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Vox
2 days ago
- Business
- Vox
Harvard just fired a tenured professor for the first time in 80 years. Good.
is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox's effective altruism-inspired section on the world's biggest challenges. She explores wide-ranging topics like climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccine development, and factory farms, and also writes the Future Perfect newsletter. The Harvard University crest on the Baker Library of the Harvard Business School in Boston on May 27. Sophie Park/Bloomberg via Getty Images In the summer of 2023, I wrote about a shocking scandal at Harvard Business School: Star professor Francesca Gino had been accused of falsifying data in four of her published papers, with whispers there was falsification in others, too. A series of posts on Data Colada, a blog that focuses on research integrity, documented Gino's apparent brazen data manipulation, which involved clearly changing study data to better support her hypotheses. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. This was a major accusation against a researcher at the top of her field, but Gino's denials were unconvincing. She didn't have a good explanation for what had gone wrong, asserting that maybe a research assistant had done it, even though she was the only author listed across all four of the falsified studies. Harvard put her on unpaid administrative leave and barred her from campus. The cherry on top? Gino's main academic area of study was honesty in business. As I wrote at the time, my read of the evidence was that Gino had most likely committed fraud. That impression was only reinforced by her subsequent lawsuit against Harvard and the Data Colada authors. Gino complained that she'd been defamed and that Harvard hadn't followed the right investigation process, but she didn't offer any convincing explanation of how she'd ended up putting her name to paper after paper with fake data. This week, almost two years after the news first broke, the process has reached its resolution: Gino was stripped of tenure, the first time Harvard has essentially fired a tenured professor in at least 80 years. (Her defamation lawsuit against the bloggers who found the data manipulation was dismissed last year.) What we do right and wrong when it comes to scientific fraud Harvard is in the news right now for its war with the Trump administration, which has sent a series of escalating demands to the university, canceled billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts, and is now blocking the university from enrolling international students, all in an apparent attempt to force the university to conform to MAGA's ideological demands. Stripping a celebrity professor of tenure might not seem like the best look at a moment when Harvard is in an existential struggle for its right to exist as an independent academic institution. But the Gino situation, which long predates the conflict with Trump, shouldn't be interpreted solely through the lens of that fight. Scientific fraud is a real problem, one that is chillingly common across academia. But far from putting the university in a bad light, Harvard's handling of the Gino case has actually been unusually good, even though it still underscores just how much further academia has to go to ensure scientific fraud becomes rare and is reliably caught and punished. There are two parts to fraud response: catching it and punishing it. Academia clearly isn't very good at the first part. The peer-review process that all meaningful research undergoes tends to start from the default assumption that data in a reviewed paper is real, and instead focuses on whether the paper represents a meaningful advance and is correctly positioned with respect to other research. Almost no reviewer is going back to check to see if what is described in a paper actually happened. Fraud, therefore, is often caught only when other researchers actively try to replicate a result or take a close look at the data. Science watchdogs who find these fraud cases tell me that we need a strong expectation that data be made public — which makes it much harder to fake — as well as a scientific culture that embraces replications. (Given the premiums journals put on novelty in research and the supreme importance of publishing for academic careers, there's been little motivation for scientists to pursue replication.). It is these watchdogs, not anyone at Harvard or in the peer-review process, who caught the discrepancies that ultimately sunk Gino. Crime and no punishment Even when fraud is caught, academia too often fails to properly punish it. When third-party investigators bring a concern to the attention of a university, it's been unusual for the responsible party to actually face consequences. One of Gino's co-authors on one of the retracted papers was Dan Ariely, a star professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He, too, has been credibly accused of falsifying data: For example, he published one study that he claimed took place at UCLA with the assistance of researcher Aimee Drolet Rossi. But UCLA says the study didn't happen there, and Rossi says she did not participate in it. In a past case, he claimed on a podcast to have gotten data from the insurance company Delta Dental, which the company says it did not collect. In another case, an investigation by Duke reportedly found that data from a paper he co-authored with Gino had been falsified, but that there was no evidence Ariely had used fake data knowingly. Frankly, I don't buy this. Maybe an unlucky professor might once end up using data that was faked without their knowledge. But if it happens again, I'm not willing to credit bad luck, and at some point, a professor who keeps 'accidentally' using falsified or nonexistent data should be out of a job even if we can't prove it was no accident. But Ariely, who has maintained his innocence, is still at Duke. Or take Olivier Voinnet, a plant biologist who had multiple papers conclusively demonstrated to contain image manipulation. He was found guilty of misconduct and suspended for two years. It's hard to imagine a higher scientific sin than faking and manipulating data. If you can't lose your job for that, the message to young scientists is inevitably that fraud isn't really that serious. What it means to take fraud seriously Gino's loss of tenure, which is one of a few recent cases where misconduct has had major career consequences, might be a sign that the tides are changing. In 2023, around when the Gino scandal broke, Stanford's then-president Marc Tessier-Lavigne stepped down after 12 papers he authored were found to contain manipulated data. A few weeks ago, MIT announced a data falsification scandal with a terse announcement that the university no longer had confidence in a widely distributed paper 'by a former second-year PhD student.' It's reasonable to assume the student was expelled from the program. I hope that these high-profile cases are a sign we are moving in the right direction on scientific fraud because its persistence is enormously damaging to science. Other researchers waste time and energy following false lines of research substantiated by fake data; in medicine, falsification can outright kill people. But even more than that, research fraud damages the reputation of science at exactly the moment when it is most under attack. We should tighten standards to make fraud much harder to commit in the first place, and when it is identified, the consequences should be immediate and serious. Let's hope Harvard sets a trend.
Vox
3 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
The Supreme Court wants to make it easier to build
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court handed down an opinion on Thursday that reads like it was written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the authors of an influential book arguing that excessive regulation of land use and development has made it too difficult to build housing and infrastructure in the United States. (Ezra is also a co-founder of Vox.) Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado concerns a proposed railroad line that would run through 88 miles of Utah, connecting the state's oil-rich Uinta Basin to the broader national rail network. The line is expected to make it easier to transport crude oil extracted in this region to refineries elsewhere in the country. The Court's opinion in Seven County places strict new limits on a federal law that a lower court relied upon to prevent this line from being constructed — limits that should make it easier for developers to build large-scale projects. SCOTUS, Explained Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Before this rail project can move forward, it must be approved by the Surface Transportation Board. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), moreover, this board is required to produce an environmental impact statement, which identifies any significant environmental effects from the rail project as well as ways to mitigate those effects. Significantly, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh explains in the Court's Seven County opinion, 'NEPA imposes no substantive environmental obligations or restrictions' on the board or on any other federal agency. It requires agencies to identify potential environmental harms that could arise out of development projects that they approve, but once those harms are identified in an environmental impact statement, the agency is free to decide that the benefits of the project outweigh those harms. Nevertheless, NEPA is often a significant hindrance to land development because litigants who oppose a particular project — be they environmental groups or just private citizens looking to shut development down — can often sue, claiming that the federal agency that must approve the project did not prepare an adequate environmental impact statement. As a result, Kavanaugh writes in his Seven County opinion, 'litigation-averse ever more time…to prepare ever longer EISs for future projects.' Indeed, the Seven County case itself is a poster child for just how burdensome NEPA can be. The Surface Transportation Board produced an environmental impact statement that is more than 3,600 pages long, and it goes into great detail about the rail line's potential impact on topics ranging from water quality to vulnerable species, such as the greater sage-grouse. Nevertheless, a federal appeals court blocked the project because it determined that this 3,600-page report did not adequately discuss the environmental impacts of making it easier to extract oil from the Uinta Basin. The appeals court reasoned that the agency needed to consider not just the direct environmental impacts of the rail line itself but also the impact of increased drilling and oil refining after the project is complete. All eight of the justices that heard the Seven County case (Justice Neil Gorsuch was recused) agreed that this appeals court decision was wrong, although Kavanaugh's majority opinion for himself and his Republican colleagues is broader than a separate opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The justices' agreement in Seven County, moreover, mirrors a growing bipartisan consensus that NEPA has become too much of a burden to development. As Kavanaugh notes in his opinion, President Joe Biden signed legislation in 2023 that limits environmental impact statements to 150 pages and requires them to be completed in two years or less. Still, Kavanaugh's opinion goes even further, repeatedly instructing courts to be deferential to an agency's decision to greenlight a project after producing an environmental impact statement. Seven County significantly weakens NEPA One striking thing about Kavanaugh's opinion is how closely it mirrors the rhetoric of liberal proponents of an 'abundance' agenda, which seeks to raise American standards of living by promoting large infrastructure projects. These proponents often claim that well-meaning laws intended to advance liberal values can have the opposite effect when they impose too many burdens on developers. As Kavanaugh argues, NEPA has 'transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool' that even stymies clean energy projects ranging 'from wind farms to hydroelectric dams, from solar farms to geothermal wells.' Related A new Supreme Court opinion is terrible news if you care about clean water Broadly speaking, Kavanaugh's opinion imposes two limits on future NEPA lawsuits. The first is simply a blunt statement that courts should be highly reluctant to second-guess an agency's decision that it has conducted an adequate environmental review. As Kavanaugh writes, 'the bedrock principle of judicial review in NEPA cases can be stated in a word: Deference.' Kavanaugh also criticizes the appeals court for blocking one project — the Utah rail line — because of the environmental impacts of 'geographically separate projects that may be built' as a result of that rail line, such as an oil refinery elsewhere in the country. As Kavanaugh writes, 'the effects from a separate project may be factually foreseeable, but that does not mean that those effects are relevant to the agency's decisionmaking process or that it is reasonable to hold the agency responsible for those effects.' Both Kavanaugh and the separate opinion by Justice Sotomayor also point to the fact that 'the Board here possesses no regulatory authority over those separate projects.' That is, while the transportation board is tasked with approving rail lines, other agencies are in charge of regulating projects, such as oil wells or refineries. As Sotomayor writes, an agency is not required to consider environmental harms that it has 'no authority to prevent.' So Seven County is a fairly significant victory for land developers as well as for traditional libertarians and for liberal proponents of an abundance agenda. It significantly weakens a statute that has long been a bête noire of developers.
Vox
3 days ago
- Business
- Vox
What is Google even for anymore?
is a senior technology correspondent at Vox and author of the User Friendly newsletter. He's spent 15 years covering the intersection of technology, culture, and politics at places like The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Vice. Somewhere between asking Google's new advanced AI to explain, in detail, how to become an expert birdwatcher in my neighborhood and using Google's new AI moviemaking tool to create cartoons of my 4-pound Chihuahua fighting crime, I realized something. Either Google is having a midlife crisis or I am. It could be both. User Friendly A weekly dispatch to make sure tech is working for you, instead of overwhelming you. From senior technology correspondent Adam Clark Estes. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. I've spent the past week tinkering with Google's new AI tools, and I can confidently say the company is somewhere between crisis and glory. It may take years before we know which path wins. Google has dominated not only the way we use the web but also the web's very existence for the last 15 years, mainly through its search and advertising divisions. As AI encroaches on every corner of our digital experience, it's not clear which company will dominate the next era or how we'll interact with it. It almost certainly won't be by typing keywords into a search engine. To find something online today, you typically type some keywords into Google, pick a blue link that you think has the information you're after, and click. Companies bid on search terms in order to get their ads in front of people browsing the web, powering Google's multibillion-dollar advertising business. Your click helps publishers, including Vox, make money from ads they host on their sites, many of which Google manages. Google is dominant enough that two federal judges recently ruled that it's operating as an illegal monopoly, and the company is currently waiting to see if it will be broken up. As AI encroaches on every corner of our digital experience, it's not clear which company will dominate the next era or how we'll interact with it. The government might not be the biggest threat to Google dominance, however. AI has been chipping away at the foundation of the web in the past couple of years, as people have increasingly turned to tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to find information online. These AI chatbots pull information from websites and present you with a tidy summary. This has become a real enough threat to Google that the number of Google searches in Safari fell for the first time ever in April. Google also recently saw its share of the search market dip below 90 percent for the first time in a decade, as AI search takes off. TikTok isn't helping either. Google recognized this inevitability a few years ago and has been trying to reinvent itself accordingly. A couple years ago, it rolled out AI Overviews, which are summaries of search results created by Google's large language model, Gemini. Then Google expanded on that concept earlier this year with AI Mode, a chatbot-based search experience also powered by Gemini that looks an awful lot like ChatGPT and Perplexity. The company announced last week that AI Mode will be rolling out to everyone in the United States in the coming weeks — just look for a sparkly button on the righthand side of the search field that says 'AI Mode.' AI Mode is how I've been trying to learn birding for the past week. Instead of plugging keywords into the old Google search box, I've been entering complex queries and getting back detailed reports. From one three-sentence prompt, AI Mode returned nearly 600 words. There were just nine links to sources, none of which I needed to click, since the chatbot had already summarized the content therein. Only by doing a little bit of digging did I realize that one of the main sources for this summary was a beginner's guide to birdwatching written by my Vox colleague Allie Volpe. This search experience, as is the case with other AI chatbots, is not always awesome. The technology is powered by large language models, which are prone to hallucinations, and so these new search tools tend to be unreliable. Then again, because AI tends to write such convincing copy, you're not always compelled to double-check the results. Publishers are seeing huge declines in traffic from Google as more people bypass the web and ask AI chatbots for information. As I learned from my birding research, it's quicker. And let's be honest, not everything you find from clicking a blue link is 100 percent accurate either. This is probably what the future of search looks like, and no, it almost certainly won't involve a list of blue links. It's unnerving for me to admit that I like the new Google. And I expect to see a lot more of it. As part of its blitz of AI announcements, Google also rolled out Gemini in Chrome, which lets the AI assistant see what you're seeing on a website. (It's currently only available for people who subscribe to Google AI Plus or AI Ultra plans or for people running beta versions of Chrome.) You can ask questions about what's on the page or ask Gemini to summarize an article. The tool can even analyze YouTube videos in real time. You can almost think of this as a more targeted version of what the new AI Mode search experience does for the entire web, and it seems useful. This is probably what the future of search looks like, and no, it almost certainly won't involve a list of blue links. While you'll undoubtedly be able to access the traditional search experience for quite some time, the sheer volume of Google's latest announcements suggests that AI everything is where we're headed. Headlines around that news echoed the gravity of it all. Reporting from Google's developer conference, Platformer's Casey Newton said, 'everything is changing and normal and scary and chill.' Tech analyst Ben Thompson declared 'the death of the ad-supported web,' thanks to Google. New York magazine's John Herrman put it more bluntly: 'Google is burying the web alive.' In the chaotic, early days of the web, Google got popular by simplifying the intimidating task of finding things online, as the Washington Post's Geoffrey A. Fowler points out. Its supremacy in this new AI-powered future is far less certain. Maybe another startup will come along and simplify things this time around, so you can have a user-friendly bot explain things to you, book travel for you, and make movies for you. In the meantime, I'll be trying to perfect my AI-generated crime-fighting Chihuahua cartoon, wondering when any of this will start to feel glorious. A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you don't miss the next one!
Vox
4 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
Why the left gets the far right wrong
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. As right-wing populism has surged globally in the past 10 years, the socialist left has advanced a distinctive explanation for its emergence and how to respond. Their theory: President Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders' ascendance is a symptom of Democrats and other center-left parties betraying their working-class base. These parties' embrace of free trade and neoliberal cuts to the welfare state cost them core supporters among low-income and non-college voters. When those policies produced painful job losses and stagnating wages, voters grew furious — anger that only mounted after the 2008 financial crisis and the worldwide rise of the billionaire class. Far-right populists were able to channel that rage into electoral victory by promising to burn the system down. The only way to beat them is to turn sharply to the left — with political parties trying to win back the working class by promising them a bigger and more redistributive state. Some of the left's leading voices have, in short, consistently gotten the right's roots wrong. I think there is a deep reason why: the left's traditional commitment to a doctrine called materialism. On the Right The ideas and trends driving the conservative movement, from senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Materialism is a very old theory of human behavior, most strongly identified with Marx and Engels. In a recent essay defending the idea, NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber locates its core premise as the idea that 'agents are acting on their objective interests — more specifically, their material or economic interests.' These 'material' concerns are not just one set of interests among many, but the primary ones — the most fundamental and basic forces in shaping human decisions. 'If I wish to be a successful artist, I have to first earn a living; in order to pursue my religious ends, I have to keep my body and soul together,' Chibber explains. 'It is not that we don't value anything else. It's that there is no other value that acts as a precondition for satisfying higher-order values.' Chibber is correct to put materialism in this sense at the center of a distinctively socialist analytic, one that profoundly shapes the modern left's approach to politics. This approach has produced brilliant works of analysis and contributed vitally to left-wing social movements in the past. However, that does not mean it is (as Chibber claims) a 'universal' analytic tool or a 'necessary foundation' of left-wing politics. Rather, there are cases where trying to fit a situation into a materialist lens can lead one astray. The rise of the far right is one such case — and the implications of this particular error are profound. The materialist dilemma The typical knock on materialism is that it is 'reductionist.' This means, in brief, that materialism reduces humans to simple consumption machines, ignoring all the other things — like love, religion, or ideology — that really matter to people. This reductionism is, I think, a serious problem for left analysis of the far right. Because so many on the left are wedded to a materialist account of human behavior, they begin with the assumption that far-right voting has to have some ultimate materialist cause. Voters' right-wing beliefs on race or religion must ultimately trace back to a material factor (like rage at factory closures being displaced onto immigrants). There is no room, in this theory, for the possibility that people arrive at beliefs for other reasons. The notion that ideas, values, and religions may have independent causal force — motivating people for their own reasons — is dismissed by some leftists on ideological grounds, even though there's ample evidence it's the case today. Many leftists, Chibber included, protest that this is an unfair critique: an attack on a vulgar strawman rather than a more sophisticated materialist theory. But such sophistication trades greater intellectual coherence for lesser practical utility. Chibber describes material interests less as necessary ultimate causes than as constraints. He admits there are plenty of cases where people care about non-material interests, but argues that people are only likely to pursue such interests when they experience limited physical constraints. 'As long as agents can satisfy their basic needs, it's perfectly consistent with materialism for them to abjure further economic gain in order to pursue different ends,' Chibber explains. 'But there will be limits to how far they are willing to go, and this is not just the limit of physical viability. Long before viability comes into question, simple physical hardship is often enough to incline social actors to return to the mundane reality of their material interests.' Such a concession fundamentally weakens materialism's ability to serve as a guide to understanding modern politics. It shifts the location of analysis away from 'objective' material interests to people's perceptions of those interests — whether they actually believe that their physical security is at stake in any given election, and whether they're right about those perceptions. These beliefs could all be influenced by non-material factors: A partisan Republican, for example, is more likely to have a favorable view of a GOP tax bill than a Democrat in a similar tax bracket. Any materialist theory of voting is caught in a dilemma. Either it advances a distinctive, yet wrong, reductionism, or else it is a theory broad enough to provide little distinctive insight. The left's errors when it comes to the far right generally stem from choosing the former over the latter. How the materialist dilemma looks in practice To understand how the materialist dilemma can hamper understanding of the far right, it's helpful to look at a particular case — Chibber's analysis of the declining relevance of class in democratic politics. Voting across advanced democracies is increasingly less connected to class. More wealthy citizens are voting to raise their own taxes, while certain segments of the poor and working class vote for right-wing parties willing to cut benefits they depend on. Surely this would be an instance of ideological or identity factors trumping material self-interest? Chibber's broad materialism allows for such a move. He could simply say that the rise of the welfare state has created a floor of material comfort for everyone, meaning that there is not enough 'physical hardship' at stake for voters to prioritize economic concerns over ideological ones. But to do so would be to betray his own purpose in writing. Chibber's central argument is that materialism remains the best lens to understand modern politics and guide left-wing movements going forward. If he concedes that voting behavior is no longer driven primarily by material concerns, then that claim is fatally undermined. So he goes a more reductionist route — positing that 'rather than an example of workers acting against their interests, [voting for right-wing parties] is an example of workers trying to pursue them.' Chibber argues, reasonably, that it is very hard for voters to accurately assess the likely consequences of policy actions. They have to rely on trusted sources, most notably the media and political leaders, to make such judgments. And Chibber's view is that these sources have simply misled the working class for their own (nefarious) material reasons: If it turns out that the experts on whom I rely are media outlets, political leaders, and community leaders that have interests of their own and benefit from misleading me, then it is very likely that, even though I am acting rationally and trying to defend my interests, I might end up giving my vote to somebody who promulgates policies that are suboptimal or even harmful to me. And in the United States, media and political parties are thoroughly captured by economic elites. The information they provide to citizens is overwhelmingly partisan, even though it is presented in a language designed to appear neutral and concerned. It should be no surprise that people end up voting for parties that do not cater to their interests when the information they receive is systematically biased. This is preposterous. In the United States, mainstream media and cultural figures were overwhelmingly hostile to Donald Trump all three times that he ran for president. They provided no end of information about how his policy proposals would harm the working class, and how his opponents' ideas would benefit them. He won two out of three times anyway, with an increasing percentage of votes among lower-income and non-college voters. A more sophisticated version of the argument might blame Fox News and other right-wing outlets specifically for deceiving these voters. But why do people trust Fox more than mainstream outlets with more objective descriptions of policy? To explain that, we need to rely on factors — most notably partisan and cultural identities — so far afield from anything reasonably termed 'materialist' that we are no longer operating in Chibber's universe. And when you look beyond the United States, to other countries experiencing similar rises in support for far-right parties, the story makes even less sense. No one could seriously claim that the media and cultural landscape across the European Union is systematically biased in favor of far-right parties. In theory, then, Chibber's materialism is broad enough to avoid the charge of reductionism. But in practice, his efforts to apply materialism as a theory of voting behavior falls into a reductionist trap. Beyond materialism This is not to deny that voters care about material concerns. It's obvious that inflation was a central reason for Trump's 2024 victory (inflation that was, in part, caused by Biden's post-neoliberal policies). But the issue here is not whether material factors are in any way relevant to modern politics. Individual elections can turn on all sorts of specific factors, ranging from scandals to wars to elderly candidates. What we're discussing here is more fundamental. It is the question of why the party system in so many countries has changed, with far-right factions consistently commanding enough support that they are now a viable option for swing voters. This was not the case for most of the post-World War II era; it clearly is now. What changed? The left continues to favor various poorly evidenced explanations for this, like a revolt against neoliberalism, because it still wants to insist on a distinctively materialist theory of politics. If you believe that, at bottom, the roots of political behavior can ultimately trace back to material interests — that ideas and identities are secondary causal factors — you will always end up looking for material explanations. Doing so causes many on the left to dismiss what is, to my mind, the best explanation of the far right's rise — one that focuses on a change to the ideological structure of global politics. Across the world, an egalitarian vision of democracy and social order has beaten its competitors — leading to the decline of formal hierarchies along racial, gender, ethnic, religious, and caste lines. This manifested in concrete social changes, like the entry of women into the workforce or the end of racially discriminatory immigration regimes, that profoundly unsettled certain traditionally-minded segments of the global population. Far-right parties became their champions. This is a fundamentally postmaterial account of far-right politics. It argues that the right wins not by channeling people's displaced economic anger, but by articulating ideas that match their deeply held beliefs, values, and identities. They did not arrive at said beliefs because of their place in the class structure or assessment of self-interest, but rather because ideas and identity are social facts in their own right. When people go to church or talk to their parents about culture, they listen. And that defines who they are as human beings every bit as much as their role as economic producers, especially in a world where the average voter in a wealthy democracy is orders of magnitude more materially secure than the workers of Marx's day. Adopting a postmaterial analytic framework does not require abandoning left-wing politics. You can see voters as driven on ideas without abandoning normative commitments to improving the lot of workers, to bolstering the too-weak welfare state, or even to seeing the existence of billionaires as a crime against democracy and human decency. In fact, I'd argue, doing so is essential for the left to succeed. As long as the left insists on materialism as its most fundamental theory of politics, not just one possible account of human behavior but always the primary one, it will continue to misunderstand the sources of its far-right enemy's power. It will continue proposing the same old slogans, regardless of their political efficacy, because to do otherwise would be to admit that materialism is in some important political sense no longer true.
Vox
4 days ago
- Business
- Vox
The US is squandering its two most important privileges
is an editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate, tech, and world teams, and is the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. In 1965, then-French finance minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing came up with the mot juste for describing the way that the supremacy of the dollar provided the foundation for the financial supremacy of the US. The fact the dollar was so dominant in international transactions gave the US, d'Estaing said, an 'exorbitant privilege.' Because every country needed dollars to settle trade and backstop their own currencies, foreign countries had to buy up US debt, which in turn meant that the US paid less to borrow money and was able to run up trade and budget deficits without suffering the usual pain. The exorbitant privilege of the dollar was that the US would be able to live beyond its means. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. It's always been an open question as to how long that privilege would last, but President Donald Trump's harsh tariff policies, paired with a budget bill that right now would add trillions to the budget deficit, might just be enough to finally dislodge the dollar. Annual federal deficits are already running at 6 percent of GDP, while interest rates on 10-year US Treasuries have more than doubled to around 4.5 percent over the past few years, increasing the cost of interest payments on the debt. As of the last quarter of 2024, 58 percent of global reserves were in dollars, down from 71 percent in the first quarter of 1999. The dollar may remain king, if only because there seems to be no real alternative, but thanks to the US's own actions, the exorbitance of its privilege is already eroding — and with it, America's ability to compensate for its fiscal fecklessness. Related Trump figured out how to hit Harvard where it really hurts But the dollar isn't the only privilege the US enjoys. Since the postwar era, America's best universities have led the world. Harvard, Princeton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CalTech — these elite universities are the foundation of the American scientific supremacy that has in turn fueled decades of economic growth. But also, by virtue of their unparalleled ability to attract the best minds from around the world, these schools have given the US the educational privilege of being the magnet of global academic excellence. In the same way that the dollar's dominance has allowed the US to live beyond its means, the dominance of elite universities has compensated for the fact that the US has, at best, a mediocre K–12 educational system. And now that privilege is under attack by the Trump administration. Cutting off federal funding for universities like Columbia and Princeton and eviscerating agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation were bad enough — but the administration's recent move to bar international students from Harvard would be a death blow, especially if it spread to other top schools. The ability to attract the best of the best, especially in the sciences, is what makes Harvard Harvard, which in turn has helped make the United States the United States. Just as losing the privilege of the dollar would force the US to finally pay for years of fiscal mismanagement, losing the privilege of these top universities would force the country to pay for decades of educational failure. American science runs on foreign talent As Vox contributor Kevin Carey wrote this week, foreign students are a major source of financial support for US colleges and universities, many of which would struggle to survive should those students disappear. But the financial picture actually understates just how much US science depends on foreign talent and, in turn, depends on top universities like Harvard to bring in top students and professors. An astounding 70 percent of grad students in the US in electrical engineering and 63 percent in computer science — probably the two disciplines most important to winning the future — are foreign-born. Nineteen percent of the overall STEM workforce in the US is foreign-born; focus just on the PhD-level workforce, and that number rises to 43 percent. Since 1901, just about half of all physics, chemistry, and medicine Nobel Prizes have gone to Americans, and about a third of those winners were foreign-born, a figure that has risen in recent decades. It's really not too much to suggest that if all foreign scientists and science students were deported tomorrow, US science would grind to a halt. Could American-born students step into that gap? Absolutely not. That's because as elite as America's top universities are, the country's K–12 education system has been anything but. Every three years, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is given to a representative sample of 15-year-old students in over 80 countries. It's the best existing test for determining how a country's students compare in mathematics, reading, and science to their international peers. In the most recent PISA tests, taken in 2022, US students scored below the average for OECD or developed countries in math; on reading and science, they were just slightly above average. And while a lot of attention has been rightly paid to learning loss since the pandemic — one report from fall 2024 estimated that the average US student is less than halfway to a full academic recovery — American students have lagged behind their international peers since long before then. Other wealthy nations, from East Asian countries to some small European ones, regularly outpace American peers in math by the equivalent of one full academic year. To be clear, this picture isn't totally catastrophic. It's fine — American students perform around the middle compared to their international peers. But just fine won't make you the world's undisputed scientific leader. And fine is a long way from what the US once was. America was a pioneer in universal education, and it did the same in college education through the postwar GI Bill, which opened up college education to the masses. By 1950, 34 percent of US adults aged 25 or older had completed high school or more, compared to 14 percent in the UK and 11 percent in France. When NASA engineers were putting people on the moon in the 1960s, the US had perhaps the world's most educated workforce to draw from. Since then, much of the rest of the world has long since caught up with the US on educational attainment, and a number of countries have surpassed it. But thanks in large part to the privilege that is elite universities like Harvard or the University of California, and their ability to recruit the best, no country has caught up to the US in sheer scientific brainpower. Take away our foreign talent, however, and US science would look more like its K–12 performance — merely fine. Life after Harvard It seems increasingly apparent that the Trump administration wants to make an example of Harvard, proving its own dominance by breaking a 388-year-old institution with strong ties to American power and influence. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the administration planned to cancel all remaining federal contracts with Harvard, while Trump himself mused on redirecting Harvard's $3 billion in grants to trade schools. Grants and contracts are vital, but they can be restored, just as faith in the US dollar might be restored by a saner trade policy and a tighter budget. But if the Trump administration chooses to make the US fundamentally hostile to foreign students and scientific talent, there may be no coming back. Politico reported this week that the administration is weighing requiring all foreign students applying to study in the US to undergo social media vetting. With universities around the world now competing to make themselves alternatives to the US, what star student from Japan or South Korea or Finland would choose to put their future in the hands of the Trump administration, when they could go anywhere else they wanted? The US once achieved scientific leadership because it educated its own citizens better and longer than any other country. Those days are long past, but the US managed to keep its pole position, and all that came with it, because it supported and funded what were far and away the best universities in the world. That was our privilege, as much as the dollar was. And now we seem prepared to destroy both. Should that come to pass, we'll see just how little is left. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
