Addressing America's traffic death crisis

We should take serious problems more seriously

My recommendation this week is Cassandra Zimmer’s very nerdy piece arguing that we should replicate the Conrad 30 Waiver Program for a wider set of J-1 trainees.

What?

The J-1 exchange visa is available for a range of occupations, including au pair, camp counselor, physician, intern, and trainee. Normally, a J-1 is valid for a limited period of time, and you need to go back to your home country for at least two years before you can apply for any other kind of visa. But years ago, Kent Conrad created the Conrad 30 Waiver Program saying that J-1 physicians willing to spend three years working in rural areas with health provider shortfalls can get that two-year requirement waived. Zimmer notes that right now, “the trainee category is underutilized, with just 10,645 trainees working at 91 participating employers in 24 states.” But if you passed a law creating a Conrad 30-style program for a wider set of trainees, you could incentivize more people to take advantage of it and fill labor market gaps that have emerged during a period of low unemployment.

She notes that there is already a bipartisan bill to allow states to get waivers for teachers.

The point is that even as we continue to try to close asylum loopholes and block people from making chaotic arrivals at the southern border, we ought to keep looking for quiet bipartisan opportunities to take advantage of immigration as a strategy for economic growth.

Some other things I’ve enjoyed:

• Tiya Gordon on EV charging for cities.

• Paul Musgrave on Tim Walz and China.

• Nate Silver’s appreciation of Kamala Harris’ convention speech.

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This week in good news: Some new science on healing corals, data centers are providing a financial boost to geothermal power, the NYC Housing Commission is smacking down some NIMBYs, and California is broadening its ADU law. This implantable sensor could prevent opioid overdoses — speaking of which, I think a lot of people don’t realize that drug overdose deaths are now going down.

Comment of the week from Avery James (on Voters care about issues, even lobstermen):

Really glad Matt wrote this. I do think as someone who works in polling, we've inadvertantly helped push this misleading view. It's very easy to ask people what degree of education they have, so education polarization gets lots of hype and we talk a lot about Dems winning college degree holders 60-40. The NYT reader compares this with their relatives back home with high school degrees and it seems clear enough.

Coding open ends on what industry or sector a responder works in to create dozens of answer categories takes a lot of time and is less fun! But the latter would probably help point out as Matt does here that sectoral polarization is far greater, and you need some of those miners and heavy manufacturing people if you want to confront climate change with technology. Those industries also have smart people with degrees who lean a lot less Democratic than people working in software, types of non-profits, academia. Just as critically, they do so for reasons that aren't easily summed up in the social politics of the college campus.

More broadly, I wish we saw more kinds of demographic splits in polls. My gut says that people with young kids at home have different opinions than demographically-similar childless people, but there’s just very little polling on this one way or the other.

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David_in_Chicago: Why aren’t traffic fatalities a bigger issue? They seem far more preventable. I drove to Georgia and back this week. The highways felt *WAY* more dangerous than ever before (I’ve made this drive like 15x). Part of it is all the construction - I guess that’s good long term - but most of it just terrible drivers (e.g., 100+ mph speeding, swerving insanely through traffic, passing on the right, constant tailgating) and a shocking amount of distracted driving. I’m becoming radicalized to the idea driving needs to become more of a privilege and we need DUI level penalties for non-DUI but super dangerous tickets.

I think this was probably intended as a pretty broad “What should we do about traffic safety?” question, but I’m going to take it literally and talk about why traffic fatalities aren’t a bigger issue.