Can Uncle Sam fix the cost of living?

Plus a Colombian saying about crows

This week, I’m recommending Steve Teles’ essay “Beyond Academic Sectarianism,” which pleads with America’s professor community to take concerns about ideological homogeneity undermining the purpose of the university seriously.

I would add only that the very gentle way in which his critique is framed underscores how bad the situation is. There was an incident recently where a young left-wing historian named David Austin Walsh complained that being a white man was hurting his odds of getting a tenure-track job. This attracted a lot of public condemnation, and he apologized. In the week or so after he apologized, several different white male historians expressed to me, in private, the view that Walsh was correct about this and that the criticism he received was unfair. I have less than zero information about contemporary hiring practices in academic history departments, so I have no idea whether these guys are right. What I do know is that the whole point of tenure, as a practice, is that scholars who have it are supposed to be able to speak their minds without fear. Yet here we had people who believe that a relatively powerless young scholar is being unfairly maligned for saying things they believe to be true, yet they are afraid to stand up for him because to do so would involve bucking the local left-wing consensus.

This particular incident is not actually a big deal, since absolutely everyone involved agrees that the field of history has much bigger structural challenges. But the casualness with which people would tell me they thought Walsh’s complaints were correct, but of course they could never say so publicly drove home the extent to which the basic truth-seeking function of the university has been compromised.

Other recommendations:

• Ethan Strauss on “criticism capture.”

• Cartoons Hate Her on kids television that adults hate.

• Tim Lee on the potentially limited demand for AI.

• Brian Beutler on the Trump/Epstein nexus.

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Good news this week includes new legislation on forestry management, California getting smartphones out of schools, new car supply finally coming online, and a big important nuclear regulatory reform passed congress.

Comment of the week goes to Thomas L Hutcheson for introducing me to a fun new saying: As we say in Colombia, “Cria cuervos y te sacan los ojos.” <Raise crows, and they will scratch your eyes out.> Biden should never have tried to be the President of the Warren-Sanders Administration. It has been Hell-bent on electing Trump since 2021!

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Our winning question this week is from Tom: Annie Lowrey recently wrote that the government just has fewer tools in its arsenal to battle the cost of living crisis (versus the plethora of tools available to address low aggregate demand). Do you agree with her? If so, is this because of something fundamental about supply-side problems, something about the politics of supply-side reform, or just, like, because think tanks spent the 2010s building demand-side policies? You write often that you want the Biden administration to pivot from big progressive wins to neoliberal cost management — what would that specifically look like?

I liked Annie’s article a lot, which offers a relatively brief explanation of the problems Americans are wrestling with in terms of the cost of housing, health care, and child care. I think that she is correct that this troika of issues is the biggest problem for Americans’ material welfare and has also ranked them in the correct order.

I think that’s an incredibly valuable exercise, and I hope everyone reads the article.

What I don’t fully get is the sense of pessimism about solving these problems. I’m not such a starry-eyed optimist that I believe these issues will all be solved in the next five to ten years. But I do believe that if everyone read Lowrey’s article and other similar articles and found them convincing and decided that these are, in fact, the big problems in American life, then we would make a lot of progress in solving them. Which is just to say that I think the main issue here isn’t so much that the federal government lacks the tools to address these problems as that there is currently a lack of political consensus that these are, in fact, our major problems. If you roll the tape back to the Obama years, there was a lot of conventional wisdom developing about the intractable obstacles to doing adequate demand-side policy. And I don’t think people were mistaken about that.