I really hope science will de-politicize. Looking at the new administrations medical appointees I am struggling to see that, but hopefully its a change that keeps sinking in over the next 20 years...
To what degree is the anti-vax movement (that people like RFK Jr represent) essentially a eugenicist movement: that they believe that the lives that vaccination saves are lives that shouldn't be saved because they were clearly genetically inferior?
That's actually probably a big part of it. Needle phobia is common among Americans; especially among men. During twenty-five years of needling people, the only ones who ever fainted were guys. Especially larger, macho-types.
That seems a remarkably petty cause for motivated reasoning with such dire consequences for society as a whole, when contrasted with (say) attachment to fossil-fuelled lifestyles as driving the motivated reasoning behind climate change denial.
Nonsense, we have a ton of anti-vaxers where I live and I have talked with many of them and some are close friends. NOT one had anything to do with fear of needles.
The majority comes from the anti-vax autism push a few years back (based on a complete garbage paper), some from the remnants of the hippie wellness community in our area, and some from far-right who just don't believe in science anyway - especially if someone tells them they need to do it. Clearly anecdotal, but I would guess more typical.
George, is this intended as a subtle joke re the Scientific American item Noah included?
But in case you are serious, I'd say no - he's from the "Whole Foods" anti-vax community. Which I would describe as the "defund the police" of medical interventions - rich people who don't appreciate where their security comes from. "Everything is so nice and fine here - how could we possibly need any protections?"
I'm so skeptical of polling on questions like "how is the transition going?". What does that question mean to people who aren't political junkies? I think approximately nothing?
To the extent it means anything, it has to be something like, "how do you feel now that the election is over?". And yeah, of course people are happy that shit show is over, and that one of the candidates won both the electoral college and popular vote, and that the other candidate conceded.
But two thirds of people under thirty are not responding to this poll question thinking "I sure like this Hegseth guy" or whatever else about how "the transition" is going. But of course that's how Republicans will interpret it, which is why they will overreach, which is where the next backlash begins.
I’m a non-unionized charter school teacher and am appalled by your stance here. It’s so easy for administration to give teachers impossible classrooms that aren’t going to see fantastic results in.
Last year I had one kid with some modest behavioral issues and like my growth and proficiency was great. My colleague had like 7 or 8 of the 10 worst behaved kids in the grade level and oh surprise surprise by any measure her test scores looked worse than mine.
Like I’ve been teaching 15 years and I don’t think I’m terrible but two of those years I’ve had unwinnable messes. I have no data from 19-20 but I’m sure it would have been bad as I spent most of the year physically defending myself and my students from one of their classmates.
I absolutely am against protecting inept teachers from job loss, though I see a lot of this without unions but giving someone a perfect class and giving them a raise because they can deliver great results is disgusting and so is giving someone a terrible class that everyone apologizes for before we even start and saying they deserve less money for harder work.
Do teachers no longer have sufficient tools to eject unruly students and maintain classroom order? I have been getting that impression from my kids as they go through middle school, and your comment seems to back it up.
For really serious disorder, no not really. Like most kids are actually pretty well behaved and then most of the kids who misbehave you can reach an accommodation with by calling home and having consistent policies and doing like diligent classroom management and adjusting your teaching practice to this year’s specific set of issues.
But for an uncomfortable minority of students shit is super fucked. Things that were once a few in the school are a few in each grade, a few in each grade are now some in most classes.
This issue of rising prevalence is something that I would love to learn more about. It seems like a bad phenomenon that we don't really understand, and I'm unclear how hard we are even trying.
I agree with this assessment. Too many public schools simply don't have the tools to get rid of real problem students, either bullies or disruptive kids. This is on top of the fact that a lot of parents don't want to be told their kids are bad or not performing and it basically just wears teachers out over the years as well. I was reading something a few months ago on the Times about how the school couldn't expel kids that were using AI to make porn of their teachers and classmates and administrators refuse to really fight for the students who need help or for the teachers, either because it happened outside of school or they are afraid of press. I'm not sure.
Yeah I hate the focus on bloodless metrics for teacher evaluation. But just the same, there are inevitably some teachers going great and others doing poorly, and some of the poor performers shouldn't keep their jobs. But this isn't unique to teaching, every profession has this dynamic. So what do we do? Well, the typical solution is to empower supervisors to use judgement. Oftentimes that is informed by empirical metrics, but rarely purely so.
I feel like I'm basically fine with that, I'm an at will employee and have been for fifteen years and most teachers who are non-renewed are non-renewed for good reasons.
But like admin puts us in impossible situations sometime and I'm a good institutionalist and I do my best to support them. But to then have that mean I'm going to make less money because you're asking me to eat a shit sandwich is more than I could take.
Would your concerns be addressed if schools used a more nuanced performance rating system to determine pay? E.g. looking at student improvement relative to their scores in previous years, and taking softer variables into account, like student, parent, and peer survey feedback?
I think my view is that merit-based pay (and retention) is good, but that measuring merit based on student test scores alone is bad.
This is not dissimilar to the private sector, where companies attempt to promote high performers, using a lot of judgement in addition to empirical measures.
This is from over a decade ago, but I haven't seen any reporting suggesting that we've gotten any better at this. Measures of "teacher quality", from two classes of the same subject, in the same year, in consecutive grades, don't even self-correlate. Like at all. How is it possible that John Q. Teacher was great at teaching 7th grade math this year, but terrible at teaching 8th grade math? Well, it's probably not -- the problem is that the metric is a random number generator, not a serious judgment of teacher quality.
He’s really not. He’s saying unions are against merit pay to protect bad teachers when there may be some of that but also bad teachers are often a result of bad administrative decisions. I don’t have any end of year data from 19-20 but I was expecting a pretty dismal set of results because of the amount of violence i was managing without assistance.
Unless administrators are held to account for screwing up it’s just a bonuses for brown nosers plan.
You’re giving the Trump voters way too much credit.
There is something happening alright, but it looks an awful lot like adult aged Americans acting like silly children. Trump’s transition is (deliberately) a freak show, and anyone with the slightest interest in how good government affects their lives would be appalled by it. So those 65%, by my reckoning, are expressing their support irrationally.
The Dems could do better on some issues and some messages to get more in tune with the electorate. But it’s a waste of time at best to decipher the ‘reasoning’ that might lead a young person to, say, decide that Tulsi Gabbard is a good pick for a national security post. That sort of person is never going to vote for a responsible political party, no matter what the policies/messaging.
"Could do better?" "Responsible?" Don't get me wrong, I hate Trump as much as the average person who posts comments on NYT editorials. But, jeez, please read the room! Until the Democrats get rid of this righteous attitude about their positions and dismissiveness of anyone who points out their failings, they will keep losing more and more elections. The problem is that moderates are now getting as appalled by the "elites" (or the "Groups") as the MAGA types are. What could have been a 60/40 split for the Democrats had they reformed some of those positions and messages to appeal to a larger portion of the electorate is quickly turning into a 60/40 split for the Republicans because the Democrats think they just need to do a little better, tweak their messaging, and wait for "that sort of person" to come to their senses. To win, you need to win them over instead of pushing them away.
Yes. This election shouldn't have been close, but it was, and I can only think it is because progressives (and I mean progressives as opposed to Democrats) have a view of what this country looks like that most Americans just don't like.
The progressive view of the US is that it is irredeemably racist and sexist, and hates gays and trans people. Look at the 1619 Project, all the DEI classes that employees have to attend at any large company. Read anything by Kendi. Remember the 2020 primary positions, including paying reparations for slavery. This is not how most Americans view the country.
Now few Democratic politicians are progressives, but unless they actively separate themselves from these positions, many voters assume they support them. And that's going to lead to electoral loss after electoral loss.
You’re still ascribing a certain rationality to the average Trump voter that does not exist.
Biden/Harris did not campaign on trans issues or support the campus protests. Biden tried to pass a border bill that was too much for many leftists and was blocked by Trump.
None of that mattered. And even if the rational voter had deep cultural frustrations with Democrats, they would still have voted for them because Trump was an objectively terrible candidate. Trump was promising real negative impacts for most people, and yet he won the most votes.
Meanwhile, most Americans chose to live in a weird alternate reality, claiming to believe that the strongest economy in decades was weak and troublesome.
I don’t claim to understand what’s going on, but I am convinced that it’s psychological. So the Dems need to be very careful about chasing the votes of deeply irrational people.
Biden/Harris did not have to campaign on trans issues, their administration spoke loudly for them.
In April 2024, the Biden/Harris Ed Dept and Biden/Harris EEOC issued separate rulings, each with the force of law, requiring every school and every workplace in the country to allow boys and men to watch girls and women shower and change, provided these males first thought to themselves "now I'm trans". After they're done ogling the naked females, these males can think "now I'm cis" and go back to their own (male) locker rooms to jerk off.
I am a 69-yr-old lifelong Democrat, with a STEM PhD from Stanford (just to stake a claim that I am not your average idiot), and I voted straight Republican because of this issue (and related "woke" issues, such as the blatant anti-Asian racism of the Democrats, receipts on request).
I do, sadly, live in a "weird alternate reality", one where men can become women via the "think system" (see The Music Man), and one where colorblind policy is somehow racist. But I did not construct that world, the Democrats did, and it's far past time for me to help the Republicans tear it down.
1. Tone it down a bit if you want to be taken seriously. You’re revealing a little too much of your inner struggles for this type of forum.
2. Consider whether you might overly be susceptible to the sophisticated fear-mongering of right wing culture warriors. It seems to me that you’re a textbook case of the weak-minded dupe that Trump relies on.
McCain made one appalling campaign choice, but was a basically decent person and a sensible candidate who was trying to present a rational case for people to vote for him.
Trump and his ‘appeal’ to voters is a totally different thing to Romney, McCain, Bush etc.
You seem to repeat this statement as truth ad naseum almost every time politics comes up from Noah, and it is just demonstrably comparing apples to oranges.
I think this was my first comment on a political essay from Noah, unless I'm misremembering? Unless you count the one about homelessness in SF
I've only been subbed for 4 months man
I think you might be confusing me with someone else? Although, McCain is my go-to example for "the democrats successfully convinced me that this man was the devil at the time, now this seems ludicrous in retrospect" so I guess it's possible I've mentioned him before
but really I don't remember it happening here
edit: i tried to find a methodology to actually test this, and i came up with one. it isn't very good but i think it's at least definitive?
i went to my substack 'activity' page and went to 'replies and comments'
then i scrolled down until I saw comments from prior to the date I subscribed to noahpinion
then I control+f'd on 'mccain'
the result showed a bunch of results clustered near the top, all related to the comment you replied to, and nothing else
I think I am therefore justified in saying you must be confusing me with someone else? With a small chance that actually I did make such a comment, and then forget about it, but none of the people replying to it used the word 'mccain'
We are not talking about policy disagreements. I have no problem with the liberal vs. conservative tension, for example, but Trumpism has no good faith policy logic behind it.
You don’t ’find ways to get along’ with everyone. If someone wants to pursue acts of blatant cruelty, for example, you reject it. You don’t seek to compromise.
You’re also falling into the trap of thinking that Trumpists ‘believe they are right’. They don’t. They don’t think Trump has a good vision for America in terms of policy. In most cases they don’t know or care what he plans to do. Their only interest is a child-like fascination with his ‘show’, which includes an implicit permission for them to continue acting like children.
no, i am saying that people said about john mccain what greg perrett is now saying about trump
and presumably it was not true back then, even though it seemed very convincing
and this makes me suspicious of the fact that this argument seems very convincing now
edit: i also feel very awkward about this whole... thing... i feel pretty certain that trump is a reaction to a very specific tendency in the progressive and liberal bubble, to assume that there is no such thing as a reasonable conservative, that conservatives aren't even worth engaging with because they have nothing of value to say so you shouldn't even bother listening, and in fact their speech is so inherently harmful that we should ostracize anybody who even gives it a platform to begin with
and now trump is happening, and it's obviously terrible and i really wish he weren't happening
but now apparently the correct response is... to double down? to believe EVEN HARDER that the reds are just contemptibly, cartoonishly evil and you shouldn't even try to engage with them?
maybe it's true. but i sure feel very, very uncomfortable with it.
Apart from the aberration of choosing Palin as a running mate, I don’t see any link between McCain and Trump. Trump is an entirely different beast to anything that has come before him, save maybe Goldwater.
I encourage you to reconsider the ‘conservative’ label you’re applying to Trump voters. Trump is the antithesis of conservative values on a personal level, and has trashed traditional conservative economic principles. His supporters tend to be reactionary types, rather than principled conservatives.
I didn’t say ‘double down’, and I agree that some Dems could improve some messaging; e.g. back off on the stranger corners of the culture wars.
But I also don’t agree that Dems should ‘reach out to’ people who deny obvious reality and seek to trash the values and institutions that have made the USA a good country. The last thing the USA needs is both major parties offering bad policies and seeking to win through lies and misinformation.
i have a bunch of red friends who truly believe that the blues are similarly unworthy of being engaged with, and i think what is happening inside their mind is probably very similar to what is happening inside your mind, since we're all humans
the object-level circumstance may not be symmetrical, but it seems like the meta-level absolutely is, that we have two groups of people who both believe that they are obviously right, *and* that being obviously right is sufficient justification to preemptively turn-one defect
i think when it comes to forming beliefs about reality, the actual object-level truth is the only thing that matters ("hmm, it seems like this research showing that vaccines are vastly beneficial has good methodology")
but that government isn't about being right, it's about resolving conflict between mutually hostile groups without violence
and in *that* circumstance, who is right and who is wrong is less important than the symmetry of both sides believing that they are right
in that case, either "believing you are right" (irrespective of whether you actually ARE right) is justification for defection, or it isn't
i would prefer to think that it isn't. we used to have political disagreements where both sides were very clearly factually mistaken (are the anglicans going to hell, or is it the puritans who are going to hell?) and even in those circumstances we needed to find ways to get along
if those people could handle it, i think we should be able to as well
this line of thought isn't very well developed yet, it's something i'm still thinking through, but hopefully that conveys something about why i feel very, very uncomfortable with this idea of yours
Compared to past eras, political rhetoric is far less centralized, far less under the control of the professionals. I have no way of proving this quantitatively, but I am pretty sure that if you compared the Kennedy-Nixon, Reagan-Carter, Bush-Gore, and Trump-Harris elections, you would find an enormous shift in the sources a typical voter relied on to form an opinion. In the first three, a candidate was defined by who they said they were. Who their chosen surrogates said they were. Who their ads said they were. And who their official opponents said they were. At least to a very large extent.
Now, however, Trump and Harris are defined by hundreds of quasi-official voices. Bloggers and influencers with a following. And, maybe more consequently, by tens of thousands of individual posters. These voices are most certainly not trained professionals skilled at messaging. Quite the contrary! Abrasiveness is in, tact is out. What you get is unvarnished attitude.
And, in my view, what this election suggests is that the middle of America, at least at this moment, finds the unvarnished left voices more objectionable than the unvarnished right.
To some extent, this is an asymmetrical contest. The right is tapping a significant well of "blow it all up" anger, and such voters are immune to being turned off by obnoxiousness from their own side.
But to a larger extent, it's that the left wing online presence is so incredibly unlikable.
As a center-left type, over the past year I have frequently muttered to myself that the only upside to a Trump victory would be to stick it to these self righteous, dogmatic jerks. People who label all dissent racism or xenophobia. Who think they get to alter language and police compliance. Who sneer at the viewpoints of average Americans while simultaneously appointing themselves the defenders of democracy.
And when I mentioned my dark thoughts to a few other center-left types, I was stunned to find out that they had been feeling the same way.
Of course, this is all utterly unfair. I am comparing left wing online people to flesh-and-blood rural neighbors. But I strongly suspect that I am describing the force that is working on a lot of people living outside blue neighborhoods.
The truth might be this: In an online world, where a political party is represented by its online tens of thousands, the left has been outcompeting the quasi-fascists for the title of "Most Unlikeable."
You failed to call out RW media, led by FOX News. Which has half the country living in an alternate facts bubble, wherein unemployment and crime are at near record highs, and where the economy is already in recession.
As long as the RW media can continue to churn out lies non-stop without any accountability or journalistic integrity, we're doomed to go the way of Hungary or Turkey within a decade.
Consumer confidence in the economy remained low despite doing very well by most conventional measures? Fox News, the most watched cable news network, had a unified message across all its shows, telling its audience what to think and they believed it.
OK, but it's also possible that Fox News noticed something that the "mainstream" media didn't, or that the Fox News viewers (being of a different socioeconomic class) experienced that the mainstream ones didn't. The actual way to get some data on this is to set up focus groups to get people talking about what they don't like about the economy, and let their hair down enough that they don't just parrot the surface level version of gripes but tell what's actually annoying them.
As just a sample, I've got a quote I wrote down sometime in the 80s that noted "But as has been demonstrated time and time again by empirical social science, one reason white Americans frequently *vote* against candidates promising to support spending for the public good is the fear that their tax dollars will be spent on minorities at the expense of themselves." Certainly never take the *aggregate* economic statistics as being the major driver of public opinion, people are much more sensitive to the *relative* changes of their status vs. that of others.
As someone who taught in a rural school for thirty-five years, I can tell you that educational statistics, very much including standardized test scores, are thoroughly compromised. Brazenly so, and on multiple levels. This has serious implications for both assessing what works, and for proposals to pay according to standardized test scores.
And that does not even touch on a deeper issue -- whether standardized tests measure what we want students to get from education.
Unions, of course, have to represent all their members, so naturally they have to point out the downsides of a plan that will be bad for many of their members. But there are always self-serving interests on both sides of any issue, and that is certainly the case here.
In any case, I would strongly urge separating the two questions: Merit pay. And evaluation based largely on standardized test scores.
Unlike so many endeavors, education does not have a concrete, agreed upon product. This makes merit far more difficult to define. And thus, merit pay is much more likely to be used to reward things like personal loyalty or likability.
To some extent, teachers and immediate supervisors and former students sharing the job of assigning merit pay would be the most promising plan. But I'll bet this would become a corrupting influence all of its own, over quite a short period of time. I'd love to be wrong, though. :)
I agree with you though. There is no nationwide curriculum, so it is hard to have a consistent "product" or "deliverable" across all the various school systems in our country. That said better teachers should get paid more, its just figuring out a way to do that, without disenfranchising existing teachers who may feel threatened by changes, or teachers who may teach students how to take tests well but not necessarily make them well rounded students or learners. It is a tough ask, not impossible but definitely not something with an easy answer.
I'd guessed as much. But couldn't help reaching for that low-hanging fruit! Maybe there is a silver bullet out there.
In a grad/undergrad university setting the popularity or lack thereof of faculty and/or their specific courses is an easily computed and somewhat reliable metric for faculty member value to the institution. But in a K-12 setting--with the exception perhaps of elective and AP courses--that's not really possible.
True ... but back when people were arguing about it, I finally realized that standardized testing was the only measure that could be imposed from outside, given that all of the players -- the students, the teachers, the parents, the school boards -- were incentivized to smile, nod, and say "All of the children are above average!" Standardized tests are a poor measure, but the actual alternative is no measure at all.
I really appreciate when you post data celebrating positive trends - I have friends who love to lament how terrible things are getting and having your charts helps me definitively demonstrate the opposite. It might not get them to completely stop (they often just change the frame), but I like to think it at least makes them think twice about just spouting off an opinion backed by nothing.
Yeah no matter how bad things seem, there is usually progress being made somewhere, I absolutely abhor when people I know (no matter the side of the spectrum) make it seem like this is the worst time period in history. That is just objectively not true no matter the metric and we are still making progress, even if we sometimes don't move as fast as we want sometimes, or even take a couple steps back in a few areas.
There are two kinds of presidential candidates: those who generate popular support that transcends their party machine and those that depend on the party for their power. In this century, Obama and Trump represent the former and Bush, McCain, Romney, Clinton, Biden, and Harris represent the later.
I could re-write Noah's Democratic party structure post in 2012 as "Republican party politics is big business donor politics, scaled up." It would talk about how republicans lost because they let interest group focus on unpopular fiscal policies drive the campaign.
If Obama were able to run against Trump in 2024 and chose to do so, assuming everything else stayed the same, I think we'd have seen him wiggle free of the interest group straitjacket that Biden and Harris happily donned. Democrats biggest problem is candidate quality, not structure. I'm unclear why nobody emerged in 2020 who could command popular support and who would buck the party line that sank everyone but Biden. Maybe great candidates only come every 20 years or so.
Two clarifying notes.
1. Trump's movement is more powerful than Obama's for two reasons. First, Obama wanted to maintain the party structure and didn't leverage his popularity to replace it the way that Trump has. Second, Trump doesn't need the party apparatus for funding now that we're ~20 years into the small-dollar donation era. Even though Obama had the financial power to have written off the party, people hadn't fully appreciated that small dollar donations enabled doing so.
2. If Obama could have run in 2016 or 2020 and did so, he would clearly have clobbered Trump. I'm not sure if the same would have been true in 2024, but he certainly would have done better than Harris.
I don't think small-dollar donations were relevant, given that Harris massively outraised Trump there: Trump's financial support came mostly from a small number of right-wing billionaires, and this allowed him to start spending his campaign money while Harris was still raising hers.
I think another overlooked fact is that Trump hast not stopped campaigning since 2016. Even when he was President, he still acted like he wasn't governing. That is an inherent advantage from a messaging standpoint vs someone that entered the race with less than 6 months to go. That said, I do think we've seen that a campaign can run with 6 months or less which is better than the never-ending horse race and campaign cycle, but I do think years of funding and that advantage that Trump had can't be discounted either.
Conservatives built on 3 simple, common, agreeable messages. Reinforced across all their elections and Supreme Court and Federal Judges.
The Conservative/Republican/MAGA "Walmart" market share:
A. God: consistently pro-Life, Religion supercedes all other Constitutional Rights
B. Guns: 2A. Any gun, anywhere, all the time.
C Glory: Defense is #1 and War is good. Vets get lifetime VA Healthcare. Many pensions. Most don't see live combat.
Dems/Liberal/Progressives:
Multiple store fronts. 3 grocers, 2 hardware stores, general store, 4 lady clothing stores, 2 toy stores, 3 bakers, general store, 2 book stores, 1 kitchen store.
A. Fractionated messages.
B. Messages that serve "Identity"
C. Something for every someone.
D. Little commonality for everyone.
E. No simple GGG ideas/message/vision
F. Little overlap
Market Share wins. Walmart wins. The local stores lose. Democrats lose.
Marketing theory that I hold is that NEEDS preexist. They need stimulating to reveal. Always giving a customer what they WANT, instead of discerning what they NEED, loses.
Most people NEED to be given a plan, a flag to follow, to belong to an organized community or 2. Authority gets things done. Committees think and do poorly.
I have made this observation likely a hundred times in an explanation of why Trump won.
Democrats were less believable than Trump was. That alone is quite the accomplishment for someone who lies as much as a Persian rug.
KJP on Biden; He is so energetic we can’t keep up with him.
KJP again; There is no crisis at the border.
Biden’s Administration; Inflation is transitory
Biden again: Our economy has never been better.
Biden again: We've created xx million of jobs, never telling Americans that they just went back to work after the pandemic.
Democrats insisting at a Congressional hearing that men can have babies.
I could go on and on. My suggestion for Democrats is not to lie. Democrats believe they know better, have the expertise, and yet Americans just thought they were full of shit.
Don’t get me started on the BS the Republicans are feeding us. They just believed them because they didn’t lie to them about what they were seeing and feeling with their own eyes.
The internet is good data. If you started out by reading every book in existence, I am certain you could continue to learn by reading everything written online.
My point was that every bit of information needs to be read critically, and some human beings are very good at that, and some are not. It's hard to see how AI can rise above the level of mediocrity unless the data savvy can point it at a task for which it is particularly well suited, such as the cyber fabrication and evaluation of new molecules.
I am not an expert on AI but it seems like this, "weeding through massive amounts of information and categorizing it," is what AI does best. It [edit: already] digests libraries of science fiction and fantasy and successfully categorizes it as exactly that.
Wisconsinite here, and not a teacher, but that article on Act 10 is just so fucking wrong it could only be written by an economist from North Carolina.
In fact it is hilariously bad--dude isn't looking at actual teacher certifications which is different than declared education majors (referred to as Teacher Preparation Programs), so he totally misses the actual data showing massive DECLINES in certified teachers. The top teacher ed programs in the state have all seen declines in enrollees, except for UW-Madison which via free tuition has cannibalized students from other instate programs, especially the private schools with much higher tuition. The mistake he makes is like looking at the number of biology majors to assess the availability of doctors.
Also, teacher merit pay has never been substantial enough to actually attract new entrants into the profession--all it meant was that to get raises you had to hit some low bar on teacher effectiveness evaluations, which are SUBJECTIVE evaluations performed by administrators that use standardized tests as only one small part of the scoring rubric. Anyways, the districts that have raised pay (for all teachers mind you) have done so by raising property taxes via referendum, something districts could have done at the city council level until Act 10 required going to the voters. So what you have are districts in affluent, highly educated areas raising pay and poaching teachers from less affluent districts that refuse to raise taxes. Its genuinely a bad policy and really has made education worse in this state unless you live in a highly-zoned suburb. Even rural republicans had to backtrack and get the state funding formula rewritten to stanch the bleeding from their districts!
The article may confirm Noah's priors, but its a bad study with serious, serious flaws and has no business being promoted as if it says anything authoritative about education funding policy or teachers unions.
Thanks - good to see an actual analysis of what was done in the study. It certainly was completely inconsistent with what I see locally in a semi-rural area.
The state of government is that in the age of the internet, governing well is boring and throwing shit against the wall is good TV. We are dooooommmmed.
Given that sharp polarization of consumer sentiment I’m left to conclude that consumer sentiment is no longer a useful indicator about the economy. IIRC these same surveys usually show very different results when they ask about “your personal situation” instead of “the economy.” Perhaps we should *only* ask about people’s personal situations.
On opioid death rates: another possibility that needs to be considered is just the population size of opioid users. Deaths in the UK are going down I think (Scotland being a possible) , but just because there was a boom in users in the 80s and 90s and they have aged out of use or or died out. The death toll in isolation tells you little about the reason. Fentanyl may have been killing off its own user base, and the opipid boom caused by over-prescription may be well past its peak.
On consumer sentiments: it makes more rational sense than people seem to appreciate for it to flip at elections. Of course you feel more positive about the future - your guy won! You voted for them presumably at least in part on the basis that they would improve the economy!
It's also clear from the graph that there is a substantial non-partisan component as both Democratic and Republican sentiment shifted in tandem as inflation rose and fell.
I really hope science will de-politicize. Looking at the new administrations medical appointees I am struggling to see that, but hopefully its a change that keeps sinking in over the next 20 years...
To what degree is the anti-vax movement (that people like RFK Jr represent) essentially a eugenicist movement: that they believe that the lives that vaccination saves are lives that shouldn't be saved because they were clearly genetically inferior?
I think the simplest explanation is they're afraid of needles.
That's actually probably a big part of it. Needle phobia is common among Americans; especially among men. During twenty-five years of needling people, the only ones who ever fainted were guys. Especially larger, macho-types.
I don’t understand this sentiment at all especially when it is expressed to me by a person wearing earrings.
Some patients have told me that they were very drunk when they got their tattoos and piercings. I am guessing that situation is not rare.
I have seen heroin users freak out over needles. I haven't entirely figured that psychology out yet.
That seems a remarkably petty cause for motivated reasoning with such dire consequences for society as a whole, when contrasted with (say) attachment to fossil-fuelled lifestyles as driving the motivated reasoning behind climate change denial.
Nonsense, we have a ton of anti-vaxers where I live and I have talked with many of them and some are close friends. NOT one had anything to do with fear of needles.
The majority comes from the anti-vax autism push a few years back (based on a complete garbage paper), some from the remnants of the hippie wellness community in our area, and some from far-right who just don't believe in science anyway - especially if someone tells them they need to do it. Clearly anecdotal, but I would guess more typical.
George, is this intended as a subtle joke re the Scientific American item Noah included?
But in case you are serious, I'd say no - he's from the "Whole Foods" anti-vax community. Which I would describe as the "defund the police" of medical interventions - rich people who don't appreciate where their security comes from. "Everything is so nice and fine here - how could we possibly need any protections?"
I haven't seen anything to indicate that, everything they say seems to really indicate they are true believers in the face of scientific data...
I'm so skeptical of polling on questions like "how is the transition going?". What does that question mean to people who aren't political junkies? I think approximately nothing?
To the extent it means anything, it has to be something like, "how do you feel now that the election is over?". And yeah, of course people are happy that shit show is over, and that one of the candidates won both the electoral college and popular vote, and that the other candidate conceded.
But two thirds of people under thirty are not responding to this poll question thinking "I sure like this Hegseth guy" or whatever else about how "the transition" is going. But of course that's how Republicans will interpret it, which is why they will overreach, which is where the next backlash begins.
I’m a non-unionized charter school teacher and am appalled by your stance here. It’s so easy for administration to give teachers impossible classrooms that aren’t going to see fantastic results in.
Last year I had one kid with some modest behavioral issues and like my growth and proficiency was great. My colleague had like 7 or 8 of the 10 worst behaved kids in the grade level and oh surprise surprise by any measure her test scores looked worse than mine.
Like I’ve been teaching 15 years and I don’t think I’m terrible but two of those years I’ve had unwinnable messes. I have no data from 19-20 but I’m sure it would have been bad as I spent most of the year physically defending myself and my students from one of their classmates.
I absolutely am against protecting inept teachers from job loss, though I see a lot of this without unions but giving someone a perfect class and giving them a raise because they can deliver great results is disgusting and so is giving someone a terrible class that everyone apologizes for before we even start and saying they deserve less money for harder work.
Do teachers no longer have sufficient tools to eject unruly students and maintain classroom order? I have been getting that impression from my kids as they go through middle school, and your comment seems to back it up.
For really serious disorder, no not really. Like most kids are actually pretty well behaved and then most of the kids who misbehave you can reach an accommodation with by calling home and having consistent policies and doing like diligent classroom management and adjusting your teaching practice to this year’s specific set of issues.
But for an uncomfortable minority of students shit is super fucked. Things that were once a few in the school are a few in each grade, a few in each grade are now some in most classes.
This issue of rising prevalence is something that I would love to learn more about. It seems like a bad phenomenon that we don't really understand, and I'm unclear how hard we are even trying.
I agree with this assessment. Too many public schools simply don't have the tools to get rid of real problem students, either bullies or disruptive kids. This is on top of the fact that a lot of parents don't want to be told their kids are bad or not performing and it basically just wears teachers out over the years as well. I was reading something a few months ago on the Times about how the school couldn't expel kids that were using AI to make porn of their teachers and classmates and administrators refuse to really fight for the students who need help or for the teachers, either because it happened outside of school or they are afraid of press. I'm not sure.
Edit (Found it):
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/08/technology/deepfake-ai-nudes-westfield-high-school.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/06/technology/tiktok-fake-teachers-pennsylvania.html
Is this deterioration in student quality a nationwide trend? I'm actually quite curious...
Yeah I hate the focus on bloodless metrics for teacher evaluation. But just the same, there are inevitably some teachers going great and others doing poorly, and some of the poor performers shouldn't keep their jobs. But this isn't unique to teaching, every profession has this dynamic. So what do we do? Well, the typical solution is to empower supervisors to use judgement. Oftentimes that is informed by empirical metrics, but rarely purely so.
I feel like I'm basically fine with that, I'm an at will employee and have been for fifteen years and most teachers who are non-renewed are non-renewed for good reasons.
But like admin puts us in impossible situations sometime and I'm a good institutionalist and I do my best to support them. But to then have that mean I'm going to make less money because you're asking me to eat a shit sandwich is more than I could take.
Would your concerns be addressed if schools used a more nuanced performance rating system to determine pay? E.g. looking at student improvement relative to their scores in previous years, and taking softer variables into account, like student, parent, and peer survey feedback?
I think my view is that merit-based pay (and retention) is good, but that measuring merit based on student test scores alone is bad.
This is not dissimilar to the private sector, where companies attempt to promote high performers, using a lot of judgement in addition to empirical measures.
I'm theoretically open to the idea of "merit pay", but the available measures of "merit" _suck_.
https://mathbabe.org/2012/03/06/the-value-added-teacher-model-sucks/
This is from over a decade ago, but I haven't seen any reporting suggesting that we've gotten any better at this. Measures of "teacher quality", from two classes of the same subject, in the same year, in consecutive grades, don't even self-correlate. Like at all. How is it possible that John Q. Teacher was great at teaching 7th grade math this year, but terrible at teaching 8th grade math? Well, it's probably not -- the problem is that the metric is a random number generator, not a serious judgment of teacher quality.
I mean his stance is just reporting on the paper…
He’s really not. He’s saying unions are against merit pay to protect bad teachers when there may be some of that but also bad teachers are often a result of bad administrative decisions. I don’t have any end of year data from 19-20 but I was expecting a pretty dismal set of results because of the amount of violence i was managing without assistance.
Unless administrators are held to account for screwing up it’s just a bonuses for brown nosers plan.
You’re giving the Trump voters way too much credit.
There is something happening alright, but it looks an awful lot like adult aged Americans acting like silly children. Trump’s transition is (deliberately) a freak show, and anyone with the slightest interest in how good government affects their lives would be appalled by it. So those 65%, by my reckoning, are expressing their support irrationally.
The Dems could do better on some issues and some messages to get more in tune with the electorate. But it’s a waste of time at best to decipher the ‘reasoning’ that might lead a young person to, say, decide that Tulsi Gabbard is a good pick for a national security post. That sort of person is never going to vote for a responsible political party, no matter what the policies/messaging.
"Could do better?" "Responsible?" Don't get me wrong, I hate Trump as much as the average person who posts comments on NYT editorials. But, jeez, please read the room! Until the Democrats get rid of this righteous attitude about their positions and dismissiveness of anyone who points out their failings, they will keep losing more and more elections. The problem is that moderates are now getting as appalled by the "elites" (or the "Groups") as the MAGA types are. What could have been a 60/40 split for the Democrats had they reformed some of those positions and messages to appeal to a larger portion of the electorate is quickly turning into a 60/40 split for the Republicans because the Democrats think they just need to do a little better, tweak their messaging, and wait for "that sort of person" to come to their senses. To win, you need to win them over instead of pushing them away.
Yes. This election shouldn't have been close, but it was, and I can only think it is because progressives (and I mean progressives as opposed to Democrats) have a view of what this country looks like that most Americans just don't like.
The progressive view of the US is that it is irredeemably racist and sexist, and hates gays and trans people. Look at the 1619 Project, all the DEI classes that employees have to attend at any large company. Read anything by Kendi. Remember the 2020 primary positions, including paying reparations for slavery. This is not how most Americans view the country.
Now few Democratic politicians are progressives, but unless they actively separate themselves from these positions, many voters assume they support them. And that's going to lead to electoral loss after electoral loss.
You’re still ascribing a certain rationality to the average Trump voter that does not exist.
Biden/Harris did not campaign on trans issues or support the campus protests. Biden tried to pass a border bill that was too much for many leftists and was blocked by Trump.
None of that mattered. And even if the rational voter had deep cultural frustrations with Democrats, they would still have voted for them because Trump was an objectively terrible candidate. Trump was promising real negative impacts for most people, and yet he won the most votes.
Meanwhile, most Americans chose to live in a weird alternate reality, claiming to believe that the strongest economy in decades was weak and troublesome.
I don’t claim to understand what’s going on, but I am convinced that it’s psychological. So the Dems need to be very careful about chasing the votes of deeply irrational people.
"Biden/Harris did not campaign on trans issues"
Biden/Harris did not have to campaign on trans issues, their administration spoke loudly for them.
In April 2024, the Biden/Harris Ed Dept and Biden/Harris EEOC issued separate rulings, each with the force of law, requiring every school and every workplace in the country to allow boys and men to watch girls and women shower and change, provided these males first thought to themselves "now I'm trans". After they're done ogling the naked females, these males can think "now I'm cis" and go back to their own (male) locker rooms to jerk off.
I am a 69-yr-old lifelong Democrat, with a STEM PhD from Stanford (just to stake a claim that I am not your average idiot), and I voted straight Republican because of this issue (and related "woke" issues, such as the blatant anti-Asian racism of the Democrats, receipts on request).
I do, sadly, live in a "weird alternate reality", one where men can become women via the "think system" (see The Music Man), and one where colorblind policy is somehow racist. But I did not construct that world, the Democrats did, and it's far past time for me to help the Republicans tear it down.
Good grief, man. You sound like Mike Huckabee.
I have a couple of suggestions for you:
1. Tone it down a bit if you want to be taken seriously. You’re revealing a little too much of your inner struggles for this type of forum.
2. Consider whether you might overly be susceptible to the sophisticated fear-mongering of right wing culture warriors. It seems to me that you’re a textbook case of the weak-minded dupe that Trump relies on.
I don't take suggestions from my intellectual inferiors, which you clearly are, since you can't put forth a cogent argument but only personal insults.
I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said the thing about Mike Huckabee. That was harsh.
"Don't get me wrong, I hate Trump as much as the average person who posts comments on NYT editorials."
You must really hate Trump ...
I think this is probably true.
But I also remember people saying almost exactly the same thing about John mccain, in a way that makes me distrust this entire category of argument.
McCain made one appalling campaign choice, but was a basically decent person and a sensible candidate who was trying to present a rational case for people to vote for him.
Trump and his ‘appeal’ to voters is a totally different thing to Romney, McCain, Bush etc.
You seem to repeat this statement as truth ad naseum almost every time politics comes up from Noah, and it is just demonstrably comparing apples to oranges.
I think this was my first comment on a political essay from Noah, unless I'm misremembering? Unless you count the one about homelessness in SF
I've only been subbed for 4 months man
I think you might be confusing me with someone else? Although, McCain is my go-to example for "the democrats successfully convinced me that this man was the devil at the time, now this seems ludicrous in retrospect" so I guess it's possible I've mentioned him before
but really I don't remember it happening here
edit: i tried to find a methodology to actually test this, and i came up with one. it isn't very good but i think it's at least definitive?
i went to my substack 'activity' page and went to 'replies and comments'
then i scrolled down until I saw comments from prior to the date I subscribed to noahpinion
then I control+f'd on 'mccain'
the result showed a bunch of results clustered near the top, all related to the comment you replied to, and nothing else
https://i.imgur.com/loVMHbP.png
I think I am therefore justified in saying you must be confusing me with someone else? With a small chance that actually I did make such a comment, and then forget about it, but none of the people replying to it used the word 'mccain'
Saying what about John McCain? I can't find anything in this post that anyone said about him.
Selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate, presumably.
I don’t buy this logic at all.
We are not talking about policy disagreements. I have no problem with the liberal vs. conservative tension, for example, but Trumpism has no good faith policy logic behind it.
You don’t ’find ways to get along’ with everyone. If someone wants to pursue acts of blatant cruelty, for example, you reject it. You don’t seek to compromise.
You’re also falling into the trap of thinking that Trumpists ‘believe they are right’. They don’t. They don’t think Trump has a good vision for America in terms of policy. In most cases they don’t know or care what he plans to do. Their only interest is a child-like fascination with his ‘show’, which includes an implicit permission for them to continue acting like children.
no, i am saying that people said about john mccain what greg perrett is now saying about trump
and presumably it was not true back then, even though it seemed very convincing
and this makes me suspicious of the fact that this argument seems very convincing now
edit: i also feel very awkward about this whole... thing... i feel pretty certain that trump is a reaction to a very specific tendency in the progressive and liberal bubble, to assume that there is no such thing as a reasonable conservative, that conservatives aren't even worth engaging with because they have nothing of value to say so you shouldn't even bother listening, and in fact their speech is so inherently harmful that we should ostracize anybody who even gives it a platform to begin with
and now trump is happening, and it's obviously terrible and i really wish he weren't happening
but now apparently the correct response is... to double down? to believe EVEN HARDER that the reds are just contemptibly, cartoonishly evil and you shouldn't even try to engage with them?
maybe it's true. but i sure feel very, very uncomfortable with it.
Apart from the aberration of choosing Palin as a running mate, I don’t see any link between McCain and Trump. Trump is an entirely different beast to anything that has come before him, save maybe Goldwater.
I encourage you to reconsider the ‘conservative’ label you’re applying to Trump voters. Trump is the antithesis of conservative values on a personal level, and has trashed traditional conservative economic principles. His supporters tend to be reactionary types, rather than principled conservatives.
I didn’t say ‘double down’, and I agree that some Dems could improve some messaging; e.g. back off on the stranger corners of the culture wars.
But I also don’t agree that Dems should ‘reach out to’ people who deny obvious reality and seek to trash the values and institutions that have made the USA a good country. The last thing the USA needs is both major parties offering bad policies and seeking to win through lies and misinformation.
i have a bunch of red friends who truly believe that the blues are similarly unworthy of being engaged with, and i think what is happening inside their mind is probably very similar to what is happening inside your mind, since we're all humans
the object-level circumstance may not be symmetrical, but it seems like the meta-level absolutely is, that we have two groups of people who both believe that they are obviously right, *and* that being obviously right is sufficient justification to preemptively turn-one defect
i think when it comes to forming beliefs about reality, the actual object-level truth is the only thing that matters ("hmm, it seems like this research showing that vaccines are vastly beneficial has good methodology")
but that government isn't about being right, it's about resolving conflict between mutually hostile groups without violence
and in *that* circumstance, who is right and who is wrong is less important than the symmetry of both sides believing that they are right
in that case, either "believing you are right" (irrespective of whether you actually ARE right) is justification for defection, or it isn't
i would prefer to think that it isn't. we used to have political disagreements where both sides were very clearly factually mistaken (are the anglicans going to hell, or is it the puritans who are going to hell?) and even in those circumstances we needed to find ways to get along
if those people could handle it, i think we should be able to as well
this line of thought isn't very well developed yet, it's something i'm still thinking through, but hopefully that conveys something about why i feel very, very uncomfortable with this idea of yours
They didn't though.
I think you leave something out.
Compared to past eras, political rhetoric is far less centralized, far less under the control of the professionals. I have no way of proving this quantitatively, but I am pretty sure that if you compared the Kennedy-Nixon, Reagan-Carter, Bush-Gore, and Trump-Harris elections, you would find an enormous shift in the sources a typical voter relied on to form an opinion. In the first three, a candidate was defined by who they said they were. Who their chosen surrogates said they were. Who their ads said they were. And who their official opponents said they were. At least to a very large extent.
Now, however, Trump and Harris are defined by hundreds of quasi-official voices. Bloggers and influencers with a following. And, maybe more consequently, by tens of thousands of individual posters. These voices are most certainly not trained professionals skilled at messaging. Quite the contrary! Abrasiveness is in, tact is out. What you get is unvarnished attitude.
And, in my view, what this election suggests is that the middle of America, at least at this moment, finds the unvarnished left voices more objectionable than the unvarnished right.
To some extent, this is an asymmetrical contest. The right is tapping a significant well of "blow it all up" anger, and such voters are immune to being turned off by obnoxiousness from their own side.
But to a larger extent, it's that the left wing online presence is so incredibly unlikable.
As a center-left type, over the past year I have frequently muttered to myself that the only upside to a Trump victory would be to stick it to these self righteous, dogmatic jerks. People who label all dissent racism or xenophobia. Who think they get to alter language and police compliance. Who sneer at the viewpoints of average Americans while simultaneously appointing themselves the defenders of democracy.
And when I mentioned my dark thoughts to a few other center-left types, I was stunned to find out that they had been feeling the same way.
Of course, this is all utterly unfair. I am comparing left wing online people to flesh-and-blood rural neighbors. But I strongly suspect that I am describing the force that is working on a lot of people living outside blue neighborhoods.
The truth might be this: In an online world, where a political party is represented by its online tens of thousands, the left has been outcompeting the quasi-fascists for the title of "Most Unlikeable."
You failed to call out RW media, led by FOX News. Which has half the country living in an alternate facts bubble, wherein unemployment and crime are at near record highs, and where the economy is already in recession.
As long as the RW media can continue to churn out lies non-stop without any accountability or journalistic integrity, we're doomed to go the way of Hungary or Turkey within a decade.
Yes, alternate fact bubbles are a serious problem. I just see that as separate from my point.
Consumer confidence in the economy remained low despite doing very well by most conventional measures? Fox News, the most watched cable news network, had a unified message across all its shows, telling its audience what to think and they believed it.
OK, but it's also possible that Fox News noticed something that the "mainstream" media didn't, or that the Fox News viewers (being of a different socioeconomic class) experienced that the mainstream ones didn't. The actual way to get some data on this is to set up focus groups to get people talking about what they don't like about the economy, and let their hair down enough that they don't just parrot the surface level version of gripes but tell what's actually annoying them.
As just a sample, I've got a quote I wrote down sometime in the 80s that noted "But as has been demonstrated time and time again by empirical social science, one reason white Americans frequently *vote* against candidates promising to support spending for the public good is the fear that their tax dollars will be spent on minorities at the expense of themselves." Certainly never take the *aggregate* economic statistics as being the major driver of public opinion, people are much more sensitive to the *relative* changes of their status vs. that of others.
As someone who taught in a rural school for thirty-five years, I can tell you that educational statistics, very much including standardized test scores, are thoroughly compromised. Brazenly so, and on multiple levels. This has serious implications for both assessing what works, and for proposals to pay according to standardized test scores.
And that does not even touch on a deeper issue -- whether standardized tests measure what we want students to get from education.
Unions, of course, have to represent all their members, so naturally they have to point out the downsides of a plan that will be bad for many of their members. But there are always self-serving interests on both sides of any issue, and that is certainly the case here.
In any case, I would strongly urge separating the two questions: Merit pay. And evaluation based largely on standardized test scores.
Is there any way to systematically and fairly assign merit pay?
That is the million dollar question!
Unlike so many endeavors, education does not have a concrete, agreed upon product. This makes merit far more difficult to define. And thus, merit pay is much more likely to be used to reward things like personal loyalty or likability.
To some extent, teachers and immediate supervisors and former students sharing the job of assigning merit pay would be the most promising plan. But I'll bet this would become a corrupting influence all of its own, over quite a short period of time. I'd love to be wrong, though. :)
Get you nuance out of here Don!
I agree with you though. There is no nationwide curriculum, so it is hard to have a consistent "product" or "deliverable" across all the various school systems in our country. That said better teachers should get paid more, its just figuring out a way to do that, without disenfranchising existing teachers who may feel threatened by changes, or teachers who may teach students how to take tests well but not necessarily make them well rounded students or learners. It is a tough ask, not impossible but definitely not something with an easy answer.
I'd guessed as much. But couldn't help reaching for that low-hanging fruit! Maybe there is a silver bullet out there.
In a grad/undergrad university setting the popularity or lack thereof of faculty and/or their specific courses is an easily computed and somewhat reliable metric for faculty member value to the institution. But in a K-12 setting--with the exception perhaps of elective and AP courses--that's not really possible.
True ... but back when people were arguing about it, I finally realized that standardized testing was the only measure that could be imposed from outside, given that all of the players -- the students, the teachers, the parents, the school boards -- were incentivized to smile, nod, and say "All of the children are above average!" Standardized tests are a poor measure, but the actual alternative is no measure at all.
I really appreciate when you post data celebrating positive trends - I have friends who love to lament how terrible things are getting and having your charts helps me definitively demonstrate the opposite. It might not get them to completely stop (they often just change the frame), but I like to think it at least makes them think twice about just spouting off an opinion backed by nothing.
Yeah no matter how bad things seem, there is usually progress being made somewhere, I absolutely abhor when people I know (no matter the side of the spectrum) make it seem like this is the worst time period in history. That is just objectively not true no matter the metric and we are still making progress, even if we sometimes don't move as fast as we want sometimes, or even take a couple steps back in a few areas.
There are two kinds of presidential candidates: those who generate popular support that transcends their party machine and those that depend on the party for their power. In this century, Obama and Trump represent the former and Bush, McCain, Romney, Clinton, Biden, and Harris represent the later.
I could re-write Noah's Democratic party structure post in 2012 as "Republican party politics is big business donor politics, scaled up." It would talk about how republicans lost because they let interest group focus on unpopular fiscal policies drive the campaign.
If Obama were able to run against Trump in 2024 and chose to do so, assuming everything else stayed the same, I think we'd have seen him wiggle free of the interest group straitjacket that Biden and Harris happily donned. Democrats biggest problem is candidate quality, not structure. I'm unclear why nobody emerged in 2020 who could command popular support and who would buck the party line that sank everyone but Biden. Maybe great candidates only come every 20 years or so.
Two clarifying notes.
1. Trump's movement is more powerful than Obama's for two reasons. First, Obama wanted to maintain the party structure and didn't leverage his popularity to replace it the way that Trump has. Second, Trump doesn't need the party apparatus for funding now that we're ~20 years into the small-dollar donation era. Even though Obama had the financial power to have written off the party, people hadn't fully appreciated that small dollar donations enabled doing so.
2. If Obama could have run in 2016 or 2020 and did so, he would clearly have clobbered Trump. I'm not sure if the same would have been true in 2024, but he certainly would have done better than Harris.
I don't think small-dollar donations were relevant, given that Harris massively outraised Trump there: Trump's financial support came mostly from a small number of right-wing billionaires, and this allowed him to start spending his campaign money while Harris was still raising hers.
I think another overlooked fact is that Trump hast not stopped campaigning since 2016. Even when he was President, he still acted like he wasn't governing. That is an inherent advantage from a messaging standpoint vs someone that entered the race with less than 6 months to go. That said, I do think we've seen that a campaign can run with 6 months or less which is better than the never-ending horse race and campaign cycle, but I do think years of funding and that advantage that Trump had can't be discounted either.
A model for the ProgDems and the MagaPubs.
Conservatives built on 3 simple, common, agreeable messages. Reinforced across all their elections and Supreme Court and Federal Judges.
The Conservative/Republican/MAGA "Walmart" market share:
A. God: consistently pro-Life, Religion supercedes all other Constitutional Rights
B. Guns: 2A. Any gun, anywhere, all the time.
C Glory: Defense is #1 and War is good. Vets get lifetime VA Healthcare. Many pensions. Most don't see live combat.
Dems/Liberal/Progressives:
Multiple store fronts. 3 grocers, 2 hardware stores, general store, 4 lady clothing stores, 2 toy stores, 3 bakers, general store, 2 book stores, 1 kitchen store.
A. Fractionated messages.
B. Messages that serve "Identity"
C. Something for every someone.
D. Little commonality for everyone.
E. No simple GGG ideas/message/vision
F. Little overlap
Market Share wins. Walmart wins. The local stores lose. Democrats lose.
Marketing theory that I hold is that NEEDS preexist. They need stimulating to reveal. Always giving a customer what they WANT, instead of discerning what they NEED, loses.
Most people NEED to be given a plan, a flag to follow, to belong to an organized community or 2. Authority gets things done. Committees think and do poorly.
I have made this observation likely a hundred times in an explanation of why Trump won.
Democrats were less believable than Trump was. That alone is quite the accomplishment for someone who lies as much as a Persian rug.
KJP on Biden; He is so energetic we can’t keep up with him.
KJP again; There is no crisis at the border.
Biden’s Administration; Inflation is transitory
Biden again: Our economy has never been better.
Biden again: We've created xx million of jobs, never telling Americans that they just went back to work after the pandemic.
Democrats insisting at a Congressional hearing that men can have babies.
I could go on and on. My suggestion for Democrats is not to lie. Democrats believe they know better, have the expertise, and yet Americans just thought they were full of shit.
Don’t get me started on the BS the Republicans are feeding us. They just believed them because they didn’t lie to them about what they were seeing and feeling with their own eyes.
Why am I not surprised that the that AI has run out of good data. As if the Internet could be called good data in the first place.
The internet is good data. If you started out by reading every book in existence, I am certain you could continue to learn by reading everything written online.
My point was that every bit of information needs to be read critically, and some human beings are very good at that, and some are not. It's hard to see how AI can rise above the level of mediocrity unless the data savvy can point it at a task for which it is particularly well suited, such as the cyber fabrication and evaluation of new molecules.
I am not an expert on AI but it seems like this, "weeding through massive amounts of information and categorizing it," is what AI does best. It [edit: already] digests libraries of science fiction and fantasy and successfully categorizes it as exactly that.
Wisconsinite here, and not a teacher, but that article on Act 10 is just so fucking wrong it could only be written by an economist from North Carolina.
In fact it is hilariously bad--dude isn't looking at actual teacher certifications which is different than declared education majors (referred to as Teacher Preparation Programs), so he totally misses the actual data showing massive DECLINES in certified teachers. The top teacher ed programs in the state have all seen declines in enrollees, except for UW-Madison which via free tuition has cannibalized students from other instate programs, especially the private schools with much higher tuition. The mistake he makes is like looking at the number of biology majors to assess the availability of doctors.
Also, teacher merit pay has never been substantial enough to actually attract new entrants into the profession--all it meant was that to get raises you had to hit some low bar on teacher effectiveness evaluations, which are SUBJECTIVE evaluations performed by administrators that use standardized tests as only one small part of the scoring rubric. Anyways, the districts that have raised pay (for all teachers mind you) have done so by raising property taxes via referendum, something districts could have done at the city council level until Act 10 required going to the voters. So what you have are districts in affluent, highly educated areas raising pay and poaching teachers from less affluent districts that refuse to raise taxes. Its genuinely a bad policy and really has made education worse in this state unless you live in a highly-zoned suburb. Even rural republicans had to backtrack and get the state funding formula rewritten to stanch the bleeding from their districts!
The article may confirm Noah's priors, but its a bad study with serious, serious flaws and has no business being promoted as if it says anything authoritative about education funding policy or teachers unions.
Thanks - good to see an actual analysis of what was done in the study. It certainly was completely inconsistent with what I see locally in a semi-rural area.
The state of government is that in the age of the internet, governing well is boring and throwing shit against the wall is good TV. We are dooooommmmed.
Given that sharp polarization of consumer sentiment I’m left to conclude that consumer sentiment is no longer a useful indicator about the economy. IIRC these same surveys usually show very different results when they ask about “your personal situation” instead of “the economy.” Perhaps we should *only* ask about people’s personal situations.
On opioid death rates: another possibility that needs to be considered is just the population size of opioid users. Deaths in the UK are going down I think (Scotland being a possible) , but just because there was a boom in users in the 80s and 90s and they have aged out of use or or died out. The death toll in isolation tells you little about the reason. Fentanyl may have been killing off its own user base, and the opipid boom caused by over-prescription may be well past its peak.
On consumer sentiments: it makes more rational sense than people seem to appreciate for it to flip at elections. Of course you feel more positive about the future - your guy won! You voted for them presumably at least in part on the basis that they would improve the economy!
It's also clear from the graph that there is a substantial non-partisan component as both Democratic and Republican sentiment shifted in tandem as inflation rose and fell.