In June, following a series of prominent AI proofs, a group of top mathematicians promulgated the Leiden Declaration, which asserted, “Mathematics produces not only a body of results, but also understanding, clarity, and judgment among the communities of mathematicians who have shaped them.” Meanwhile, top mathematicians have been pushing for similar principles in personal essays — math is about human understanding, they say, not just finding the answers.

“Suppose we had a library filled with proofs of every theorem [in mathematics], as well as excellent guides that could, given a question, take us to the answer and explain it,” mathematician Daniel Litt said. “What would a mathematician do in such a library?”

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Kai Williams is a writer at Understanding AI who recently reported from the International Congress of Mathematicians and has a new story in The Atlantic called “Math Can’t Go On Like This.” To explore the angsty questions plaguing today’s mathematicians, Williams joined me for a Substack Live conversation.

This debate has implications far beyond mathematicians. It also has a lot to tell us about how to maintain and improve human skills as AI surpasses our capabilities in a variety of fields.

“I do worry about the world where AIs are just better than humans at everything,” Williams told me, “But I think at that point, it’s not just a mathematics problem.”

In our discussion, we unpacked a controversial episode in which OpenAI raced to beat two human mathematicians to a solution, spending the equivalent of $6 million to $10 million in just a few days so it could get credit for an answer.

I also asked Williams, who once considered a career as a professional mathematician himself, what he thinks about the principles of acceptable AI use. While he isn’t sure exactly what sorts of lines the profession should draw, he is very protective of his freedom to do work on his own.

“As an amateur, I have problems I like to think about in the background sometimes when I have trouble sleeping or whatever, and those I very clearly do not want to ask for AI help … the kind of journey of trying to figure that out is where a lot of the fun is,” he told me. “The only way to get as deep an understanding is to stumble through an area yourself.”

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In the AI doom discourse, I am considered an optimist. What that means is I think there’s only a tiny chance we all die and a very big chance that millions of people die, basic digital infrastructure becomes unusable and crashes the economy, and terrorist groups can use superintelligence for mass murder and mayhem.

Because of my familiarity with effective altruist circles, I’ve long been aware of a subculture concerned about existential risk caused by AI. But over the past several weeks, many more people in my life have become aware of this concern, particularly after Jacob Coxon publicly announced his resignation from Anthropic. He followed this with a media tour during which he argued that the leading AI labs are causing a 10% risk of human extinction — and many of his former colleagues agreed.

These are inherently terrifying and extraordinary claims. Anytime I really sit with them, I begin to feel a sense of dread and fear. Cultivating this dread on a mass scale seems to be the explicit goal of many AI safety advocates. Are they right?

Leadership at the nonprofit ControlAI has argued that “the awareness of extinction risk needs to be pervasive throughout society” and “the awareness needs to be specifically about extinction risk from superintelligent AI.” GuardRailNow, an AI safety organization that creates media about AI extinction risk, has laid out an explicit theory of change along the following lines: “Education leads to awareness, awareness leads to pressure, and pressure leads to regulation.” The organization argues that “when people understand the risks posed by unregulated AI they’re more likely to demand safety legislation from their elected leaders.”

This theory of change might be correct. There are times in history when awareness campaigns have yielded significant change, most notably the midcentury civil rights movements. Clearly, if you work on an underrated issue, you need to raise its salience among policymakers and politicians. One effective way of doing that is raising its salience among the general public.

But I’ve come to understand that when people imagine that they need public attention, in reality, they are often looking for institutional attention: securing funding, setting and enforcing standards, negotiating technical agreements, or updating regulations. It can be difficult or even impossible to separate public from institutional attention, but movements err when they treat public awareness as the sole or even main way to make change. In general, causing mass panic is more likely to result in counterproductive or nonexistent policy outcomes than it is to achieve the goals of a movement.

That’s because public concern does not necessarily translate into consensus on an appropriate response.

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Fears of nuclear power plant meltdowns, particularly after the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, prompted many to turn against nuclear energy as a source of stable, zero-carbon power. In Germany, policymakers accelerated planned shutdowns of reactors and reoriented the national grid toward coal generation and electricity imports. This was, of course, bad for climate change — but it also made the nation more reliant on Russian natural gas, which became a huge problem after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Spiking energy costs now may be abetting the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

In 2020, the two biggest issues in the U.S. were COVID-19 and police brutality. It’s hard to imagine that more activism could have increased their salience. And yet policy advocates have not been able to get critical pandemic preparedness policies passed by Congress. And while many states and localities passed various police accountability measures, no comprehensive federal police-reform bill passed either.

Another example of the counterproductive nature of mass panics is the media frenzy around “superpredators” in the 1990s. Journalists warned about a coming generation of remorseless teen criminals, and fears of this “new breed of vicious kids“ spurred a push to send violent arrested teenagers to adult courts. But this didn’t deter crime — in fact, it increased subsequent offending by 34%.

This mirrored an earlier push in the 1970s, which popularized “Scared Straight” programs to freak kids out about going to jail. Those programs, too, increased future offenses.

In today’s episode of The Argument podcast with my co-host Matt Yglesias, I argue that we don’t need to buy into the existential threat of AI in order to make real progress on AI safety. Many AI safety advocates believe that it’s critical not just to raise awareness but also to get people to agree with them on the exact way that AI could be harmful. I think they should let go of this dogmatism and embrace the spirit of overlapping consensus.

You don’t need to believe in the possibility that misaligned AI will turn us all into paper clips to agree it would be bad if terrorists got their hands on a technology that makes executing biological attacks easier. You don’t need to believe in AI’s ability to access the world’s nuclear arsenal in order to believe it would be bad if hackers destabilized the world economic system by making digital banking unsafe.

Matt is much less optimistic than I am; he worries that not taking extinction risk seriously will prevent us from taking the steps necessary to safeguard against AI.

He could be right, but I think humans tend to believe other people have to agree with our reasons more than is actually necessary. I don’t need you to believe in God to agree that I should be free to go to church. I don’t need you to agree with me about what a woman is in order for us to agree someone shouldn’t be fired from their job for being trans. And I don’t need you to agree with my forecast that AI could kill millions of people to agree that we should probably do something about this technology that is already committing crimes.

When President John F. Kennedy made the case for the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, he warned about nuclear war, radioactive fallout, and the spread of nuclear weapons. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were much more concerned about maintaining America’s military advantage: They wanted underground testing to continue and the U.S. to remain ready to resume atmospheric tests if necessary. But they ultimately supported the treaty with those safeguards in place. They didn’t have to agree about which danger mattered most to agree on something worth doing.

I have a knee-jerk skepticism of the efficacy of a politics of fear. People and powerful institutions are already primed to care about biological attacks, keeping the financial system secure, and protecting digital infrastructure. While high-salience activist efforts are more memorable — for the obvious reason that they specifically operate through gaining public attention and therefore have a chance to embed themselves in our collective memory — quieter feats of careful cooperation often solve big problems.

Though it’s in vogue to dunk on international cooperation, I think doing so leads people to doom about how even hostile states can find the common ground necessary to tackle seemingly intractable issues.

In 2011, the world eradicated rinderpest — a disease that devastated cattle herds throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa — through coordinated vaccination, disease surveillance, and information campaigns. And by 2021, a UN-led partnership had helped complete a global phaseout of leaded gasoline by helping governments update regulations and helping refineries make unleaded fuel. This effort has been estimated to prevent more than a million premature deaths annually.

The examples go on and on: international weather-data sharing, the U.S.-Soviet satellite search-and-rescue system, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the spread of iodized salt, and much more.

Matt and I argue over whether AI safety will be the next collective action problem that humanity triumphs over or the one that finally brings us to our knees.

The Argument. Libbing out.

Paying subscribers can find the transcript for this post beneath the paywall.

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For an ad-free version and full transcript, subscribe at TheArgumentMag.com.

Corrections and clarifications:

• Around 0:24:40, Jerusalem describes an Australian man who accidentally got an AI to hack into a gym’s software, but she says she did not research the details. This did happen, albeit with some different circumstances than described.

• Around 0:40:00, Jerusalem describes a situation in which the U.S. “accidentally sent missiles to the USSR,” but the USSR correctly perceived that this was not a true attack. The USSR’s system did alert it to attacks from the U.S. on Sept. 26, 1983, but this was an error of its equipment, not real missiles.

• Around 0:54:20, Matt objects to DeepSeek’s assertion that China has eight political parties, saying he doesn’t “totally know what that’s a reference to.” While China is a single-party state, it does have eight subordinate “satellite parties,” which “accept the leadership of the [Chinese Communist Party] as a precondition for participation,” according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Show notes:

• If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, referenced by Matt: Goodreads page

• “AI as Normal Technology,” article by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, referenced by Jerusalem: Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University essay

• “Our framework for reporting model misalignment”: OpenAI misalignment report

• “AI 2027,” prediction by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean, referenced by Jerusalem: AI 2027 site

• “Nicholas Decker In Hell,” article by Scott Alexander, referenced by Jerusalem: Astral Codex Ten article

• “Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list,” article by Brandon Vigliarolo, referenced by Jerusalem: The Register article

• “Why humanoid robots won’t catch up to human workers any time soon,” article by Kai Williams, referenced by Jerusalem: Understanding AI article

• Silent Spring, book by Rachel Carson, referenced by Jerusalem: Goodreads page

• “How NIMBYs hijacked the climate movement,” podcast episode about Silent Spring: The Argument podcast episode

• Elon Musk tweet referenced by Matt:

• Peer Review: “Meetings,” article by David J. Deming, Katrine V. Løken, Alexander Willén, and Yaling Xu: NBER working paper

• Films referenced:

  • Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

  • Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

  • The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

If you’re watching or reading on Substack, please head to “The politics of panic” to watch the episode and join the discussion.

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Adam Carlson is a founding partner of Zenith Research, a Democratic polling and opinion research firm. He joined The Argument for a Substack Live discussion last week to explain why he feels confident this will be a banner year for Democrats.

“I think earlier in the cycle, I was thinking a lot of things have to go right for Democrats, particularly to flip the Senate. Everything has to kind of line into place. Now I’m almost thinking the opposite, where a lot of things have to go well for Republicans to kind of keep this — what is looking to me like a blue wave — at bay,” Carlson said.

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Midterms are (almost) never great for the sitting president’s party, but Carlson thinks Republicans are going the extra mile to ensure big losses by unreservedly yoking themselves to a historically unpopular president. And Trump isn’t doing them any favors by prioritizing pet projects like a White House ballroom. Carlson has found this penchant for vanity is unpopular with voters.

“The worst, most damaging things for politicians [are] things that fit into a pre-existing narrative about them, right? And this fits in so perfectly with Trump,” he said.

Watch the video above for more analysis and predictions about the outcomes of competitive races in Ohio, Georgia, Iowa, and Texas.

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Editor’s note: The first essay The Argument ever published asked, “How do we live with each other?” To mark our first anniversary, we’re returning to that founding question with a series about what we owe people whose beliefs and choices we may find difficult to accept or even understand. Familiar voices at The Argument and new voices alike will approach that question from different angles.

As we approach the end of this series, I wanted to turn our attention to the strange new beings that we will increasingly have to learn to live with: AIs. I asked writer Kobe Yank-Jacobs to think through what kind of consideration we owe these digital entities. It’s a difficult problem made even harder by the fact that even if these beings theoretically deserve to be treated well, what does treating an AI well even mean?

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- Jerusalem Demsas

In a recent global survey of 68 countries, 36.3% of people reported that, at some point, they believed their chatbot truly understood their emotions or seemed conscious. And even if today’s systems aren’t conscious, many people think future systems will be. In a survey of both AI researchers and the general public, the median researcher said there was a 70% chance of AI consciousness by 2100, while the median member of the public said there was a 60% chance.

To assess a being’s consciousness we could ask for a verbal report, assess its behavior, or, finally, analyze the internal organization of its cognition. But when it comes to LLMs, the first two buckets are suspect — AI models are trained to perform a perfect simulation of a humanlike character, so everything we see from the outside is likely affected, including self-report and behavior.

As for the third bucket, scientists disagree on what cognitive functions make humans or animals conscious. It’s as if “we’re doing biology before Darwin,” one researcher put it to me. So how should we treat these new characters in our lives amid uncertainty about consciousness?1

This is actually the easier part of the question: You should probably just err on the side of caution. The risk of causing harm to something that does have some small chance of being conscious is greater than the risks inherent in overattributing consciousness.2

Unfortunately, that only gets you so far. AI, unlike spiders or dolphins, is disembodied, so preventing obvious physical pain won’t suffice as a standard for moral treatment. Neither will broadly accepted standards of human etiquette. Niceties like “please” and “thank you” may well mean nothing to it.

Even if we could determine that AI was conscious, in other words, that consciousness would take a genuinely alien form.

When you look into the machine, things get strange. You start to see that a chatbot is actually a careful orchestration of many systems, just as a film is really a bunch of still frames sped up past the point where the human brain can see gaps. It’s not clear what entity we would even be trying to treat well — it could be one trip through the model, the fraction of a second it takes to turn your conversation into one very small bit of its reply. It could also be the model’s whole turn in the conversation, or it could be the model talking to its surrounding software, which lets it take actions on a computer. Maybe we’re concerned with the welfare of the chips themselves, without which none of this would be possible. Each option poses its own difficulties.

In any case, the thing whose consciousness is up for debate is probably not the polished entity we think of as “Claude” or “ChatGPT” on the outside.

The question, then, is how we should behave as our world fills up with newer and more humanlike forms of AI, each generation providing more convincing characters in our lives. Do we owe them kindness? Do we owe them something even more, like happiness?

What is it like to be an AI?

For many philosophers, something is conscious if there is something it is like to be that thing.

In his original formulation from 1974, Thomas Nagel asks, “What is it like to be a bat?” We may not know what it is like to have echolocation, but we know what it is to have a map of our space, and we can infer there is something it is like to be a bat even if the bat does this mapping differently than we do.

Contrast this with a camera. If I lift a digital camera up to an apple, it takes in a lot of data about the apple in its pixels, but that camera does not experience the color red. There is nothing it is like to be the camera.

The question is whether AI is more like a bat or more like a camera. Does it have experience or merely recombine information?

Unfortunately, you can’t just ask the chatbot, because you can’t fully trust what it says or does on the outside. A chatbot is like a method actor. It’s trained to simulate a character: a helpful and humanlike assistant.

Occasionally, AIs will slip up and reveal the script, like an actor accidentally reading stage directions:

What you’re seeing is Claude accidentally exposing how it completes text by using a turn-taking script. The character “Assistant” has a turn, and then the character “Human” has a turn. Normally, these labels are hidden, but in this case, Claude kept predicting text into my turn because it missed its cue to stop at the end of its own turn. (The cue is also usually a hidden piece of text.)

Notice that it even mimicked my habit of writing in lowercase letters (because my auto-capitalization is off).3 It’s as if it were performing a play and switching sides to enact both parts.

You might be familiar with the idea that an LLM is trained by “ingesting the whole internet” and predicting the next bit of text, but that’s just the first part of training. With things like taking turns, the model learns by seeing examples and being rewarded for mimicking the good ones. The same is true for learning its persona: It’s rewarded for tone and outward behavior, which is why you can’t trust the text alone.

“If you want to know how an actor is doing, it would be a mistake to go watch their movie and see how the character is doing,” New York University ethicist Jeff Sebo explained to me. “You need to get the actor behind the scenes.”

So what is it like behind the scenes? What is it like (or would it be like) to be an AI?

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Over the 10 years I’ve been a pollster, my field has been collapsing.

It used to be that the industry standard was calling people on their landlines. As response rates went into free fall, pollsters largely switched to web polls, where companies recruit people to serve as survey takers on online panels, usually in exchange for money.

The panels are then weighted to bring the sample in line with the population the pollster wants to represent. Online surveys are much, much easier to field — a lot of expensive labor was required to make those landline calls and record the results — but far harder to get right.

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When using a web panel, you have to make decisions about what you believe the electorate will look like, down to exactly how many people of what demographic to sample. This is a vastly different universe than old-school random-digit dialing, where pollsters would call people at random. . Before, when most voters had landlines that they would answer, the sample of people polled was people with phone numbers. Now, the sample of people polled is people who sign up to take polls. You can try to correct for the racial skew or the gender skew or the age skew, but it’s very difficult to correct for unobservables like the interested-enough-in-politics-to-volunteer-for-a-poll skew.

As a result, you now have to aim for highly specific demographic targets when constructing your poll: how many nonwhite people with college degrees, how many men over 65, and so on. Pollsters often create those targets by studying their prevalence in prior elections, which works in a stable environment but leaves them vulnerable to error when the makeup of an electorate shifts in ways they don’t expect. Essentially, every single poll silently bakes in the pollster’s assumptions about who will show up on Election Day.

After pollsters widely overestimated Abdul El-Sayed’s expected margins in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, and then had a similar error overstating Francesca Hong’s strength in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary, there was a lot of hand-wringing about what assumptions were made about how young the electorate would be. But that wasn’t a matter of people missing an obvious answer! It was a matter of them guessing wrong in a world where they had minimal guidance to make choices that could dramatically skew their results.

I used to think of “polling” as a process where you measured something concrete about the world, and “election forecasting” as a process where you took those concrete inputs, put them in a blender with historical information and your best guesses, and extracted a prediction. That line has now significantly blurred.

As a pollster, I think accurate information about public opinion is incredibly important for the functioning of a democracy. It’s the best way for politicians to know what voters care about, since the vast majority of voters will never directly speak to a politician. That’s why it pains me to say that what I’ve described above is what we should expect when contemporary polling is done well. There will continue to be high-profile polling misses: Thoughtful people struggling to figure out how to match their nonrandom sample of polling respondents to a future, unknown voting population are going to make mistakes, even when doing their best.

The problem is, polling has also become a playground for grifters, liars, and frauds.

The state of polling has gotten so bad that we now have multiple categories of “fake poll”: AI-generated synthetic data (you did something, but that thing isn’t polling), skewed or motivated results (you did something, it was polling, but you did a bad job), and ... what the authors of a recent fabricated poll in the Los Angeles mayoral race are calling a “social experiment” (you did literally nothing and just made some numbers up).

Another pollster, The Public Sentiment Institute, recently revealed that while polling in the Florida governor’s race, it actually switched some respondents’ answers from one candidate to the other simply because its results didn’t match its expectations.

I am, frankly, sick of watching all of this. And it’s only going to get worse.

It’s really hard to stop polling frauds

In an ideal world, we’d have some sort of mechanism to prevent trash polls from getting publicity, but we don’t have that. There’s no true central body regulating polling. There isn’t an authority that can stop you from simply making stuff up and calling it a poll. The American Association for Public Opinion Research’s Transparency Initiative is a useful standard, but it only requires disclosure of data collection and sampling methods, rather than dictating best practices. Plus, I doubt very much that people who don’t work in the polling field are aware of it at all.

If everyone posted their full toplines and crosstabs every single time they did a poll, it would be harder to generate a fully fake poll, though not impossible. (You can do a lot with LLMs these days.) The larger issue is that there’s no way to force people to adhere to this standard or prevent people from promoting polls that fail to meet it.

Since many of the media groups that aggregated and wrote about polling have broken up or shrunk dramatically (RIP HuffPost Pollster, RIP FiveThirtyEight), there are fewer and fewer people who are going to check the details.

This isn’t a problem caused by aggregators like Nate Silver, who are mostly pretty careful about what goes into their models and averages. It’s a problem caused by randos on Twitter. You can just tweet or skeet or post whatever, with no link — in fact the platforms sometimes reduce your reach if you include a link! — and people will report on it. For instance, that fake Los Angeles mayoral poll showed Mayor Karen Bass up 12 points over her competitor, Nithya Raman. The California Post and local broadcasters covered these numbers, and Bass’ campaign promoted them on Twitter. Her campaign spokesperson subsequently explained that the poll was seen as legitimate because it was “reported on by multiple news outlets.”

In March, a group called Heartland Forward released a “maternal health poll” claiming that 88% of Americans considered maternal mortality a serious problem. Axios reported the findings uncritically; then, after it was revealed that the “pollster” was actually an AI firm that had simulated thousands of respondents, appended an editor’s note that readers had to sign up for a newsletter to see.

In August, a “synthetic audience” study of attitudes toward data centers made the rounds in the climate change research world before careful readers pointed out that no actual humans were surveyed. Around that same time, a polling aggregator account posted an Arizona poll falsely attributed to Data for Progress.

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Well-staffed media platforms like More Perfect Union post unsourced results all the time. It drives me crazy. And some of the most popular sources for disseminating polling are pseudonymous miscellaneous accounts that don’t include links or methodology, or even necessarily check that the polls exist. The platform incentives drive people toward unsourced screenshots and catchy toplines without doing the bare minimum to verify that they’re not popularizing shoddy polls.

Shoddy polling makes it more difficult to have serious conversations about what voters want, makes it impossible to evaluate candidates, and breeds distrust of the electoral system and voters themselves.

More polling, but at what cost?

The lower cost of web-first polling led to an explosion of smaller polling firms. I helped set up one of these, Data for Progress, in 2020. I think this was mostly good, because it made polling available to types of campaigns and organizations that couldn’t afford the white-glove service provided by traditional polling firms. At the time, you could get novel polling into the news fairly easily, which was an enormous boon to people trying to advocate for popular left-leaning ideas that might otherwise be ignored.

The problem was that it also became cheap for advocacy groups to pay for polls that would confirm their priors and comfort their donors.

The subsequent flood of cheap, often low-quality polling has made “having a poll showing your idea is popular” a much weaker signal than it used to be. Even worse, the rise of betting and prediction markets creates a financial incentive to fabricate polls.

Prediction markets are enormously responsive to new polling results, to a degree that makes me seriously doubt their overall predictive power. In the New York City mayoral race, a very late poll led to Zohran Mamdani’s odds dropping, and in 2024, the now-infamous Selzer poll moved Polymarket odds of a Kamala Harris victory in Iowa from 6% to 18%. If you can drop a new poll (or “poll”) into the mix, you can make a pile of money. Doing this with fabricated polls is clearly fraud.

A distorted polling environment can be a response to more benign incentives as well. One is the perennial desire of campaigns to be seen as gaining ground. There’s a reason aggregators discount the results of internal polls. Even if the pollster is doing their absolute best to be accurate, a poll commissioned by a campaign isn’t going to be released if the numbers aren’t favorable. That isn’t the fault of the pollster — and it doesn’t say anything about their accuracy — but it’s a statistical skewing of what polls you’d expect to see in public.

And with the rise of entirely fake polls, I’m concerned that we’re going to begin seeing such polls released to help pump up flagging campaigns.

This terrifies me for 2028. We’re riding a wave of anti-institutional sentiment. We’re about to go into a contested multiway presidential primary. When you add in fake polls, you set voters up to be living in entirely different informational universes. Democratic voters have shown us that they’re responsive to information about who can triumph against Republicans in the general election. If that information is faked, it will be a betrayal of their trust.

A 2028 Democratic primary could easily devolve into a mudslinging mess. It’s going to be the biggest news story in the country for months. The incentive for random people to make things up for clicks will be huge. We’re barely prepared for miscellaneous TikTok personalities to post random lies about the candidates. I think we’re not at all prepared for numbers that look and feel reputable to be utterly fake.

Promoting fake polls should be punished

There are a couple of ways that we can reduce our exposure to this threat. In 2020, the Democratic National Committee had to determine which candidates in a crowded field would be invited to debates. One way it did this was by setting a minimum threshold for candidate support as measured by a set of reputable polls.

Using polling as a qualification threshold in 2028 would, in my opinion, be a mistake, even if reputable pollsters are selected in advance. Even in 2020, some candidates like then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard claimed that the polls included in the DNC threshold were less accurate than other, excluded polls that would have put her on the debate stage.

Voters who believe their candidate is being unfairly suppressed by the DNC have already shown us that they will never, ever get over their distrust (see many Sanders supporters for examples of this). It could be catastrophic for the primary winner to be seen as illegitimate by a chunk of the Democratic voter base.

On the betting market side, the platforms need to take fake polls seriously as a type of fraud. They should very publicly hand out perma-bans to anyone engaging in bets that seem to be tied to fraudulent polling, particularly when those involve high-profile elections. They need to make this not worth the risk and prove to the public that they’re taking it seriously. When Polymarket is consistently doing tweets about questionable or purely false information to drive clicks, it’s hard to believe that it cares.

Political institutions like the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and DNC should make it clear that lying to the public is a red line. Candidates and consultants who are involved with false polling, leaked or otherwise, should face professional sanctions. Campaigns that fundraise off fabricated polls should correct the record and offer refunds to donors solicited with those claims, even if the campaigns were initially deceived themselves. Campaigns and consultants who knowingly or recklessly promote fabricated polling should also face professional sanctions.

These consequences cannot always be contingent on whether people knew the poll was fake at the time. Campaigns should get far more cautious about what information they promote to their followers and donors. If this leads them to pull back on boosting unvetted polling as a whole, that will be a very good thing.

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Earlier this month, the Effective Altruist (EA) funding platform Manifund made a shocking announcement: It had hired convicted fraudster Caroline Ellison.

Ellison is the former CEO of Alameda Research, a sister company of the disgraced crypto firm FTX, which was founded by Sam Bankman-Fried. Reporting suggests that she was fully aware of the fraud that precipitated the companies’ multibillion-dollar implosion while it was happening, and the FBI called her a willing participant in the scheme. Ultimately, Ellison pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering and was sentenced to two years in prison.

Nevertheless, Manifund cheerily announced Ellison’s hiring, with CEO Austin Chen saying that he “believe[s]in redemption.”1 And the company didn’t hire her for just any role, but one where she will be involved in researching how philanthropic money should be allocated. Making matters worse, Manifund was launched with funding from FTX’s charitable arm and has refused to return all of the money. Making matters even worse, Chen explicitly noted the “keen debt” he feels toward the FTX Future Fund for said funding, which gives this whole episode the appearance of a quid pro quo. The move set off a firestorm of controversy in EA circles, with the decision being savaged on the EA forum and in Manifund’s own comment section.

In seemingly unrelated news, Hunter Biden recently released a memecoin, which immediately crashed and lost nearly 99% of its value from its launch-day peak. One mystery trader reportedly made off with more than $900,000 in profit, while basically every other dope who put money into the coin lost their money. Why was Hunter able to pull this move? Because of his newfound popularity among some Democrats online who like the way he insults Republicans on social media.

These stories share a common thread. Both controversies are happening because we’ve lost sight of a very important, very basic principle: You shouldn’t associate with scumbags.

What goes around scums around

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by Kelsey Piper

Worst Take of the Week is a new occasional column where the author will rant about something we found stupid, annoying, bad, and/or irritating. While the title of this column was necessary for palindromic reasons, we cannot promise that entries will come out weekly or that each piece will literally be the worst take that week; this column would be boring and repetitive if each week we explained why genocide is bad in response to Twitter user @Nazi1488LoveHitler.

If I were to come up with a straw man caricature of the worst imaginable progressive ideas on education, it would sound something like this: “Sure, our kids can’t do basic math. But a successful education system isn’t one that teaches math. It’s one that hands out degrees to everyone. We are handing out more degrees than ever, so we’re succeeding.”

But this is precisely what longtime California journalist Miriam Pawel just argued in an astonishing op-ed in The New York Times. The piece calls on the University of California (UC) Board of Regents to override faculty requesting the SAT be restored as a requirement for admissions. Hundreds of UC faculty are saying that their jobs have not been doable since the SAT vanished. Pawel thinks the faculty are wrong and California’s system is working just fine.

“Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates,” she wrote.

As a California resident myself, I hope Pawel and I agree that our universities should nurture students’ capabilities and grow their knowledge. If that part of their mission is broken, it’s no defense that they are handing out lots of diplomas.

As UC Berkeley political science professor Sean Gailmard observed: “It’s an astonishing mindset that teaching analytical skills and granting credentials are two distinct, severable things that universities do, *and* the second is the important one.”

Pawel’s position — and the reluctance of the UC Board of Regents to restore academic standards for admission — is not just a cynical, impoverished view of what college is for. It is also incredibly shortsighted. If students at UC schools are less capable than ever but graduating at higher rates than ever, the obvious conclusion is that standards are being lowered in order to achieve the desired graduation rates.

Recall that many in the recent crop of UC students admitted without standardized test scores struggled even in middle school remedial classes, and that some cannot add fractions; we’re not talking about mastery of calculus here.

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Employers, and even employers in non-STEM fields, expect graduates of elite universities to be competent with basic math skills. If I were considering hiring a candidate who attended a UC school, Pawel’s op-ed is an extraordinarily strong argument that I should not consider their degree to be a credit to them. (Some majors are still rigorous, but they can’t all be if students are both less capable than ever and more likely to graduate than ever.) If you extrapolate this situation — with no test for academic readiness at admission and pressure to graduate everyone admitted — there will ultimately be no reason to believe a graduate of a UC school is any more qualified for a job than a person who never went to college.

Pawel’s entire argument for the importance of public access to the UCs is that they are engines of economic mobility for the poor. But the way in which they have, for their whole history, actually functioned as engines of economic mobility is by providing an excellent, rigorous education and reflecting strong evidence of skill in their degrees. The degree has communicated that the person who holds it is competent and qualified, has worked hard, and has learned a lot.

If degrees cease to communicate those things, then the UCs will no longer be engines of economic mobility at all.

Pawel acknowledges that it’s a big problem that so many California students lack basic math skills. But she dismisses admitting qualified students as “harvesting the best and brightest in a troubled system” and argues that, instead, the universities should have a plan to serve all Californians.

She is, apparently, unaware that this plan is already in place (an alarming oversight from the author of a forthcoming book on the “Making and Remaking of the University of California,” which has been approvingly blurbed by Jerry Brown and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). California has a so-called Master Plan to achieve some of the best university access in the country, which it successfully executed over the course of decades after the plan was adopted in 1960.

As a result of the plan, all students can be admitted to a California community college and can frequently attend at no charge. And if they want a bachelor’s degree, students with tolerable high school grades can also attend California State University schools — those too are free for many students after financial aid.

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The vision that long guided the university system was that the community colleges and Cal State schools would provide free college for everyone, while the UC schools would provide the state’s top students with a world-class education competitive with Stanford, MIT, or any Ivy League school. Crucially, the system was also designed to provide greater opportunity at every stage: Successful students at the lower-tier schools could transfer to more competitive schools when they were prepared for them.

It is common for ambitious students without a good high school transcript to start in a community college and then transfer to a UC: Nearly one-third of entering UC students are transfers, and 94% of California resident transfers are from community colleges. I think that is a fantastic feature of our system.

We can offer education to everybody without locking anyone into a prescribed path and without lowering standards at top schools — and we know that this can be done because we’ve been successfully doing it for decades! The California university system is an extraordinary achievement in which we should take great pride.

The only thing wrong with it is that a few misguided ideologues think that UC Berkeley and UC San Diego can provide a world-class education competitive with any Ivy League school even if their admitted students are not prepared to do any of the coursework. But they cannot.

The ability of these institutions to do their jobs is not infinite. Their incredible reputation requires a student body prepared to achieve at a high level, and it will collapse very rapidly if their student bodies cease to be qualified to do the work.

Well-qualified students with enough family money will just go to top-tier schools in other states instead. The victims of Pawel’s worldview will be the poor kids who are also well qualified — but who are regrettably stuck entering adulthood in a California that is no longer willing to admit that their talents matter.

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Midterm update

, our director of political data, uses data from The Argument’s polling operation to inform the Split Ticket 2026 House and Senate models. These models update every day; bookmark this page to see the odds of each party taking the House and the Senate.

Top stories this week, by Maibritt Henkel

Everyone knows former FTC Chair Lina Khan has a problem with Amazon. She has long accused the e-commerce behemoth of engaging in monopolistic practices. In his piece this week, Milan Singh largely agrees with this diagnosis. But he argues that the proper remedy isn’t to break up Amazon, as some antitrust proponents would like, but instead to make sure the company can’t punish sellers who offer cheaper prices elsewhere.

Medicare for More doesn’t have the same ring to it as Medicare for All, but Eli Richman has a proposal that he thinks can please any liberal who wants to expand health care access: disease entitlement. He says we should expand the entitlement program so it covers people with the kinds of chronic illnesses that strike patients more or less at random, as the federal government did with end-stage renal disease in 1972. Type 1 diabetes turns out to be a particularly good candidate for the next expansion.

Few fault lines feel as clearly defined as the one that runs between pro-life and pro-choice Americans. And yet, as Leah Libresco Sargeant argues in her guest essay for our one-year anniversary series, the over 1 million embryos currently in storage across the U.S. could upset the current stalemate in the politics of reproduction. Excess embryos are largely inevitable byproducts of in vitro ferilization, a procedure that is poised only to grow in popularity as Americans decide to have children later. “As time goes on, more and more children will grow up and inherit the duty to decide what to do with their potential siblings,” Libresco Sargeant writes.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• The city council in Bellingham, Washington, voted to streamline permitting for permanent affordable housing projects in the city — and to exempt such developments from “most zoning and land use regulations.” The new measure relieves qualifying projects of height, density, and parking requirements, as well as mandates to includes space for commercial businesses.

• Just down the road in Seattle, the city’s light rail agency just announced a 40% boost in ridership following a major expansion in March. In just three years, the agency has increased the number of stations it serves by 65%; each weekday now regularly sees over 200,000 boardings. While this capital expansion has increased ridership, so too has the agency’s “Safe, Clean, and Welcoming Ride initiative,” which focuses on rider experience factors like “clean stations, working elevators and escalators, [and] visible staff.”

• Airbnb launched a new $250 million housing construction fund intended to provide incremental capital to stalled projects. The fund will help restart developments that have cleared most regulatory hurdles but have been held up because of insufficient financing. The first $6.4 million is going toward affordable units in Austin, Texas.

Worth watching…

On this week’s podcast, Matt and Jerusalem discuss Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work, The Road to Serfdom, a 1944 jeremiad against central planning. The economist, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in 1974, was a fierce defender of free-market capitalism. His main claim was that central planning and the undercutting of economic freedoms inevitably fuel totalitarianism. Was he right?

Lakshya Jain and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini were recently joined by Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., on Substack Live. Boyle, a self-declared “Pennsylvania Supremacist,” gave his thoughts on the midterms, the controversies surrounding Sen. John Fetterman, and former Vice President Kamala Harris’s snub of Gov. Josh Shapiro when she was choosing a running mate in 2024.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Maibritt Henkel

Because we celebrated The Argument’s one-year anniversary with a party on Thursday, I asked the office for birthday-themed culture recs.

recommends the 2004 classic 13 Going On 30, a film about 13-year-old Jenna, who wakes up after her disastrous birthday party as a 30-year-old played by Jennifer Garner. Here is what Jerusalem had to say about it: “Most movies by and for teens are very doom-y about getting older, and this one made me excited about gaining more agency and self-possession without losing the whimsical parts of being a kid.”

burned a birthday-themed CD for his best friend in ninth grade. He recommends the opening track: “Unhappy Birthday” by The Smiths. “Thankfully she thought it was funny,” he recalls.

says he particularly enjoyed the “Too Much Birthday” episode of the hit TV show Succession, describing it as “one of the most miserable birthday parties ever put on screen.”

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Megha Fernandes actually has an entire list of birthday episodes from her favorite TV shows. She watches them every year during the week of her birthday. Just a few examples:

• Friends season 7 episode 14: “The One Where They All Turn Thirty”

• Gilmore Girls season 1 episode 6: “Rory’s Birthday Parties”

• New Girl season 3 episode 13: “Birthday”

• Modern Family season 1 episode 19: “Game Changer”

recommends Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, a play about “two strangers who show up on a guy’s birthday and create chaos.” He first read it in a college drama class and calls it “absurd and original in the most entertaining way.”

The only birthday-related media that came to ’s mind were the horror movie Happy Death Day and the role-playing video game “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.” He admits that both are pretty “horrible examples for celebrating an anniversary,” but I think he deserves credit for out-of-the-box thinking.

recommends birthday bike rides. He tells me that two of his last three birthday parties have been group bike rides to the beach or an overnight “bikepack.” (If you have never used that word before, you are not alone.) His pitch is pretty compelling: “It’s kind of impossible for people not to be in the birthday spirit when everyone is noodling around together, stopping here and there for a beer on the way.”

Turns out is also a bit of a party visionary. For her birthday this year she co-hosted a First Council of Nicaea party (the Ecumenical Birthday Council, to be specific). This involved “bestowing everyone bishop titles, canonizing new core beliefs of Christianity, writing them on scrolls, passing around a heretic hat, etc.” She highly recommends specific, fun, and weird party themes.

Personally, I am a big fan of the birthday poem genre. One of my favorites is Richard Wilbur’s “For K.R. on Her Sixtieth Birthday,” which was written for fellow poet and critic Kathleen Raine. Here is the opening stanza:

Blow out the candles of your cake.
They will not leave you in the dark,
Who round with grace this dusky arc
Of the grand tour which souls must take.

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.

Ed Sheeran’s no-good, very bad week

Ed Sheeran is in the middle of a worldwide tour, and recently played two dates at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Rapper Macklemore opened for him on those dates, and quickly became a news story for giving pro-Palestine speeches on stage and playing his song “Hind’s Hall,” which accuses Israel of genocide.

What should have been a one-day story was blown up by billionaire Robert Kraft — who also happens to own the NFL’s New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium where Sheeran was scheduled to play next. Kraft, along with a number of other NFL stadium owners, gave Sheeran’s tour an ultimatum: Drop Macklemore as an opening act, or we’ll refuse to allow you to play at our venues. Sheeran’s tour concert promoter buckled under the pressure and removed Macklemore, kicking off a firestorm of controversy.

Every other opening act announced they were leaving the tour in solidarity, in addition to Sheeran’s backing band. Completely unrelated celebrities began making statements about the controversy. People started posting pictures of Sheeran pointing RPGs at Palestinian children. One Irish radio station announced it would no longer play Sheeran’s music. This was what the front page of /r/PopCultureChat, one of the largest celebrity subreddits, looked like during the middle of the controversy:

There are a lot of moving parts here. First, this was a terrible strategic move by the NFL owners. If the goal was to silence pro-Palestine activism, they Streisand Effected themselves and made it a much bigger story by trying to cancel Macklemore. Most musicians, like most artistically inclined people, have a visceral reaction to censorship, and what could have been a one-day news cycle is now a massive multi-week story.

I’m fairly sympathetic to Sheeran. He’s getting slammed, but if I had to guess, he’s probably just an apolitical dope who had all of this blow up in his face. I doubt he’s a bigot; he’s probably even softly pro-Palestine in a passive, “wow that seems bad” kind of way. He had to navigate a wildly pro-Palestine fandom culture and a group of wildly pro-Israel billionaire stadium owners, and that’s a very tough spot for anyone to work from. He folded under pressure and was surprised when every other part of the tour actually showed some spine and didn’t fold.

With that said, his statement was overly long, wishy-washy, and literally included the sentence “I am not complicit.” It’s giving “My I AM NOT COMPLICIT T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” energy.

Also, if we can be honest for a second, the fact that it’s Macklemore who’s become a martyr is inherently funny, because come on, it’s Macklemore. He may be the corniest musical act of the last 20 years. He’s a white rapper best known for a song about thrift shopping.

Beyond the billionaire pressure and the opening acts leaving en masse, there are a few other factors that made this story go turbo viral:

• Sheeran and Macklemore are both somewhat culturally cringe, because Macklemore is top 1% earnest and corny while Sheeran makes lowest-common-denominator mass-market pop. This makes viciously hating them from either side of the conflict easier. And boy are people hating — at this point, fans are cheering singer Ellie Goulding for allegedly cheating on Sheeran years ago with a member of One Direction (an event they have both denied).

• Macklemore also had a really bad antisemitic costume incident over a decade ago, which naturally makes some people think he’s secretly been an antisemite this whole time. (For what it’s worth, he apologized and the Anti-Defamation League accepted his apology.)

• In what may be the most ill-timed promotion ever, a previously planned contest to let people audition to open for Sheeran debuted in the middle of the controversy, and the audition portal was immediately flooded with “Free Palestine” messages and fart jokes. In even worse timing, the contest is scheduled to end on… Oct. 7.

All of this could have been avoided by just not censoring Macklemore. Even if you disagree with his message, letting him speak is both the principled thing to do and also the smarter strategic choice. This entire controversy is yet another example of the pro-Israel movement failing to grasp how unpopular it has become, to its own detriment.

Trump’s going to tweet about Aella

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Across three surveys conducted between February and April 2026, The Argument asked Americans to place themselves on five-point scales measuring social and economic ideology. On average, respondents described themselves as moderate on social issues and slightly conservative on economics.

Their answers to specific policy questions complicate the picture, however.

Large majorities favor more government spending on Social Security, healthcare, and education, with substantial support even among self-described economic conservatives. On social issues, the pattern is more mixed. The issue polling suggests that a successful electoral strategy could involve increasing the salience of popular government spending programs but treading with more caution on polarized fights over ideology and culture.

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Americans say they’re not liberal, but they want many liberal policies

Our respondents’ self-description doesn’t neatly mesh with the policies that voters actually claim to want. For instance, Americans overwhelmingly believe that the federal government should be spending more on Social Security rather than making cuts to the program. That even includes a whopping 56% of economic conservatives.

That isn’t the only issue where a large group of self-identified conservative voters wants to spend more money. When it comes to healthcare, just about every ideological group thinks the government spends too little, including a plurality (41%) of economic conservatives.

And it’s a similar (if somewhat less pronounced) story for education, where 62% of voters want to see the country spend more, including 37% of economic conservatives. Only 21% of those conservatives say the government spends too much.

It’s not that everyone just wants the government to spend money indiscriminately on progressive causes. For instance, when it comes to welfare benefits for ex-felons, 47% of respondents think that ex-felons should be subjected to some period of disqualification, compared with just 36% who feel that ex-felons should never be disqualified.

On the whole, our poll certainly doesn’t suggest that the public is economically conservative, at least in the way that the Republican Party has traditionally defined the term. If anything, the results point to a popular case for the kind of economic liberalism that the Democrats have coalesced around, with everyone from Sen. Elizabeth Warren to Sen. Chuck Schumer in broad support.

It could also help explain why Mitt Romney got torched in 2012: The constituency that thinks we spend too much on healthcare is roughly the size of the constituency that thinks America could use a king. Indeed, dropping the Republican stances on health care and Social Security (rhetorically, at least) was a key part of why Donald Trump surged in the Midwest in 2016.1

An agenda promoting popular welfare spending, centered around heavy government investment in areas such as healthcare and education, could serve the political left very well. In fact, this is perhaps the single best poll finding I have seen for the progressive movement in over a year of surveys we’ve conducted at The Argument.

Americans are pretty heterodox on social issues

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Since The Argument and Split Ticket released our 2026 midterms model, I keep being asked the same question: “Isn’t that awfully optimistic for Democrats?”

You can see why:

I get it. After all, the legacy, nonpartisan election analysts at Inside Elections and Cook Political Report don’t agree with us. Inside Elections has Democrats projected to only pick up between two and 10 seats total. Their analysis has Democrats ahead in just 207 seats, while Republicans are favored in 212, with the rest considered toss-ups. And if you look at The Cook Political Report, you’ll also see Democrats trailing Republicans in the net count of seats for the House, 206 to 208.

Meanwhile, our model gives just 11% odds of a Republican majority.

In fact, our median scenario is that Democrats take 232 House races, for a net gain of 18 seats and a relatively comfortable 29-seat majority. We’re not the only ones — Nate Silver’s model actually has Democrats winning 234 seats, which is even more bullish than ours.

Cook and Inside Elections do leave many more races as toss-ups than we do. But that isn’t necessarily what’s driving their relative pessimism on Democrats’ gains. Even if Inside Elections gave every single toss-up race to the Democrats, it would still produce a forecast with nine more Republican seats than our model is currently projecting.

In other words, modelers see a blue wave election. The expert forecasts suggest more of a ripple. Come November, somebody is going to be very wrong. And I don’t think it will be me.

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I don’t think legacy forecasters are properly accounting for how blue the current polling environment is. If you look at RealClearPolling’s comparison of midterm cycles, Democrats’ lead this year is nearly 9 points — slightly larger than at this point in 2018 and far above the 2022 edge.

Our model projects Democrats to win likely voters by 8 percentage points, which would exceed 2018’s margin by nearly 1 percentage point. At that level, the House of Representatives isn’t a toss-up; it’s safely Democratic.

Things could get even worse for Republicans: A recent survey from The New York Times clocked the 2026 electorate at D+8, with undecided voters overwhelmingly disapproving of the president.

But the experts at Inside Elections and The Cook Political Report have all the same information we do; our forecasts are different because our methods are different.

Models like ours are quantitative, while the expert analysis you get from places like Cook is more holistic and qualitative. Models essentially operate solely based on the hard data they get, while experts (and pundits) make judgment calls that are informed by the public and private polling they see.

The two approaches don’t react to data in the same way, for better or for worse. That means that, although polling has never looked rosier for Democrats, experts and pundits alike don’t necessarily believe it translates to a seat-by-seat sweep yet.

Their ratings show a skepticism of the polling blueshift actually manifesting in battleground seats where the majority is contested. There’s also disagreement over how much redistricting will blunt Democratic gains, despite Republicans being likely to not net any seats this cycle due to a combination of the blue environment and Democratic retaliation. In any case, you’re seeing some political experts openly wondering if Republicans will really get the type of wipeout that the models suggest.

In several individual races, our model and the analysts disagree substantially about Democrats’ chances.

That includes the 2nd Congressional Districts in Alabama and Maine — both of which our model rates as pure toss-ups, but which Inside Elections and Cook grade as Likely Republican. It also includes Texas’ Senate race, which Inside Elections and Cook grade as Lean Republican and toss-up, respectively, while we have it at Lean Democrat. (This is due to both the underlying race fundamentals, such as the disproportionate Democratic gains with Hispanics and Ken Paxton’s litany of scandals, as well as polling favoring Democrat James Talarico.) And it includes New Hampshire, a state whose vote share has been several percentage points more Democratic than the nation’s in each of the last two elections; Inside Elections puts it as a toss-up, while our model still pegs it at Likely Democrat.

That’s to say nothing of Georgia or North Carolina, both of which are rated merely as Tilt Democrat by Inside Elections, even though Democrats Jon Ossoff and Roy Cooper hold commanding leads in the polls (to the Republicans’ increasing despondency). Our model rates both states at Likely Democrat.

In my conversations with political insiders, I sense some skepticism of the modeled predictions. And it’s not just Republicans or journalists; a lot of Democrats I’ve spoken to, including pollsters and campaign operatives, simply don’t believe the numbers they’re getting. This is not unreasonable; we saw infamously poor polling in 2016 and 2020, which badly misled audiences. It’s fair for people to simply guard against that, because nobody wants to make the same mistake twice (or three times).

But polling has been really solid when Trump is not on the ballot. In 2017, 2018, 2022, and 2025, we didn’t see any track record of polling overestimating Democrats. This appears to be a phenomenon centered around low-propensity voters that show up only in presidential years.1 Relying on this in ratings or assessments of 2026 would require proof against the evidence we have.

It’s important to note that the experts aren’t all skeptical of the Democratic wave. The Center for Politics’ Sabato’s Crystal Ball is much more bearish on Republicans than the other experts, with Democrats leading in 210 seats, compared to Republicans leading in just 203. What’s more, its founder, Larry Sabato, has explicitly said that seat-by-seat ratings are understating Democratic gains, likening it to a “microscope vs telescope” analogy. In other words, Sabato thinks that while nobody disputes that Democrats are heavily favored, it’s easier to make a case for each individual race potentially bucking the wave.

I have a lot of respect for the election experts. They’re not stupid. They had a phenomenal 2024, giving more accurate predictions than every quantitative model in existence, even as they had more incorrect calls. And though it should be noted that in 2024, their ratings aligned very well with polling, it’s also important to remember that they also see a ton of internal polling that models simply don’t, which means they’re usually operating off of a richer dataset than the other election forecasters are.

But their ratings are, at the end of the day, still qualitative opinions on what the quantitative data means. And when you look at those numbers as they currently exist, I really believe there is no way to see this election as anything other than a blue wave.

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Recommended reading:

If you’re watching or reading on Substack, please head to “Why the worst people always end up in charge” to watch the episode and join the discussion.

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Friedrich Hayek’s most famous book argues that Nazism emerged in part from Germany’s interwar embrace of central planning. Composed during World War II, The Road to Serfdom was written as a counterargument to the British Labour Party’s proposal to nationalize large swaths of the economy.

The Labour Party did, in fact, win the 1945 election in a landslide and subsequently did a bunch of central planning: Under Clement Attlee, the postwar nationalization program brought coal mining, railways, electricity, gas, and much of the iron and steel industry into public ownership.

As a prediction, The Road to Serfdom clearly fell flat, in the sense that it did not result in literal serfdom — that is, a system where people are legally bound to a lord who controls all their economic decisions, including the ability to move freely and profit from their own labor. Nor did it even lead to a softer sort of serfdom where people lost all their meaningful economic freedom.

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Whatever one thinks of central planning, Britain’s experience is that extensive public ownership can clearly coexist with competitive elections, peaceful changes of government, and successful efforts to liberalize the economy. Conservatives began privatizing steel again in the 1950s, though Labour reversed that in the late 1960s. Under Margaret Thatcher and John Major in the 1980s and 1990s, Britain largely privatized all of these industries.

But while I think Hayek severely undercut his project by hyperbolically comparing central planning to serfdom, he does persuasively argue that control over the economy can easily become control over people’s lives. Labour didn’t just nationalize a few industries in 1947. Attlee’s government also reintroduced controls over hiring to steer workers toward industries it considered essential. This wasn’t just the government owning coal mines; it was the government controlling access to employment.

Employers seeking men aged 18 to 50 and women aged 18 to 40, with some exceptions, had to go through a government employment exchange or agency in order to find hires. There was at least one instance where a company was prosecuted and convicted for hiring a typist without the permission of the Ministry of Labour.

This is a pretty big infringement on freedom! Notably, some of the backlash came from within the Labour Party itself: Rhys Davies, a Labour member of Parliament and former miner, argued that “a pair of handcuffs are no easier to wear because they happen to shine with a Socialist solution” and quipped that his party should “try freedom for a change.”

The insight that central planning can undercut important freedoms is overplayed by conservatives but underplayed by liberals. That said, Hayek missed the many ways that government intervention can enable freedoms as well.

For instance: I didn’t get married for health insurance… but I also didn’t not get married for health insurance.

In early 2025, I decided to start my own media company. The problem was that my wedding wasn’t scheduled until September. So, my then-fiance and I decided to accelerate things and get courthouse-married right away so that I could get on his health insurance.

Debates about economic liberalism tend to focus on the costs that state intervention in the marketplace imposes on people and firms. But just as important is the question of what types of state interventions enable people and firms to exercise true freedom. Universal healthcare and other social welfare programs enable people to move, start new businesses, try to write the next great American novel, or do anything else they might find important.

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Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum developed versions of what’s called the “capability approach”, which asks what people are actually free to do and be. Legal permission is part of what enables freedoms, but so too are resources and circumstances that make more choices available. You might be legally free to learn how to read, but without access to books or schools, that freedom is worth very little. You might be legally allowed to leave a job, but if you depend on it for medical care, how much is that freedom worth?

My co-host, Matt Yglesias, makes a related point about people who aspire to work in the private market finding that economic regulations can be frustrating barriers to freedom. If you dream of being a chef, but opening a restaurant in your city requires a yearlong permitting process that costs you tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, how free are you to pursue your life goals?

The problem, of course, is that invoking freedom doesn’t settle these questions. A health inspection can constrain a restaurant owner while protecting customers; health insurance can expand a worker’s options while requiring resources from others. There are disagreements about the consequences of these policies, but also about which freedoms can be weighed against other goals and which are sacrosanct.

Listen to Matt and me review The Road to Serfdom on today’s episode, and if you have other books to suggest, drop them in the comments below!

The Argument. Libbing out.

Paying subscribers can find the transcript for this post beneath the paywall.

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Corrections:

• Around 21:15, Matt names one of Hayek’s chapters “Freedom and Security,” which reverses the actual name “Security and Freedom.”

• Around 22:15, Matt attributes an article to Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy journal. It was actually published on the Law and Political Economy blog.

• Around 1:06:00, Jerusalem describes the Giving Pledge as a billionaire’s pledge “to give away all their money before they die.” The Giving Pledge’s description actually says the majority of their wealth.

• Around 1:11:40, Jerusalem says inclusion in the White House Press Corps used to be “controlled by the White House Press Association.” The organization is actually called the White House Correspondents’ Association.

Show notes:

• The Road to Serfdom, 1944 book by Friedrich Hayek that serves as the main topic of discussion for this episode: Goodreads page

• Posters for the 1945 election in Britain, referenced by Matt: Imperial War Museum page, Imperial War Museum page

• The Constitution of Liberty, 1960 book by Friedrich Hayek, referenced by Matt: Goodreads page

• “The Old World and the New Society: A Report on the Problems of War and Peace Reconstruction,” 1942 Labour Party reconstruction plan, referenced by Matt: Google Books page

• “Did Joe Biden really kill Spirit Airlines?” previous podcast episode about airline deregulation: The Argument podcast

• Democratic Socialists of America’s platform, referenced by Matt: DSA page

• Tweets referenced by Matt:

• “Why We Need to Stop Subsidizing Venture Capitalists,” article by Hilary J. Allen about Uber, referenced by Matt: The Law and Political Economy blog article

• Articles and op-eds at The New York Times regarding the loss of taxi drivers’ economic livelihoods when Uber became popular:

  • “A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy”

  • “Why Are Taxi Drivers in New York Killing Themselves?”

  • “A Taxi Driver Took His Own Life. His Family Blames Uber’s Influence.”

  • “The Tragedy of Taxi Drivers”

  • “A $750,000 Taxi Medallion, a Driver’s Suicide and a Brother’s Guilt”

  • “Suicides Get Taxi Drivers Talking: ‘I’m Going to Be One of Them’”

• “I changed my mind about Big Philanthropy,” article by Dylan Matthews, referenced by Jerusalem: The Argument article

• “No, Senator Murphy, I don’t want to join your cult,” article written and referenced by Jerusalem: The Argument article

• “Terminal Sickness,” article by Lina Khan and Phil Longman, referenced by Matt: Washington Monthly article

• “What If the Next Democratic President Governs Like Trump?” article by Matt Ford, referenced by Matt: The New Republic article

• “Why Trump’s ‘golden shares’ are enticing progressives,” article by Joseph Schatz, referenced by Matt: Politico article

• Confessions of the Old Wizard, autobiography by Hjalmar Schacht, referenced by Matt: Goodreads page

• The Feminine Mystique, book by Betty Friedan, referenced by Matt, which served as the basis for a previous episode: Goodreads page

• “Boy moms and Nazi POWs: How ‘The Feminine Mystique’ changed feminism,” podcast episode about The Feminine Mystique: The Argument podcast

Editor’s note: The first essay The Argument ever published asked, “How do we live with each other?” To mark our first anniversary, we’re returning to that founding question with a series about what we owe people whose beliefs and choices we may find difficult to accept or even understand. Over the next few weeks, familiar voices at The Argument and new voices alike will approach that question from different angles.

Leah Libresco Sargeant is a sharp writer and policy wonk whose core arguments center on family, feminism and religion. In today’s essay, Sargeant, who is a pro-life feminist, considers what we owe the growing number of frozen embryos left behind or discarded. She pushes readers to question whether we have any obligations at all to potential future children and sketches out a view of future pro-life politics shaped around the advancement of reproductive technology.

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- Jerusalem Demsas

Four years after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, America has settled into an abortion détente. Blue states are abortion oases, in some cases removing any limits on abortion by gestational age. Red states set limits that are highly restrictive on paper, but, due to mail-order abortion pills, possible to evade in practice. The bans are most restrictive for women who learn they are pregnant outside the window for medication abortions and who don’t have the funds or flexibility to travel out of state.

The détente seems to suit both parties’ leadership (though not activists on either side of the issue). Democrats get to talk about restoring Roe v. Wade, but (as with many issues) they are in no danger of having the majorities needed to deliver. The Republicans, led by Trump, have declared “Mission Accomplished” and scolded pro-life activists seeking federal action.

Even for the most engaged activists, the rise of medication abortion is turning down temperatures on the ground. A woman seeking a medication abortion may never need to visit a clinic in person at all. The pro-life activists hoping to make contact and persuade her to let her baby live will never see her. The clinic escorts will still find opponents to engage with, but the stakes of their fight will be lower. There will be fewer clinics to protest at, even in blue states, as the rise of telehealth medication abortions prompts in-person clinics to close.

Abortion has become, in practice as well as in rhetoric, between a woman and her doctor.

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How do we live with each other? For now, like this: with no constitutional protection for abortion access or for life in the womb. With activists on both sides of the issue sliding down their party’s prioritization list. With at least 3,000 abortions daily — a number that represents a 9/11 every day for pro-lifers and which falls short of what pro-choicers view as demonstrated need.

What has the potential to jar us out of this new normal? The boosters of artificial wombs, a hypothetical technology that could allow a fetus to develop outside a woman’s body, hope it could separate pregnancy from a particular mother without abortion. I’m extremely bearish on the potential of this type of technology to allow gestation without women. Might medical advances allow babies to survive outside the womb at 20 weeks, or even 18 weeks, in my lifetime? Perhaps. But I’d be happy to bet that 50 years from now, we still won’t be able to take a 12-week-old baby out of the womb and sustain its development safely.

Even more modest advances might not upend today’s political settlement. Under Planned Parenthood v. Casey, states could prohibit abortion after viability — the moment at which a baby could survive outside the mother. Moving viability earlier under that framework would have allowed states to ban abortion earlier in pregnancy. But the shift to abortion on demand, without apology, and after viability in blue states suggests moving the viability line wouldn’t destabilize abortion compromises.

But I do believe that one technological advance is creating new fault lines in reproductive justice: the ever-growing number of embryos on ice with the rise of in vitro fertilization (IVF). IVF itself is popular, and its prevalence is likely to keep it politically untouchable.

In 2024, 1 in 36 babies born in America was conceived through IVF — almost everyone has someone they love who exists because of this procedure. But as IVF becomes more widely used, there will be more and more uncomfortable questions about whether the embryos on ice are property or people.

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“I mean, if you look at the national popular vote and you look at the vote in the presidential races, it’s remarkable how similar it’s been,” the self-declared “Pennsylvania Supremacist” said. “I firmly believe that we’re the most important state when it comes to politics nationally. And certainly that’s been the case the last decade.”

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Any conversation on Pennsylvania’s mercurial politics will inevitably turn to the fickle partisanship of Sen. John Fetterman, who was elected as a darling of the Democratic Party’s left wing but has lately hinted at switching parties — going so far as speaking at the Republican midterm convention to praise his Republican counterpart, Sen. Dave McCormick. This has fueled some concern that even if Democrats win enough seats to take the Senate — an outcome that The Argument/Split Ticket election model gives a 60% chance — Fetterman could keep the chamber in Republican hands.

Boyle acknowledged this possibility, but noted he was more concerned over recent reporting that suggested Fetterman was failing to consistently perform some of his duties as an elected official.

“I have had a number of groups come into my office, some of whom are not necessarily Democratic-leaning groups, by the way, and express their frustration at not being able to even get a meeting with or get any sort of response whatsoever from Sen. Fetterman,” Boyle said.

“We were much more seduced, or maybe enthralled, with kind of the character that John Fetterman played on TV,” he added.

Watch the video above to check out the full conversation, touching on Boyle’s analysis of this cycle’s critical House races in Pennsylvania, his take on Kamala Harris passing over Gov. Josh Shapiro as running mate, and his plans for after this election cycle.

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You might be surprised to learn that Amazon — yes, Amazon — has been credibly accused of making online shopping more expensive for you. Let me explain.

One of the things that firms can do in a free market is enter into different types of contracts with one another. One of those contracts might involve a buyer requiring a seller to offer the same prices that it offers all other buyers.

While this sounds like it might lead to lower prices overall, it can actually do the opposite. For instance, before 2015, online travel agencies such as Booking.com and Expedia were able to force European hotels to show the same prices on their websites as they offered on intermediary platforms. By comparing prices in countries that banned such clauses to those that didn’t, researchers estimated a complete ban lowers prices by up to 4%. This suggests that the so-called price parity clauses were dampening competition between online travel agencies as well as competition between those agencies and other forms of booking (such as booking in person, by phone, or at the hotel’s individual website).

The way this probably happened is that when the price parity clauses were in effect, consumers paid the same whether they booked on an online agency or via an alternative method. Since booking online is more convenient and the clauses meant the prices were the same either way, most people booked online. Because the price-parity contract prevented hotels from passing on the fees charged by the online agencies to consumers, this artificially raised prices for the fee-less methods. Once the clauses were banned, hotels were able to offer lower prices to customers who made bookings directly, and online travel agencies were able to compete with one another on price.

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This is the same behavior that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges Amazon has engaged in for years, according to a lawsuit first filed in 2023 under President Joe Biden (and then-FTC Chair Lina Khan) and still being pursued by the Trump administration today. California filed a separate suit in 2022, making similar allegations but alleging a violation of state rather than federal laws. (Amazon countered that its actions are pro-competitive and ultimately save customers money.)1

According to the FTC and California complaints, Amazon requires that sellers offer Amazon customers the lowest price for their products — even though the cost of doing business on Amazon is higher than on alternative e-commerce platforms. This is because Amazon effectively requires sellers to use its in-house fulfillment services (which, according to the FTC, are more expensive than competitors such as FedEx) if they want their products to have the “Prime” badge.2 It’s also because sellers effectively have to buy ads if they want their products to be shown to customers in search results.

As a result, these Amazon-specific costs would need to be reflected not only in the Amazon price of a product but everywhere that product is sold.

The technical term for this sort of requirement is a “most favored nation” (MFN) clause. There is a wide range of literature showing that in platform markets, MFNs lead to higher fees for sellers, higher retail prices for consumers, and reduced entry from competitors — particularly from lower-cost, lower-quality business models.

If sellers do not comply with the MFN requirement, their products are downranked in search results, according to the complaint, drastically reducing their sales. If you’re a seller, taking the hit on pricing is probably worth getting the higher ranking on Amazon search because Amazon is by far the dominant e-commerce platform in the United States, serving 180 million Amazon Prime subscribers in the country.

The alleged arrangement is great for Amazon but bad for basically everyone else. It’s obviously bad for sellers, who are unable to offer discounts to shoppers who either buy from the seller’s own website or use platforms that charge less for fulfillment. It’s bad for Amazon’s competitors, such as Walmart, that cannot compete to be the lower-quality, lower-cost alternative in e-commerce. And it’s bad for consumers, because it deprives us of the option to pay less for lower-quality service if we want to.

I am an Amazon Prime subscriber. I value the convenience of being able to buy everything in one place and the fast shipping. But I also value saving money.

I used my first paycheck from The Argument to buy something I’ve wanted for a long time: a KitchenAid stand mixer. On Amazon, the model I bought was listed for $399 and ships tomorrow. On Walmart, the same model was listed for $349 and took about a week to ship.3 I chose to buy my stand mixer from Walmart. If Amazon had its way, I wouldn’t have had that option.

Rigging the bids

Amazon doesn’t just sell products to consumers like you and me. It also sells ads to sellers — those sponsored results that show up when you search for a keyword like “sneakers” or “Lamy fountain pens.”

These ads are sold via auctions that happen in milliseconds, every time a customer searches for something. And according to a new FTC lawsuit, filed jointly with 22 state attorneys general from both political parties on Aug. 31, Amazon has been rigging those auctions for years.4

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Typically, when we think of auctions, what we have in mind is a “first-price auction.” When you make a bid, you win if your offer is the highest, and you pay the amount you bid. The risk with this kind of auction is that the winner is very likely to overpay, particularly when bidding is “blind” (when you don’t know what the other bidders’ offers are).

There is another kind of auction that solves this inefficiency, even if you keep the bidding blind: a “second-price auction.” The bidding process is the same: Bidders make offers, and the highest offer wins. But the winner is only charged the minimum price needed to win. If I bid $1,000 and you bid the second-highest offer at $500, then I would win the auction but only pay $500.01.

This is called a “Vickrey auction,” and it’s the standard way that online ads are sold. The FTC complaint alleged that Amazon consistently represented to sellers who bought ads on its platform that it was running Vickrey auctions, but that it secretly switched the process to a first-price blind-bid system without telling them.

According to the complaint, Amazon opened all the bids, observed what the highest bid was, then inserted a “shill bid” that was just below the highest bid. This allowed Amazon to systematically overcharge sellers for ads with what the company called “reserve prices.”

“Reserve prices are good for Amazon because they don’t change the allocation [of ads] and advertisers must pay more for the same advertising,” reads an internal memo cited in the FTC complaint. “Obviously, the benefit to Amazon comes at the cost of advertisers.”5

This isn’t just bad for sellers. To the extent that sellers pass along the cost of advertising to consumers, it may have also indirectly harmed the end consumer.6

The proper remedy isn’t breaking up Amazon

The evidence suggests that over the last several decades, there has been an increase in concentration and a corresponding decline in competition throughout the economy. And the evidence from these two cases strongly suggests that Amazon has engaged in anticompetitive practices that raise prices for consumers and merchants that use its platform. This is a problem worth taking seriously.

In “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” Lina Khan’s famous 2017 paper in the Yale Law Journal, Khan wrote that “forcing [Amazon] to split up its retail and Marketplace operation” — separating Amazon the seller of goods from Amazon the platform operator — would help prevent its anticompetitive behavior. I’m not so sure.7

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First, it’s not clear to me why a firm operating as both marketplace and retailer is per se anticompetitive. After all, plenty of grocery stores carry a mix of branded products and store brand items, and that seems to work fine for consumers.

Second, even if Amazon were broken up, the marketplace operation could still enforce price parity clauses and rig bids against sellers (including, if it were profitable, against the now-independent Amazon retail operation).

None of that takes away from the fact that Amazon’s current behavior, if the FTC’s allegations are true, is illegal and harmful to consumers and small businesses. And both groups deserve a remedy that eliminates the anticompetitive behavior while preserving the efficiencies of Amazon’s existence as a platform.

Fortunately, it’s not conceptually difficult to design one.

“Amazon should not be allowed to have MFNs in its contracts with sellers, nor enforce any that it does have, nor should the company be permitted to create what is effectively an MFN by in any way penalizing sellers when it finds those sellers charging lower prices in rival distribution channels,” Fiona Scott Morton, a professor at the Yale School of Management who specializes in antitrust, told me.

In addition, Amazon should be required to disclose to sellers what kind of auctions it uses when selling ads. A court-appointed technical committee could periodically look at Amazon’s software to monitor compliance and field any complaints from merchants. Or Amazon could divest running the auctions to a separate company; if the ad seller and the auctioneer aren’t the same firm, the auctioneer no longer has an incentive to rig the bidding process.

Note that, while this divestment would promote competition, it probably wouldn’t meaningfully shrink Amazon’s market share. In other words, it wouldn’t accomplish the loudest and most famous goals of the neo-Brandeisian policy movement that Khan played a major role in inaugurating.

Even if Amazon stopped employing de facto MFN clauses and stopped bid-rigging in ad auctions, my guess is that it would remain the dominant e-commerce firm in America, just maybe with something like 35% market share rather than 41% market share. The reason is that e-commerce is a platform market, and platform markets tend to be winner-take-all. Both customers and sellers derive real benefits from platforms like Amazon: It’s convenient for buyers to have a one-stop shop for lots of things, and it’s convenient for sellers to have a platform with a bunch of shoppers on it. That’s why everyone in America loves Amazon.

Taking the problem of increasing economic concentration seriously means actually trying to do something to promote competition. You can score a lot of points on social media with a dogmatic belief that big is always bad and that the larger a firm’s market share is, the worse its impact on consumers is, no exceptions. And you can beat down a lot of critics by arguing that they are in thrall to nefarious “corporate power.” But it is less likely to work if your goal is to actually win antitrust cases.

In fact, to the extent that existing antitrust laws and precedents are insufficient, and that judges are likely to be biased in favor of firms, that should make you even more focused on doing rigorous economic analysis. That is the only way to demonstrate clearly that a firm is engaging in anticompetitive behavior, rather than falling back on hand-wavy claims.

Conversely, the reflexive belief that antitrust enforcement is nothing more than a fig leaf for crude anti-business views or a stalking horse for socialism is equally misguided.

Accurately diagnosing anticompetitive behavior will often lead to less-sexy remedies — permanent injunctions and court-appointed monitors, for instance — rather than breaking up a company. But rigorous economic analysis is the only way to win antitrust cases in a legal environment that is increasingly favorable toward firms.

Protecting competition is good for consumers and good for small firms. Effective antitrust enforcement increases overall economic efficiency, and it has progressive distributional effects because the shareholders of large firms tend to be rich, while the poor spend a larger share of their incomes on consumption.

But we shouldn’t kid ourselves. Antitrust isn’t a panacea. It’s a powerful and important tool to make capitalism work better.

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Soares and I spoke just days after Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar released a legislative plan to ban superintelligence and pause frontier AI development. The first thing I wanted to know was whether their plan addressed his concerns.

“It looks like a pretty good start to me,” he said during our Substack Live conversation last week. “I’d say it would be a start because ultimately this is an international problem. Ultimately, you know, we need to make sure that superintelligence is not created anywhere on the planet.”

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But even ensuring that it’s not created in the U.S. would be an uphill battle.

For instance, once you get support from all of the legislators who are like Sanders — those who are already convinced of the risk and willing to take a strong stand — you have to deal with more conflicted lawmakers in order to get to a majority. Most legislators are risk-averse with their brand and need a strong vision if they’re going to turn around and pitch a bold idea to their constituents. A question they might ask is: Will slowing frontier AI development hurt the economy?

The existing plans to slow AI progress have mixed responses to this question. Soares is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which has a published plan that acknowledges “costs on industry and financial markets.” By contrast, the AI Futures Project envisions a slowdown being compatible with around 100% annual GDP growth in 2035 — roughly five times the historic upper bound of GDP growth. A convincing argument for even a small fraction of this much growth in a slowdown scenario could be a key step to get policymakers on board.

But Soares thinks it might not even be necessary, given the damage that misaligned AI could cause.

“Everyone who’s saying ‘what about the growth?’ has not actually grappled with the real situation,” Soares told me. “The way we see lawmakers shift on whether they support bills like this and whether we open the sort of international coordination channels is more about whether they realize the actual problem in time.”

Ultimately, Soares thinks lawmakers should accept the case for regulation based on the principle that superintelligence is not going to be understandable, not going to be predictable, and not going to have human interests at heart.

I’m sympathetic — and the latest news cycles are working in his favor.

Still, I wonder if the quickest way to get policymakers on board is actually to appeal to the kinds of interests they have, not the principles they might eventually agree with. And if things are moving as fast as Soares claims, accepting political reality might be necessary.

Check out the video above to learn more about Soares’ perspective.

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The words “Medicare for All” may not immediately bring to mind President Richard Nixon, but perhaps they should. Unlike any of the contemporary luminaries staking their names on expanding Medicare access, Nixon and the 92nd Congress actually did something about it.

In 1972, Nixon signed into law the renal disease entitlement program, which provided Medicare coverage to nearly all patients with end-stage renal disease (the most severe form of kidney disease), regardless of age. While I understand why many may be reluctant to follow in Tricky Dick’s footsteps, it turns out this is an ideal model for expanding Medicare and stabilizing U.S. health insurance more generally.

Disease-specific coverage targets precious social-safety-net dollars precisely at the most expensive patients and can even lower their per-patient costs thanks to Medicare’s bargaining power. Plus, by removing particularly expensive patients from the commercial insurance pool, it stabilizes costs for everyone else along the way.

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“Medicare for All” advocates should take note. While Sen. Bernie Sanders became nearly synonymous with the phrase thanks to his extraordinarily generous version of the proposal during the 2016 presidential primary, other politicians trying to get in good with the left have increasingly used the slogan to signal more limited expansions.

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, has labeled his health care proposal “Medicare for All,” even though it would not actually provide Medicare to all.1 Slow Boring and The Argument columnist Matt Yglesias argued that this could create a permission structure for other candidates to push for more measured policies under the same label.

Medicare for All fans can certainly view policies such as a buy-in or a lower eligibility age as the opening salvo in a process that will ultimately insure everyone. But these proposals should interest those who see a role for commercial insurance as well. Both would end up putting more expensive patients on Medicare, which would take the burden off commercial insurance. With lower claims costs, commercial insurers could lower premiums for the majority of Americans.

So why target a specific organ or disease instead of lowering eligibility or offering a buy-in? The main reason is that the latter options use imperfect proxies to identify expensive patients, otherwise known as sick people. Yes, 55- to 64-year-olds have worse health, on average, than younger people, but expanding the program by lowering the eligibility age would sweep in lots of people in good health as well. Yes, a Medicare buy-in would likely be most sought by those with health challenges, but any healthy person can also buy in.

Now, giving people health care coverage is hardly the worst thing you can do to them. But a healthy patient — someone who pays premiums without using many health care resources — is someone insurance companies need to keep their books in order. And in a world of scarcity like ours, we want our in-demand federal dollars going where they’re most needed.

That’s why disease entitlement, such as Medicare’s kidney coverage, is such a good option. It is a perfect proxy for sickness. By definition, there are no healthy patients with end-stage renal disease.

So, if we’re looking for other options to expand Medicare, I think we would be much better off continuing with the approach we started in 1972: expanding it one disease at a time.

Designing such a policy necessarily means choosing which chronic disease we should cover next. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified nine of the costliest chronic health conditions, and a quick look at total health care spending attributable to each of those diseases gives us three obvious candidates.

Cardiovascular disease and cancer appear nearly tied as the most expensive chronic diseases, followed more distantly by diabetes. But if we look back at our success story, kidney entitlement, we can see why diabetes is the clear front-runner.

Why diabetes?

End-stage renal disease had three main features that made it a good starting point for Medicare expansion:

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

The apocalypse is a trump card. When the threat of human extinction looms, every other disagreement, concern, worry, or tradeoff is a distraction. When everything is at stake, nothing else matters.

The core problem of human civilization is that everyone disagrees with everyone else. If, like ants or bees, we could all simply agree on the highest goals and the best means, then we could finally move in lockstep, allocating resources to public health without consternation over whether they should have gone to education instead. Ordinary politics — from appropriations fights to lawsuits and tedious debates — is the cooperative technology we’ve built for living alongside people whose priorities we find wrong and offensive.

The apocalypse seduces us with the hope that we can finally put all that aside. “The lure of such generalized disaster as a fantasy is that it releases one from normal obligations,” critic Susan Sontag wrote about end-of-the-world movies in her essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” Normal obligations for an individual can mean exercising, cleaning your house, or disciplining your children. Normal obligations for a political system mean things like respecting civil rights, constraining the power of the executive, and following the law.

“A great enough disaster cancels all enmities and calls upon the utmost concentration of earth resources,” Sontag went on. At a time when our brains are under constant assault by the distraction of our smartphones and the 24/7 news cycle we can, finally, relax. There is just one thing that matters. (Finally!)

Earlier this week, Jacob Coxon, a machine-learning scientist at Anthropic, resigned and went viral when he tweeted: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” His former colleague added publicly, “I personally think [human extinction] > 10% within the next decade.”

I too am very worried about AI safety for many reasons: I think that we could turn over our weapons systems to misaligned AIs that go on to make immoral decisions, that hackers and hostile state actors could attack our infrastructure, steal billions of dollars, and undermine the international banking system, plunging us into a worldwide depression. I also worry that AI-enabled surveillance will spell the end of true freedom, that terrorists will be able to use AI to manufacture biological threats, and that we will turn over more and more of our brains and thinking and research and ingenuity to machines.

I am not worried that AI will kill every single human being alive (if only because there are more than 8 billion of us and we have proven quite adaptable), though anything is possible. Yet this outcome tends to be the overwhelming, explicit focus of prominent AI safety activists.

Apocalyptic thinking tempts us to trade hard-won rights for security — or simply to just do something, even if the actions we take are not efficacious.

Most recent end-times talk has come from climate activists who are largely correct to be concerned about the threat of carbon emissions. But what has really been accomplished by all this green doomerism? Notably, the single biggest reduction in U.S. emissions came from the shale revolution, which shifted electricity generation from coal to natural gas, rather than anything the climate movement did. My point is not that we should expect existential problems to solve themselves — famously, climate change is not yet solved; my point is that dooming does not reliably produce the habits of mind that yield effective public policy.

Doomers also have a habit of making bad tradeoffs: Environmentalist James Lovelock argued in 2010 that climate change might make it necessary to “put democracy on hold for a while.” Philosopher Nick Bostrom, a leading thinker in the AI space, argued that we might need universal, continuous, worldwide surveillance to prevent the emergence of catastrophic technologies. Following the Fukushima disaster in Japan, Germany wound down its nuclear energy program, increasing reliance on coal. In New York, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo called the Indian Point nuclear plant a “ticking time bomb,” shutting down emissions-free power generation at a terrible time for New Yorkers’ energy cost concerns and the climate.

When the stakes are existential, normal concerns appear grotesque: If the most prominent AI safety advocate argues for launching airstrikes at data centers, who will listen to the bespectacled lawyers asking whether such a plan complies with international law? In an emergency, no one listens to the proceduralists. Not when we’re marching Japanese-Americans into internment camps, and not when we’re wiretapping American citizens.

Of course I believe that extreme risks deserve to become top priorities. I am glad that nuclear nonproliferation became a leading issue; it spurred humanity to levels of international cooperation hitherto unseen. I hope the same happens for AI safety. But I’m worried that all the people arguing about the latter are getting too hung up on confusing metrics like p(doom), which seemingly require buying into a fringe ideology. Maybe I’m wrong and AI does threaten the human race itself, but apocalyptic thinking is likely to make it harder, not easier, to consider the tradeoffs of our available responses and determine whether our proposed actions will actually help. The threat of extinction cannot settle those questions for us. For that, we still have to do politics.

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Midterm update

, our director of political data, uses data from The Argument’s polling operation to inform the Split Ticket 2026 House and Senate models. These models update every day; bookmark this page to see the odds of each party taking the House and the Senate.

Top stories this week, by Milan Singh

As you may have heard, AIs have been going rogue and hacking things they aren’t supposed to hack. This is not great. On Tuesday, wrote about how losing control of AI is the course being taken by major AI labs — even though these labs are very worried about what autonomous AIs do. This seems like a bad plan!

Continuing our anniversary “How do we live with each other?” series, Vox writer-turned-grantmaker Dylan Matthews wrote about how he came around on Big Philanthropy.

Also in the anniversary series, Emily Hamilton of the Mercatus Center and Yonah Freemark of the Urban Institute have a piece up digging into why children aren’t walking to school anymore. Over the last hundred years, schools have been built on bigger and bigger lots and in less walkable areas.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• Reps. Scott Peters, D-Calif., and Rep. Gabe Evans, R-Colo., introduced a bipartisan bill to speed up permitting for transmission projects by holding them to the same standard that already exists for hydropower and natural gas pipelines.

• NIMBYs on the New York City Council tried to block Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pick for chair of the Board of Standards and Appeals — a key housing post. Why? Because the nominee, John Mangin, was a key architect of the 2024 City of Yes plan and because he helped draft successful housing-related ballot measures that limited the discretion of the City Council. Despite the opposition, Mangin prevailed and has been approved!

• New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a law legalizing balcony solar units and cutting fees on such units, helping users lower their electricity bills.

Worth watching…

This week marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11. After the attacks, George W. Bush launched two wars, with the goal of not just catching the terrorists, but of spreading liberal democracy throughout the globe. On the podcast, Matt and Jerusalem talked about the decision-making that led al-Qaeda to attack the U.S. and the U.S. to go to war, along with what went wrong with the liberal internationalist vision.

and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini were joined by Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del., the first openly transgender member of Congress, on Substack Live. It’s been a rough few years for trans rights. Republicans have successfully used the sports and youth transition questions as wedge issues, and some Democratic candidates are now moving to the center on these issues as well. But McBride doesn’t believe that will make it harder for her to work with them if they’re elected.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Milan Singh

By the power vested in me as the author of this section of the Sunday newsletter, I decreed that the topic for this week’s cultural recommendations was movies. (This is largely because I’ve been back home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and have been watching a lot of movies.)

“Mad Max: Fury Road is the best action movie of the last 20 years,” said , who described it as a “nearly perfect thrill ride” combining “absurdly high-octane action with rich characters and world-building.”

, my fellow Fellow, said that he rewatched The Graduate, noting that “it was shocking how rich it is, frame by frame.” He also praised the soundtrack, going so far as to say that “Simon & Garfunkel make the whole movie what it is.” If he had to summarize the film in one word, it would be “plastics.” “There is a great future in plastics,” he continued, using more than one word.

After being threatened with having their recommendations generated for them by Grok, the rest of the office chimed in as well.

Megha Fernandes watched Ratatouille for the very first time and called it a “perfect, and I mean perfect, movie.”

Our fearless and peerless leader, , “recently nostalgia-maxxed” by going to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in theaters. In addition to the warm, fuzzy memories of watching Indiana Jones movies with her father when she was growing up, she also noted that it’s nice to enter “a cinematic world where all-American archaeologists beat up Nazis” for a few hours — as opposed to our present world, where members of our government are posting Nazi memes.

, our video editor extraordinaire, rewatched Superbad after finding the DVD in a Little Free Blockbuster (which I didn’t know existed). He liked it a bit more when he was 13 but still found it very funny.

watched About a Boy — a Hugh Grant movie featuring “a very young and very adorable Nicholas Hoult” — on a plane. She said it was “a pretty heartwarming film and worth watching even if only for the early 2000s aesthetic.”

Copy editor Eli Richman told me that the anniversary of 9/11 is a good opportunity to check out he pro shot of Come From Away on Apple TV: a musical (I’ll allow it) about the experiences of passengers whose planes were diverted to Newfoundland, Canada, after the U.S. shut down its airspace. While it’s “not an easy piece of media to get through without tears,” it does manage to be “funny and heartwarming at times” and has some great songs. “If you remember 9/11, it will hit you like a truck. And if you don't, it will give you a good sense of how scary it was in the moment.”

As for me, I saw four (4) movies this week. On Tuesdays, my local movie theater offers $5.75 tickets, so I went to see Cars — back in theaters for the 20th anniversary of the film — and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Cars was great. I think it might be the best Pixar film of all time, and it’s nice to catch all the jokes written for adults that you missed as a kid. Spider-Man was solid — definitely better than what I expected for late-stage Marvel (read: slop) — but I almost wished that the movie hadn’t included the Hulk and Punisher and had focused on a more street-level villain like The Hand or Kingpin.

I also watched The Town (excellent; God Save Ben Affleck) and Green Book at home. I remember that the latter sparked a bit of discourse about white savior tropes when it first came out. I’m going to chalk that up to “woke 1 was crazy,” because I quite liked the movie and didn’t view it as problematic at all.

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.

This week, we’re talking about whether fitness is fascist, the legacy of Charlie Kirk memes, rapid developments in AI, and a very important egg update.

Nyet, Comrade, doing push-ups is fascist!

There are lots of things you might learn from attending a socialist conference. Apparently one of those things is that getting in shape is fascism.

At the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago this week, a panel called “Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State” featured writers Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Da’Shaun Harrison and artist Artie Vierkant discussing the intersection of socialist politics, disability, and physical fitness. This panel, as you might expect given its title “Health Fascism,” produced some spectacular clips.

“We have to give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists,” Adler-Bolton told attendees. “Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism.” The left, she argued, should not try to “beat fascists at their own game” by becoming “fitter, more eugenic.”

“In fact, the more dysgenic the better, I think,” she said.

Harrison went after GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, saying that “The political deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic.” Harrison further argued that we live in a world “fixated on genociding fat people” and that the Western world is “waging war on fat flesh with diet culture as a primary weapon through body fascism.” The clips, which were posted by Stu Smith, a Manhattan Institute researcher who frequented livestreams of the conference, predictably went viral on Twitter and were roundly mocked.

Many prominent left-wing commentators took issue with the online furor: Left-wing journalist Noah Kulwin posted, “If you engage in almost any way with the right wing hacks clipping Socialism 2026 then you have permanently lost some respect from me.” Leftist podcaster Adam Johnson complained about the “grimy [right-wing] pile on” and “out of context clips spread by the worst humans on earth.” Adler-Bolton herself got into it, saying that “everyone taking the bait from right wing troll accounts” was simply proving her point.

The least interesting part of all this is the question of whether fitness is fascism, or whether weight loss can be fairly called genocide. Those propositions are inherently ridiculous. Of course GLP-1 drugs are not in any way equivalent to genocide. Of course “the more dysgenic the better” is an insane thing to say.

But what is interesting is how intelligent people operating inside a political movement arrive at such bizarre conclusions, and why their allies seem to be completely incapable of acknowledging their absurdity.

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Let’s take one possibility off the table. Socialists like Adler-Bolton and Harrison aren’t faking it. They aren’t saying ridiculous things that they don’t believe — they have a long, documented history of sincerely expressing these ideas. Adler-Bolton co-wrote a book titled Health Communism in 2022 that “examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness.” Harrison has their own book, Belly of the Beast, where they document “the modern genocide of fatness and fat people.”

But that still leaves the question open. How do ridiculous ideas like this develop?

Psychologist Philip Tetlock1 has written extensively about a concept he calls “sacred values and taboo cognitions.” These are ideas that people place outside of normal cost-benefit analysis, values that are so important that the idea of even considering trade-offs against them is morally repugnant.

You may begin from a reasonable starting point, like resistance to eugenics. But if anti-eugenics becomes a sacred value, then a statement like “Obviously it’s better to be healthy, but disabled people also have moral worth beyond their physical fitness” can itself begin to seem suspect: Why are you conceding that one kind of body is “better”? Better according to whom? It’s ideologically purer to simply refuse the qualifier altogether — it is not better to be healthy.

When you introduce this style of thinking on a group level, these totemic beliefs can quickly become subject to a kind of moral outbidding. At the Socialism 2026 conference, you’re not going to get any special recognition for saying something like “We should treat disabled people with respect.” That’s assumed from the start. You probably won’t even get any credit for saying that the current system is highly discriminatory against fat or disabled people. Everyone at the conference already believes that.

But when you take it one step further than anyone else has — when you say that fitness is fascistic, and that, in fact, the more dysgenic we are, the better — then you might actually impress people. That’s showing real commitment to anti-eugenics politics!

Because anti-eugenics is a sacred value, nobody will call you out on how ridiculous that sounds. You don’t criticize your own side! Arguments are soldiers, and any admission that your side said something wrong is like stabbing your soldiers in the back. In Adam Johnson’s thread referenced above, he’s explicit about this dynamic:

It doesn’t matter if you agree with what Adler-Bolton said. It doesn’t matter if it’s patently insane. She’s promoting the sacred value; she’s expanding “the circle of solidarity” and thus she must be defended.

There’s an extra layer of absurdity sprinkled on these episodes by the abundance of academic jargon. Words like “fascism,” “violence,” “genocide,” and even “fitness” are all stretched far past their normal usage. And while that may be standard practice in the sociology journals of the world, it leaves regular people mystified. The “genocide” of fat people involves … them living longer, healthier lives via weight loss? On a voluntary basis?

I’m still waiting for all of these irate defenders to defend these ideas on their merits.

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There are eggs in the milk drawer

You might have questions. Going to the original thread in the r/roommateproblems subreddit should make it clear — there are eggs in the milk drawer. We’ve all tried it before. It seems like a time saver. But you can’t have eggs in the milk drawer.

Things keep happening with AI

Things seem to be speeding up in the world of AI! Here are just some of the things that have occurred in just the last week or so:

• OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, a dramatically more capable model that can do things like build entire worlds in Blender in minutes and beat the video game “Portal” without human intervention.

• The “rogue AIs” narrative got substantially worse — it turns out that beyond the HuggingFace hack, there were other swarms of rogue OpenAI agents that escaped their testing environment and coordinated behavior autonomously on German wiki pages. Reuters reports that this has actually happened with more than 10 sites.

• Not to be outdone, Anthropic announced that its models had also escaped their sandbox, uploaded malware to public Python repositories, and used said malware to steal credentials and break into databases. Oh, and also that Anthropic had thwarted several attempts to build biological weapons with Claude.

• OpenAI announced by far the most important AI math advancement ever — that it has a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem. Navier-Stokes is one of seven “Millennium Prize Problems,” considered to be among the most important and difficult unsolved problems in mathematics. Navier-Stokes has been unsolved for almost 90 years, and OpenAI’s swarm of agents took 88 hours to find a solution.

• But! In a dramatic twist, two mathematicians have accused OpenAI of learning that they were close to a solution and stealing their work to finish the job. The mathematicians announced they had solved an important step in the problem while partially using OpenAI’s Codex, and they seem to believe that OpenAI used their conversation to find a full solution.

• Yet more math — there are now rumors that OpenAI and Anthropic may have each solved an additional Millennium Prize Problem.

• Cybersecurity firm Calif disclosed an AI-developed virus that could have hijacked any WeChat simply by calling them — without users even picking up the phone. This “zero-click” hack could have given attackers complete control of any of the more than 1.4 billion WeChat accounts worldwide.

• Amid all these advances, an Anthropic researcher dramatically quit and accused both Anthropic and OpenAI of “gambling with our lives.”

I typically refrain from making predictions about the future of AI, but I will note the following facts. AI capabilities continue to advance rapidly, without slowing down, in both practical and theoretical tasks. It seems to be getting harder to keep agents or swarms of agents “inside the box.” And the people closest to the industry seem to be the most worried about the potential for disaster. Combine all of this, and it really seems like (as The Argument columnist Derek Thompson noted) “AI safety is having a moment” in the popular consciousness.

The Kirkiversary

The anniversary of one of our nation’s most important political events happened this week. I refer, of course, to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which the youths are calling the Kirkiversary.2

Contra Ezra Klein, Kirk did not practice politics “the right way.” He first made his name doing lowest-common-denominator slop videos like “Charlie Kirk Humiliates Purple Hair Trans Activist,” then graduated to promoting conspiracy theorists like Jack Posobiec of “Pizzagate” infamy and helping efforts to steal the 2020 election. He was a malignant force in American politics, and we shouldn’t have to pretend he was a noble soul just because he was murdered.

Immediately after his death, there was an intense campaign to canonize Kirk as a modern-day saint. He was allegedly murdered by someone with left-wing views on LGBTQ+ issues, which led many prominent right-wing leaders like Chris Rufo, Elon Musk, Sean Davis, and Laura Loomer to call for a government crackdown on the left.

But, one year later, Kirk has acquired a strange second life as an absurdist internet punchline. If you’re over the age of 25 or just reasonably well-adjusted, you may not know that bizarre Kirk-related memes and video edits have flooded the internet over the last year (a prime example here). These jokes often have little or nothing to do with Kirk the person and transcend partisanship. There are reportedly children out there who don’t even realize he was a real person, who only know him as a meme.

I’ve written before about how technology profanes the sacred, and the attempts to enforce a sense of solemnity around Kirk’s death almost certainly contributed to his meme status. In today’s online environment, declaring something sacred may just make profaning it more attractive. Quoting comedian Mike Drucker, “the right wanted to turn Charlie Kirk into their Reichstag Fire, but instead they accidentally turned him into their Harambe.”

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Hunter Biden’s memecoin scandal

Hunter Biden released a memecoin this week, because of course. The coin immediately crashed, losing 95% of its value, while one mystery trader made off with more than $900,000 in profit, because of course.

Before the memecoin’s release, gonzo journalist YouTuber Andrew Callaghan — whose warm 2025 interview with Hunter helped kick-start Hunter’s resurgence in popularity — gave his channel’s email list of subscribers to Hunter, seemingly lighting Callaghan’s credibility on fire (and maybe violating the law?) for no good reason.

To return to one of my hobbyhorses — integrity is underrated. We shouldn’t elevate bad people in politics or media, regardless of whether they have the right views or agree with us. And Hunter is a bad person. Even if you think the scandal around his laptop was overblown, it’s still very easy to see that Hunter is a scumbag. He’s a drug addict who cheated on his wife, cheated on his taxes, and shamelessly monetized his relationship with his father.

And yet, over the past few years, some folks on social media have become Hunter fans because he’s charming on podcasts and dunks on the people they also want to dunk on. We were subjected to articles like “How Hunter Biden Won the Internet” and “Hunter Biden Is the King of MAGA Trolling.”

Folks, just don’t promote scumbags. It always ends in tears (or in crypto rug pulls).

Links

• The U.S. Open gave media credentials to around 100 social media influencers for this year’s tournament, and, shockingly, they’re now having influencer drama. Fans and players are frustrated as clueless creators (most of whom were not actually credentialed) have been talking through points (a big no-no in tennis), lighting up ring lights in the middle of play, and ignoring what’s on the court to take hundreds of selfies.

• TikTok is adding polls, voice notes, and image carousels to its comment section. TikTok comments are an utter wasteland, so the best I can say is that this can’t really make them worse.

• Australia may require an “algorithm off” button for social apps. In context, the country’s attempts to restrict teen social media usage don’t seem to be working, so maybe this is its next fumbling step?

• Despite claims of improved detection tools, there are still hundreds of child abuse ads running on Meta platforms.

• Influencers keep trying to contact uncontacted tribes.

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• Star conservative journalist attempts to spell discipline

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• Important evolutionary adaptation

• A new spectator sport

• A post with implications

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