My top recommendation this week is Alice Evans rounding up a bunch of public opinion data on masculinity and gender roles, with the conclusion that even Republicans mostly hold views that would have been considered strikingly feminist or left-wing 40 or 50 years ago.
She’s posting, I think, because of the gender gap discourse around the 2024 election, and I’ve been thinking about this for the same reason. It’s only natural, faced with a growing gap in political behavior, to focus on what divides Democrats and Republicans with regard to gender and gender roles. But at the same time, I think that when alien historians try to understand what was happening on Planet Earth between 1970 and 2020, they are much more likely to see this 50-year span as noteworthy for the dramatic shift in consensus opinions about gender roles than for “neoliberalism” or whatever is driving voters this November. This American Time Use Survey data is older, but confirms that the change is not just in what people say, it’s in what they do. Contemporary dads are spending much more time on childcare and housework than our grandfathers did.
It’s also interesting that rather than this leading to equalization of childcare responsibilities, it’s led to a large increase in the aggregate amount of childcare from parents. These individual topics — modern fatherhood, the unequal gender division of labor, the rise of intensive parenting — are all things that people talk about a lot, but I think we rarely put all three together. And it’s probably not a situation that any of the participants in the debates of the 60s and 70s saw as a likely outcome.
Some other recommendations:
Brian Beutler’s adventures in door-knocking.
Joseph Politano on the AI investment boom.
Azeen Ghorayshi on puberty blockers.
Some good news this week: It turns out that plants absorb more CO2 than we knew, we’re getting some new treatments on skin cancer, a new carbon capture project in California, and the IMF says America has the strongest economy in the world.
Also two good pieces of research: expanding optometrists’ scope of practice works, and cleaning up school buses helps students learn.
Comment of the week from Nicholas: I don't want to be utterly fatalistic two weeks out, lord knows the polls could miss and we are all coconut pilled on November 6th. But in Matt's spirit of pre-logging a take for the sake of unbiased accuracy, I think if Trump wins, especially if he wins the popular vote, we are going to get a thousand think pieces and takes about America's latent blood thirst for authoritarianism, when I think it really is as simple as American's being directionally closer to his positions and vibes on the Economy, on Immigration, and on Foreign Policy. People will spill so many words on what this means when I really think it can be summed up in the mind of a low information swing voter as "eggs cost more" and nothing deeper than that. That is both promising, in the sense that voters are more elastic than we assume, but also frustrating in that it requires democrats to be consistently better than they have proven capable of lately.
MB: During your conversation with Nate Silver you said “one of the big ironies of the Biden term is that he personally is clearly much more invested in foreign policy than domestic issues. And that was a real driving force of the decision making in his administration, the internal structure of his White House. And I don’t think that foreign policy track record is remotely successful.”
I feel like I remember you forcefully defending the Biden foreign policy for most of the administration, on Afghanistan withdrawal, on arming Ukraine, (to a somewhat lesser extent) on China. So why has your view changed? Is it just related to the Israel issue, and if so what do you think another administration could have done to handle the situation better, or do you have broader complaints about the wider Biden foreign policy?
This is a good question. Let me start by just saying that I misspoke a little, a peril of talking rather than writing.
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