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Fast Company
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
5 excellent free podcast apps for iOS and Android
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you've been on the internet before. If so, you've likely stumbled upon a podcast or two. There are almost 5 million of them out there, after all. The problem isn't finding a podcast, though—it's finding the best way to listen in. While Apple and Spotify have made a big push into the space, and their apps are perfectly serviceable, they're not always the best fit for power users or people who just want a clean, no-nonsense experience. The good news? There are other options, and you don't have to pay a dime to access them. Here are five fantastic, and completely free, podcast apps for iOS and Android. Pocket Casts: Cross-platform king If you ask a podcast aficionado for a recommendation, there's a good chance they'll say Pocket Casts. And for good reason. It's got a clean, intuitive interface that makes managing your subscriptions a breeze. The free version offers all the essentials you need, including variable speed controls, silence trimming, and a volume-boost feature to level out inconsistent audio. Better yet, it syncs your listening progress across iOS, Android, and the web, which is a big deal if you like to jump between your phone and your computer. There is also a premium version, Pocket Casts Plus, which costs $40 per year. With it, you get some power-user features like folders to organize your shows, a shuffle feature for your 'Up Next' queue, bookmarks, access to a variety of themes and app icons, and some cloud storage for your own audio files. Overcast: iOS app makes podcasts sound better If you're looking for something that's equal parts simple and fully featured, Overcast is a must-try. Developed by Marco Arment, this iOS app includes features such as 'Smart Speed,' which shortens silences dynamically without distorting the audio, and 'Voice Boost,' which normalizes and enhances volume across all your shows. The free version has some light, unobtrusive ads, but if you want to get rid of the ads and support the developer, a premium subscription costs just $15 per year. With that subscription, you also get the ability to upload audio files to your own private feed. Podcast Addict: Android powerhouse For Android users, Podcast Addict is an absolute beast. It's a feature-rich, highly customizable app that gives you an almost overwhelming amount of control over your listening experience. You can manage podcasts, audiobooks, live radio, YouTube channels, and RSS news feeds all in one place. While its interface can be a bit busy, it's a great choice if you're a tinkerer who likes to fine-tune every detail. For the sheer number of features you get for free, it's tough to beat. The premium version, which removes all ads, starts at 99 cents per month and grants you access to some extra customization options like different app themes, a custom opening screen, and a playlist widget. Castbox: Smart recommendations If you're looking for your next podcast obsession, Castbox is a great place to start. Its AI -powered recommendation engine does a surprisingly good job of serving up new shows based on your listening history. It's a solid, all-around player with a large library, and it also includes some nifty features like in-audio search, which lets you find specific keywords within an episode. It's available on both iOS and Android and provides a smooth, modern experience. Castbox Premium starts at 99 cents per month and gets rid of all the visual ads and video ads that play when you launch the app. It also gives you unlimited subscriptions (the free version limits you to 100 channels), a personalized homepage, and advanced playback settings that can be customized for each individual podcast. AntennaPod: Android's minimalist, open-source choice If you're looking for a no-frills, ad-free experience, AntennaPod is a fantastic option for Android users. It's a lightweight app with a clean interface that focuses on the core task of listening to podcasts. There aren't a ton of fancy discovery tools, but if you already know what you want to listen to and just need a simple, reliable way to manage and play your episodes, AntennaPod gets the job done. AntennaPod is unique on this list because it's a completely free and open-source project, which means it doesn't have a paid version or any in-app purchases. The early-rate deadline for Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Awards is Friday, September 5, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
Time Business News
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Business News
The Ultimate Guide to the Funniest Podcasts That Will Leave You Laughing Out Loud
Podcasts have become a huge part of modern entertainment, and funny podcasts are leading the way in popularity. Whether you're driving, doing chores, or just need a mental break, a good comedy podcast can transform your mood instantly. With thousands of options out there, it can be overwhelming to choose the right one. That's why we've created this ultimate guide to help you find the best funny podcasts that promise uncontrollable laughter, quirky commentary, and hilarious storytelling. In this guide, we'll explore what makes a podcast truly funny, share top recommendations across various categories, and even help you discover hidden gems that haven't hit the mainstream yet. Get ready to subscribe, laugh, and repeat! Before we dive into the list, let's define what makes a podcast actually funny. After all, humor is subjective. A funny podcast usually combines several of the following: Witty banter between hosts between hosts Relatable topics delivered with a humorous twist delivered with a humorous twist Improvisational comedy or stand-up elements or stand-up elements Surprising guests and offbeat interviews and offbeat interviews Ridiculous scenarios , games, or segments , games, or segments Strong storytelling with comedic timing The magic lies in the host's ability to create an atmosphere that feels both casual and wildly entertaining. Whether scripted or spontaneous, a great comedy podcast doesn't just tell jokes—it invites you into its weird, wonderful world. Podcasts have exploded in popularity over the last decade, with comedy consistently ranking among the most downloaded genres. This is no accident—comedy podcasts are: Easy to digest Portable and binge-worthy A perfect remedy for stress and boredom Streaming services and podcast apps like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Pocket Casts now offer personalized recommendations, but sometimes the best gems are buried under the algorithm. That's where this guide steps in. Let's kick things off with the crème de la crème —the shows with massive followings and consistent laugh-out-loud moments. Conan O'Brien blends celebrity interviews with self-deprecating humor, making this podcast a must-listen. His awkward charm, quick wit, and authentic conversations with A-listers make it laughably endearing. Hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett, this podcast features unexpected guests and unscripted chaos. The chemistry between the hosts is electric, and the laughs are non-stop. Looking for light-hearted chuckles while doing the dishes or walking your dog? These daily or short-form podcasts are perfect for micro-doses of joy. Trevor Noah's team delivers punchy political satire and comedy gold from their nightly show, in bite-sized podcast form. Australian YouTubers talk nonsense, tell wild stories, and prank each other endlessly. It's like hanging out with your most unfiltered friends. Long drive ahead? These episodic podcasts are perfect companions when you need something funny, yet engaging enough to stay awake on the road. Quirky facts mixed with British humor? Yes, please. Hosted by researchers behind the BBC show QI, this podcast is both educational and hysterical. Comedians interview guests about their dream meals—sounds simple, but their over-the-top reactions and surreal tangents take this show to another level of funny. Let's dig deeper into less mainstream comedy podcasts that deserve a place in your feed. Dramatic readings of real, one-star reviews. The deadpan delivery and absurdity of the reviews make this podcast a comedy goldmine. Comedian Connor Ratliff investigates why Tom Hanks allegedly fired him from a small acting role. The mystery is real, but the humor is rich and quirky. An American history podcast where one host reads a bizarre true story while the other reacts in real-time—sometimes shocked, always laughing. Comedy is not just a boys' club. These female-led podcasts prove that women are absolutely killing it in the humor department. Nicole's no-filter approach to dating and relationships is honest, hilarious, and heartwarming all at once. Chelsea Peretti's surreal humor and awkward energy create a unique, hilarious podcast experience. Improvised comedy takes serious talent—and these podcasts are bursting with it. An improv podcast set in a fantasy realm. Think Lord of the Rings , but with more fart jokes and wizard puns. A sci-fi improv series that's equal parts Star Wars parody and space sitcom. You don't need to be a nerd to appreciate the laugh-out-loud moments. If you're looking for something to enjoy with someone else , these podcasts have wide appeal and spark lots of shared laughter. Comedians bring their partners on the show for surprisingly sweet and funny relationship talk. Jake and Amir from CollegeHumor give hilarious (and terrible) advice to listener-submitted questions. Who says you can't laugh and learn at the same time? John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman's satirical news podcast blends sharp analysis with British humor. This show debunks health and wellness myths—with brutal honesty and biting humor. Most of the podcasts mentioned can be found on major platforms like: Spotify Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Pocket Casts Stitcher YouTube (for video versions or clips) To get the best experience: Use headphones to catch every giggle. to catch every giggle. Download episodes in advance for offline laughs. in advance for offline laughs. Create playlists of your favorites for road trips or workouts. In a world full of stress, deadlines, and doomscrolling, funny podcasts offer a refreshing escape. They're more than just background noise—they're therapy for your funny bone. Whether you're into absurd improv, sarcastic banter, or honest confessions turned comedic, there's a podcast out there waiting to become your next favorite. So plug in, press play, and prepare to laugh until you cry. And remember: the best funny podcast is the one that makes you smile, again and again. Which of these made you laugh the hardest? Or do you have a hidden gem we missed? Let us know and keep the laughs going! TIME BUSINESS NEWS
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Elon Musk's Luck Runs Out
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts For a while, it seemed as if DOGE Elon and Tesla Elon could exist in the same space-time continuum. One of them carried out Donald Trump's ruthless cost-cutting mission while the other pitched cars that appealed most to people who were highly likely to oppose that mission, or even rage against it. As activists spray-painted STOP DOGE on Teslas at dealerships and anti-Tesla protests spread all over the world, there still was no concrete proof that Elon Musk had to amend either version of himself. Then this week came Tesla's first quarterly earnings report since Musk started his work with DOGE, showing the company's profits down 71 percent from the same time last year. After a conference call, one major investor said Musk was 'delusional.' Suddenly it seemed as if Musk was on a 'Kanye West–like trajectory,' according to Patrick George, editor in chief of InsideEVs and our guest this week on Radio Atlantic. George has been covering Tesla since the 2010s. He's watched Musk shoot himself in the foot in the lead-up to this moment, so he is well placed to understand why Musk didn't see this coming. In this week's episode, the Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel interviews George about how Musk found himself in this clip: Growing backlash against Elon Musk and his new role in President Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE— News clip: Protestors taking out their anger on the Tesla car and owners were busy all over the country— News clip: Tesla, the car company Musk founded and runs, has seen its stock price fall dramatically, as you can see from this chart— Hanna Rosin: The moment of reckoning for Tesla's founder has arrived. The company's earnings report showed that profits dropped 71 percent since this time last year. On a call with investors this week, Musk announced that he would spend a day or two per week on his Washington business but that he would mostly turn his attention back to the struggling company. As Patrick George, the editor in chief of InsideEVs, wrote in The Atlantic this week: Luck runs out. Patrick George: I think he thought he would come in and gut the federal government and be seen as this great crusader and that everything would've worked out great just the way it always has. He's had all this success before, right? But now, like, people are, you know—they're running away from this company, and that might be the greatest failure of all here. [] Rosin: I'm Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. My colleague Charlie Warzel interviewed Patrick George recently about the tumultuous journey Tesla's been on, from darling of the environmentally conscious to target of tire slashing. And the two of them land on Musk's blind spot, which caused him to miss this coming crash. Charlie Warzel: Patrick George, welcome to Radio Atlantic. Thank you for joining me. George: Great to be here, Charlie. Thanks for having me. Rosin: Their conversation explains so well how we got to this moment. George: Covering Tesla in the 2010s, the kind of hate mail we would get from people whenever we'd criticize the company or put something negative in one of the reviews of the Tesla, whatever—there were so many people back then who were such true believers in what he was doing, I mean, thinking that he's saving the world. And I'm kind of sad for those folks now who really believed in this environmental mission of the company. Those are the ones who are dumping their Teslas. Those are the ones who feel abandoned right now, who feel betrayed by this guy they once believed in who has very much gone to what they perceive as the dark side. Warzel: What has been going through your head over the last few months as we're watching, you know, Musk take this role in the government and have this interplay between his polarization and the stock? George: You know, every now and then, I have to step back when I read a sentence in the news or I even write a sentence on InsideEVs or for The Atlantic—you know, something like, President Trump holds a White House 'summit' full of Teslas, you know, amid widespread protests against Elon Musk, his chief advisor and government cost cutter, that are happening all over the world, including vandalism. And I just stepped back, and I'm like, How did we get here? Like, is someone putting LSD in my coffee every morning? Like, this is just such a baffling, bizarre outcome from the way that Tesla's trajectory has worked for the longest time and where it's at now. You know, for lack of a better term, it's kind of insane, honestly. When I started covering Tesla, and I was a young writer at Jalopnik—I started at the end of 2012. And one of the first things I did was my then–editor in chief, Matt Hardigree, and I—we interviewed Elon Musk from the Tesla factory floor when they were trying to get the Model S up and running. You know, the first car was the Roadster. And that was kind of a science project, honestly. It was a Lotus Elise stuffed with laptop batteries, more or less. And the Model S was their first real car. And they were trying to get it ramped up. And we talked to him, on the factory floor. And I remember, you know, him being at the time very tired but, you know, charming, smart, but also self-deprecating. We were doing stories on those early Model S's is having all kinds of quality problems. And he was going, Yeah, we're working on it, but we're doing this Herculean effort to get it up and running. And, you know, I still think the Model S—the original one—is the most important car of the 21st century, because that was what proved the case of electric vehicles for the whole world. Because they were golf carts before that. They were, you know, the Nissan Leaf Codas, things like that. And it became this It Car in Hollywood. You probably remember this. Everybody—all the celebrities were trading in their Prius for the Model S. And it was fast, and it was sexy. I mean, it could smoke a Porsche 911 in a drag race. Like, a Prius couldn't do that. And over time, we covered this guy and his company. It's like, Hey! Here's this quirky guy who's kind of breaking all the rules, and he's doing some cool stuff, and he's also clearly an asshole too. And he's insane about some things. But what they're coming up with is this really interesting alternative to gas. And I can just say personally, you know, by the end of the last decade, I kind of realized that this is the future. This isn't just a niche alternative to gasoline. It's the future. And that wouldn't have happened without Tesla. But there are so many shades along the way of what happened with him that kind of inform where we're at now, just the way that he treated the press, the way that he treated open access to his company, the way that he treated his own public image, the sort of vindictiveness against his enemies. He can be very vain, certainly. He's very obsessed with his own public image, you know, very vindictive—obviously, calling that cave diver the 'pedo guy' or getting in a huge amount of trouble for saying he had the funds to take Tesla private. He had this Kanye West–like trajectory. It's like, This guy's brilliant, but he's also horrible. And over time, the horrible part of him sort of overtakes that. But, you know, this amount of wealth that he amassed came with this tremendous amount of power. And I think he has gotten really into his own myth and own legend about exercising that power in unprecedented ways. Warzel: So I've always been fascinated with the correlation between Tesla's stock price and Musk as a persona. There's an analyst at Moody's who said, quote, 'I do think fundamentally that a significant fraction of Tesla's value is due to the fact that Elon can command this attention continuously,' which sort of suggested to me that Musk is almost like a human meme stock. So I'm kind of curious: How much do you think Tesla's value is just tied to this future projection of Elon Musk as this guy who's going to, you know, either have that Edison-esque ability to innovate beyond any constraints or just that, you know, he can kind of brute force his way into making the future bend to his will? George: I think that the value of the company, the image of the company, is extremely driven by him and by his involvement in it. Another analyst we talk to a lot who's one of the most bullish of all Tesla bulls, Dan Ives at Wedbush, you know, he says repeatedly, Elon is the heart and lungs of the Tesla story. And he said that Elon is Tesla and Tesla is Elon. The idea is that he has had so much success and he's generated so much value for the company before that surely he'll do it again, and he'll keep doing it, and he's the key driver of that. I'm not sure there is a company in modern times that is so intrinsically linked to one person. Probably the closest analog was Apple and Steve Jobs. I mean, this has also led to kind of lack of accountability with Musk, too, because I think that at any other company, certainly any company in the auto industry that we would cover, if you've seen the value of the company get so tanked this hard over a number of months, that person, that CEO would've been shown the door by now. But there is this belief that Musk is uniquely the one person who will deliver the future. And that's something he's built up himself. Certainly, that's a myth he's built up himself. I go back to the early days of Tesla, right? The really early days, like, in the 2000s, there was a New York Times article about Tesla Motors and what they were doing. And Musk—before he was CEO, he was just, like, an angel investor and heavily involved in the company—was furious because it didn't mention him at all. So he always wanted his image to be wrapped up in that. Long before he owned Twitter, he was one of the central figures on Twitter and really used Twitter to get around traditional media and get around press releases and events and things like that to reach that audience directly and build up a following directly. And you said the phrase meme stock earlier. We hear that quite a bit now, and it's like, okay, admitting that Musk is damaging the company or wanting him out, that will collapse a lot of that value. So, like, there is an incentive to sort of keep this vibe—I almost want to say grift—going, so it keeps, you know, printing money as it has before. Warzel: I think this protest movement is extremely fascinating. I was in the Bay Area recently, and I was blown away. The person I was visiting used to own a Tesla, and they said— George: Used to? Warzel: Yeah. And, well, this was a while back. But they said that the person they sold it to, a friend, had it keyed the other day. Even just on a very small scale, if it's not a protest, there seems to be lots of acts of, like, casual vandalism and things like that. And then, as recently as March, I think there was a protest at nearly every Tesla dealership in the United States. So the movement seems to be somewhat durable. And yet I think the very initial parts of this protest we watched coincide with a pretty substantial drop in the stock, so much so that you have Elon Musk and Donald Trump basically doing a Tesla infomercial on the White House South Lawn, right? Teslas and EVs have always had a political valence, but does Tesla have a clear idea of what its brand is now? Because I don't know if it's going to sort of reclaim that green, progressive halo anytime in the near future. George: I actually do think that the backlash against Tesla is the biggest crisis it's ever faced, bigger than when it was a tiny start-up trying to get its first real car out in '08, when the world was crashing—bigger than when COVID happened, and it had to shut down its factories. I think this is the biggest crisis it has ever faced as a company. And you said at the beginning of our chat, Charlie, the word polarizing, right? And Tesla's interesting because it's always been a polarizing brand. Like, when it was embraced by liberals and Californians and the Hollywood crowd, you know, like, the rest of America was like, Hey, you have a Tesla. You're so smug. You know, you're saving the world, huh? And now it's kind of flipped on its head, right? Now you have all of these folks in California who are trying—and kind of everywhere, they're trying—to get rid of their Teslas, like Democratic-leaning, progressive-leaning, even center-leaning people who are done with the brand because of Elon, because of DOGE. Meanwhile, you have Fox News defending him left and right, saying that he's an American hero who must be protected at all costs. And you know, Pam Bondi saying she's going to stick up for him. I mean, what a bizarre reversal this is. And at the same time, there is no evidence we have seen that buyers in red states, more conservative-leaning folks, are going to be flocking the Teslas en masse. Like, I don't want to stereotype here, but there are many, many studies and data points that we've reported on over the years that show that conservative-leaning voters are more skeptical of electric vehicles than liberal-leaning folks are. And that's a climate-change thing. And it's also just, like, how they've been trained to view EVs over the years, you know? So it's like, Are you for EVs or not? You want Elon to succeed, but you're not going to buy his car. You know, like, I have family in deep-red Texas, and, you know, when we were down there recently, everyone was saying, Elon's the best. He's great. He's, you know, cutting government waste. It's like, Okay, well, would you buy one of his cars? Absolutely not. No. It's like, that is a problem—that is a problem with them being able to sell cars. And my personal theory is: The ultimate test of this is going to be the new Model Y, which just came out. And, you know, for those of you who don't know, and I bet there's a good amount of people listening to this who probably own a Model Y, this is the best-selling EV in the world. By some metrics, that's the best-selling car in the world. There's a new one out. It looks a little different. The specs are better. It has more range. They fixed the interior up. It's nicer. All things equal, this should be the best-selling car in the world again. This should pull a repeat. And if this thing doesn't sell, if it has lousy—you know, it just went on sale now, so we're not going to know in the first quarter, but if a Q2, Q3, Q4 rolls around and this thing is sitting on dealer lots unsold, that is an existential problem for Tesla. That's a disaster moment for them. I think that would be the ultimate proof that they have totally alienated any potential buyers or fans that they might have once had. Warzel: But at the same time, we just talked in this conversation about Musk's, you know, ability to buoy the company and the stock. Do you think that is under threat, essentially? George: Yeah. And that's where the disconnect is, right? Is because the stock price at Tesla is all predicated on future stuff. It's solving autonomous driving. It's robotaxis. It's artificial intelligence, which Musk has gotten really into in recent years. It's predicated on robots too. Like, they see the future as automation. It's not car sales. It's not duking it out with Nissan and Volkswagen over market share. Like, he doesn't think that's going to propel the company to its, you know, trillion-dollar value and take him to the stars and help him start his Mars colony someday if he's just, you know, selling cars. When we're talking about why its value is so high, it's not just because Elon is great. It's because for the last decade, Elon Musk has been personally promising that self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles, robotaxis are, you know, about a year away—something he's been saying since 2016, about. You know, that is the value of the company. That's where all that money is wrapped up. It's the idea that this company specifically will solve self-driving cars. Never mind the fact that, you know, Google's Waymo has years more experience—you know, many, many, many miles more experience. Warzel: Yeah, they're on the roads. George: They're on the roads. Yeah. You could go to—what?—half a dozen cities in America and use a Waymo. So they're years ahead of Tesla at actually getting a quote-unquote 'robotaxi' service on the road. But there's still that belief, with all they've invested, that they'll be the ones to deliver autonomous cars one day. That's the 'valuation of Tesla' part of it. But it's still a car company. Its revenue still comes from being a car company. Its revenue still comes from other car companies buying regulatory credits—meaning, you know, they pollute so much so they buy credits from Tesla to offset their polluting. That's a huge source of their revenue. So he may have these grand dreams of robots and space and AI and everything else, but right now, it does need to sell cars. It does need to move metal. And if it can't do that and the revenue tanks, you know, you can forget AI and robotaxis. And the other thing I think about, too, is supposedly they're going to be launching their robotaxi service in Austin this summer. Okay. Right. Well, if he's made this brand so caustic and so controversial, who's going to want to use that service? I mean, is it really going to be some widespread thing like Uber, or are people going to go out of their way to avoid it? And I think that latter outcome is a very real possibility here. [] Warzel: When we're back, I ask Patrick George to explain why Tesla's crisis may be existential for reasons beyond Elon Musk. [] Warzel: So putting aside Musk just a moment here: The protests we've mentioned have been noticeable. I'm curious: What are the non-Musk-related threats to Tesla, right? We have Tesla having this real, genuine, first-mover advantage, especially in the United States. But it's not alone anymore. You've got Rivian. You've got Polestar. You've got, you know, a series of EV competitors. Taking the Musk and Trump out of it, what does the company have to worry about right now? George: Yeah, let's start with competition, right? Because it's not just the start-ups you mentioned. It's that Tesla sparked this industry-wide shift towards electrification. And when we say electrification, that means more hybrids and eventually a move to an all-EV market. And this started in kind of the middle-end of the last decade, when all of these traditional automakers started chasing Tesla's value. Like, when you're Ford or you're Toyota, you're looking at Tesla like, Why the hell are they valued so much more than we are? Like, we need to be like Tesla. We need to become tech companies. We need to electrify. And it took them years to do it. And, I mean, let's be honest. Like, not all of them are pulling this off, this transformation from being traditional carmakers to being, you know, makers of software and battery-powered vehicles. Like, this is all we write about at InsideEVs. It's just the struggles to do that. But they're getting there. And some of them are now surpassing Tesla in many ways. Like, you can buy a Hyundai or a Kia with more range than a Tesla has, and faster charging. There's stuff Volvo's coming out with that has, you know, 400-plus miles of range. There's better performance from cars like Audi now that are electric also. So Tesla started this, but they haven't been able to keep up, and that's been a huge criticism of this company for a long time, is they haven't kept their product lineup fresh, as every company should. Like, there was the Cybertruck and then one update to the Model 3 sedan. Beyond that, there hasn't really been a lot. And meanwhile, you have other companies coming out with, like, three-row SUVs and more crossovers and just more different options in the EV space. And that's just in the West. The other problem is that once they set up shop in China, which Tesla's Shanghai factory is what has provided them with stable long-term profits since the early part of this decade. But it also got the entire Chinese auto industry—took that baton and ran with it. And, I mean, you know, we see all the time—like, you probably heard the news last few weeks: The Chinese automaker BYD has a new technology for five-minute EV fast charging. Like, nothing in America comes close to that, and we probably won't for a decade or more. So with its incredible industrial might, like, China is racing way ahead of Tesla, and Tesla's kind of a stale brand there. So between the protests in America and Europe that are tanking sales, and the fact that Chinese buyers are moving on to other brands, like, I think the picture doesn't look great for this company. Warzel: A big thing that I have seen as sort of an EV dilettante is the notion of, you know, especially in America, Tesla's charging network, and that infrastructural portion being really important to the company. The idea of the BYD extremely fast chargers, like, are those, in your mind, existential threats to Tesla? George: Not any one thing, but put it all together, and yes. And remember what we said about how so much of Tesla's value is locked up in solving autonomous cars? Well, BYD also has—they call it God's Eye, an autonomous-driving system that they're putting on, like, Toyota Corolla–priced vehicles in China. So, like, I can't attest this myself. It's obviously hard for us to test Chinese cars as extensively as we would here. But, like, this company claims to have done something Tesla's promised for a long time, but a hell of a lot cheaper. Then you have faster charging. Then you have the fact that, you know, China's full of—what?—two dozen Tesla-esque companies that are racing ahead. All these little things adding up, like, it's like a dam bursting almost—that just all these things that this company pioneered, it can't keep up with at scale. Tariffs and geopolitical tensions keep BYD and the other Chinese car companies out of our market for now. I personally tend to think that's a temporary thing, at best, and that capitalism, even China's version of it, tends to find a way. But, you know, once that happens and one of these automakers is able to sell in this country or even build cars in Ohio or Michigan or Tennessee or whatever, and you know, the Americans can get a taste of something that far surpasses a Tesla for much cheaper, I think that's going to be a real headache for that company. Warzel: Well, and as you're saying all this, what's running through my mind is this, like, complex threat matrix. You know, like, everyone's sort of encircling Tesla in this way. And meanwhile, Elon Musk—who I said I was going to keep out of it for a second, but I have to bring him back in— it seems from the outside, was not paying any attention to any of this. George: Certainly busy, but he's also remarkably tactical. I don't believe, based on everything I've heard and read and interviewed, and associates I've talked to about the guy—like, he does think many moves ahead. And I think part of the reason that Tesla's stock price shot up after the election was this belief that by working with Trump, Elon can sort of carve out a regulatory framework, get rid of regulations in America that limit the deployment of autonomous cars—like, essentially that by working with Trump, they could, you know, deploy autonomous cars and robotaxis more quickly nationally and in a way that's favorable to Tesla. Because right now, the regulations governing autonomous cars are state by state. It's municipality by municipality. It's very patchwork. But if you had a federal framework, and if that framework was favorable to Tesla, you know, that is a game changer for their ability to deliver on the promise of their stock price. Like, that's where my mind goes for the car company, specifically. And when Trump was still on the campaign trail right before the election, Elon said as much. He was basically up there being like, Yeah, we need a regulatory framework that's going to work for autonomous cars. That's all boring to say. But the idea is that when you watch Fox News and their defense of this great American business patriot, it's just that he's just a hero who is cutting government waste and getting rid of the deficit, when, in reality, I think that he used this to enrich his own companies and to clear out obstacles for the things he wants to do, especially when Tesla's concerned for robotaxis. But that single-minded focus on autonomy and AI has meant they've taken their eye off the ball when it comes to products, when it comes to cars people can buy. And he's been on record as saying that it's pointless for us to come out with another car that has a steering wheel. Like, why would you do that? It's like coming out with, like, a horse and buggy, but the technology's not there yet. You know, for now at least, it does have to be a car company, and it does have to still do battle with Hyundai and General Motors and BYD, whether he wants it to or not. Warzel: It sounds like a very classic sort of—you know, as someone who's followed Musk for a really long time—his obsession with the future, and I think genuine. Like, actual, genuine enthusiasm for the possibility of things. His sci-fi brain is so overactive that it causes this. Like, I'm sure that there's an element of bullshitting here with, like, We're going to be in Mars by 2030, and everyone's going to be walking around. George: Been saying this stuff for 10-years-plus. Yeah. Warzel: But I think there is also a genuineness, too, right? Like, the steering-wheel thing feels very real to me, right? Like, This is right around the corner. Of course, we're not going to build another car with the steering wheel. Meanwhile, every year that future pushes further and further away is another year that Tesla doesn't have that product that can sort of fill the gap between his understanding of what is to come and the reality that, like, we're just not there yet. George: Yeah. But this speaks to how they've been successful before. And it's just—that's the Musk mentality. You just kick down every door until you get what you want. And I go back to when they built the Model 3, you know, the first really affordable sedan. It's not just that it's a cheap electric car. It's built in a completely different way than cars were built before. And the factory that builds it had to be completely reset from how car factories worked. It's like, Just hit reset on everything, and just do it. That's your goal. And you just do it. But they are running into technological limitations with how they do autonomous driving. Like, they are not there yet. And, like, I've used autopilot. I've used full self-driving for many years. I have seen it get better. Warzel: Those are Tesla features. George: Yeah, of course. Right. These are the self-driving Tesla features. I should say, they're not really self-driving. This is what we would call a semi-autonomous driving-assistance system that kind of helps you on the highway or will take over some steering around town if we're talking about full self-driving, and they're getting better. Full self-driving tried to kill me on two separate occasions, Charlie, which really hurt my feelings. And it hasn't done that in a while, but it's still not a hundred percent. And for true autonomous driving to work, it has to be safer and better than a human every single time, in every single scenario. And they're not there yet. Warzel: What is so difficult to put together for someone like myself—but I assume, also, a lot of different people who aren't paying attention to Musk and Tesla, like, this granularly—we're talking about an inability to fill the gap between the technological future of Musk's imagination and the current moment, right? Do you think some of that is just, like, the margins of starting to, you know, suffer these consequences for not delivering? George: You know, a year ago, I kind of thought if Elon ever met his Waterloo, it would be his inability to deliver on these promises of autonomy and autonomous cars. Like, it would just get to the point where that technology's just not there yet. You know? And maybe someday it will. I think on a long enough timeline, yeah—probably humans will not be driving cars. Maybe that's 10 years from now or 100 years from now. I don't know. But lately, I think that what may be his greatest downfall and what may be a kind of death blow to this company is his inability to understand people. He understands technology, but he doesn't get people. And he has said, you know, empathy is a weakness. He doesn't relate to other people well. You know, he's blamed this on being neurodivergent, I guess. Either way, not a great people person. And I don't think he counted on people abandoning the Tesla brand as furiously as they are, as quickly as they are, in response to him, in response to his actions with DOGE. I don't think he counted on that. I think he thought he would come in and, you know, gut the federal government and be seen as this great crusader, and that everything would've worked out great, just the way it always has, as he's had all this success before, right? But now, like, people are—you know, they're running away from this company, and that might be the greatest failure of all here. Warzel: Patrick George, thank you so much for joining me on Radio Atlantic. George: Thanks so much for having me, Charlie. [] Warzel: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. And Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. If you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at That's Hanna Rosin is the host of Radio Atlantic. I'm Charlie Warzel. Thank you for listening. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Minority Rule in America
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Something has gone wrong in American democracy. Though our diagnoses differ, the entire political spectrum chafes at the widespread dysfunction. Our traditional modes for understanding democratic decline—tyranny of the majority, corruption, erosion of trust, polarization—all of these shed some light onto our current circumstances, but they fail to explain how policies with broad public support don't materialize. While reporting on the democratic terrain in state and local government, I've become preoccupied with how easily minority interests are able to hijack broadly beneficial policy goals—often through mechanisms we view as democratically legitimate. Tools developed to push against a potential 'tyranny of the majority' have allowed majorities to be subjugated to the will of minority interests time and again. Whether it's by professional associations, police unions, homeowner associations, or wealthy individuals, majority rule has repeatedly been hijacked. Steve Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has a similar diagnosis. In a new essay titled 'Minoritarianism Is Everywhere,' he argues that America's democratic deficits require a serious rethinking of liberal governance and values. On today's episode of Good on Paper, we discuss the causes and consequences of minoritarianism and debate potential solutions. 'Faced with the fact that actually lots of people don't want things that liberals want, the way that liberals have responded is finding sneaky, complicated, roundabout ways to get around' that fact, Teles argues. 'And instead of trying to find other ways to persuade them or compensate them or other things, we've tried to find these complicated, expert-delegation kinds of ways around that. And sometimes that works. But one thing I think it does is it also raises questions about the legitimacy of the larger system.' The following is a transcript of the episode: Jerusalem Demsas: We're used to thinking about the tyranny of the majority. We don't have to imagine what happens when majority voices vote to trample on individual rights. That fear so animated the Founding Fathers that they designed a system to restrain it: a bicameral legislature with one chamber—the Senate—insulated from electoral pressure by staggered six-year terms, and lifetime appointments for judges to shield them from the shifting tides of public opinion. They spent far less time thinking about the opposite problem: tyranny of the minority. [] Demsas: Yet today, much of my own work is thinking through the ways that well-organized interest groups and strategically placed individuals have managed to take hold of the systems of power throughout government and enact their minoritarian preferences. From land use, permitting, and zoning abuses by homeowners associations to police unions, gun-lobbying groups, and environmental groups fighting against popular opinion in favor of a niche ideological perspective—once you start looking for undue power wielded by a minority, it's all you can see. This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is Steve Teles, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. He has a new article out called 'Minoritarianism Is Everywhere' that I think is the single most important piece you can read about this trend in American democracy. Steve, welcome to the show Steven Teles: Thanks for having me. Demsas: In the early days of the United States of America, thinkers like Madison and Tocqueville were primarily afraid of tyranny of the majority. Why was that the dominant mode through which they feared democratic collapse? Teles: So the Founders had a lot of experience from their own experience of the colonial period and going back to their reading of the Greeks and Romans about how republics fell apart, and they thought that republics fell apart, in part, because they had too much of an expectation of homogeneity. And so one of the most important things to understand about the Founders is they actually did believe that diversity, as the yard signs say, is our strength and that the way to actually make a republic work was not to actually try and get homogeneity but actually to get conflict, to get diversity so that no part of the community would be able to actually tyrannize the rest. We know the famous line from Madison that when you extend the sphere, you take a greater variety of interests. And so part of their theory was to create a republic that was big enough that no single interest could dominate and, within that, to break apart whatever level of government in order to ensure that there would be deliberation. I think deliberation was really the underestimated part of the Founders' constitutional idea. It was not just that they wanted to ensure that a majority couldn't tyrannize over a minority, but that people would actually have to argue—they would have to provide reasons—and that was the one of the motivations for having separation of powers, as well as having what they call the 'extended sphere.' Demsas: What's the extended sphere? Teles: So the extended sphere was the idea that you would have a large republic. Every other republic in history had been small. They'd been city-states. The anti-Federalists, who were the opponents of the Federalists, had some of that same idea— Demsas: Including Madison. Teles: —that the only way republics could work is if they didn't have disagreement, because otherwise, one group would tyrannize over the other. And the experiment of the Founders was to have an extended sphere, to have one over, originally, 13 colonies but eventually a kind of continental republic. And a continental republic is something that nobody had ever attempted. People only thought you could have that level in an empire. And so that was really the experiment that the Founders were trying—was to have something large that had only been imperial in the past, but make it a republic. Demsas: So you've recently written an essay warning us about the tyranny of the minority. Do you think that the Founders were wrong about their assessment, or do you think that something has changed? Teles: So there's kind of two stories you can tell about this. One is: The government just does a lot more than it used to. A lot of our system was designed to keep government from doing very much. It was designed to slow the government on the way up. And one thing I often tell my conservative friends is that separation of powers has, and a lot of the other devices that the framers created, a kind of perverse effect on the way down. Once you've already built a large government up, all of those systems are also a brake on trying to reverse it. So it may be that having separation of powers means you have to have a much larger majority in order to create new government programs. But all those same separation-of-power systems also are an obstacle to cutting them later on, which is one of the reasons, for example, that DOGE is having to do all these things that are of, I'll say, marginal constitutionality— Demsas: Questionable legality? Yeah. Teles: —because they can't actually pass things through the separation-of-power system that the Founders created. So they're trying to do it through a sort of soft authoritarianism. So that's one thing, right? One thing is that the Founders didn't anticipate that we'd have a government as big and as sort of into everybody's business as we have now. And the other thing, and this was something that Mancur Olson, the economist from the University of Maryland (go Terps), said a few decades ago, which is that one of the things that Founders didn't really count on was concentrated interest—that one of the basic problems of democracy is that, in many cases, you actually can dominate government if you have a very concentrated interest, which gives you disproportionate attention, and that democracy is really not a system that lets the majority govern. It's the system that allows the attentive majority to govern. And the attentive majority is a lot smaller than the actual majority. And that also is important if what you mostly want to do is to keep things from happening, right? So when we talk about—a lot of the things that you write about in your own work are about people stopping things, obstructing things. And so when you combine the fact that in our system it's easier to obstruct than it is to create—and again, you go back to all the systems of separation of powers, and we can talk about all the other forms of participation that got layered on top of that—all of those are wired up for obstruction. And when you combine obstruction plus concentrated participation and concentrated attention, you have a formula for allowing often very small minorities to dominate government. Demsas: I think for a lot of listeners, this is going to feel like an odd conversation to have right now, because a lot of the blocking points, a lot of the veto points, a lot of the obstructionist things that we're witnessing right now are actually preventing a lot of harm or at least are the only things that are standing in the way of even greater harm done by, whether it's DOGE or whether it's other types of soft authoritarianism. So isn't this kind of a misplaced concern in this moment? Teles: So that's funny. I actually thought at the very last minute of pulling this essay. Literally a couple days before I was supposed to send it to Yuval Levin, who's the editor of National Affairs, I sent him an email that was more or less along the lines of, I don't know, man. Should I actually be publishing this? And then I thought, I don't know. I mean, when are you going to publish? There's never a good time to do stuff like this. And part of my argument is that people who think government should be doing a lot of stuff, which is, more or less, me, need to be thinking about what it is, the state that we want to build on the rubble of whatever we may, inshallah, inherit in a few years. And I think that's a thing that we're not going to have a lot of time to figure out. And if you go and look at the essay, one thing I argue is that the problem with this majoritarianism discourse or minoritarianism discourse that you see out there that's been part of the democracy-trademarked discourse that's been going on for quite some time is it sort of assumes something about what the status quo ante in the United States was before Trump, before authoritarianism. It also assumes something about lots of European countries because this discourse is supposed to be transnational. It assumes that all of those systems were more or less okay, and then something twisted happened in conservatism, and it morphed into populist authoritarianism, and that was what was wrong. And I think that story has a lot to answer for. In the European context, it has a lot to answer for the fact that huge amounts of European governance, especially EU-level governance, is not majoritarian at all. It's bureaucratic; it's professional. That's exactly what the EU, and especially European Commission, was designed to do. It was designed to create a highly insulated, elite form of governance. And it's not a surprise that lots of political forces grew up to counter that. And I think that's a sort of hidden or overlooked problem. Also in the United States, a lot of the targets of populist authoritarianism are not about liberalism's majoritarian manifestations. They're about its most elitist and professional manifestations. Demsas: Well, I want to push on this, because I think there's a tension between two things that you care about. At the Niskanen Center, where you work, you guys have a state-capacity program where you're trying to increase the ability of the state to do what it says it wants to do. That means having really high-quality staff. It means caring about expertise. It means updating your IT systems and your data systems, and ensuring that you have really high-quality people and products that you're able to create for Americans. And many of the minoritarian structures that you criticize—administrative agencies, and you just talked about this in the EU, licensing boards, etcetera—they're created to add expertise and consistency to policy. If we sideline this sort of professionalized governance that you're talking about in favor of more direct democratic control—I mean, walk me through how that works. Are we saying that Congress is writing extremely detailed laws delegating how agencies should work? But also, it feels like you get less information, like you get more short-termism in government. So how do you think about that? Teles: Yeah, so this, in a way, gets us to the delegation question, which is raised in a lot of constitutional administrative law. And I actually think that often conflates two things. So the one question is, do we actually have rule of law? Right? Has whatever it is that the bureaucracy is doing, has it actually been authorized by the legislative branch? And that's the question if you think about things like Title IX, where Congress has passed extremely vague laws and then passed that authority over to bureaucracies, which then passed the authority over to other organizations and divisions inside of universities and firms. I think that's a legitimate problem of democratic governance. And that's separate from the question of whether government can actually manage the things that it has been legitimately democratically authorized to do—so the kind of things you were mentioning, the Niskanen Center, and I'm going to say that name as many times as I want because that's my second job, along with Johns Hopkins. And Jen Pahlka helped set up a state-capacity program at— Demsas: She's been on the show. Teles: And the things that they're talking about are things like, as you were talking about before, setting up IT systems. So we've authorized the government to do a bunch of things—to send people Social Security checks, to send people unemployment insurance, to do all of these things. And that, I think, basically authorizes them to create whatever systems are necessary to do those things that the legislature has completely unambiguously, normatively decided that government should be doing. And I think there, there's a very wide breadth of legitimate expert authority to figure out how to actually act on those things. When, on the other hand, we transfer ambiguous regulatory authority over private entities or other governments, I think that raises a very different question, and it raises a question about whether or not experts actually do have the authority to answer deeply, morally, normatively complicated issues. So I actually think those are two different questions. Demsas: I want to get into the 'Democracy™️' discourse, because I think that situating this conversation is important. So the traditional arguments that most people, I think most listeners, will have heard about minoritarianism are focused on institutions like the electoral college and the filibuster that benefit the Republican Party by amplifying the voices of rural states, where fewer people live than coastal states. In their book, Tyranny of the Minority, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky argue that, and I'm quoting here from a review by Kurt Weyland, 'The U.S. institutional framework has an exceptional set of counter-majoritarian features, designed to forestall the unfettered domination of the current majority and to give political minorities institutional mechanisms for defending their basic interests and rights. The Electoral College in presidential elections, the Senate with its disproportionate representation of small states and its filibuster, and the Supreme Court with its judicial review and its lifetime judges all fulfill this function. Yet in Levitsky and Ziblatt's view, the effort to prevent a 'tyranny of the majority' through this globally unique institutional set-up has gone too far: It has allowed the nationally ever less competitive GOP to establish its tyranny of the minority—while also enabling its continued focus on racially resentful whites and its refusal to adjust to multiracial diversity.' So this argument, I think, is kind of weird in this moment because Donald Trump just won with a multiracial coalition, a multi-class coalition, for sure, and won with the popular vote. And there was movement to the right across this country, even in the most progressive jurisdictions. And we now see a trifecta in the federal government. And so while this argument kind of, I think, really struck true in 2016, when Trump won while losing the popular vote, it feels kind of weird now. So how much of your argument is in line with what Levitsky and Ziblatt are talking about? How much are you kind of actually critiquing this view? Teles: So I do think there's something to the Levitsky and Ziblatt—and they're great political scientists. I'd say they're probably better political scientists than I am, although that's not much of an accomplishment. But the thing I would say about them is—and my critique is more about what they're not talking about than what they are talking about. So I do think that they're—and again, I'm probably more sympathetic to our basic constitutional arrangement than they are. I think there's a reason why some degree of separation of powers, especially for a country as diverse as we are, makes a degree of sense. My critique is more all the nonmajoritarian things that we layered on top of the framers' system, right? So I would say that the degree of minority influence that we have in the original constitutional system was fine, and we should have stopped with that. But in the article, I argue that we've added a lot of other minoritarianism systems on top of the original constitutional system, which I think makes a lot of sense and is just the degree of nonmajoritarianism that actually works for a large, complicated government. So if we got rid of the filibuster, even with the malrepresentation in the Senate, we would have a lot more majoritarian way of making decisions. And also, we would not have the weird bias we have about doing lots of things through spending bills that we should really be doing through regulation or other kinds of things. But again, when you think about minoritarianism, there are a lot of things that Levitsky and Ziblatt don't talk about. They don't talk about the weird ways that we make decisions about housing that are extremely—and you've, obviously, written a whole book on this, as well as a million essays that people have written—about the numerous ways that minoritarianism warps how we make land use decisions. But lots of other forms of minoritarianism had sort of crept into our system on top of the sedimentary layer of our original constitutional system. And those that were really created mostly by liberals, or at least by defenders of activist government, are mostly not part of the 'Democracy™️' discourse. Demsas: Is then your argument just, Yes, this is true that there are a bunch of benefits that the current system gives to the Republican Party in our federal system, but that's an incomplete view of the ways in which minoritarianism has also upheld progressive ideas in the states? Teles: Well, I actually think when you look at some of the bias—I don't want to go too far back again into litigating the stuff that's actually in the Levitsky and Ziblatt, and the other sort of people who are questioning our inherited Constitution, too much—but I think that some of that slant has actually declined in recent years. If Democrats were more competitive in Texas, a lot of this discourse would look very different. And it's not that far, although everyone always says that a Democratic Texas is the future and always will be. But I think one way to think about this is: There are parts of our governance system that are minoritarianism and are biased in favor of Republicans. There's no question about that. And some of them, I think, are worth the benefits we get from those, and some of them are not. But there's lots of other parts of our governing system, especially things that were created in the 1960s and '70s—forms of participation, forms of professionalism, forms of expert governance—that systematically, at least politically in the past, have favored Democrats and liberals. And that is not part of our democracy discourse. And if we really do think majoritarianism is the key normative guide that we should use for thinking about constitutionalism—and I'm not entirely sure that it is, but if it is—then we really need to think about the full sweep of minoritarianism and the parts that actually favor interests that we usually associate with Democrats and liberals. Demsas: Well, that was a little milquetoast, Steve. You're not going to defend majoritarianism? Teles: No. I mean, I think majoritarianism in some cases is a perfectly legitimate argument, that it's better than just straight-up minoritarianism. Demsas: I mean, it's quite literally democracy, right? Teles: Right. Well, but again, democracy is legitimate to the degree to which we think that certain decisions should be made by government at all. There's lots of things that we don't think should be, either because we think they implicate rights or because we think that it's just inefficient to have decisions made by majorities. So I don't necessarily think that housing— Demsas: But as a principle for what the government does do, you want to defend majoritarianism? Teles: Again, it's better than the alternative, right? Demsas: Such a political scientist's answer. Teles: I mean, I don't want to sound milquetoasty, but I want to be precise. Demsas: That's fair. Teles: If we have to have a decision and a decision has to get made, I think a lot of people in the democracy discourse tend to import a lot of stuff into the idea of democracy, beyond the idea that at some point we should make a decision, and it's better to have a majority make that. Now, the problem there with majoritarianism is: Which majority? So again, this goes back to work you've done. We have to make a decision about the unit that we should actually have making majoritarian decisions. So it may be that we need to have regulation of what kind of things people build and where. But should that be made by Irvine? Or should it be made in Sacramento? And that is a decision that you can't make on democratic standards. That's a decision you have to make on some other standards. Should it be national? Demsas: It's also practical considerations. Teles: It's also about whether or not you can overload the agenda of one level of government. So even if you might think that, serially, having the national government do something would be better, having lots and lots of decisions would overwhelm the capacity of a central government to actually manage them simultaneously. Demsas: After the break: why local politics are a breeding ground for minoritarianism. [] Demsas: One reason I wanted to bring you on is that Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, has taken over all policy discourse. And we had them on the show, and you should go listen to that episode if you haven't. I asked them on the show when they came on about why there isn't more conversation about localism in their book. Like, why don't they talk more about the fact that a lot of the problems they're identifying are actually a function of our localist and decentralist tendencies in government? That it's not really a problem that some people don't like housing. I don't like a lot of things. Like, I don't like certain colors. I don't like certain architectural styles. I don't like them. The problem is that we have a structure of government that takes that preference and allows it to be a veto on larger public interests. Like, well, we do need homeless shelters. We do actually need a place to house people who are lower income. We actually do need a place to house everyone. We need a place to put people. And that is not cared about. And again, this is touching on exactly what you talk about in your piece around this majoritarian desire kind of being trounced by these minority interests. And after reading your essay, though, part of what I kept thinking about was that maybe the problem isn't minoritarianism itself, that there are these checks that allow for vetoes. The problem is that local government cannot—and state and local government cannot—mediate between a bunch of different minority interests and balance those against majority preferences. Meaning, I feel like this is not as much of a problem at the national level as it is at the state and local level. There are a lot of things you've identified that come into play at the national level, but I think in local government, what we see is: The reason why these special interests are able to exert so much influence is that voters have basically disappeared from the playing ground. So this is Sarah Anzia's great work. She's a Berkeley professor who wrote this great book called Local Interests. And what she argues is, essentially, in the vacuum that's been created by voters at the local level—and I mean, just to put some numbers on it, just 23 percent of eligible active voters in New York City cast a ballot for mayor in 2021. And that's a city that has a ton of local media. People are highly educated. There's a ton of activity there happening to create civic institutions to push people out to vote. Like, 23 percent of eligible, active voters—that's a small percentage of the broader adults who exist there. Teles: And that's high for lots of local governments. Demsas: That's high for local governments. Yeah, in North Carolina, 463 municipalities held elections in November 2021. All told, about 15 percent of registered voters turned out. But when you look at what happened in 2020, the year before that, five times as many people turned out for the general and statewide elections. And the reason I say all of this is that part of the problem is not that there are interest groups coming and making their case to the government, whether it's teachers' unions or environmental groups or police unions or it's homeowners' associations. It's that when they show up, there's no voter majoritarian voice really there. So I wonder: How much of the problem do you think is attacking minoritarianism writ large, versus how do you make more of the decisions pushed up to levels of government where majority voices are actually heard? Teles: There were a bunch of things in your peroration there that I want to pull apart. One is, especially in housing, the basic problem with localism is where you have governments that are making decisions about their jurisdiction, but the influenced parties are in some other jurisdiction, right? So again, in lots of these cases, the thing that's a problem is the people who would benefit from new housing are not only in the jurisdiction, but not participating, right? They're somewhere else. They're in Ohio. They're in Indiana. They would benefit from actually being there. And so that's a particular problem of putting decisions that have enormous national or even or statewide implications in the hands of local governments. As you were saying, we do have this basic, really corrosive problem of incredibly low participation in local elections. And especially when you get to pretty small jurisdictions, the other problem is: We don't have functional party competition in most of those places. So not only do we have very small turnout, but we have almost no political competition to help people actually organize their decisions. So especially in lots of blue jurisdictions, there ought to be parties. And they wouldn't be Republican and Democratic Parties—they would be a Jerusalem Demsas party versus a left NIMBY coalition that would want no one to ever build or even walk around or do anything. They'd just all stay in their houses. Demsas: That was a really generous take on left NIMBYs. (Laughs.) Teles: Yeah. So again, we have all these sort of reinforcing problems in local government. And in the paper, one thing I say is that that's bad for what you might think of as a more general interest, but it's very good for the people who do show up. And the people who do show up are organized. So you think about local governments where you only have 15 percent of people showing up. All the election is in the primary, as opposed to the general election. Well, who wants that? So one way political scientists talk about that is that the institution is endogenous, in the sense that it's related to the interest of the people who help shape the institution, right? Demsas: Yeah, so why do we have off-year elections at all? Teles: Right. We have off-year elections, in part, because the people who benefit from them, which are often the government's own workforce, want them that way. So teachers' unions, for example, love off-cycle elections where decisions are made in primaries, because they know what's going on, they know what the decisions are being made, and they can actually participate and get their interest magnified. Demsas: And they have organizing capacity to turn people out to primaries. Teles: Right. They can show up at every level of government. That's one of the advantages of having teachers' unions that are organized in a federated way, which is that when nobody else is organized at a local level, they're organized, and they can draw on this rich basis of information they get from being part of a national organization. The same thing is true of police unions. The same thing is true of other government unions. And those public-employee unions had the further advantage that lots of the decisions that matter to them are made in collective bargaining rather than through normal lawmaking, which is even less public and accessible to ordinary voters. And again, that's where their informational and organizational advantages are particularly consequential. Demsas: Yeah, you make this point in your piece. But the thing I want to ask you about, which I think needles at me a lot, is: Is there a majoritarian preference for minoritarianism? And by that I mean, it's hard to know that the majority preferences aren't being followed. Someone once told me the reason there's so much low voting in local elections is because everyone's happy with what's going on. If they were really upset, they would show up and say something about it and do something about it. And I think that's a bit flippant and ignores a lot of things, the cost that it might require to show up in elections. But there's something there, right? There's something there about this system in many ways. Every one of us, every member of the electorate, is both part of the majority and part of a minority at every given moment in their lives. Maybe you're a part of the majority because you're a part of a racial majority, but you're part of a religious minority. Maybe you're part of a minority of people who like a certain economic policy, but you're a majority in terms of abortion policy. All the time, you are part of both majorities and minorities. And it may just be the express preference that, given that you know that, we actually do kind of have a preference for a system where minority voices can obstruct, because everyone is more afraid of bad things happening to them than they are of the good things they want not happening. Teles: Yeah. So this is where I think some of these questions are related to the particular time that we're in. When a lot of the laws that we're talking about were passed in the late '60s and early '70s— Demsas: What kinds of laws? Teles: When you think about a lot of the environmental laws that were passed in that era, or laws about public participation—when court decisions were changed, they gave people more access and more ability to use things like the Administrative Procedure Act to get influence. That was a period in which Americans were, for a variety of reasons, particularly sensitive to the risks of things happening, of various things happening. Their kids getting a terrible toy that killed them or having environmental damage or having— Demsas Rivers on fire— Teles: Yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of things that you can think about. I think we're in a different era, and a lot of the conversation we're having around abundance comes from a general sense that that government just doesn't work, and it's not delivering things, and that there's something really temporally urgent about the need to actually do things. And so the decision of whether the government should have a bias toward allowing majorities to work their will or allowing minorities to obstruct, to keep things from happening is partially a function of the times that we're in. I also think when you add in geopolitical competition—the fact that Americans are worried that we might not have the economic wherewithal to actually compete with a militarizing China. When you actually think of European countries are now really having to face this, the fact that they don't have the economic base to actually have a military that can do anything, I think that's actually making all of those things seem really urgent and is making the need to actually ensure that nobody is ever harmed by anything seem less consequential. And so that's what I think a lot of the abundance discourse that you were referring to earlier is responding to, that sense, and also responding to the sense that it's generating populism. If you look at the ads that the Reform Party put out in Britain, one of the most striking of them started out with the person saying, 'You know, nothing works anymore.' And that sense that nothing works anymore is one of the most important and most sort of lost factors in driving populism—is the idea that all this supposedly expert liberal governance doesn't seem to be making anything better. Demsas: I want to return to the solutions that you presented at the beginning when we talked, and you had two. One was liberal populism, or plural professionalism. These are the two ways forward you see for someone trying to combat pernicious minoritarianism in our democratic system. I'm first hoping you can define both of those for us. Teles: So by liberal populism, I mean the idea that we could have an activist government without necessarily a high degree of delegation to expert authority. And if you go back to the original populists, back in the day, in the late 19th century, the thing that was interesting about them is they really liked legislatures, and they really disliked courts and executive agencies, and they thought, We're going to go get the people en masse to go and vote for us, and then we're going to pass very specific laws in Congress that don't give executive-branch agencies or courts a lot of authority. And I think there are ways that we could do that now. I mentioned earlier, if you think about a carbon tax, or you could, actually, just literally take away the authority of local governments to make decisions about housing at all. You could just say, Look—everything's by right. Now, again, there'd be a lot of problems with that. There'd be difficulties. But compared to the status quo, the point about liberal populism is not that everything they do is going to be perfectly calibrated but that it would be relatively simple. It would be easy. It would be easy for the public to actually know what was happening and whether it was succeeding. And so doing things straight up through taxing and spending is another way of doing things through what I would call liberal populism. So just making things illegal, or making them legal, or spending or taxing, right—doing that, as opposed to doing things through complicated, multistep expert delegation of the kind that liberals have gotten used to. That's what I mean by liberal populism. Demsas: Let's stop right there then, because I want to ask you about this. What happens when you can't pass something that is simple to address an important problem, like carbon tax—most environmentalists would love to see a carbon tax. They would love to see a price on carbon. We're seeing now in Canada and the new prime minister, Mark Carney, who's taken over from Justin Trudeau for the Liberal government, as part of his appeal to voters as he's facing a real threat from the Conservative Party, is that he is repealing their carbon tax. And we see this in the United States. There was a real attempt to do a cap-and-trade system to try to get a carbon tax passed. It just was not politically viable in this country. People do not want to see their energy costs go up. It's just not something that they're going to accept. Given that is often true for a lot of the first, best policies that people want to get passed, you inevitably have to go, like, Okay, what can you get done in this system then? And a part of why we see such a kind of kludgy outcome from many of these other policies is that there are smart people working on this problem, realizing that they cannot get their first, best policies. And so is your answer that you should just not do things if you can't get that first, best policy? Or how much of a kludge are you willing to accept to get us marginally closer to these goals? Teles: Yeah, so I've always found this a very weird argument. What I would say on this is: The most simple point of democracy is you have to persuade people to do things. And if they regularly and repeatedly say they don't want something, then you don't do it. Experts can come up with lots of ideas about what should be done, but at some point, there has to be a check on that from legislators, from the public, and if you actually can't persuade them, you just don't get to do it. Demsas: I think this is unfair, though. Because I think that often what's happening is the public is giving competing signals. The public is saying, I don't want to see my energy costs go up. They're also saying, I would like hurricanes not to be as intense all the time. They're also saying, I care about environmental protection in some ways. And these are things that the democracy has to mediate, because if every single country was like, We're not going to tax carbon. We're just going to let this happen, people would be really upset with the eventual outcome. Teles: Okay. Just to be clear, I want to tax carbon, and I think climate change is a big problem. I don't want to have anybody come at me and send emails saying, Steve Teles didn't think climate change is a big problem. But I do think that one of the things you are describing is what I've sometimes called 'structural sneakiness.' Which is: Faced with the fact that actually lots of people don't want things that liberals want, the way that liberals have responded is finding sneaky, complicated, roundabout ways to get around the fact that people just don't want to do what people who want an activist government want to do. And instead of trying to find other ways to persuade them or compensate them or other things, we've tried to find these complicated, expert-delegation kinds of ways around that. And sometimes that works. But one thing I think it does is it also raises questions about the legitimacy of the larger system. If you keep producing governing outcomes that people don't like—they don't like the consequences of them—and you don't actually just directly try and convince them and find other ways to convince them, find ways to pair it with other stuff, overall that this creates sort of alienation from the larger regime of activist government. So I think every time you try and do these end arounds that you're talking about, there is a kind of external effect. It's not necessarily in that domain, but it's on the general system of activist government. Demsas: So people lose trust, and they feel betrayed by government. Teles: Yeah. And again, I think that this is a problem that has happened to liberals, in general. It's just that instinct of having to actually take people's problems and take their objections seriously. And directly trying to argue with them, as opposed to finding end arounds, as you were just describing, is a real fundamental problem with liberalism. Demsas: So I want you then to explain your second solution, which is plural professionalism. Teles: Right. So what I say is, liberal populism is a partial answer to certain kinds of problems, but there's going to be a lot of stuff that government's still going to have to do through experts. There's a lot of things in which some degree of delegation is inevitable, given the complexity of what government needs to be doing. And when that's true, the argument I make in the piece—and it draws in another piece I wrote with Jal Mehta on plural professionalism and education—what I say is, it's a problem that our expert class has gotten more and more ideologically homogenous. And that is not, I think, an inevitable feature. There's lots of smart conservatives out there. We might disagree about how many there are. But I think there—I meet a lot of them. They could be in government, but in many cases, they've decided that lots of these expert fields are simply sort of ideologically coded. So you think about the example of nursing, right? It wasn't that long ago that everybody just thought that nursing was, by definition, a female field. And so men who might've liked to be nurses, who might've been good nurses, just didn't go in, because they thought it was definitionally incompatible for men to do that. I think many of these expert fields are increasingly ideologically coded in the way that nursing was gender coded. And that has lots of consequences. I actually think it has some consequences for explaining what DOGE is doing right now. If there was a larger cadre of conservatives who actually knew what they were doing and actually knew how government works and actually knew what the actual programs of HHS were, they would be able to govern by sort of taking the reins of these things and taking away the parts that they don't like, the parts that they think are excessively woke or in infested with DEI. But they don't actually really know how lots of these government agencies are working, so they're trying to make it up with having a bunch of 20-something technologists operating with AI telling them where to cut. And I think if we actually had a cadre of people in the regular civil service who were more diverse, we would actually have, again, more deliberation. We would actually have more arguments, not so much about the facts or about technique but about the relative weighting of normative preferences. I think that's one answer, is to actually diversify that expert class. That takes you back to universities. It takes you back to professional schools. And it also, I think, should also make conservatives have to look in the mirror and ask themselves why there aren't as many people going into these expert fields in public policy and social work and other kinds of areas. Demsas: We had Sahil Chinoy on the show recently, and he has a paper called 'Political Sorting in the U.S. Labor Market.' And his finding is that a Democrat or Republican's co-worker is 10 percent more likely to share their party than expected based on local partisan shares. So if you're comparing the partisanship of Silicon Valley to the partisanship of Google—these are just hypotheticals—you might expect that there would be a certain level of partisanship just by who lives in that area, but it's even more partisan than that. And the thing that I found really interesting about his research is that he's tracing it throughout the entire system of how someone decides what company they end up working at. It begins with what college you go to, and then what major you choose within that college, and all these other things that end up with you choosing a more partisan workplace for whatever reason. And the thing that—I mean, I agree with a lot of what you said, but the thing I really want to push on, though, is this idea that there are a lot of experts across the ideological domain who could provide these functions. So because there's all this sorting going on, if you are a completely ideologically neutral person hiring at the PPO in the White House, and you're looking for the best people in certain spheres, they're going to be people who are predominantly one ideology over the other. And more than likely, they're going to be liberals because liberals end up working in areas that are adjacent to public policy. And conservatives end up working more in private-sector areas. And so part of the problem we're identifying here, though, is that even if someone wanted to have this sort of plural professionalism, it would mean you got worse people who were conservatives. Teles: Well, so if you think the answer to this is just ideological affirmative action and preferential treatment, then in equilibrium, you're going to get worse. And again, now, that's a function of other things that were happening earlier in the labor market. And this is where, again, I think it's worth thinking about this as a structural problem. Just as we have ideas about structural racism, I think it's also worth thinking about sort of structural ideological bias. And most of the bias in many of these fields really is structural, in the sense that it's self-reproducing; it's chronic. Again, once a field gets defined ideologically in the way that I talked about before, then nobody has to do any discriminating. The perception of what the field is about does all of that work. So my friend Harold Pollack at University of Chicago has talked about this in the field he's in, in social work. And social work is now so definitionally marked as being a left-of-center thing that people would just think it was inappropriate for a person like them to do that if they were more conservative, even though there's lots actually really important work that people who come from a more conservative point of view could be doing in social work—and, in fact, are doing but they're doing without, necessarily, that kind of technical training. So I think of this as a long-term project. So one of the things I'm involved with is a new school of government at Johns Hopkins, and we have a very deep sort of institutionalized commitment to ideological diversity in the faculty we hire and the students that we're going to bring on. And part of that's an effort to try to get some capture on the problem that we're just describing. But to go back, there's a reason why the labor-market phenomenon you're talking about exists, which is: Homophily is a very powerful force in human affairs—the fact that birds of a feather flock together. It's because at any one time, that reduces conflict. People like being around other people who share their values, and managing diverse workforces, whether they're managing for race or ideology, is hard. It takes extra work to do that. Now, again, I think there's a reason to think that it produces, over time, better outcomes, because it surfaces conflict in ways that are actually necessary, as opposed to simply having everybody assume they know what everybody thinks and, also, not checking each other's work when it agrees with their ideological priors. One of the advantages of having some degree of diversity, for example, in academia, is you really want people rerunning people's models or checking their footnotes. They're going to do that more if they have an ideological motivation to do so. And they're going to do it less if it feels like, well, that's just going to make you feel like a jerk because you're that guy who is checking the model of the thing that everybody wants to believe is true. Demsas: Well, Steve, I think this is a great point for our last and final question. What is something that you thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper? Teles: So I know you want me to say that, like, my choice of toothpaste or something was the thing I thought was good on paper, but I'll give the more prosaic one, that I thought the Iraq War was a great idea. Demsas: Really? Teles: And I wasn't, like, out there writing stuff in Foreign Affairs at the time. But for lots of reasons, at the time, I remember very strongly thinking that—now, part of this was that I thought we had sort of run out of other options, that the old line that lots of ways you get in trouble is that you say: This is unsustainable. Something must be done. This is something, ergo we should do this something. And the thing, and in retrospect, that was so disturbing to me when I actually saw what happened in the Iraq War is: I was ignoring lots of things that professionally I should have known about. A lot of what I actually teach people about is the problem of joint coordinated action, the difficulty of actually doing big, complicated things. And for some reason, I just didn't apply any of that knowledge when it was about something that, for normative or other reasons, I thought was a really good idea. And so my penance for that is I started teaching a class called Policy Disasters that always ended with the Iraq War. So that was the last case I would do, but it was my effort to sort of ritually abuse myself for having made that big mistake and to try and teach other people how to apply what we know about why big, complicated things go wrong, even the things that they care a lot and feel normatively invested in. [] Demsas: I was too young to have a considered opinion on the Iraq War at the time, but I do find it interesting that there's—like, polling had like large majorities in favor of the Iraq War, yet I never find anyone admitting that they were one of the 60-something percent of people who were ready to go to war there. So I appreciate you admitting that to us on this podcast. Teles: Thank you for having me here. Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. And hey, if you like what you're hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. I'm Jerusalem Demsas, and we'll see you next week. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump Didn't Actually Undo Tariffs
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Perhaps yesterday you went for a walk at lunchtime and fretted about your 401(k). President Donald Trump had announced record-high tariffs on dozens of countries. Stocks had been tanking for days. You already had to look up the meaning of stagflation (high unemployment plus high inflation, yikes). And that morning had brought more dismal news: Investors were rapidly pulling out of bond markets. Bond markets! The safe zone! The place your overanxious mother would tell you to park your money! Then maybe you got back from your walk, checked the news, and saw the headlines that Trump had 'paused' the tariffs or 'reversed course'—for everywhere except China, whose exports were now taxed at 125 percent. What does this mean? Is the economy stable again? Is your 401(k) safe? Is anything still predictable? To help us understand the extraordinary volatility of the past few weeks, we invite Justin Wolfers, economist at the University of Michigan, to speak with us on the latest episode of Radio Rosin: Was today real? Honestly, today just seemed like an unreal day. Truly. Justin Wolfers: Was this week real? Rosin: Was this week real? Exactly. Wolfers: What day's today, Hanna? It's Wednesday. Rosin: It's only Wednesday. Wolfers: Okay. So in 11 minutes we will have been at this for seven days in a row. Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. What's 'this'? Wolfers: The confused mumblings of an old man who didn't do very well in his college economics course. Rosin: Are you talking about the president? Wolfers: I might be. [] Rosin: Okay. In one single day this week—I'm talking about Wednesday, yesterday—two extraordinary things happened: In the morning, we woke up to the news that investors had started rapidly selling off U.S. bonds, which worried economists because U.S. bonds are the safe haven, and it's a very bad sign for the U.S. economy if investors no longer trust the safe haven. And then, midday, Donald Trump made the announcement that he was gonna reverse course on tariffs. Sort of. We'll get into it. President Donald Trump: Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know? A little bit yippy, a little bit afraid … Rosin: Which, around lunchtime, caused the second extraordinary thing: The stock market surged. Had one of its biggest single-day jumps in history. What is happening? [] I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. We are living in a world in which the president makes decisions with enormous global consequences and then unmakes them 24 hours later. So today we are going to try and get a handle on all this volatility. Is it over? Are we still in it? Wolfers: Yep. Do we still need to do levels or any of that magic? Rosin: To help us, we have University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers. Wolfers: It's been crazy, but that's all of us, right? Rosin: Okay. I'm just gonna tell you my experience of the day: It's Wednesday afternoon—that's when we're recording. I feel like what happened today for a lot of people who track the news: You go to lunch. You're worried about tariffs. You're worried about what's gonna happen. You come back from lunch, and it's like, Trump backs down, pauses tariffs for 90 days. Is that what happened to you today? Wolfers: Yeah. Actually, I was in my home office, and I suddenly heard this enormous belly laugh coming from downstairs. Rosin: Your wife? Wolfers: My better half, Betsey Stevenson, is also an economics professor, and she saw the humor in it. And it's kind of stunning. But we've seen this movie before, and that's what's so funny. This is what Trump did in the first term to NAFTA. The United States had a free-trade agreement with Canada and Mexico. Basically you'd had President Clinton and the leaders of Canada and Mexico get in the room and negotiate that there would be zero tariffs on everything. But each leader was allowed a couple of little asterisks because there were a few politically sensitive groups in each country. Trump comes along, rips the whole thing up, and says, I need a better deal. Now, just to be crystal clear, it's very hard to get tariffs below—they were effectively zero percent before. It's very hard to get them below zero percent. So he caused a trade war with Canada in the first term. And then basically came back with what we would say is a rebranded NAFTA. For all intents and purposes, it's exactly the same, and he declares a win. What just happened? He launched us headlong into a trade war with every country on Earth. Now says, Oh, they all wanna negotiate. Now, here's the really important thing to understand, Hanna: Almost every country on Earth had very low tariffs as of last Tuesday. Like, 1 or 2 percent because governments all around the world have been liberalizing trade for decades now. There really aren't many tariffs out there. That matters because if the next act of this play is the president just threatens to blow the world up and then everyone calls him and says, Let's make a deal, the best they can do is restore back to where we were on Tuesday. Rosin: So we've just gone around the world and come back to where we were. Is that what you're saying? Wolfers: I think that's the end game. That's not where we are right now. So here, I wanna be crystal clear. Everyone saw the president's announcement: Oh my goodness. He's getting rid of reciprocal tariffs. But he's not. For one of our most important trading partners, China, tariffs are now up to 125 percent, and for every country around the world, they're 10 percent, which means there's been no change for many countries. But some of the worst excesses of what he announced before have gone away. We are still in the midst of tariff-mageddon. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: And we're still in the midst of an incredibly disruptive tariff regime. The American average tariff rate today will be 10 times higher than it was in January. It will be roughly as high, possibly higher, than the Smoot-Hawley tariffs during the Great Depression. It will be 10 and sometimes 20 times higher than most of our trading partners, and the United States probably has no longer got the highest tariffs in the world, something we had this morning, but we will have the highest tariffs in the industrialized world. So among advanced economies—and it's not even close. Rosin: Got it. So what you are saying, what I understand you to be saying, is: crisis not averted. He reset our expectations in the course of that week to some absurd level and then lowered them back to what is still too dangerously high a level. Wolfers: Yes. Now, you might then say, 'cause I know that you love to track financial markets minute-by-minute. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: If we only got rid of a quarter of the tariffs, why did stocks soar on the news? And I think what's happened is there's been two sets of shocks over the last week. One shock is a shock to tariffs. They rose enormously. The second shock is we thought, for most of the last seven days, we'd learned how profoundly incompetent this administration was, and that the president was willing to look down the barrel of a recession and say, Let's just keep going. And that there were no adults in the White House. This was a rollout that was laughably awful from start to finish. Rosin: Now there was speculation that it was because of the bond market that he backed down. Can you explain what the bond market is and why it's important? Wolfers: Okay, so let me get to other speculations first, 'cause they may be bigger. Rosin: Okay, go ahead. Wolfers: The first is: The chances of recession skyrocketed. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: We were—are, still are—looking straight down the barrel of a recession in 2025. That would wipe out the Republican House. I think that has a lot of people freaking out—and they should, because recessions are really, really, really bad. The second thing you saw was every time Trump moved towards tariffs, stocks fell dramatically. Every time he backed off, they rose. He'd knocked off roughly $6 trillion from the value of the U.S. stock market in the week he was going—actually might be more, so it might be a trillion a day. So realize that when Elon Musk was saving us with DOGE, he was like, saving 1 billion here, 1 billion there. This was a thousand billion every day. So that is causing a lot of pain, particularly to the Republican donor class. And then you asked about the bond market. So things started to go crazy in bonds. So what is a bond? Well, when I go to the bank and put money in the bank, it might not feel this way, but what I'm doing is lending money to the bank. It has my money for a while, it can use it, and it'll give it back to me when I want it back. That's how it works for you and I. But if you want to borrow money or lend money and you're a big corporation, what you do is to lend money to a corporation, you sell them bonds. And to borrow money, if you're a corporation, you buy bonds, and what a bond is, is you say, Hey, can I have your money and I'll give it back to you in 10 years with interest. U.S. government bonds—that's how we fund the government debt—typically regarded as the safest asset in the world because the U.S. government is in charge of an amazing economy and we'd never screw things up. Rosin: And safe is the important word here. Like, an investment advisor would tell you, Do you wanna be safe? Do you wanna rest easy? Safety, it's our safe space. Wolfers: It's the only thing safer than money under the mattress. Rosin:. Yes. Right. Wolfers: So, because it's safe, people are willing to lend money to the U.S. government at a low interest rate. And that actually saves all of us tons of money. 'cause the U.S. government owes a lot of money. Just, if you've ever seen your family mortgage and thought about What would it be if the interest rate changed a little? You'll see it makes a huge difference to your family's finances. That's the same for bond yields. So what happened over the past couple of days is bond yields—so interest rates—spiked. What normally happens when the world's in chaos is the opposite, because everyone's worried, Oh my goodness, there's chaos. Let me go and buy the safe thing. Let me hide it under the covers. So how do you make sense of all of this? This is essentially the rest of the world saying, If I wanna be safe, I don't want to be associated with America. Rosin: Right. So the volatility, such as it is already so far, has made America a less predictable place, made the foreign investors' appetite dip. Wolfers: And domestic investors, too. Rosin: Yeah. Okay. Wolfers: And lest the bond market feel distant from listeners' lives— Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: —we do, just like your family pays on a mortgage, the federal government has to pay interest on its debt, and it's one of the biggest expenses in the federal budget. And so when the interest rate rises, we have to pay more, which means there's less money for roads and schools and tax cuts, if that's what—it's real money. Rosin: Yeah. So Justin, everything you just said, the cycle of events you just described, actually could make one feel safer because it suggests that what seemed chaotic, unpredictable, capricious is actually responding to real-world inputs. So if I'm a business owner and I'm trying to make decisions about sourcing or investments or whatever, you know, am I feeling like, Oh, the future is predictable. The president actually does respond to changes in the market when, when it gets really serious? Wolfers: Right, so one, you should feel a little bit more relieved than you felt this morning. But this morning, what we had was a madman raising tariffs so that we had the highest tariffs in the world, essentially cutting Americans off, imposing sanctions on Americans. Cutting us off from the global economy, even as recession threats were rising, and saying, I'm gonna stay the course. So it's good that at some point the guy's persuadable. That is an enormous relief. It is terrible that we just had the week we had. It's awful that three-quarters of the tariffs are still in place and the stock market is still well below where it was when he was elected. And it's not just that I care about your 401(k), but that stock market is essentially a bet on the future of the American economy. And people are betting we're less healthy than we were a week ago and certainly less healthy than we were on Election Day. And there's one more thing I wanna scare you about. Rosin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wolfers: So here's the cycle from the first term: Trump does something dumb, markets react, Trump listens, markets go back to normal. We just saw that play out again this week. But if what happens next time is: Trump does something dumb; markets think he's going to react and undo it, so they don't bother freaking out. If they don't bother freaking out, he's not gonna undo it. Rosin: Does anyone stand to gain from this kind of volatility? You know, he did tweet, This is a great time to buy, and some people speculated he was setting a sign to followers before juicing the market again. That's maybe paranoid, I don't know. Wolfers: No, it's not. It's before the announcement. Rosin: Okay. So you don't think it's paranoid? Yeah. Wolfers: This is corrupt on its face. This is saying, You want to time the market, you watch me, you look at me, you listen to me. It would land anyone else in jail. Rosin: After the break, how this might affect the chances of a recession for all of us—or the thing economists fear the most: stagflation. [] Rosin: So we've been through a couple of recessions, near recessions: 2008, the pandemic. The words that economists are using—depression and stagflation—why? What's the likelihood of those? How do you think about those? Wolfers: Right. So what we're worried about is a recession. None of us are quite sure how deep it might be. The good news, for those looking for the silver lining, is it's crystal clear. We've got the early data from the first quarter of the Trump administration, and all the data from the last quarter of the Biden administration: It's crystal clear that the economy's in very good shape fundamentally. So we are hitting whatever this cavalcade of bad news is with a lot of momentum. But the extent to which the president has undermined confidence is quite dramatic. What we have at the moment is what economists call a split between the hard data and the soft data. Soft data is when you ask people, Are you optimistic? Do you plan to make investments? Do you think unemployment's gonna rise or fall? And when you look at those numbers, they're terrible. They're all at recession levels. Rosin: That's because of everything you've talked about: trust—people don't trust. It's unpredictability. You can't make decisions if you're in an unpredictable environment. Wolfers: Look, on January 1, there wasn't much to worry about. And on April 9, there's a lot to worry about. Rosin: Got it. Okay. That makes sense. That's the soft numbers. Wolfers: And everyone has understood that. Rosin: Got it. Wolfers: When you look at the hard numbers, like how many people have jobs, how much money they're spending—they're substantially stronger. They're actually quite good. Now, they're also a little more dated. We get the soft numbers before the hard numbers. So the question is Which of those two stories wins the day? So that's an ordinary, run-of-the-mill recession. What we're worried about now is actually something called stagflation, which is, if you like inflation and you like recessions, two great flavors together. We call it stagflation. Stag: stagnating output, stagnating labor markets. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: Flation: inflation. Rosin: So it's high unemployment and high inflation at the same time. Wolfers: Terrific, isn't it? Rosin: And why is that every economist's worst nightmare? Why is that the worst thing? Wolfers: Well, do you like one bad thing at a time or two? Rosin: Got it. It's just because it's the doubling of terrible outcomes. And it's hard to know how to control that. Wolfers: It's very hard to know what to do, because for Jay Powell and the Fed, normally if you've got unemployment, you'll lower interest rates. And if you've got inflation, you raise interest rates. Rosin: Right, right, right. Wolfers: So go to bed at night thinking to yourself, you're not running the Fed. Rosin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You wouldn't have any levers to pull, you wouldn't know what to do, so you're stuck. Wolfers: Yes. Rosin: Okay. So we know what Americans are worried about. The investing advice is always Wait it out. Just wait it out. Is that actually good advice? Are there any safe havens? If I were a smart economist, would I be doing something totally different than what the average American is being told to do? Wolfers: Well, fortunately, if you invest in my new crypto coin, Justin Coin— Rosin: Justin Coin. Wolfers: —I can guarantee enormous— Rosin: You didn't even name it after Betsey. It's not even called Betsey Coin. Wolfers: You know Trump did Trump coin before he did Melania coin. Rosin: Okay, fair, fair, fair. Wolfers: So Betsey Coin's coming tomorrow, for those who want the complete set. Okay, so let me be clear about what I can say and what I can't. So I wanna start with what I can't say. Realize people in financial markets are paid a lot of money to keep track of what's going on. What that means is all of the madness from earlier today is already priced in. So coming in later this afternoon and saying, Well, now that he's backing off the tariffs a bit, I should buy stocks. No, they were a good buy before anyone else knew, but as soon as anyone knew, they were no longer a good buy. Rosin: Right. Wolfers: So that's the source of the usual argument, Don't try to time the market. It's too hard. If someone tells you that they know which way the market's going, the right answer is to never talk to them again. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: They're a grifter. Rosin: So you don't know either. Nobody knows. Wolfers: I don't know either. What I do know is that we live in dangerous times. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: If you don't have the stomach for that, then you wanna pull the money and put it, you know, in a low-interest savings account. Now, should you have the stomach for it? You know, here's some good news: When risk is high, it's usually paired with high reward. Rosin: Okay. A last thing: Let's say you're not in the stock market at all. Is there any downside to what's happening right now? Wolfers: Is there any downside? Yes. Rosin: You could be unemployed. Wolfers: The economy's on the cusp of recession. Currently, betting markets say it's a 53 percent chance of recession this year. I don't care about the stock market based on it being rich people's wealth. But the stock market is two things. It's rich people's investments, and it's also a betting market on the future of the economy. So when stocks are down, that's telling you very, very smart people in very fancy suits, running very complicated computer models who ring up all the world's data are less optimistic about the future of American business. Rosin: And that's gonna trickle down to you, whoever you are. Wolfers: That is going to affect your income, your unemployment, the inflation rate, the interest rates you pay, on and on. And so that—it's just that it's a signal of how the economy is going to affect your life. Now, it's true that the stock market is not the economy. That's an old expression people use. So you shouldn't take what I said too far, but to the extent that the Trump tariffs are meant to have any positive effects on America, they're meant to boost American businesses and then all the positive effects on you and I are downstream of that. So the fact that they have actually undermined the stock value of American businesses tells you that the overall effect of the Trump tariffs is going to be negative. Rosin: Although Trump would say that's just not yet, but you know, I know what you mean. Wolfers: You mean Trump would say that he understands the true value of American business and the stock market doesn't? Rosin: Better than you do? Yeah. Wolfers: Remember two minutes ago I said if someone ever says that to you? Rosin: Right, exactly. Exactly. Okay. I'm gonna summarize this conversation: It's a teeny, teeny bit better than it was a day ago, but we are definitely not out of crisis yet. Is that fair? Wolfers: Spot on. Rosin: Okay. Thanks, Justin. Wolfers: Wish I had happier news, Hanna. Rosin: That's okay. [] Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at That's I'm Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening. Article originally published at The Atlantic
