Wray, who—remember—became the FBI director when Donald Trump fired the previous FBI director, James Comey, in his first term.

But people were genuinely stunned by the scope of this demand to know the names of all of these agents who worked J6—and then there’s one other related case—because it’s, you know, potentially 4,000 to maybe even 6,000 personnel if you’re taking in FBI agents, analysts, people who play a support role.

But then something really fascinating has happened: There has been this—I hesitate to say the word defiant—but there are senior leaders at the FBI, including the person who is serving as the acting director right now, who essentially are saying, No, you cannot just fire agents for this reason, for no real cause. These people have protections under civil-service rules. They have due-process rights. And what’s more, some of the advocates for these folks are saying, Look—you can just read the plain language of the order that I just read to you and see that this is a retaliatory response, that what the president is doing is going after people because he doesn’t like their opinions or what they did.

As you pointed out, these thousands of agents didn’t pick to be on the case. I mean, it’s not like they raised their hand and said, Yes, please. I would like to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump. They were assigned these cases. So the leadership has actually really kind of dug in here, some of them, and essentially is saying, There’s a process for this. This isn’t fair.

Now, we’ll see how long they can resist the White House on this, but we’re seeing some real institutional pushback from the FBI, which personally, I think, is encouraging.

Rosin: I want to get more into the pushback, but I’m curious what we know about this group of agents. There’s a few thousand. Because, yes, I followed the January 6 cases. I know that it was the biggest investigation in history, but who are they? Like, if you think about losing these 4,000, is why I’m asking, what’s their expertise, and what do they generally do?

Harris: If we take that group of the J6 investigators, the agents themselves, these could be people who were pulled in from all over the country. So this could include agents that were investigating national-security-related matters, counterterrorism matters, transnational crime, narcotics. The universe of these agents, as you know, was so big because the case was so big and demanding.

Trump, though, has zeroed in, more particularly, on some individuals, including some very senior-level officials that have the title of executive assistant director, and he actually named some of these in this order. And those people were involved in things like, for instance, the Mar-a-Lago investigation, when Donald Trump took classified documents from the White House and stored them at his estate in Florida—offenses for which he was later charged under the Espionage Act.

Some of these people—one of them was the special agent in charge of the Miami Field Office, which participated in the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Others had supervisory and leadership positions on intelligence and counterintelligence matters. It was a counterintelligence squad at the Washington Field Office in D.C. that handled the Mar-a-Lago case. So, you know, he understands that there are people who, individually, separate from J6, worked on the Mar-a-Lago case, as well, and those people are being singled out too.

Rosin: Right. I mean, there are two things here. One is, we’ve talked about this in terms of other agencies, like USAID, which is: What vast institutional knowledge would you lose? So these people worked on individual cases, but also, they have a lot of expertise in counterterrorism. They just must have a large, you know, body of knowledge and experience that you could lose.

Harris: Absolutely. So let’s just take, for instance, the squad at the Washington Field Office that did the Mar-a-Lago investigation. They work in the counterintelligence division of the FBI. So when those folks are not investigating, you know, Donald Trump’s removal of classified documents, they’re looking at things like spies operating inside the United States trying to maybe steal government secrets or recruit agents in the United States. They’re looking at people who might be mishandling classified information. They look at people who might be leaking to journalists as well.

These are folks who work on highly specialized counterintelligence cases. This isn’t just something that you, you know, kind of step into, and on day one, you know how to do it. These are different kinds of tradecraft. They’re very sensitive. These people all will have high-level security clearances. They will have been vetted for these jobs. So folks who are in positions like that, when you eliminate them, you know, it’s not entirely clear to me that there is just then, like, a backup bench of people who can come in to do these really important national-security cases.

And the same would go for anyone who’s working actively on counterterrorism, you know. I mean, Donald Trump has talked a lot about his concern that there are, you know, terrorists making their way inside the United States, taking advantage of, you know, weak border security or other ways of getting into the U.S. Well, it’s FBI agents who do counterterrorism cases that investigate things like that.

So if you’re suddenly moving people with this level of expertise off their jobs, or you are creating a real disruption and distraction while they’re trying to do their jobs, I think that arguably weakens national security, it creates vulnerabilities, and it distracts the FBI from doing its job, which is to go out and not just investigate crimes but to try and stop violent crimes and bad things from happening to Americans and to the U.S. government.

Rosin: Right. So you can see the future crisis. Like, you can project a future crisis where we are vulnerable to terrorism or something like that because we’ve lost a huge amount of this expertise.

Harris: I think that’s right. Yes. It doesn’t seem to me like he is thinking through the consequences of hobbling the FBI at this moment. What he is interested in is retribution. He’s interested in payback. And he is putting, you know, not only the country, but he’s putting his administration at grave political risk by doing that.

Rosin: Okay, Shane. Here’s something else that I was wondering about. Since when did the FBI come under so much suspicion from the right? I’ve always thought of the FBI as an agency conservatives can get behind, and Trump’s attacks feel like they upend all that. It’s confusing.

Harris: Oh definitely. And this has long been one of the more baffling aspects of Donald Trump’s critique of the FBI, as he’s painting them as this kind of leftist deep state.

I mean, the FBI—I’m speaking in general terms, of course, I mean—it is a generally conservative institution, both because I think that the people who work in it are often politically conservative or just sort of dispositionally conservative. It’s a law-enforcement agency. I mean, it does everything by the book. There are jokes in the FBI about how it takes, you know, five forms that you have to fill out before you can make a move on anything. It is a very hidebound, bureaucratic, small-C conservative organization. I mean, these are cops.

Rosin: Right. Right.

Harris: Okay? It’s a bunch of cops, right? This is like, if you want to think in generalities, like, you know, USAID is like, Oh, yeah, it’s people who want to get to charities, and they worked in the Peace Corps, and they’re all about humanitarian causes. And that, too, is kind of a broad brush.

But, you know, when I talk to people who have worked in the bureau, if you knew these people, these are not people who you would associate with progressive causes. That doesn’t mean that they are sort of reactionary right-wingers. I don’t want to make that impression either. They’re very much following the rule of law. It’s a conservative institution. It is very hidebound and steeped in tradition and in regulation.

And, you know, Trump just has this image of it as this out-of-control left organization. And he has persuaded large numbers of his followers and Americans that this is true. And I have to tell you, in the 20-plus years that I’ve covered national security, one of the most fascinating and bewildering trends that I have seen is this change in political positioning, where now, people who tend to be on the left, sort of—I don’t want to say revere the FBI and the intelligence agencies but—hold them up as models of institutions of government that we need to have faith and trust in, and they’re there to try and protect people. When it was a generation ago, people on the left who were deeply skeptical of the CIA and the FBI because these agencies were involved in flagrant abuses of civil rights and of the law in the 1950s and ’60s.

And now it’s people on the right who, particularly after 9/11, used to be so reflexively defensive of the CIA and the FBI and counterterrorism and Homeland Security, who now have sort of swapped political positions with the critique on the left that see these institutions as, you know, run through with dangerous, rogue bureaucrats who want to prosecute their political enemies. I mean, it’s just like the people have switched bodies.

Rosin: Let me ask you a broader question about this. As someone who’s been tracking Trump’s attempts to rewrite the history of January 6 for a while, I could say I was a little surprised by the blanket pardon of insurrectionists, maybe a little more surprised by this effort to go after the agents who investigated them. Because—and tell me if this is an exaggeration—to me, that could send a message to supporters: If you commit violence on my behalf, not only will you not get punished, but anyone who tries to go after you will be in trouble. Which, if I continue that logic, seems like, potentially, a blank check to commit violence on the president’s behalf. Is that paranoid?

Harris: No. It’s not. It’s not. That is, I think, one of the clear risks that we face with the president behaving in the way that he has. And I would take it one step further, which is to say: The message is that if you are an FBI agent, or maybe more to the point, an FBI leader, someone in a management position, there are certain things that you should just not look into and investigate.

And not to say, like, now that the president enjoys, you know, presumptive immunity for all official acts. I mean, who knows what the FBI is even going to investigate when it comes to Donald Trump. But how good would you feel being assigned a case to look into Elon Musk or, you know, Trump campaign donors who may have engaged in illegal activity or influence peddling, the whole universe of people connected to Trump?

What he is saying by pardoning these J6 rioters is that If you are on my side, I will come protect you. And I think that will send a clear message to FBI personnel that there are whole categories of people and therefore potential criminal activity that they should not touch, because it gets into the president, his influence, his circle of friends. I think that is just a potentially ruinous development for the rule of law in the United States.

The FBI is there to investigate crimes objectively, regardless of who may have committed them. And what the president is doing now is essentially saying there’s a whole category of people who, if not outright exempt, are people that are going to fall under his protection, and for the people who might dare to investigate them, there will be consequences.

Rosin: Well, Shane, thank you, but no thank you, for laying that out in such a clear and chilling way. I appreciate it.

Harris: My pleasure, Hanna. Thanks for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

There are two Chicago neighborhoods that are, on the surface, quite similar. They are both more than 90 percent Black; the median age of both is roughly 38. About the same share of people have college degrees, and the median income of both is roughly $39,000.

But one experiences about twice as many shootings per capita as the other.

The University of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig opens his forthcoming book, Unforgiving Places, by describing the neighboring places of Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore, both minutes away from the elite university where he teaches. Ludwig’s argument begins by reframing the problem of gun violence away from the demoralizing story of American exceptionalism and toward the more granular variation that differs state by state, city by city, and yes, block by block.

“Whatever you believe about the causes of gun violence in America, those beliefs almost surely fail to explain why Greater Grand Crossing would be so much more of a violent place than South Shore,” Ludwig writes. “How, in a city and a country where guns are everywhere, does gun violence occur so unevenly—even across such short distances, in this case literally right across the street?”

Talking about gun crime almost always turns into talking about gun-control legislation, a debate that has been happening my entire life and I’m sure will continue past my death. But on today’s episode of Good on Paper, Ludwig and I spend little time on that topic, focusing instead on policy levers that could reduce gun violence but don’t require national gun-control legislation.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: In 2022, Louisiana had the second-highest rate of gun deaths in the country. I’m just back from a reporting trip to the Lake Charles area, and I had a few people remark rather pointedly to me that my home of Washington, D.C., is a violent place, seemingly unaware that D.C. has had a significantly lower rate of gun deaths than Louisiana for many years now.

Why do some places see higher rates of gun violence than others? It’s an incredibly important question to answer rigorously. Homicide is a leading cause of death for young adults, and the vast majority of those homicides happen with guns. But this is a topic where the politics rarely line up with actionable solutions.

After the COVID-19 crime wave, politicians have scrambled as they place crime at the top of the agenda again and are searching for public-policy tools to address violence in their communities.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at the Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is the economist Jens Ludwig, from the University of Chicago, who has spent his career studying the economics of crime. He has a book coming out in a few months called Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of Gun Violence.

Jens and I talk about the classic explanations for why gun violence happens in some places and not others. He pushes back against the classic right-wing explanation that the problem is bad people and the classic left-wing argument that solving the problem of gun violence requires ending mass social inequalities first.

One note about the show: We’re going to begin adding the studies and articles and books we reference in the show notes, so you can easily access them for further reading. A link to Jens’ book will be there, too, if you’d like to investigate his argument further.

Okay. Jens, welcome to the show.

[Music]

Jens Ludwig: Thanks so much for having me. It’s such an honor to be here.

Demsas: Jens, you have a book coming out in April called Unforgiving Places. What’s it about? What are you arguing?

Ludwig: The book basically makes two arguments. One argument is that we’re despairing about the problem of gun violence because we’ve thought about it as just all being about gun control, and I think that’s not true. I think the problem of gun violence in America is partly about guns, and it’s partly about violent behavior. And if we can’t do anything about the guns, we can at least try and do something about the violent behavior. And the experiences of L.A. and New York over the last 30 years show us that there’s real progress that you can make there.

And then I think the other core argument of the book is that violent behavior is not what we’ve thought. I think most people have thought of violent behavior in America as being about thoughtful, deliberate action that leads you to focus on incentives, like bigger sticks or more enticing carrots. And in fact, I think most shootings in America are instead fast-thinking, reactive—it stems from arguments. And that leads us away from relying exclusively on incentives and towards a very different type of policy that we just haven’t been talking about or thinking about.

Demsas: When I was reading your book, there was a stat that just has been rattling around in my brain since I read it. You write that shootings account for fewer than 1 percent of all crimes but nearly 70 percent of the total social harm of crime. What does that mean? And how is that even measured?

Ludwig: Yeah. So the way that economists think about that sort of thing is very analogous to how environmental economists think about environmental harm. If you go back to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska a million years ago, there’s the tangible cost of cleaning up the bay or whatever it is, and then there’s the sort of social costs that don’t show up on any sort of budget spreadsheet anywhere. That’s the “harm to this pristine place now being ruined forever” kind of thing.

And so environmental economists have come up with ways of quantifying those sorts of intangible costs. And we can use the same sort of approach to measure the harm for crime as well. It basically comes down to what people are willing to pay to avoid exposure to different types of crime.

And so what you can see is people really don’t like disorder. They really don’t like having their bicycle stolen, their car stolen. I lived in cities for the last 30 years. I’ve had almost every sort of property crime that you can imagine happen to me. But the thing that people really, really are petrified about is staring down the barrel of a gun. And I can tell you that from firsthand experience. I was held up at gunpoint myself on the South Side of Chicago, going to pick up my older daughter from her piano lesson about five years ago.

My University of Chicago colleague Steve Levitt did a study where he showed that every serious crime that happens in a city reduces the city’s population on net by one person—so fewer people moving in, more people moving out. Every murder that happens in a city—the overwhelming majority of murders in the United States, unfortunately, are committed with guns—every murder that happens in a city reduces the city’s population by 70 people. And I think that’s another way to sort of see exactly how much the gun-violence problem in America is driving the crime problem.

Demsas: I also think it’s just remarkable to really think about this in perspective of how much effort we spend in trying to eliminate certain types of crime. I mean, if 70 percent of total social harm is shootings, then the vast majority of our efforts should just be focused on guns. And property crime should take a backseat, all this sort of thing. Intuitively, we understand that, obviously, murder is worse than other forms of crime, but I think the degree to which that is driving America’s violence problem and crime problem and the harms that ricochet out into communities is, I think, not well understood.

Ludwig: Yeah, I one million percent agree. And I think it also sort of helps you see a path to a criminal-justice system, a law-enforcement system that kind of sidesteps a lot of the current political fights that we’re having. I think everybody agrees that gun violence is a hugely serious problem, that we should be holding people accountable for this.

Even the mayor of Chicago, who I think within the political distribution is one of the more progressive elected leaders in the United States—he’s going around talking about the need to improve the odds that shooters get arrested and wind up behind bars. And so I think this much stronger focus on gun violence would be a way to concentrate everything on the thing that the American public really cares the most about. It sidesteps a lot of the fraught political debates about how we do enforcement over lots of other things that the public doesn’t like, but it’s not the first-order thing that they’re worried about.

Demsas: So there’s familiar pattern that I think most people are aware of when it comes to the gun-policy conversation in the United States, and it’s: There is a tragic mass shooting—maybe at a school, maybe at a nightclub—and then there’s this intense rallying to pass gun legislation.

And economists have quantified this. There’s a study that showed that a mass shooting leads to a 15 percent increase in the number of firearm bills introduced within a state the year following that shooting. Interestingly, in states with Republican-controlled legislatures, those are often laws that loosen gun restrictions. But even when looking at Democrat-controlled legislatures and laws that tighten gun restrictions, studies often struggle to find significant impact of these laws on reducing gun violence, reducing deaths, reducing mass shootings.

In your book, you also seem kind of pessimistic about the potential for gun legislation to have a large impact on reducing gun deaths. Why is that?

Ludwig: Yeah. Let me respond in two ways. The first is: Federal gun laws set a floor, not a ceiling, on what cities and states can do. And so lots of cities and states around the country, including my home city of Chicago, have enacted gun laws that are more restrictive than what you have under the national law. And the problem with that is that we live in a country with open city and state borders. So what Gary, Indiana, is doing about air quality affects the South Side of Chicago, and vice versa, right?

And in the same way, like, my family for the last 18 years has lived in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. Our favorite ice-cream place in the area is Dairy Belle in Hammond, Indiana. So we spend 20 minutes driving down there every summer, like, way too often. And when we come back from Indiana into Chicago, nobody stops us at the city border to check what we have in our trunk.

And when you look at where the crime guns are coming from in Chicago, almost none of them come from a gun store in Chicago. They come from places like, you know—there are gun stores quite close to Dairy Belle in Indiana that are big sources of crime guns in the city. So I think the way that you want to be thinking about gun regulation, I think, is very analogous to how you would do something like regulate air quality. And that’s to think about regulation at the national level in a world in which you’ve got what an economist would call lots of externalities across jurisdictions in their own laws.

Demsas: But even federal gun-control legislation has often felt, at least from my overview of the economics literature, like it hasn’t had a massive impact, whether it’s assault-weapons legislation or other forms of gun-control legislation that’s passed over the past few decades. Is that just a reflection of the fact that these laws are pretty modest in what they’re attempting to do? Or does that indicate that we can’t really attack this problem legislatively?

Ludwig: What I would say is: Most of the national gun laws that we’ve enacted in the United States are very modest, as you said. I think the biggest problem with the gun laws that we have in the United States is: Most of the laws regulating gun acquisition—you know, gun sales—only apply to gun sales that are, basically, carried out by a licensed gun dealer.

And that’s something like 50 or 60 percent of all gun sales in the U.S. And the other 40 percent are almost completely unregulated under federal law. Some states try and regulate that, but that’s not a loophole—that’s like a chasm that you can drive a truck through. And you know, when you look at where the guns used in crime come from, you wouldn’t be surprised to see that’s the most important source of crime guns that you see in Chicago and other cities around the country.

But you know, I think the difficulty of cities and states regulating their way out of the gun-violence problem, and the difficulty of substantially changing national gun laws, has led a lot of people to conclude that gun violence in America is a hopeless problem, because we can see that the gun-control politics are stuck.

So one way that I’ve come to think about this is that that’s too pessimistic a view. And the reason for that is that gun violence is not just about guns; it’s about guns plus violence. So it’s having lots of guns around, but also having people who use them to hurt other people. And if we can’t make much progress on the gun-access part of things, the good news is that there’s a second path to progress, which is to try and change the willingness of people to use guns to hurt other people.

We have something like 400 million guns in the United States, in a country of about 330 million people. And I think the existence proof that shows us that you really can make a huge difference on the gun-violence problem by figuring out how to control violence comes from the Los Angeles and New York City experience over the last 30 years.

So in 1991, the murder rate per 100,000 people in L.A. and New York was very similar to Chicago, actually, at that time. It was something like 30 per 100,000. So to give you a sense of what that means: In London, the murder rate is something like one or two per 100,000. So the United States is just totally off the charts. Almost all of those extra murders here are committed with firearms.

And in the 30-year period following that—so 1991 (the peak of the crack-cocaine epidemic), 30 years after that, up through 2019 (the last year before the pandemic)—the murder rate in Los Angeles declined by 80 percent; the murder rate in New York City declined by 90 percent. And those are cities that are swimming in the ocean of, you know, hundreds of millions of guns in America. And I think that speaks to a more optimistic take, that it is not a hopeless problem—not just that something can be done but that something substantial can be done.

Demsas: The other variation you point to in your book that is what really intrigued me is that Canada and Switzerland also have above-average rates of gun ownership, but they don’t have particularly high rates of murder in line with what we would expect if you just took America’s experience. And I think I had this kind of model in my head that it’s just like, If you have this many guns, there’s nothing you can do. Like, that’s the situation. There will be variations based on other things, like whether the economy is doing well or whether we’re incarcerating people or not, or how many cops there are on the street and what they’re doing. You’d still see variations in crime, but you would always have some kind of baseline level of criminality.

But I want to get to the core argument of your book, which I think is maybe encapsulated by a pretty provocative question on the back cover, which says, “What if everything we understood about gun violence was wrong?” This is a very bold claim, and I’m excited to explore it with you. But I think that the first part of that is unpacking what it is that you mean by “everything we understand about gun violence.” You lay out two competing theories that Americans hold about the causes of gun violence. One is the “root causes theory” and one is the “wickedness theory.” Can you just walk us through what those two are?

Ludwig: Yeah, the conventional wisdom in America right now says that violent behavior is thought through, right? So it’s either bad people who aren’t afraid of whatever the criminal-justice system is going to do to them, or it’s people in bad economic conditions who are desperate in doing whatever they need to do to survive. And both of those conventional wisdoms on the right and the left actually have something in common, which is: They think of gun violence as being sort of a deliberate behavior, and that leads us then to focus on incentives to solve the problem. You know, We need bigger sticks, if you’re on one side of the aisle, or if you’re on the other side of the aisle, We need more enticing carrots.

I think the thing that’s so striking is that it just doesn’t fit with what all of the data tell us gun violence in the United States is. Most shootings are not premeditated, and most shootings are not motivated by economic considerations. They’re not robbery. They’re not drug-selling turf. That’s all what psychologists would call “System 2” slow thinking.

Most shootings, instead, stem from arguments. They’re reactive, or what psychologists would call “System 1” thinking. And the fact that so many shootings stem from these sorts of in-the-moment conflicts that go sideways and end in a tragedy because someone’s got a gun, that helps explain why deterrence is imperfect. Someone acting very reactively is not thinking through a jail sentence. And it also helps explain why a social program that’s intended to reduce poverty—like give somebody a job, give somebody cash, whatever—that also isn’t solving the violence problem.

Demsas: I want to hold here a bit because I think this question, Are people making rational calculations? is both at the heart of a lot of economics and also the heart of what we’re going to talk about for the rest of this episode. And I accept that I do not think that I or anyone else is constantly doing a benefit-cost analysis about every action that I take, even if it is as important as whether you pull out a gun and shoot someone.

But I wonder whether that undersells the rationality that still exists, right? Because we know that deterrence is possible. We know that when we increase the certainty of capture—if you know you’re going to get caught for shoplifting, if you know that you’re going to go to jail if you shoot someone—that significantly decreases crime incidents. And what that indicates to me is that there is a level of benefit-cost analysis happening, even if people aren’t fully using that System 2 part of their brain.

Ludwig: Yeah, I one hundred percent agree that deterrence is really a thing. I’m a card-carrying economist. I work at the University of Chicago. I totally believe that incentives matter and that deterrence is a thing. But I think that this really connects very importantly to where we started, that gun violence is the part of the crime problem that is the thing that drives the total social cost of crime.

So in many ways, crime is an unhelpfully broad term. It’s almost like disease. What would you do about disease? I mean, I don’t even know how to think about answering that. Like What are we talking about? Like, pneumonia or cancer? And crime is a similarly unhelpful, super-broad umbrella.

And there was a study, for instance, done in Sweden a few years ago where they looked at what happened when you put cameras up in the subway system. And what you could see is that property crimes go down when you camera-up the trains, but violent crime doesn’t go down, right? And I think what that tells you, partly, is that different behaviors are shaped differently.

The key breakthrough of behavioral economics and behavioral science over the last couple of decades is to realize that our minds work in two different sorts of ways. There’s the deliberate, sort of rational benefit-cost calculation that psychologists call System 2, and a sort of very reactive, automatic, below-the-level-of-consciousness cognition that psychologists call System 1—or fast thinking and slow thinking.

And different behaviors are driven by different types of cognition. And so stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family is much more System 2 than what you do in an argument. Let me just point the finger at myself, first and foremost here. I’m not saying anything about other people’s behavior that is not true of my own behavior.

I’ve lived for 18 years in Hyde Park. It’s a little University of Chicago village in the middle of the South Side of Chicago. Every Wednesday morning, I take my dog, Aiko, out for a little walk. One day, I’m walking down the street, and about three or four doors down from me, there’s a neighbor whose dog is off leash, runs down the driveway, and attacks my dog.

Demas: Oh God. I hate that.

Ludwig: No, exactly. And this guy, the neighbor—his kids are literally in the same classroom as mine at the lab school. He lives four doors down from me. I have every incentive in the world to handle that gracefully and constructively. And that’s exactly what System 2 rational thinking would have done.

It turns out: That is exactly not what I did in that case. I assume this is a podcast where people don’t curse, but you can only imagine the stream of four-letter, seven-letter, and twelve-letter words that came out of my mouth at this guy who I’m going to be seeing for years into the future. I’m going to be seeing him at the parent potluck at school.

And so it really speaks to this idea of: In these super high-stakes moments, where people just don’t have very much bandwidth and they are relying on sort of very fast thinking to navigate, we are not always our best selves. We are not thinking about benefits and costs and things off into the future. We can make mistakes. All of us can make mistakes.

And in my case in Hyde Park, I was very lucky that neither one of us had a gun. But in a country with 400 million guns, you know, lots of people are in situations like that and behave the way I did and, unfortunately, they or the other person’s got a gun, and it ends in tragedy. And those tragedies, really, I would just point out, claim two lives. Somebody does something stupid in a moment and, you know, you spend the rest of your life in prison, and somebody else winds up dead. It’s multiple tragedies stemming from that.

Demsas: First, is your dog okay? Was everything fine?

Ludwig: Yeah, she’s a big chicken. She’s, like, a 70-pound shepherd mix who decided, rather than to try and defend herself or whatever, she would—I don’t want to throw my dog under the bus here. Everything turned out fine. She’s a lover, not a fighter. (Laughs.)

Demsas: (Laughs.) Your dog also is in System 1 thinking.

Ludwig: Yeah, exactly.

Demsas: Well, first, we’ll shout out the late Danny Kahneman here and his Thinking, Fast and Slow book, which provides much of the foundation of the System 1, System 2 model that you’re talking about here.

But I want to push here a bit because I think one of the common objections people have to this line of argument is that, yes, it is the case that, whether someone’s coming at you or you’re worried about your dog, and you don’t react the in the way that you might if you used your logical brain to react if you had time to think—but given that if you place every single American in the exact same conditions, you still see large variations in how people choose to respond, right? Like, all the people who are in conflicts in the South Side of Chicago do not shoot each other. A very small minority of people are choosing to shoot each other, even if they have access to a gun.

And so doesn’t that push against this idea that the problem is this System 1 thinking? Like, there is something particular about the choice to pull out a gun and kill someone in that moment. And it’s not just, Well, anyone can make that mistake, because even if you think about this demographically, we’re seeing mostly young men make this mistake and make this choice. There is something going on here that is not just, You’re not able to think under stress.

Ludwig: Let me take your question and sort of turn it on its head for a second. One of the things that I point out in the book is like a version of an observation that Jane Jacobs made 60 years ago in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is: When you look at similarly poor neighborhoods in American cities, you see huge variation in crime rates, especially violent crime.

And as I mentioned, I lived for a long time in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago. There are two neighborhoods just south of Hyde Park. There’s Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore that are socio-demographically, historically almost identical in terms of their racial and ethnic composition, their socioeconomic composition. They’re adjacent neighborhoods, so they’ve got exactly the same gun laws; they’ve got exactly the same social policies. When people get caught, they get sent to exactly the same court system. So all the incentives that conventional wisdom would say would matter are identical. And yet the shooting rate per 100,000 is, in most years, about twice as high in Greater Grand Crossing than literally across Dorchester Avenue in South Shore.

Demsas: Wow.

Ludwig: So that’s sort of taking the premise of your question and noting that the incentive explanation certainly doesn’t explain all of the variation that you see in gun violence either.

So what could it be then? I one million percent agree with you that—at its core, the argument here is: People are people, and a lot of what determines the outcome of this interpersonal conflict is the situation that someone finds themselves in. But if it’s not socioeconomics, and it’s not the characteristics of the criminal-justice system, what else would it be?

And I think in many ways, Jane Jacobs was really onto something 60 years ago in thinking about what that thing would be. To sort of connect an experience that I had in Chicago a couple years ago to Jane Jacobs’ insight, I was in the juvenile-detention center on the West Side of Chicago, I’m talking to a staff leader there, and he says, I tell all the kids in here, “If I could give you back just 10 minutes of your lives, none of you would be here.”

And one of the insights that Jane Jacobs had 60 years ago is: If the problem here is people do things in these 10-minute windows that they later regret, you could almost sort of think of fraught social interactions as like a high-wire act. And one of the ways that you can help people is by—what do they do in the circus for high-wire performers? They have a safety net there.

And one of the safety nets that you have much more of in some neighborhoods than others is essentially what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street”—prosocial adults who are around and able to step in and deconflict things when it happens. And you could see exactly that when you look at South Shore versus Greater Grand Crossing.

So there is, for instance, much more commercial development in South Shore than in Greater Grand Crossing. And what that means, in practice, is that there’s just lots more foot traffic in the community in South Shore than Greater Grand Crossing. And so if a group of teenagers is getting into an argument, there’s more likely to be, like, a neighborhood adult around to step in.

It’s also the case—so my friends Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir have a wonderful book that came out a couple of years ago, called Scarcity, where they point out that one of the many challenges of being poor in the United States is living in day-to-day circumstances that tax mental bandwidth. It’s just very stressful, right? And people with limited bandwidth wind up relying much more on System 1 than people who are less bandwidth taxed.

So when you look at the data, you can see all sorts of indicators that there’s much more stress and bandwidth tax for people living in Greater Grand Crossing than South Shore. And what that would lead you to conclude is that the people who are in Greater Grand Crossing are going to be more likely when they’re in these difficult, 10-minute, fraught interactions with somebody else to rely on System 1 to navigate that than their more deliberate, rational benefit-cost-calculating selves.

So I think the sort of left-of-center perspective that there are root causes that matter is definitely right. I think it’s totally right for property crime—you know, crimes shaped by economic considerations. I think it’s just a little bit incomplete with respect to the part of the crime problem that the public cares the most about, which is gun violence. And so I think we just need to expand our lens about what aspects of the social environment we want to be prioritizing for our public policies.

Demsas: I’m a housing person, so I’m a big fan of the Jane Jacobs book and the argument that she kind of draws out, and I think people can imagine this if they’ve been in streets and communities like this before, is when you have kind of mixed-use development—you have a coffee shop, and above that coffee shop, you have apartments, and across the street, there’s also a park, and there’s also a school nearby—is that that means that throughout the day, there are many different kinds of people watching the streets.

Versus if you had just a fully residential area, and then during the day, everyone’s basically gone because they’re either at school or work, so it really empties out of people to watch things. Or if you have a fully industrial area, where when people go home for the day, there’s nobody there. Or commercial area, same thing. And so when you have these kinds of mixed-use-development areas, it feels a lot safer because you can just always feel like there’s someone around doing normal business or taking their kids to school or whatever.

So I would love for housing policy to be the key. But is your argument, then, that the differences between neighborhoods that have similar socioeconomic problems, similar legal environments, etcetera but a large variation in gun violence is largely a function of their urban form?

Ludwig: I just—I absolutely adore that this is a sort of empirical, data-intensive, data-nerd podcast, and so in that spirit, I do think one of the big challenges for making progress on the sort of the crime and criminal-justice problem is: A lot of it is editorializing rather than guided by data. And so I think one of the key things that I tried to do in the book is really stick to the data and see what the data are telling us.

And so does the built environment matter? There was a wonderful study by Mireille Jacobson and Tom Chang that looks at what happens in Los Angeles when marijuana dispensaries open or close as a result of some regulatory change and when food places open and close.

That’s like the natural experiment of Jane Jacobs, like, let’s put in more mixed use—and what you can see is that when a retail establishment closes and foot traffic goes down, crime goes up.

There was a wonderful study by a great team at the University of Pennsylvania that worked with the City of Philadelphia to do a randomized experiment where they picked a bunch of rundown, vacant lots all over the city and picked half of them to redevelop and turn into little pocket parks. And what you can see is that the pocket parks then wind up bringing more people out of their homes and spending time there in public. And you can see that people feel safer, and they are safer. Gun violence goes down as a result of that.

My research center, the University of Chicago Crime Lab, we did a randomized trial with the City of New York a couple years ago where we helped put increased street lighting in some public-housing developments and not others. And one of the things that that would do is also potentially get more people out in public. We see violence decline there as well.

And then one other thing that I would just add—actually, two other quick things that I would add to this is: I think it gives you another way to understand all of the research and economics that suggests more police reduce crime. I know you had Jen Doleac on recently; you guys were talking about this.

I think most people would say, Oh that’s, like, deterrence or incapacitation. But when I look at the Chicago Police Department, for instance, the average Chicago cop makes about three arrests—not per week, not per month—per year. Three arrests per year.

Demsas: Wow.

Ludwig: So it’s, like, not a gigantic arrest machine that is generating all of this massive deterrence. What are police doing? Well, one of the things that they might be doing is helping interrupt these 10-minute windows. It’s something preventive, right? And I think that is a potentially important part of it.

And the thing that I would add to this, as well, is that sociologists believe that one of the most important determinants of a neighborhood’s violent-crime rate is what they call “collective efficacy”—this is research from the 1990s—the willingness of neighborhood residents to sort of step in and do something when there’s some sort of problem in the neighborhood. And I think that also is very consistent with this kind of behavioral-economics view of the gun-violence problem and what to do about it.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: the problem with focusing on the “root causes” of gun violence.

[Break]

Demsas: Someone listening to this will say, How is this different from the root causes analysis that you kind of critiqued? Right?

Because there’s a really great quote that you have in your book, which is that we “treat gun violence as something that will get better once we fix everything else that’s wrong with society.” And I think that’s a frustration that a lot of people have, is that they are sympathetic to the idea that if we invested more in education, or if we invested more in social-welfare programs and UBI (universal basic income), expanded health care, that there would be reduced crime in 20 years, in 30 years.

But that doesn’t really respond to the specific concern of, Tomorrow when I walk to school, am I going to get shot? Can you help distinguish between your analysis and that root cause analysis?

Ludwig: What I hear in Chicago is something that you hear in lots of cities around the United States, is like, Gun violence is just a symptom of poverty, and we’re never going to solve the gun-violence problem until we solve the poverty problem.

And let us all hope that’s not true, because, as you know even better than I do, we’ve been working really hard for decades to try and solve the poverty problem in the United States, and it’s proven to be very difficult. I think the key optimistic observation or suggestion that we get from this behavioral-economics perspective on the gun-violence problem is: We can make massive changes in the gun-violence problem by changing parts of the social environment that are much easier to change than poverty and segregation and all of these other super big, super important social problems.

If I could wave a wand and I could end poverty and segregation in Chicago, believe me—I’d be the first person to wave that wand. And so I’m not arguing against any of the policies trying to do that. They’re super important. It’s more like, What else can we do on top of that to really start to make a meaningful difference on the gun-violence problem?

And I can’t wave a wand and end poverty in Chicago, but what I can do is: I can make it easier to have commercial development in Greater Grand Crossing than we currently have here on the South Side of Chicago. I can strategically deploy money to turn a bunch of vacant lots that are littered with empty broken beer and tequila bottles and turn that into a little pocket park that people are willing to be in. I can put money into things like block clubs. I can do some version of what the University of Chicago does, like put unarmed private security guards on some key corners to make sure that there’s an eye on the street because of that. So there’s a bunch of pragmatic things that you can do that can really make a difference that sort of complement these other efforts to address these really big root causes.

And maybe the one other thing I would just add: You might look at that sort of strategy and say, To some people, that’s going to feel unsatisfying that it is addressing a symptom, not the underlying cause. Like, we’re leaving the root causes there, and we’re just treating the symptom of the root causes. But I actually think what that concern or that perspective misses is that the causal arrow runs in both directions between gun violence and root causes, if that makes sense.

And you can sort of see a lot of these communities are in vicious cycles right now, where it’s like: You’ve got a lot of gun violence. People and businesses leave—fewer eyes on the street, fewer community resources to build the kind of public infrastructure that helps address this problem, even more gun violence, even more people leaving. There are lots and lots of neighborhoods, lots and lots of cities that are trapped in that sort of vicious cycle.

But if you can get the gun-violence problem under control. I think you can see that you can turn those vicious cycles into virtuous cycles. I think of gun violence, you know, not as a symptom of some deeper thing but in many ways as the social problem for cities that sits upstream of so many of the other social problems that cities are trying to wrestle with.

Demsas: To give your model in layman’s terms: Gun violence and shootings happen because there’s a large availability of guns and because people are not interrupted in pulling those guns out in the midst of a heated moment. So as you point out in your book, the vast majority of shootings are happening in the course of an argument—not in a premeditated sense but in [the sense] that someone bumps you on the sidewalk, or they insult you, or something like that—and that violence, that shooting happens because there’s no one to step in and say, Hey. Let’s calm things down. Is that kind of the overview that you’re giving us?

Ludwig: Yeah. The highest-level version of this is: All of our policies have conceived of gun violence as a problem of System 2 slow thinking, when I think it’s, actually, mostly a problem of System 1 fast thinking.

And so for starters, we just need a big reorientation to understand differently what the problem actually is to be solved. And once you have that reorientation—once you sort of think of gun violence as a problem of not bad people unafraid of the criminal-justice system, not people in bad economic circumstances stealing to feed their families, but normal people making bad decisions in fraught, difficult, 10-minute windows—one thing that you start to do then is start to think about, How do I change the social environment so there are more people, more eyes on the street to sort of step in and interrupt? And the other thing that you start to think more seriously about is, like, How do I focus my social policies more on helping people understand their own minds better and anticipate what they’re going to do in these difficult 10-minute windows?

And one of the ways that we can do that is through a very different type of social program than we’ve typically thought of in the U.S.—these behavioral-economics-informed programs like Youth Guidance’s Becoming a Man or Heartland Alliance’s READI program or YAP and Brightpoints’ Choose to Change program. These are all things that we’ve subjected to randomized controlled trials in Chicago.

And what they basically are doing is: They’re helping people understand that they’ve got fast thinking as well as slow thinking and recognize that their fast thinking can get themselves into trouble in these fraught moments, and helping them anticipate that and sort of better navigate those 10-minute windows. And you can see in randomized experiments that that reduces risk of violence involvement by, depending on the study and the time period, like, 30 to 50 to 60 percent. How you scale that, I think, is the frontier scientific and policy challenge, but at least now we can sort of see the direction that we’ve got to go.

And the other thing I would just add is: I think this behavioral-economics perspective also helps us understand why education is so important for solving the violence problem, but not in the way that people have historically thought. Most people would say, Yeah, of course, education is so central to solving the crime problem, because education improves people’s earnings’ prospects, and blah, blah, blah.

And it’s true that education is hugely important for people’s earnings prospects, and education is good for making better citizens. It is good for lots and lots of reasons. But the other thing that the data tell us education does is: It helps people learn to be more slow thinking and skeptical of their own minds in high-stakes moments. That turns out to be sort of a key byproduct of everything that schools ask people to do.

And I think of education as, like, in many ways, the most important sort of crime-prevention, gun-violence prevention tool that we have. I think things like rote learning are not what we want either for educational purposes or from the perspective of making schooling as sort of crime preventive as possible. And so I think there are other ways of reimagining what school does, which would be good for making school sort of more helpful for a world in which things like problem-solving are increasingly important for economic outcomes, but also super valuable for making education more helpful in addressing the gun-violence problem.

Demsas: You alluded to this a couple of times now, but it’s interesting that there’s one way to interpret your result as just, as like, We need to put a bunch more cops on the street, and those can be the eyes on the street. And that is kind of consistent with the literature we explored in the Jen Doleac episode around why increasing numbers of police officers can reduce crime, and violent crime, in particular. And the other avenue—I mean, these are complementary—is that there needs to be more attention on how to improve people’s System 1 thinking. And the Becoming a Man program, which I think is now really popular, is a great example of that.

But scaling these sorts of things is really, really difficult, as you mentioned. Are you indifferent between these two policy avenues, like an increased number of police officers, versus investing in programs that improve people’s ability to understand their own System 1, System 2 thinking? Or is it that you really want people to do one of those over the other? And in which case, it does seem very difficult to scale Becoming a Man and other programs. We have not been able to do that, despite years and years of positive coverage of that program.

Ludwig: For starters, I would say, we should be pushing on every possible front to solve this problem. It’s a huge humanitarian problem, one of the key drivers of Black-white life expectancy disparities in the United States, hugely important for the future of our cities that are the key economic engine for the whole country. So I wouldn’t say, like, Let’s do this or this. If we have multiple things that could be helpful, I’d say, Let’s push on every front.

On the eyes-on-the-street stuff, I would say, There’s tons of scalable stuff there, and it’s not just hiring more cops. So you can hire more cops in cities that like cops. You can put unarmed security guards on the street. You can fund community-violence-intervention nonprofit groups. You can clean up vacant lots and turn them into parks. You can improve street lighting. You can change zoning laws and permitting rules and whatever to make it easier to have stores interspersed with residential in a neighborhood. Tons of different things there that you could do, depending on the local political environment in your city, all of which are super scalable, all of which would be super helpful, all of which would increase the chances that there’s some sort of prosocial adult around who can sort of step in and de-escalate something.

On top of that, I think then there’d be huge value in trying to figure out how to scale the social programs that also help people better understand their own sort of thinking. And I think one of the most exciting visions for the future here comes from artificial intelligence, weirdly. My University of Chicago colleague Oeindrila Dube did a fascinating study with Sandy Jo MacArthur, who used to be at LAPD for many years, and my friend Anuj Shah, at Princeton.

They basically did Becoming a Man for cops. And what was so interesting about it is: Becoming a Man works with teenagers in middle school and high school. And it’s, like, an adult working with these kids, and that’s super hard to scale, because the program counselor is expensive, and they vary in skill, and How do you hire enough people? and everything that makes a social program hard to scale.

But the Becoming a Man for cops—what they did is they had this artificial-intelligence-driven force simulator thing, where they give cops feedback to see when their System 1, their fast thinking, is leading them to an unhelpful response, through a bunch of simulation exercises that the AI can do. And you look at the randomized control data, and it seems to have remarkably helpful impacts.

And I think the thing that’s so exciting about that is: Thinking about AI as a human-capital development tool lets you see, Oh I see. Once you’ve got the software, the marginal cost for rerunning software is super low. And the great thing about software is that it basically runs the same way over and over again. So we might be looking at a future where AI can be a super valuable way to enhance human capacity in ways that include addressing one of the most important social problems facing cities, which is gun violence.

Demsas: We’ve gotten a little bit into this, but trying to compare all three theories that are kind of existing out there: When we’re thinking about the root causes theory, that leads us to believe that we should invest a ton in antipoverty measures and expand healthcare, job-training opportunities, UBI, whatever. And then the wickedness theory kind of indicates that we should just try to root out and incarcerate bad people for as long as possible to prevent them from doing crime. Your theory, the “unforgiving places” theory—what do you want policy makers to take from that?

Ludwig: The first thing I want policy makers to take from this is to recognize that the gun-violence problem itself is different from what we think. Again, it’s not a problem of System 2 deliberate, slow thinking, people responding to incentives. Gun violence is mostly driven by System 1, reactive, fast thinking. That’s the most important thing.

From there, I would say we need to do two types of things. We need to change those aspects of the social environment that reduce the risk that conflict escalates. And related to that is, too, just in the safety net, is whatever your position on the Second Amendment, I think this is also why guns out in public are particularly worrisome. If people want to have 500 guns in their basement locked up, that’s one thing. But when people are taking guns out on the street, that’s the thing that makes interpersonal conflict on the South Side of Chicago so much more dangerous than interpersonal conflict in the south side of London or whatever. So people around to deconflict conflict when it happens, and anything that we can do to get guns off the street would be super helpful.

And then I think policies that help people, you know, both K–12 education and things like, you know, Becoming a Man to try and help people better anticipate and navigate those 10-minute windows. And that’s a policy agenda that really doesn’t make much sense under either the conventional wisdom of the left or right, right now. Those things aren’t about changing people’s incentives, so it’s like, Why in the world would they possibly work? But I think they’re really central to making huge progress on the problem. And I think if you look at the experiences of L.A. and New York over the last 30 years, they validate that view, or they’re certainly very consistent with that view, at least.

Demsas: Jens, always our last and final question: What is an idea that you once thought was great and ended up being only good on paper?

Ludwig: Great—so we launched a big research project with the superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools a couple of years ago. The huge priority of this superintendent was truancy. So Chicago used to have something like 150 truancy officers for its 600 schools in 1991, and with budget cuts, they got rid of all of them. And then you look at the data and, like, there are tons of kids who are missing three or four weeks of school a year.

And so you look at that, and the superintendent is like, This surely is a key reason that kids are not doing well in school. So Jon Guryan and I launched this big research project with CPS, and we worked really hard to try and figure out how to get kids to come to school more often, without the punitive whatever of truancy officers. With a bunch of partners, we managed to figure out a way to get kids to come back to school more often. And then we look at the data, and we see it does not boost their learning at all.

Demsas: Oh wow.

Ludwig: So weird, so counterintuitive. You would think, If you don’t go to school, you can’t learn. It’s super intuitive. And yet, you get kids to come to school more often, and they don’t learn.

Demsas: Wait. What’s going on? Doesn’t that kind of conflict with a lot of ed-policy research?

Ludwig: Yeah. So super weird, right? And so it was only very recently that Jon and I were looking at data right after the pandemic, and what you can see in the data is, for instance, if you look at eighth graders in Chicago, the average eighth grader in Chicago academically is like a sixth grader. And something like a third-ish of Chicago eighth graders academically are, like, closer to fourth graders.

Demsas: Wow.

Ludwig: And the eighth-grade teachers—their feet are being held to the fire to teach eighth-grade content. And so then you ask yourself, Why is it the case that sending a kid who, academically, is at the fourth-grade level to school to be taught eighth-grade content doesn’t improve their learning? Like, to ask the question is to answer it.

Demsas: So it’s like, basically, the kids who are missing a bunch of school are more likely to be the kids who are way behind in school. And so they’re going to benefit less from being in school.

Ludwig: Exactly.

Demsas: Oh wow. That’s a very depressing answer.

Ludwig: Yeah, we were confusing, you know, What is a cause, and what is effect? And so it seemed good on paper. Now we realize that there’s a very different underlying problem that we’re working hard to fix. But that’s my depressing answer to leave you with.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was fantastic.

Ludwig: Thanks so much for having me on. It was great.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.