Sometimes I worry that I’m giving the wrong impression around here.

I write quite a lot about many of the negative side effects of technology, including what’s going on with social media and AI. I think Posting Is The Most Powerful Force In The Universe, and not in a good way. I worry about influencers, about gambling, about what technology is doing to the social contract. I yell at venture capitalists. I talk about how smartphones and social media are causing all kinds of harmful social phenomenon and how technology profanes the sacred.

You could be forgiven for thinking this is a tech-skeptical blog, one that only exists to promote the worldview that technology is harmful and needs to be tightly controlled. This is especially true when it comes to AI - I’ve written about AI video slop, AI chatbot psychosis, and the many ways AI content is taking over social media. But the truth is that at heart, I’m a techno-optimist. I believe in the transformative power of technology, and that includes AI. So I want to explain why so much of the blog focuses on the negative, and why despite all the negative aspects of AI it’s going to have a transformative impact on society.

Part of the reason that this blog focuses on the negative so often is that it’s easy to write negative stories. Something that’s new has an unexpected side effect, people get upset, you summarize what happens, make a few pithy observations, and Hey Presto you’ve got a story. Negativity bias is everywhere in the media - local TV stations and newspapers worked for decades off the informal motto “If it bleeds, it leads”.

But beyond simple negativity bias, part of the reason I’m always talking about the downsides of AI is that social media is dominated by two particular use cases of AI: LLM chatbots and video/image generation. These two modes of AI are ubiquitous online, and can be incredibly controversial. If you’re mad about AI it’s almost certainly one of those two things. Concerns about copyrighted images? Fake AI-generated images of a politician? Slop content dominating your YouTube algorithm? Deep faked non-consensual pornography? All due to AI-generated videos and images. Meanwhile AI chatbots are the primary concern when it comes to social media bots, AI psychosis, and more. I share some of these frustrations - I’ve been stunned by how real-world humans seem to be outsourcing their common sense to chatbots:

But here’s the core of my pitch. Even if you hate AI art, AI video, and LLMs, you should still be optimistic about AI in the long run. There’s so much more to AI than just those things. AI is helping people right now, today, and it has the potential to help billions in the future in very tangible, non-digital ways.1

How is AI helping people? I’m glad you asked.

Self-Driving Cars

In America, around 40,000 people die every year from car crashes. Millions more are injured in car crashes every year. And the evidence is very strong that driverless cars are much safer than human drivers:

Waymo estimates that typical human drivers would have gotten into airbag-triggering crashes 159 times over 96 million miles in the cities where Waymo operates. Waymo, in contrast, got into only 34 airbag crashes—a 79 percent reduction.

In fact, that 79% reduction in serious crashes almost certainly downplays how much safer Waymos are compared to conventional human drivers. When the blog UnderstandingAI actually went through every NHTSA report for a Waymo accident, the vast majority of airbag crashes were other drivers running into Waymos - often while the Waymo was completely stationary. Only in a tiny minority of crashes was the self-driving software even partially at fault.

We have every reason to believe that the coming transition to self-driving cars will save tens of thousands of lives per year, as well as preventing millions of injuries. It will also revolutionize many aspects of everyday life. We’ll need less space in our cities for parking, freeing that space to be used for retail, housing, parks, etc. People will be able to read, work, sleep or play during their commutes. Police will be able to re-allocate their time to solving serious crimes rather than endlessly monitoring traffic. And this transition is already happening - you can take Waymos in multiple cities right now, today. They’re expanding and will soon start driving on freeways. Driverless long-haul trucks are coming soon as well. It’s a big deal, and something that we should all be excited about.2

AI-Boosted Manufacturing

The best way to show how AI can be used to improve manufacturing is to just show an example, like how auto manufacturer GM re-engineered their seat brackets using AI-powered ‘generative design’:

The benefit? The end result is structurally stronger while using less raw material and having fewer parts. It also looks like something from an alien spacecraft, which rocks.

This sort of AI-assisted design is already producing improved parts in our cars, rockets, planes, and in all kinds of consumer goods. And that’s just one way AI is being used - it can also help redesign plant processes, help iterate prototypes, speed up simulation and testing, and more. It’s making the things we buy better and more efficient bit by bit.

AI in Medical Imaging

A wide variety of medical imaging is currently being automated using AI techniques. AI currently either matches or outperforms medical professionals when it comes to detecting breast cancer, interpreting echocardiograph results, detecting lung nodules, finding melanomas, diagnosing tuberculosis and more. By looking at images of the brain, custom AI models are able to diagnose patients with Alzheimer’s up to seven years before they show any symptoms. Custom models also show great promise in predicting Parkinson’s disease from voice recordings.

The benefits here are potentially huge. AI can catch more diseases early, saving lives. AI also reduces the workload on radiologists - and contrary to dire predictions, most countries are experiencing a shortage of qualified radiologists, so this is a big deal. Less time spent poring over blurry images means more time for radiologists to do everything else - building plans for care, communicating with patients and other doctors, etc. There’s also evidence that AI can help doctors and patients make better diagnoses, especially tricky diagnoses.

Instant, Free Translation

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, our hero meets a bunch of aliens and is able to understand their language by inserting a Babel fish into his ear. The fish has special properties that allow the user to hear any language as their native language, and it was necessary as a plot device to get around the question of “Why do all aliens speak the Queen’s English?”. It obviously wasn’t realistic, but in science fiction novels it’s normal to invent crazy new forms of technology.

Just a few decades later, Babel fish are essentially real.

I worry that most people don’t fully appreciate how remarkable this is. It is absolutely insane that I can go to virtually any place in the world, whip out my phone, and instantly be able to translate any text in any language. If I need to talk with locals, I can speak into my phone in English and have the words instantly translated, written or spoken, into any language I choose. And I’m describing it the old-fashioned way. Apple now offers real-time live translation in current gen AirPods. It’s almost exactly the same thing as having a Babel fish in your ear! Imagine telling someone a hundred years ago that translation into any language would be universal, instant, and free. It’s astonishing.

Weather Forecasting

Weather forecasting is undergoing a revolution:

The new A.I. forecasts are, by leaps and bounds, easier, faster, and cheaper to produce than the non-A.I. variety, using 1,000 times less computational energy. And, in most cases, these A.I. forecasts, powered by machine learning, are more accurate, too. “Right now the machine learning model is producing better scores,” says Peter Dueben, a model developer at ECMWF in Bonn, who helped to develop the center’s Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System (AIFS). The improvement is hard to quantify, but the ECMWF says that for some weather phenomena, the AIFS is 20 percent better than its state-of-the-art physics-based models.

What sort of real world impacts is this having? AI is improving monsoon season rainfall predictions in South Asia, giving more accurate forecasts further in advance, which has large benefits for farmers. AI is also better at predicting the paths of hurricanes than conventional models:

Contra to the usual concerns about AI power usage, these AI models are also faster and cheaper to run than conventional weather models.

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Frankly, the examples above are just a few of the biggest examples of AI that impacts our everyday life. There are so many more stories out there:

• AI is being used to more quickly identify potholes in cities, leading to better street maintenance.

• AI is being used to identify illegal fishing activity and protect wild fish populations.

• AI has completely, utterly solved the previously intractable problem of protein folding.

• Machine-learned force fields could make it orders of magnitude faster/easier to model and design new materials.

• AI-targeted pesticide spraying tools can precisely target weeds and reduce the use of pesticides by 70%.

• AI models can predict the aftershocks of earthquakes better than conventional models.

If you want to peruse dozens more examples, you can check out the site AI Opportunities.

What you may notice here is that virtually none of the positive uses of AI listed above have anything to do with chatbots or image/video generation. Most of these uses are in professional settings. There’s genuinely so much that can be accomplished by applying AI to hard problems.

It frustrates me endlessly that so much energy, time, and brainpower is instead devoted to large language model chatbots and AI video. I don’t think LLMs are useless! I use them frequently. But I do think that we should divert at least a little bit of the energy going into chatbots and instead put that energy towards advances in the hard sciences, in predicting disasters, in diagnosing and preventing diseases.

There are signs we may be entering a new age of cross-partisan anti-AI politics. So my plea for you all is this - even if you think that ChatGPT is the devil, don’t toss out the baby with the bathwater. Let’s keep pushing to accomplish tangible things with AI, even if we worry about the social consequences of chatbots while we do it.

Back in 2013, the Economist created a version of a chart originally presented in Bernard Harcourt’s 2011 article “An Institutionalization Effect: The Impact of Mental Hospitalization and Imprisonment on Homicide in the United States 1934- 2001.”

That Economist chart, which is now over a decade old and whose data series stops nearly a quarter of a century ago, recently went viral on Bluesky, where it was given a sort of progressive spin — the moral of the story there was that America’s prisons are full of mentally ill people in need of treatment, not punishment.

It was also covered by Conn Carroll in the Washington Examiner, who offered a more right-wing spin, arguing that a large share of America’s homeless population ought to be coercively institutionalized in mental hospitals or drug treatment facilities.

I think that people are quick to draw these inferences from the chart because both of the policy claims are pretty reasonable. Specifically, I believe that:

• Providing mental health and substance abuse treatment services to convicts rather than having them cycle in and out of prison is a good idea.

• While housing scarcity is the main statistical driver of homelessness (a large fraction is cyclical and involves employed people without serious mental illness sleeping in their cars), there is a non-trivial population of chronically homeless people who suffer from addiction and other illnesses who probably should be coerced into treatment.

Meanwhile, the chart is eerie, but I think it’s pretty misleading.

Despite the symmetry of the lines, it’s just not true that the currently incarcerated population consists primarily of people who would be institutionalized in mental hospitals absent the de-institutionalization trends of the 1960s.

It’s hard to know exactly what would have happened, counterfactually, had we not shuttered those institutions. But the demographics of the present-day prison population are very different — much younger and more male — than the demographics of the historical mental hospital population. What’s more, while it’s hard to blame Harcourt too much for ending his series in 2001 when he published back in 2011, there’s no reason for people like Carroll to be doing that in 2025. Notably, the incarceration rate peaked in 2008 and, as Keith Humphreys pointed out over the summer, is poised to plunge in future years.

Fifteen years of sharply declining incarceration have not generated a boom in institutionalization of the mentally ill (in part because the institutions themselves mostly don’t exist anymore) or a surge in crime.

Again, without disputing that there is reason to believe there are people both on the street and in prison who could use treatment, I just don’t think any of the predictions a reader of Harcourt’s original chart would have made have panned out.

In particular, the steadily declining aggregate institutionalization rate since 2008 has not generated a steady increase in homicide. The actual relationship between incarceration and crime is bidirectional: locking people up can reduce crime, but high rates of crime also lead to lots of people being locked up. And the real relationship to mental health issues is much more tenuous than the eerie symmetry of the original chart suggests.

But getting this all straight starts with trying to better understand what Harcourt was arguing in the first place.

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Slow Boring is off today for Veterans Day because we support the troops and, as usual, we want to bring a paid article out from behind the paywall for your reading pleasure. In Europe, of course, the November 11 holiday is called Armistice Day and it celebrates the conclusion of World War I. Personally, I’m moderately obsessed with this war because I see it as the tremendous hinge point of all modern history, a major — and profoundly consequential — event that very much could have turned out differently. In this post I looked at a kind of obscure corner of the war, the Italian Front, where nothing all that earth-shattering happened but one that I argue could have been decisive if the leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had taken their own assessment of the stakes more seriously.

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On the eve of World War I, Europe was divided into two major blocs.

One was the Triple Entente linking France, Russia, and the United Kingdom — three major powers who’d settled their colonial disputes and were determined to contain the rising power of Germany. The other was the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. War broke out, famously, because Austria went to war with the small nation of Serbia, which was allied with Russia, and that set the dominoes tumbling.

Except for Italy, which initially opted out of the war, only to join later on the Allied side.

Once they entered, Italy’s wartime performance has generally been viewed as dismal. Half a million Italian soldiers died and, even more so than on the Western Front, the battle lines of the Italian Front barely moved at all until the Central Powers’ sudden collapse at the end of the war.

Notably, Italy ended up requiring the assistance of a number of British, French, American, and even Czechoslovak divisions, though they only had to fight on a narrow front against an Austro-Hungarian Empire that was also battling Serbia and Russia.

The more important Allies were so unimpressed with Italian military performance that in the postwar treaty making, they erred on the side of being nice to the then-new country of Yugoslavia, and Italy wound up gaining less territory than they’d hoped from joining the Allied war effort. Disappointment with the fruits of war became part of the grist for Benito Mussolini’s mill and contributed to the rise of Fascism. But of course, Italy’s military performance in World War II as an Axis power was also incredibly weak and disappointing, requiring multiple bailouts from Germany and arguably leaving Hitler worse off than he’d have been without their “help.”

The overall poor reputation of the Italian military performance means they tend to be neglected in accounts of the war. But I think there’s a good case to be made that had Italy stuck with the Triple Alliance and fought as one of the Central Powers in World War I, they would have won the war. Italy was not a particularly effective fighting force against Austria and there’s no reason to believe they would have been a particularly effective fighting force against France. But even a modest amount of additional pressure on France would have been a big deal. Austria would have had more troops free to fight Serbia and Russia. The naval balance of power in the Mediterranean would have shifted, with the Allied blockade dramatically less effective.

So why didn’t Italy join the Central Powers?

Well, they wanted a higher price for their support than Austria-Hungary was willing to pay. But the Habsburgs were both the proximate instigator of the war and had their empire completely erased from the map as a result of losing it. So I think it’s not just an interesting historical counterfactual, but a case in point of the importance of setting priorities and thinking clearly and pragmatically about what you’re doing.

The guns of August

In case you’re not totally up to speed, the run-up to World War I basically went like this:

• Austria-Hungary ruled the present-day countries of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbian nationalists thought all that territory should be amalgamated with Serbia into a new country called Yugoslavia.

• Some of present-day Slovenia and Croatia had large Italian-speaking populations, as did South Tyrol which was part of German-speaking Austria.

• Serbian terrorists, aligned with an organization that had received some support from the Serbian government, assassinated Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand while he was visiting Sarajevo.

• Austria responded by making onerous demands on the Serbian state, hoping to bring them to heel and end the long-term threat to their power in the Balkans.

• Russia committed to backing its Orthodox ally and defending its own power in the Balkans.

• Germany committed to backing its ally, Austria, and prepared to also go to war with Russia’s ally France.

• France had spent years itching for a chance to team up with Russia to fight Germany and retake the Alsace and Lorraine, which they lost in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, so they were excited about this, even though they had almost no concrete interest at stake in Serbia.

• German war planners believed they could not win a long two-front war and also could not quickly defeat Russia because the logistics of invading Russia are infamously bad. So they aimed for a lightning strike on Paris, and thought the easiest way to do this was to plow through Belgium.

• Britain objected to the German violation of Belgian neutrality and, more broadly, wanted to uphold the balance of power in Europe, so they came to France’s assistance.

Why didn’t Italy join the war?

As a technical matter of treaties, their position was that the Triple Alliance committed them to come to the defense of their partners, but this was basically a war that Austria-Hungary had started, so the terms didn’t apply. But more broadly, the war was essentially about the Habsburgs trying to bolster their power in the Balkans. This held no particular appeal for Italy, which was structurally aligned with Germany in having colonial ambitions that clashed with France and England, but mostly wanted to get Italian-speaking land out of Habsburg rule and into the Kingdom of Italy.

Austria-Hungary consulted extensively with Berlin before making their demands to Serbia — they did not want to fight a war unless they had German backing. And they got that backing. Germany didn’t want Habsburg power to collapse in the face of Serbian nationalism, and they were in some respects eager to fight Russia sooner rather than later since they feared Russian industrialization. But the Habsburgs did not consult with Rome, whose military power they didn’t really respect. Beyond that, any consultation would inevitably consist of Italy asking Austria to give them territory in exchange for their help and they didn’t want to do that. And yet, Austria felt that Serbian terrorism was an existential threat to their empire that had to be crushed at all costs. The alternative to giving up Tyrol and some Dalmatian islands turned out to be the destruction of the state.

The Italian difference

Imagine, though, a world in which Austria takes the prospect of an Italian ally a bit more seriously. They tell them that instead of fighting Austria to take Tyrol, they can have it for free. They can also have some Italian-speaking portions of Dalmatia and Istria — but the crucial Istrian city of Trieste will continue to be Austrian, because it’s the empire’s most important seaport. Even Trieste’s Italian-speaking middle classes can see that the city would become more or less a backwater as a peripheral part of Italy (which has many coastal cities) rather than an important commercial center as the main port of a large multi-national empire.

If the Central Powers win the war, Italy is also free to take Corsica and Nice from France, and perhaps expand their colonial holdings in Northern and Eastern Africa.

The war still opens with Germany sweeping into France and Belgium in the northeast, but now with Italy attacking southeastern France. The terrain is extremely unfavorable to attackers and the Italian army is bad, so they don’t make much headway, but they are pinning down some French troops. Theoretically (and boringly), this could make enough of a difference for Germany to score an early win and capture Paris. But to be more interesting, let’s say the French are too smart to let that happen and ultimately throw all the troops they need at the Battle of the Marne and the Race to the Sea, leaving only the lightest possible force to fight the Italians until the front is stabilized. The Western Front settles down for a long war just like in the real world, but now France has lost even more territory thanks to the initial barely-opposed Italian advance.

Having begun by seizing a swathe of French territory, Italy shifts into the defensive with a relatively small force opposed by a similarly small French force that nonetheless leaves them stretched thinner against the Germans than in our actual timeline. The bigger difference is that Austria-Hungary no longer has to worry about fighting Italy. They’re able to send more troops against Serbia sooner, which also brings Bulgaria into the war sooner. With the Italian navy active in the Mediterranean and the Habsburg navy not confined to port, the French and British are unable to land at Salonica or evacuate retreating Serb forces to Corfu — they’re simply knocked out of the war.

The real world Italian Front featured up to 58 Italian divisions and up to 61 Austrian divisions facing off against each other. For context, Germany had 146 divisions on the Western Front until Russia’s withdrawal from the war let them boost that figure to 192. Without fighting against each other, Italy and Austria could have each sent 26 divisions to the Western Front, and the Central Powers would have been at full strength there all along. That would still leave plenty of troops to spare for Italy to pressure France on the Alpine front, while Austria and Bulgaria move fast against Serbia. With Serbia collapsing faster, Romania never joins the Allies, and the Central Powers don’t lose access to Romanian wheat. Russia collapses faster. With Italy’s long seacoast and Navy in play, imports to Spain are then re-exported to Italy and Austria and become a loophole in the Allied blockade system. The British need to respond to that by being more obnoxious at sea, while a less-pressed Germany can be a bit more restrained with its U-Boats. With the freedom of the seas issue less clear and Italian-Americans against US participation in the war, Wilson is more reluctant to get involved. The Ottomans aren’t pressed at Gallipoli and are in stronger shape fighting in the Middle East.

Simply put, even in the absence of signature Italian victories, the Central Powers are in a stronger position on every front — in the Balkans, at sea, in global diplomacy, in the Middle East, and on the Eastern Front where Germany is winning faster, while the balance of power on the critical Western Front is more favorable. France cracks, especially because the ostensible point of the war (Serbian sovereignty and Russian assistance in recovering Alsace-Lorraine) is over.

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The iron curtain

Germany emerges from the war dramatically stronger, with satellite regimes set up in the Baltics, Finland, and Ukraine, while the governments of Greece (which is forced to give up some land to Bulgaria) and Romania are committed to a pro-German orientation. Germany also picks up Belgium’s colonies in Africa. Bulgaria expands at the expense of Serbia, as does Austria-Hungary, which gains more land by square mile than it passes over to Italy. The Ottomans secure Kuwait and the Sinai peninsula from the British, who otherwise suffer no real losses in their defeat. Italy pockets Austrian territory, re-annexes Nice and begins to reverse the de-Italianization of the city, and also takes over Tunisia. A somewhat oddly shaped Poland is created out of formerly Russian territory with Archduke Maximilian of Austria installed as king.

There’s a view in some Habsburg circles that this was all a terrible mistake.

The war was won, but the basic mismatch between the dynastic logic of the empire and the emerging national logic of Europe persists. Yugoslavia is now essentially a political reality within the empire, a third force balancing the Austrian and Hungarian elements. Romania is an independent state, but across the border from it are Romanian-speaking Habsburg lands. The same is true of Poland and Ukraine. Nothing has actually been resolved.

Except it turns out that the rise of Bolshevik Russia actually resolves a great deal.

National elites of Eastern Europe are keen to keep the Communists out, and that means accepting German leadership one way or another — you can do it as a member of a linguistic minority in a Habsburg-ruled empire or you can do it as a citizen of an independent state embedded in a Germany-dominated system of trade and security. But either way, German is the elite language of commerce, diplomacy, and science.

By the same token, there is considerable worry among German liberals that the fairly harsh peace imposed on France would simply lead to the emergence of hard-right revanchist anti-German politics there. In practice, though, the economic hardship and inflation induced by postwar reparations mostly lead to a surge of Communist activity in France. That does provoke a countervailing set of right-wing politics, but it’s mostly pro-German — or at least anti-anti-German — in pursuit of the larger goal of keeping the reds down. As a gesture of good faith and recompense to the Belgians, Germany eventually agrees to establish the official headquarters of the German-dominated European Union in Brussels.

Thinking things through

What does this all matter?

Well, it doesn’t, really. I just like alternate history, and especially World War I. On the various videos and message boards about this, one common counterargument is that Italy couldn’t have survived economically as a Central Power due to its dependence on British coal. I don’t think I buy that since there was a rail link from Vienna to Venice via Trieste, so German coal could have made it down. More broadly, my view of the situation is that active Italian contributions to the war effort were not particularly crucial. They were a valuable recruit to the Allied side primarily because they were a massive distraction to Austria.

The other objection, which speaks to the larger lessons here, is that Austria would “never” have agreed to make these kinds of territorial concessions to Italy.

But here comes the part where in politics you need to make smart decisions. If you’re Germany or France or Bulgaria, you can fight a world war, lose, and live to fight another day. For Austria, losing the war was genuinely existential in a fairly clear-cut way. South Tyrol and parts of Dalmatia are a small price to pay to prevent your empire from vanishing entirely. And notably, it was Austria’s decision to initiate the war. They felt it was extremely important to make tough demands of Serbia, that the Serbian threat was existential. Well, if the Serbian threat is so dire that it’s worth rolling the dice on a general great power war, then it’s surely worth sacrificing a couple of provinces to keep Italy, secure your southwestern frontier, and win the war.

I often hear moderate-minded people say that if Democrats really believed the threat of Trump was as dire as they say, they’d be more compromising about X, Y, or Z and maximize their odds of beating him. I agree that’s what they ought to do, just like the Habsburgs should have been more compromising. And the Germans should have insisted on it. But I think if you look at these kind of historical incidents, whatever level of misjudgment was at work isn’t properly characterized as insincerity. Everyone involved in the terrible slaughter of the Great War was painfully sincere in their concerns and hopes and dreams and fears. What they did was miscalculate, badly, over and over again, in multiple directions and on multiple sides.

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We know that people, particularly People In Certain Demographics ™, are waiting until later and later in life to have their first children. What effects do we expect to see, as a result of that change?

There are some obvious ones. We expect there to be fewer kids overall, if only because there’s less time to create them. We expect the average parent to be richer and more-stably-situated, on account of being older. We expect the average parent to have less energy, and to be in poorer health, on account of being older.

What else? What psychological and sociocultural effects do we expect?

I posit: we expect the average parent to have an identity and a self-conception that is less heavily defined by Being a Parent, and more heavily anchored to values and personality traits that existed beforehand. We expect the average parent to be more like a child, and also more like a childfree twentysomething, than was previously the case.

The theory, of course, is that identity starts out very malleable and gets less so with age. Kids and young adults often reshape their values and their personalities with terrifying quickness (usually in the direction of “whatever is most adaptive and convenient in the current situation”). As we get older, we become more rooted in our existing selves, and less wildly flexible in that way. Parenting is the sort of all-encompassing lifestyle change that pushes you towards all-encompassing internal change; a thirty-five-year-old will resist that pressure much more than a twenty-year-old will.

If this is true, we’d expect to see alterations in the average parenting style. We’d expect the average parent to be less hierarchical and authoritarian, more communicative, more anxious and hesitant, more inclined to care about children’s short-term well-being, more emotionally engaged, more emotionally demanding, etc. Which is all to say - more inclined to look at the parent/child relationship from the child’s point of view, and/or to treat it as just another Relationship People Can Have, as opposed to identifying completely with the parental role.

Which is what we do see, pretty clearly, and of course there are a thousand different stories you can tell to explain it, but - here’s one more.

(Note that this runs directly counter to another intuitively-plausible possibility: that because young parents are closer to their kids in age, and also closer chronologically to their own memories of childhood, they’re therefore more likely to feel empathic identification with their children. I think this isn’t what we see, though, and also the story kind of falls apart if you think about it, in the same way that “neighboring tribes with similar cultures should be close allies” falls apart.)

I wish I had some actual quantitative data on this. Actual social scientists are better-equipped to address this kind of question than armchair speculators are.

1. In the week before the government shutdown, I spoke to many Democrats in Congress who endorsed the shutdown strategy but didn’t actually believe it would work. They anticipated that Democrats would face backlash from the public, leading to immediate pressure to surrender, and they mostly hoped that they would not personally need to issue the surrender votes and tempt backlash from their own base. Instead it worked — the public mostly blamed Trump.

2. That’s because Republicans have the White House and both houses of Congress, Trump seems like a reckless guy, and he’s obviously not someone who feels tightly constrained by laws or norms. He literally demolished the East Wing of the White House because he felt like it. People hold him responsible for outcomes.

3. With the recent SNAP fracas, he in fact leaned in to being responsible for outcomes. The decision to interpret the shutdown as requiring him to block nutrition benefits was made by him alone, and he went to court to enforce it.

4. What’s missing from the online anger at Democrats is that a lot of the people I’ve spoken to, both in Congress and in the policy community, were genuinely very stressed out about the harm the shutdown was doing to the country, including lost wages and disrupted air travel. Politically, this is perverse — the public blames Trump for the shutdown, so the worse conditions became in America, the better the political outcome for Democrats.

5. One reason Democrats felt guilty about this, nonetheless, is that lots of them didn’t really believe their own spin. The public blamed Trump, but they blamed themselves and felt bad.

6. Jeanne Shaheen’s group that led these talks has been widely characterized as “moderates.” But I find a style of moderation in which you vote to ban internal-combustion-engine cars and won’t support a voter ID law but then shy away from procedural hardball to be absurd. If you look at the Majority Democrats roster of Michael Bennet, Ruben Gallego, and Elissa Slotkin in the Senate (plus current Senate candidates James Talarico and Angie Craig), they are all against the deal and instead offer some gestures of heterodoxy on questions of public policy.

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7. Nervous Democrats hoped that Election Day would be a turning point: either Democrats would come up short and that would be the proof they needed to cave, or Democrats would do well and Republicans would feel pressure to throw them a bone on health care.

8. Instead, Trump said the shutdown was hurting Republicans and that the solution was for Republicans to use the nuclear option and either “terminate the filibuster” (his words) or create some kind of carveout for continuing resolutions or appropriations bills.

9. This became, in the eyes of the appropriators and institutionalists of the Senate Dem caucus, the real stakes. Winning on health care was off the table and their fight had become about the future of the appropriations process. A shutdown might drag on for weeks and might pull Trump’s numbers further down, but the endgame would be a rule change and partisan appropriations bills, not a win for Democrats on health care.

10. I’ve been arguing for filibuster reform for more than twenty years now, starting with a G.O.P.-controlled Senate, so I am simply not sympathetic to the view that Democrats needed to abandon a winning political tactic in order to preserve the precious bipartisanship of the appropriations process. But that was the actual choice that induced critical senators to blink, and you shouldn’t let overheated rhetoric obscure that.

11. Don’t miss that, having saved the precious appropriations process, what’s been agreed to here is passage of a few relatively minor appropriations bills, plus a continuing resolution through the end of January. Some version of this drama may well recur in February.

12. Because this is really all on some level about the filibuster, I want to say in an earnest way that I think debate about which party is “helped” by supermajority rules is a bit childish. Both sides would get to pass some high-polling items that the opposition party objects to, and both sides would also have to admit to their base that some of the stuff they’ve been promising isn’t actually viable. I think that would be a win for the country, not a zero-sum transfer from one party to the other — politics would be a little less dysfunctional and insane.

13. Senators hate this, though, because the filibuster really does give individual members more leverage and make things less leadership driven, which helps make being a senator more fun than being a House member. Is that a good reason to blink at a critical moment in American history? I’m skeptical.

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