<v SPEAKER_01>We obviously can't have a law that says all immigrants to the United States have to like raise their children to be moderate Democrats who like agree with me about everything.

<v SPEAKER_01>But if I like somehow could master plan that's Matthew Iglesias.

<v SPEAKER_00>Welcome to the argument.

<v SPEAKER_00>Today we're gonna talk sort of about someone else's take.

<v SPEAKER_00>A few months ago, Shadi Hamid at the Washington Post wrote this piece: Muslims shouldn't have to assimilate to belong.

<v SPEAKER_02>Okay.

<v SPEAKER_00>I'm gonna do the thing where I say something way spicy and complicated later.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think Muslims should have to assimilate.

<v SPEAKER_01>I think you matt.

<v SPEAKER_01>So what is this piece actually argue?

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>So he basically is responding.

<v SPEAKER_00>So Andrew Ogles, who's a Republican congressman from Tennessee, um, wrote a pretty bigoted tweet that said Muslims don't belong in American society.

<v SPEAKER_00>And Shoddy writes that he noticed that he wanted to prove he belonged and that he wanted to prove that he had integrated very well.

<v SPEAKER_01>And that Muslims in general have integrated well into American society to do like respectability politics for second-generation Muslims.

<v SPEAKER_00>Exactly.

<v SPEAKER_00>But then he noticed that he was like, you know, I actually don't want to say that.

<v SPEAKER_00>He writes, quote, it concedes a premise I no longer accept that a minority community's right to be in the United States depends on its willingness to converge with the cultural mainstream.

<v SPEAKER_00>It shouldn't depend on that.

<v SPEAKER_00>It shouldn't depend on anything.

<v SPEAKER_00>There's like two parts to this.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, obviously, like I don't think that we should like deport people who like don't agree with mainstream cultural issues, however you define that.

<v SPEAKER_00>I don't think we should have like a roving index of like what the average views are that we deport people for.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um and I also think that like obviously it's the case that Muslims can practice their faith, even if that's not like the mainstream position.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think that like getting at the heart of what he's talking about here, which is this idea that immigrant assimilation is bad, is is something that's been rising um predominantly on the left, um almost entirely on the left, actually, um, for the for decades, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>This idea of America as a melting pot has been seen as sort of offensive to immigrants who are coming here.

<v SPEAKER_00>The idea that you'd have to like converge in how Americans dress, how they talk, uh what they eat, that like, you know, they speak English, like all these kinds of things, that that would be a harm done to immigrant communities rather than a benefit of engaging and being part of the American cultural, political, social story.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like to me, I'm like, I think that's not bad, like I love the fact that I'm American.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like I enjoy the fact that when we came here, my parents were like, we gotta teach this girl English.

<v SPEAKER_00>She's about to go into preschool, we've got to stop speaking other languages.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like that would I would love to have been, you know, fluent in many more languages like my parents are.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think it was great that they taught me English, that that I was able to be similar to my friends, that, you know, I was sneaking Britney Spears MP3s past my parents at a young age, et cetera.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um But yeah, I think it's just something that's gone out of vogue right now.

<v SPEAKER_01>So I mean, let's think about think the the melting pot, right, metaphor.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, it's weird because who melts things in a pot?

<v SPEAKER_00>What do you mean it's soup?

<v SPEAKER_01>Well It's a melting pot.

<v SPEAKER_01>Is it?

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, it's soup, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>No, I don't think so.

<v SPEAKER_01>Because like the No, because I think the reason that there was like a left backlash against it, right, is like that like things like meltdown, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Versus this like tossed salad concept, right, where everything is like nice and composed.

<v SPEAKER_00>There's a restaurant called the melting pot, which is about fondue.

<v SPEAKER_00>Wow.

<v SPEAKER_00>Maybe it's fondue.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, sure.

<v SPEAKER_01>But I mean, the point is, you know, I I there's this old metaphor, right, which I think does have the idea that like people will come to America from different places and some of their distinctiveness will be melted down, right, as they like join the maw of of Americana.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, well, and and there's this contrary idea, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>A multiculturalism idea that we shouldn't uh do that, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>That we should let each group, you know, be its own distinct, uh beautiful, unique flower.

<v SPEAKER_00>But it's so funny because like whenever I when I was young and I heard the melting pot, I saw that as two ways, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>Again, maybe because I had the soup metaphor that apparently is not correct.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like when you add something to soup or something that it melts, like it doesn't disappear.

<v SPEAKER_00>It like changes the flavor in the same way that like immigrants coming here, they become more American, but particularly if they're a significant enough uh fraction of the population, the rest of the country also becomes more like them in the same way that like, you know, most of the things that we consider American food now, like whether it's hot dogs or, you know, and more uh Chinese American food or sushi or whatever in in California, um, you know, those things are making America more like these communities too.

<v SPEAKER_00>So like I always thought it was like a two-way street with the melting pot.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, I agree.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, I think if you if you take that metaphor um super literally, like it no, no, I mean, because I do think that like that's how it works, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>That like a consequent, like that, you know, today Italian Americans are not on average super distinct from a like generic white American, but also pizza is just like a very American food.

<v SPEAKER_01>And that wasn't true a hundred years ago, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>That like it it is like a two-way melt.

<v SPEAKER_01>But there is like, I mean, I'm here on this some some Notre Dame uh page, you know, some something from Black and Green Atlantic.

<v SPEAKER_01>I don't know what that is.

<v SPEAKER_01>This is some some woke academic thing.

<v SPEAKER_01>And they're saying the melting pot theory requires that immigrants assimilate in order to become one common culture, American.

<v SPEAKER_01>The salad bowl theory basically calls for us to celebrate our diversity along with our oneness.

<v SPEAKER_00>And they couldn't pick something better than salad.

<v SPEAKER_00>Well, like a sandwich.

<v SPEAKER_00>Sandwich also does that.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like all real food has this quality.

<v SPEAKER_01>So I'm like a little confused as to what, you know.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's very like sweet green coated.

<v SPEAKER_00>They get sponsored.

<v SPEAKER_01>There could be there could be a stew.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um there's a so but I mean, I think that a real thing here is that we have a concept of multiculturalism, right, that exists in in certain contexts, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>So you have countries that are sort of multinational in their like state concept, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>So like part of the idea of Canada is that Francophones are not going to assimilate into Anglophone Canadian-ness, that there's like a lot of institutions designed to preserve Canada as a bilingual country and society.

<v SPEAKER_01>Canada, like the United States, like Australia, also has indigenous communities.

<v SPEAKER_01>And in Canada, in part, I think because of the Quebecois binationalism, they have been like more attentive to the idea that their First Nations, you know, are meant to be like their own thing.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so you're not like trying to melt them down into the Canadian ether.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, and then there's a question of like, should we treat immigrant communities as if they are like national minority populations?

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Who like each have their own uh kind of thing.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I think, I think, especially in Europe where they have a more, they have a different uh tradition of European nationalisms than we have, there has been like a real sort of push to say like there's gonna be like independent communal institutions that are not necessarily going to assimilate or that it's like disrespectful to ask them to.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well what what I found like particularly provocative uh about Hamid's formulation of this is that he said that like a group's right to be present of the United States shouldn't depend on their willingness to assimilate.

<v SPEAKER_01>It shouldn't depend on anything.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>And that I mean, he is not I just don't believe I mean, I sometimes when people write things, I'm like, do you I don't think they really mean that, like anything?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, what if you were a terrorist?

<v SPEAKER_00>You know, like obviously that you don't mean that.

<v SPEAKER_01>But that's what I mean.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like this is one of these things where right, so you can't mean that, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>But then you do have to start reasoning back and be like, you know, I think most people are not gonna go like full Andy Ogles on this and say like whole religion should be categorically excluded uh from the United States.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>But it also does matter, I think, in practice to people, like what are the quantities involved in different kinds of motions of people and and things around the world.

<v SPEAKER_01>I think that if there were seven Muslim immigrants living in the United States of America, like Andy Ogles wouldn't even be doing that tweak.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like it like it wouldn't arise as a question, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Just like people pass through.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, America is a fairly pluralistic society and sort of always has been.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think the thing that's going on here is that like everyone's getting like way too focused on like European debates where Muslims are a much larger proportion of the immigrants coming into the country and also a much larger proportion of uh countries because they're just like smaller, um, as they have like a bigger, bigger impact.

<v SPEAKER_00>So like if you have like a few hundred, you know, Muslims showing up in like some rural Irish town, whatever, like that just like is a bigger deal than like what happens in the United States.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I just want to like pause here because I think that like something about Shoddy's column that struck me weirdly is that it doesn't really take seriously like the preferences of immigrants.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like I can't speak for like all immigrants everywhere, but it is the case that there's like a selection mechanism by which like coming to the United States, like often people feel like pretty positively about the United States and a positive American culture, even if they have like some negative things, like you know, like my parents were very worried about us becoming like, you know, hooked on TV.

<v SPEAKER_00>So we just didn't have a TV in the home or whatever, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>They literally these things, but like largely we're positive about America's influence in the world.

<v SPEAKER_00>And most people who come here have those sentiments, in large part because most of the world, until, you know, quite recently, like lots of the world, had like very positive sentiment about America's role and cultural impact.

<v SPEAKER_00>And also just most other places don't have a Hollywood.

<v SPEAKER_00>They don't have movies or music that like their country is churning out constantly.

<v SPEAKER_00>They don't have a world language like English that is dominant across the the the you know the rest of the uh the continents.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so you have books that people are reading, articles that they're reading, songs that they're listening to, movies that they're watching, TV shows, radio, politics is done in a language and in a context where they're very familiar with America and often have very positive associations.

<v SPEAKER_00>So the idea that, like, you know, like how are we imposing this on other people?

<v SPEAKER_00>People who come here want to fit in.

<v SPEAKER_00>They may want to, of course, maintain their religious commitments.

<v SPEAKER_00>They may have specific things they dislike about the cultural politics or they may be more conservative on women's rights or LGBTQ issues, et cetera.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like, they don't want to like walk into a Barnes and Noble and like have someone say, like, you know, go back to where you came from because it's obvious that they're foreigners.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, they want to feel like they're a part of these communities and that they don't seem like a stick out like a sore thumb.

<v SPEAKER_00>And this is why so many immigrants report, you know, different experiences of assimilating in the US versus other countries where it's much more difficult to just kind of like fade into the background of a country that is much more homogenous racially or is much more homogenous religiously.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, but so okay, I I think there's like a couple different things here.

<v SPEAKER_01>And and one is this question of aspiration, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>So I think definitely native-born Americans feel better about the idea of immigrants who whatever they think in detail, like abstractly, are like America is good.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>I like, I want in on America.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, right.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I felt like Hamid is sort of Hamid winds up talking a lot about religious practice, you know, and like obviously, like most Americans are not Muslims.

<v SPEAKER_01>If you practice Islam in like a highly observant way, you're gonna be self-selecting into a minority.

<v SPEAKER_01>But it it seems to me that that's perfectly consistent with also being like an American superpatriot.

<v SPEAKER_03>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, depending on where you're from and what the situation is, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>But you know, I there's a very long tradition of the in the United States of America of like people of minority religious practices coming here to escape persecution.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so like the Amish are very much not assimilating into mainstream American society, but they're very American.

<v SPEAKER_03>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, like they came here because Anabaptists were being persecuted in Germany.

<v SPEAKER_01>They're like nice and chill.

<v SPEAKER_01>They don't like do political campaigning.

<v SPEAKER_00>Have you seen this new TV show where they have uh people go into Amish country and then try to find a partner?

<v SPEAKER_00>And they have to like live as Amish people.

<v SPEAKER_00>So you ha I don't really understand how it works because I thought that like the whole camera thing would not be allowed.

<v SPEAKER_00>But yeah, they have like uh so they are kind of assimilating into our reality TV show culture.

<v SPEAKER_01>Sure.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um I mean, there's I there's a lot going on.

<v SPEAKER_01>But you know, you know, um Have you seen Witness?

<v SPEAKER_00>Uh no.

<v SPEAKER_01>Oh, Peter, we were moving back.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, this is like a Philadelphia cop and he winds up in Amish country hiding out.

<v SPEAKER_01>As depicted in that movie, and as I think I understand it, like they are very committed to their way of life, but they're also not like giving other people a hard time.

<v SPEAKER_00>We're really getting our info about Amish people from incredible sources about what they're doing.

<v SPEAKER_01>No, but you know, and and a real part of America, right, in a fundamental sense, is that um, you know, we accept communities like the Amish, like the Hasidic Jews who who live in in Brooklyn and some areas around New York City, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Certain like highly insular, fairly illiberal religious cultural traditions like exist within the American ether and really are not melted down by the melting pot.

<v SPEAKER_01>But those groups, at least most of them, to the extent that I know, are kind of like very like pro-American, you know, in their like rhetoric and and framing of things.

<v SPEAKER_01>And and certainly the Amish and and ultra-Orthodox Jews have like right-wing uh political commitments in the American political context.

<v SPEAKER_01>I think that one thing that has started to throw some people about immigration to the United States is the spec, and and I I think historically, this was also the case like a hundred years ago, yeah, is um, you know, a lot of a non-trivial share of Jewish and Italian immigrants were socialists or anarchists.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so it's like coming here from another country, and not so much like not assimilating in terms of like what kind of food do you eat, or even like where do you worship, but in saying like on a political level, I like reject the like basic values and worldview of the American system, yeah, is like a that's a shock to people.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, Shadi kind of gets it.

<v SPEAKER_00>At the end of his piece, he goes, America was not founded on the assumption that its citizens would eventually come to agree on foundational questions.

<v SPEAKER_00>It was founded on the more radical proposition that they wouldn't, that people who disagree about God, religion, and the good life could share a country anyway, not because they would converge over time, but because convergence was beside the point.

<v SPEAKER_00>They're like, there's like I like half agree with this, which is that, like, yes, of course, like, I mean, this is a very like small L-liberal viewpoint that like there would be large disagreements.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think this would even in a very, you know, uh non-diverse country on racial or foreign-born citizen or foreign-born uh numbers, you would still see like large divergence about the good life looks like.

<v SPEAKER_00>Not not like all white people agree on what the good life looks like.

<v SPEAKER_00>They're like just vastly different um across states, regions, even within them.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think that that this is it really raises like what foundational questions do you have to agree with in order to kind of be a part of the American mainstream?

<v SPEAKER_00>And like, this is like a difficult like balancing act because you both want like some level of people being dissenting, but like I wouldn't want a bunch of like authoritarian-minded people coming in and saying, actually, I think what's a good way to run this country is um, you know, to have a king or to have a dictator, and like we're going to try and convince and we're going to work to convince more people to do that, and we're also going to uh try to bring in more immigrants who agree with our views, such as to like overthrow the existing liberal democratic system.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so, like, there are some foundational questions, clearly, that like I believe even Shoddy would probably agree is not like good.

<v SPEAKER_00>But then, like, that's actually what's at stake here.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, you're not just a vague, like, do you like America?

<v SPEAKER_00>Do you have positive associations with our culture?

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, as you said, but also, do you believe in the very function of like liberal democratic system, egalitarianism across like gender and and and racial groups, et cetera?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, those are things that, like, yes, not every American believes in them, but that's at the heart of the American political system.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, and I thought that characterization of the founding premises of the United States was a little odd.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, it is true, clearly, that like the First Amendment to the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom and the basic concepts of creedal nationalism are that we are not going to have convergence on these questions about God and the good life.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, but to say that it is okay for citizens to not converge is itself like a meaningful political commitment, like a meaningful and unintuitive political commitment, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>That like up until the foundation of the United States of America, there wasn't really any country that like said that was okay.

<v SPEAKER_03>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And, you know, I I mean again, in the Muslim world, um, there is not a lot of liberalism in those countries in terms of matters of religious freedom.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so, you know, I a um there's some like line on right-wing Twitter, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>It's like when you're in power, like I I talk about freedom because that's your principle.

<v SPEAKER_01>But but anyway, I don't know what you're talking about.

<v SPEAKER_01>Okay, but it's easy when you are the minority group to be like, of course, we need liberalism and toleration, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>But then you have to ask, like, well, what's the situation gonna be when it flips?

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>And, you know, I think that if you talk about, you know, people are gonna move to the United States from Japan.

<v SPEAKER_01>Japan is a very homogeneous society, also seems to have like a very liberal political order.

<v SPEAKER_01>And you think that, like, whatever level of assimilation Japanese people do or do not make to American society, they're like, is it actually a disagreement about the foundations of liberalism and democracy?

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, but like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, um, well, I think this raises questions about whether like the political systems of these countries match the views and desires of the citizens, particularly the citizens who are seeking to us to immigrate.

<v SPEAKER_01>It does raise that question.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, again, I think it would be very simplistic to just be like, well, obviously, every immigrant from a Muslim country that has an authoritarian theocratic regime at home like espouses that and wants to bring it to America.

<v SPEAKER_01>That would be simplistic and wrong.

<v SPEAKER_01>But like the question does exist, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>As to like, sure, people can come to America who have like different values and different commitments and different cultures, but you do want to know that at least most of them are like basically committed to liberalism and aren't just um, you know, because people have lots of different reasons uh to migrate.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, you know, if you are fleeing a land of religious persecution, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Or you are fleeing from the Castro regime in Cuba, like you have certain kinds of reasons to go.

<v SPEAKER_01>But also, like lots of people just migrate for work, you know?

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, like which is totally fine.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, but like yeah, they do, but then they like, I mean, I'm I'm gonna agree with what you're saying, but I think that like also when they're migrating for work, they have often choices about where they would end up as a result of that kind of economic um pull.

<v SPEAKER_00>And, you know, there's a reason why people end up wanting to immigrate to the US and Canada over other places because they don't feel like it's gonna be a place where they have to give up every single thing about themselves.

<v SPEAKER_00>Of course.

<v SPEAKER_01>But but these things do, you know, even like on the micro level, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like um people used to talk about the plan in DC, uh, which was the idea that there was like a government conspiracy to like bring white people uh into Chocolate City and like whitefy it.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, that's overblown.

<v SPEAKER_01>Uh, but it is true that DC, you know, its population crashed and it was mostly white flight.

<v SPEAKER_01>It became very heavily black city.

<v SPEAKER_01>And as the population started to grow, most of the people who moved in are white, because most people in America are white.

<v SPEAKER_01>And you had lots of instances.

<v SPEAKER_00>And also you had black middle class leave for the leave, yes, yes.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, and you have a number of instances of local elected officials who lost their seats, primarily because the new people who moved into their neighborhoods had like different ideas and preferences about what's happening.

<v SPEAKER_01>And you have a lot of clashes about bike lanes in particular, which are like, I mean, you you bike.

<v SPEAKER_01>I love to bike.

<v SPEAKER_01>And it's not like only white people can ride bicycles.

<v SPEAKER_00>In fact, people of color ride bicycles more, black people ride bicycles more as a proportion.

<v SPEAKER_01>The the at least like construct in local DC politics.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's like young white.

<v SPEAKER_01>These white people moved in and like they really want bike lanes, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>And like it's a big fight that's like fraught in various different ways.

<v SPEAKER_01>And, you know, this is not like foundational, like your basic commitment to liberalism or something like that.

<v SPEAKER_01>But you know, people care about political issues.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so it's not crazy that one of the things they care about is like how will new people living in my community alter the politics of that community.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And like, we obviously can't have a law that says all immigrants to the United States have to like raise their children to be moderate Democrats who like agree with me about everything.

<v SPEAKER_01>But if I like somehow could master plan that's they're trying to do that right now, but for right-wing Republicans, I want you to know.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, that's like uh that's an effort underway by the Trump administration to uh um select people who have, I think, more Well, I mean, I do think like part of the point, yeah, of their like the only refugees should be white South Africans, is that they expect white South Africans will like vote for Republicans that agree with Trumpist sort of policies.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, some of them are probably just like super duper literal minded racists.

<v SPEAKER_01>But if you could somehow like guarantee them that like the very most right wing people of Jamaica are gonna move to the United States and like be pro life conservative Republicans who like tax cuts, like you would get some support for that.

<v SPEAKER_00>I forgot, I forgot to look uh pull it before this, but there Was some study, we'll put it in show notes that um talked about how uh perce perceptions of immigrants' political views, and by this it was measuring, I believe, partisanship.

<v SPEAKER_00>So, like Democrats, Respublicans, like shifted people's support for it in that direction.

<v SPEAKER_00>A way that, like, I think my prior was like, I don't think people really care about this that much, so it like pushed me in the direction that I do care about it more than than expected.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like, this is one of those weird things where like first-gen immigrants largely are coming in here more conservative.

<v SPEAKER_00>There's like like tons of room for Republicans, like Hispanics voting more for Trump because he like made an effort to win their votes.

<v SPEAKER_00>Sure.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like that did happen.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, you know?

<v SPEAKER_00>And it seems like when Vietnamese populations being very Trump open to Trump, like these are populations of immigrants that are willing to vote for Republicans because they happen to have culturally considered views, and like until they become like extremely virulently pro-deporting people by the virtue of their skin color.

<v SPEAKER_00>Then it becomes like, well, maybe I gotta be Democrat.

<v SPEAKER_01>I think that one of the worst things that happened in the politics of my lifetime was when Democrats started talking like really, really publicly about how the increasing Hispanic population was gonna create this like inevitable permanent Democratic majority, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>It was like they were like, we're gonna do the plan, but like in a good way.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I I it's like quite natural, I think, that there was like a very significant conservative backlash to that, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>It's like it's like the the villain in a Bond movie telling the plan, you know, like outlining his evil scheme before he has the chance to actually implement it.

<v SPEAKER_01>And it wasn't like analytically accurate, which makes it even worse.

<v SPEAKER_01>But if people had just said all along that it's like, well, you know, you got Latino immigrants who are coming in, and they are like in some ways more left-wing, in part because they're more economically downscale, but they also have some more culturally conservative attitudes and some other things.

<v SPEAKER_01>And also, like in Texas, there's a kind of specific Tejano political tradition that goes one way and like I'm sorry, who's gonna this is gonna be like a stump speech or something?

<v SPEAKER_01>Or no, but I mean like takes her, yeah, you know, that just You're right.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's the emerging democratic majority.

<v SPEAKER_01>Because this was like a highbrow thing.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like there were articles about this all the time.

<v SPEAKER_01>And then as Trump started to gain support, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like there was this take that it was like this is happening because America is becoming more diverse.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I remember being at Vox and you know, writing articles in the 2020 uh Republican National Convention, Trump went like out of his way to highlight Republicans of color.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I just like I remember being in a slack, and you know, people were like, what's going on here?

<v SPEAKER_01>And they were positing all kinds of like crazy bank shot things.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I was just saying, like, I think Trump is trying to win black and Hispanic voters.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, that's what he's doing here.

<v SPEAKER_01>And it was like at that moment of like Trump and anti-Trump kind of hysteria and stuff.

<v SPEAKER_01>There was like such psychological resistance among progressives to like the concept that Trump, this like bad racist guy, could just be making like straightforward electoral appeals to a diverse community on the basis of like heterogeneous political opinions that exist.

<v SPEAKER_01>That like there are marginal votes.

<v SPEAKER_00>He was also being a little trolley, I think.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think he thought it was funny.

<v SPEAKER_01>Maybe maybe, but like it's like I mean, I think the like the my African Americans in the front here, I mean that kind of like he gained a lot of Latino support in that cycle and a modest amount of black support in the context of losing like aggregate support.

<v SPEAKER_01>And those trends have continued.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, you know, of course, because um, you know, I if you if you just live in the world and listen to people and don't think that much about partisan politics, it's like pretty clear that there's a lot of more conservative opinions about gender roles uh among people of color in the United States relative to like affluent white liberals.

<v SPEAKER_01>And that doesn't always like drive people's voting behavior, but clearly it's like a thing that you can do.

<v SPEAKER_01>And we got like way sort of off track in in the national discourse around this.

<v SPEAKER_01>So, you know, a question of assimilation is always like assimilate to what?

<v SPEAKER_01>Because your life trajectory, right, is sort of assimilating to a more like liberal set of cultural norms than existed in your family.

<v SPEAKER_01>And that's great.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um but feel don't sound so sad, Matthew, if only Jerusalem had retained her conservative past.

<v SPEAKER_01>No, no, no.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, I I I I do think it's great.

<v SPEAKER_01>But you know, I mean, I think we're thinking about like American conservatives, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>On the first level, they have like a baseline level of suspicion of cultural difference.

<v SPEAKER_01>And then like they would want to hear, I think that people coming here from the developing world, will like retain more conservative.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, the thing I think is important, I mean, when academics in particular are studying assimilation, they're often like looking at like indicators like income and you know, English language acquisition and other uh aspects uh that you can track in data that show that immigrants, whether first gen or second gen or third gen, whatever, like that they seem indistinguishable on some of these metrics from the native-born population or people whose grandparents were also native-born or something like that.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think there's like a few things that can, I mean, like one thing is that like conservatives care a lot about, I think, and also, you know, many people on the left as well, is that immigrants don't just come here and then just draw down on social services.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like this idea that you have like a bunch of people coming over and instead of providing productively, like, you know, the classic story, like they're becoming Nobel Prize winners and they're CEOs and they're um small businessmen, entrepreneurs, that instead that they're drawing down on the public tax coffers.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like one thing that like people often talk about is like that assimilation happens a lot in America.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think they often like don't understand how good America's actually been at removing these labor market differences by the time they're in second generation.

<v SPEAKER_00>So this is one of my favorite academic books is Streets of Gold by uh Ron Abermitsky and Leah Boustan.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, and they look at like millions of census records to look at what immigrant assimilation resembles today, because people often are like, well, the Ellis Island immigrants were just like way more assimilated.

<v SPEAKER_00>They're like, well, those people were white and they were English-speaking, right?

<v SPEAKER_00>But it's like just like not true.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, they find that uh Mexicans today are actually assimilate the fastest, uh, and that children of immigrants whose parents are at the 25th income percentile rise to roughly the 40th to 65th, just as it was in the 1900s.

<v SPEAKER_00>So, like America's ability to assimilate has like a long-standing win for us.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like there's another report, the 2015 uh National Academy of Sciences report, um, that looks at uh current immigrants and their descendants integrating to US society across all those things, education, language, et cetera.

<v SPEAKER_00>And again, it finds, especially when you look at compared to you to Europe, that America's really good at doing this.

<v SPEAKER_00>You don't have this problem of you know, people not speaking the native language when they were like coming here at three years old and like still can't speak English.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like that's just like not a thing that occurs in America with any kind of regularity.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, partially because English is like a global language that most people have some exposure to beforehand.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, also because English is easier than some languages, like, you know, like Dutch to learn.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um uh so yeah, I mean, I just think that like there's part of this, which is just, I mean, I mentioned this before, so much immigration, anti-immigration discourse, I think is built on this presumption that immigration in the West is like all the same and that all the experiences of Western countries are can be equally applicable to the United States.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's just like clearly not true.

<v SPEAKER_01>So so I mean, you're talking about their right assimilation as kind of economic mobility and also cultural, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, because I mean I think the cultural piece of this is more interesting, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>And at least I was always told uh by my grandparents, my grandparents were not immigrants, uh, but they were raised in immigrant households.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, their parents did not speak English really at all.

<v SPEAKER_01>I I mean, I don't want to say they didn't speak English at all, but they were not comfortable enough in English to speak it at home.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And you know, so like my my grandfather, who grew up in a Spanish-speaking household in a Spanish-speaking community in Tampa, you know, he said that like when he went to school, um, they would like hit the kids if they spoke in English in Spanish to each other.

<v SPEAKER_01>So clearly that's like a fairly extreme form of uh, you know, assimilation in the carrots and sticks um perspective.

<v SPEAKER_01>But, you know, he he was a very left-wing guy, um, but was always and not in favor of like physical coercion of children, but he was always very skeptical of the bilingual education trend.

<v SPEAKER_01>He um became a professional novelist uh writing in English uh because he knew English really, really, really well, uh, because there was a firm pressure uh to go do English and so on and so forth.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um my mom's mom, um, she talked about how when she became a uh teacher, they like really, really pressured her and other teachers that they had to speak unaccented English, that they had to like purge them.

<v SPEAKER_01>And she was very proud, more proud than was supported by the reality of her ability to like speak English without any kind any hint of accent.

<v SPEAKER_01>But she also talked about like very deliberate stuff that was done to like tell her and other like little girls growing up in tenements that like they had to brush their teeth because in America, like this is what we do, and that even at one point she was like taught to ride a horse, and it was absurd because like her family was poor and she had no opportunity to ride horses.

<v SPEAKER_01>But they was just like this.

<v SPEAKER_00>Also, is that is that American that we all ride horses?

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, I think maybe we did in the I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_00>Okay, I don't know, you know who that seems like must have been always like kind of an elite kind of horses are expensive.

<v SPEAKER_00>There's no way the average American like uh is riding horses.

<v SPEAKER_01>In the countryside, I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_01>I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um especially not in New York.

<v SPEAKER_01>No, I mean, no, no, the point is that it didn't make sense, but that there was this deliberate thing that like we are going to cultivate Americann-ness, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like in the kids.

<v SPEAKER_01>And of course, there's like a lot of absurdity to that, and I don't think you should hit people for speaking Spanish.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um but I do think that we have moved away from that, not just in a sense of like hot takes about salad bowls, but that there's not you that you have like restrictionists who are just like, we need to have fewer immigrants, and then you have um people who are for immigration who I just I I often feel like are like excessively for immigration.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, not like excessively favorable to it, but like won't like don't want to do anything to like cultivate Americann-ness because there's such a fear of cringe.

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>That like you're not gonna be the guy who taught my grandma to brush her teeth, you're gonna be the guy who taught her to ride a horse, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>But like on net, dental hygiene plus horse riding is like better than doing neither of those things, I think.

<v SPEAKER_01>Even though some of it was stupid.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, like there really is like real value, I think, to explicit instruction in American cultural practice, even though there's like no way to do it without making some kind of errors.

<v SPEAKER_00>And also at some level, like I don't want to like pay, like it obviously is condescending at some level to tell people like how they should behave in order to be like good Americans.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like that there's like a level, it's impossible to like deliver that in any non-condescending way.

<v SPEAKER_00>That's what I mean.

<v SPEAKER_00>And no, I mean like it's just it's just true.

<v SPEAKER_00>And at the same time, I think it is both desired by many immigrants and desirable for the purposes of maintaining a high immigration country, um, that there is some of that made explicit because I think something that gets lost is that living in a pluralistic country often, you know, can sound like you're saying, oh, like there's there's like no rules whatsoever for how, or not even rules, but like expectations for like how you behave and comport yourself.

<v SPEAKER_00>But it's like if you travel to different places, like there are different norms about behavior.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like a friend of mine was in um was in uh South Korea and she was like waiting for the train, and she's like, everyone waiting for this fucking train.

<v SPEAKER_00>Someone just like moves right in front of me in a way that like would be considered like quite rude in America, but like in South Korea, I've now read about this, and she also had someone there talk to her about it.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, if you like are leaving room, it just means there's room for someone to be there.

<v SPEAKER_00>Now, like, is that like written down in the South Korean like metro system?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, no, of course not.

<v SPEAKER_00>But these are like unspoken rules and expectations.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think cueing is the one that's been uh studied the most, like the way that people like will line up for things and what they will um what they will uh uh you know expect you to do and and and you know what whether cutting in line is uh like loud or not.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I find that in very diverse societies or groups, you actually have to have more explicit rules or expectations rather than less.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I mean, like when I began working in professional spaces and like finding myself in areas where there were like way more rich people than I had like spent most of my life around, you kind of were like, oh, like there's like some rule here that I'm like not picking up.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like the best people in my life have been people be like, hey, like there's like this rule here about like this thing.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like, you know, most people don't want to say that because they don't want to seem rude, but they're gonna let you look like a fucking rube and everyone's gonna hate you anyway.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so to me, like the choice here is like not between like, you know, anyone can just do whatever the hell they want and there's no problem, because even the very people espousing these views about how like we shouldn't expect any assimilation to happen, would themselves be mad if all of a sudden we had, I don't know, like Indian city levels of like not caring about traffic violations.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like they would find that to be bad and they would be annoyed at if you had, you know, I mean, there's some I there's some countries where it's like less annoying that people will play their phones out loud in public spaces.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like here in America, this is like a common complaint now that people will just do this.

<v SPEAKER_00>I don't know how much of this is actually driven by the fact that like there are immigrants here who are unaware of this practice, but like it would be good to tell someone, like, hey, you can do whatever you want, but I'll let you know that people will find it extremely fucking irritating if you are playing your phone out loud on the bus without headphones.

<v SPEAKER_01>But I do think, I mean, I do think this is kind of a deep problem here, you know, because I think that in contemporary progressive society, like most people, in a kind of a practical way, are just so averse to being accused of like condescending or talking down to people, particularly like across racial and ethnic lines, that they are just so much more willing to err in the other direction, even if the upshot of airing in the other direction is like now I'm gonna move to like super nimby suburbs and not deal with any of this, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And you know, and it's it's bad.

<v SPEAKER_01>I remember when I I did a I did a like a I I like I lived with a Russian family for a couple months in the summer of 1998.

<v SPEAKER_00>And you know in the United States, or in Russia, in Nizhinovgrad.

<v SPEAKER_01>And you know, they took the American teenagers who were gonna go do this and they like told us stuff about Russian society, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>And like you can't do that without grossly oversimplifying.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yes.

<v SPEAKER_01>And also talking down to us and also sort of talking down to the nature of Russian society.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>But like one of the things I will remember is that they told us that like in Russian households, there is not the same expectation of privacy that exists in the United States of America.

<v SPEAKER_01>And like you should expect members of your host family to just like come into your room, you know, like without knocking, come in when you're not there, that you know, and like I don't know, like you don't need to like that, but like you can't treat somebody who is doing that as someone who's engaged in non-normative behavior because there's just always a difference in life between this guy is doing something that I don't like, and this guy is being a huge weirdo, yeah, and I don't like that, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, and they also told the Russian host families that like Americans have like certain like ideas about personal space and blah blah blah blah blah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And like Did you have your room walked in on a lot?

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, I mean, I absolutely did.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um I'm not like a very private person.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, but like isn't it like what if you were like what if you're like changing?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like what are you doing that didn't matter?

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean So there was no knocking even.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's not like they're just like constantly in other people's rooms.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's just like it's interestingly different.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, I mean, I remember I was staying once at the house of somebody who I'd never met before.

<v SPEAKER_01>I I like came into his house, and he was like so polite to me and myself, you know, just like bending over backward.

<v SPEAKER_01>He was very American.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, that he it wasn't like I, as a guest in his home, just like need to be need to like put up with whatever, you know.

<v SPEAKER_01>And you know, different, different people are different and different cultures are different, and there's a difference between I'm not familiar with this and like you're being crazy.

<v SPEAKER_00>My version of this was uh when I was going to Germany for the first time by myself, and my dad was like, and I was staying at like it was one of those like uh you know Airbnb situations where you're like literally in someone else's home, you're just a room there.

<v SPEAKER_00>And my dad, who's like a very well-traveled person, spent a lot of time in Germany, um, was like, Drew Solom, like, do not take a long shower.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I was like, I don't take that long.

<v SPEAKER_00>He's like, no, don't take a shower for more than like five minutes.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, they will hate you.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I was like, I don't think this is a big deal, but I like trust my father on this kind of thing.

<v SPEAKER_00>So like I went there and I like, you know, I did, you know, took normal show, what took a very fast shower, is like, let's get out there.

<v SPEAKER_00>And then my host the next morning commented, she's like, Wow, like thank you so much.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, Americans are so wasteful.

<v SPEAKER_00>What if they come here?

<v SPEAKER_00>They're here with their like 10-minute shower.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I was like sitting here like, this is like insane behavior, but also like very glad someone told me ahead of time.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like that story indicates something I think is important, which is like often the method of assimilation is that the children of first generation immigrants will impart these lessons onto their parents.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so, like, I'm not, I don't think either of us are really, I mean, I don't know.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I'm I'm I like like the fact that there are these nonprofits doing, I guess, this horse stuff for your for your ancestors.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um uh, and I think that like it would be good to have other ones which are, I mean, these things kind of often do exist.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, let's just have Sports League where you have multiple people across differences, or like, you know, here in DC, there's if you want to help like young kids often from different countries learn to read because they're behind on their reading, like you can go do that, and that's like a way of introducing people.

<v SPEAKER_00>So it's often like less overt.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like the bigger thing here is just like will always be like family members that are more assimilated, explaining the rules to their own family.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so, like, there's like some level of like quote unquote condescension there, but like not really because it's like your family, and so you don't really feel this level of uh, you know, but I think that this kind of stuff still leaves a little undecided the more macro issues that I think um Hamid's peace was getting at initially, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Which is that sure, you know, you can tell people, you know, like in Russia, whatever, it's like you they don't like drink water at their meals.

<v SPEAKER_00>What do you mean?

<v SPEAKER_00>They don't drink water?

<v SPEAKER_01>No, they do drink water, but not like with food in the same kind of anyway.

<v SPEAKER_00>It sounds fake.

<v SPEAKER_01>I don't know, but manufacture I guess.

<v SPEAKER_01>But like it's fine, you know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_01>And you just like you just live your life, and and I just continue to believe what I believe, and that's fine.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um But there's this kind of like macro shift in the values and political landscape when large numbers of immigrants come somewhere.

<v SPEAKER_01>And those are things that I mean Shoddy was saying we shouldn't ask people to assimilate, but I feel like the issue is more that like they they don't assimilate.

<v SPEAKER_01>I I mean obviously to some extent people do, but I mean, you know, it the countries really do change permanently as a result of influxes of people.

<v SPEAKER_01>The United States is dramatically more Catholic today than it was um 150 years ago because people immigrated from Catholic countries.

<v SPEAKER_01>There's some attenuation of Catholic faith, but there's also quite a bit of persistence.

<v SPEAKER_00>There's actually uh, you know, we have a fellow here at the argument, uh Maybert Henkel, who's from Denmark, and she was telling me um that Denmark has had some some Muslim uh uh migration, and something apparently that is very normal in Danish culture is that when they go to the pool, they just only only have like these communal showers, and everyone kind of just showers naked together, and like that's like very normal.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like Starship Troopers?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like what?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like the co-ed showers?

<v SPEAKER_00>I don't I don't know what they're called.

<v SPEAKER_00>Sounds like you said a word, but sounds vaguely.

<v SPEAKER_01>No, I said like starship troopers.

<v SPEAKER_00>Oh, starship troopers.

<v SPEAKER_00>Okay.

<v SPEAKER_00>I was like, that sounds like a vaguely German word.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um no, but so anyway, they have these showers and she was like, you know, and if you have like young, you know, like in the same way that you might bring like your young son to the bathroom with you, even if you're a mom, um, they would also have young boys there too.

<v SPEAKER_00>And what something that has happened is that increasingly there's been a demand from um Muslim migrants to have private showers there as well.

<v SPEAKER_00>And something that I this raises, right, is because like at some level you can feel like, well, how does it hurt you to go take the private, like if someone else takes the private shower, like you can go do your communal like shower thing.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like one thing that it has like shifted, it sounds like, is that there's this vibe of like you're making it feel weird now.

<v SPEAKER_00>Now you're making it seem weird that we're all like what doing this thing because you're like, I'm gonna go into my private shower.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like, this is obviously a very like kind of maybe trivial example.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's become, I think, a bigger deal in Denmark than um I could appreciate.

<v SPEAKER_00>But there are many of these cultural choices which do kind of shift the vibe for native-born Americans or previous immigrant communities that are like obviously we don't want to outlaw this behavior, but there has to, there is some sort of like friction and negotiation that's gonna have to happen here, um, especially because these are like, my understanding, these are public pools, so it's not like a private situation.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, and I I just think that that's like underappreciated, even though I land on the side of like this ultimately does not matter to me at all.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like whether or not there are private showers.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, there's a Question of in that case, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Of like who accommodates who, yeah, to what.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>And you know, I think I would always say that, you know, we we make a lot of accommodations for people's religious faiths in the United States of America.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like we are in the custom of doing that.

<v SPEAKER_01>So when people come with new uh faiths, they ask for and receive the same kinds of accommodations as previous faith communities have already won for themselves.

<v SPEAKER_01>Often there's just direct overlap, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like Muslims don't eat pork, but Jews have always been like not eating pork or observant ones.

<v SPEAKER_01>And you know, Friday versus Saturday, Saturday versus Sunday is Wednesday Sabbath, you know.

<v SPEAKER_01>So we've sort of like processed on a formal level some of this kind of stuff.

<v SPEAKER_01>When you come in and you are asking for a new accommodation that like other people have not already asked for and received, that, you know, it it naturally becomes a trigger point where somebody's gonna say, well, no, you should be changing to accommodate our norms.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like you don't need you don't need to like go back to Syria and like bring our bathing norms there.

<v SPEAKER_01>But like if you want to come here, like just deal with it.

<v SPEAKER_00>But this is actually why I think America is often so much better than Europe at this, because we're already so diverse, our norms tend to be more individualistic.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like there's a reason why it's like normal to have private showers in the United States, or even just like private anything, like that.

<v SPEAKER_00>These individual choices are accommodated at a level where many of these decisions are had in private.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so cultures that have had much more like, I guess, public-communal sort of vibes to them have to negotiate something that's much more difficult than we have to.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, this just like isn't a problem in the United States.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, I mean, I mean, certainly that is not a problem in the United States.

<v SPEAKER_01>But you know, you get other sorts of things, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>So in the United States.

<v SPEAKER_00>Americans are just more prudish in general, so we're homage to, you know.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, I mean, something I I was reading about um through uh Alice Evans, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, in the UK, um, like most women work outside the home, but some don't.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, but like most do.

<v SPEAKER_03>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And then among sort of British Muslim immigrant communities, female labor force participation is much, much lower than it is among native Britons.

<v SPEAKER_01>And you won't, you don't want to have like a rule that says like married women.

<v SPEAKER_01>Must work out the home, yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Must work, because that's actually not the British norm.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like there are stay-at-home moms in the UK.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's just there mostly aren't.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>And it's like a set of norms that is functional and is like works well enough, and female labor force participation is lower than male labor force participation, but higher than US female labor force participation.

<v SPEAKER_01>And it is what it is.

<v SPEAKER_01>When people come in and they have like the same range of behaviors as anybody else, but they fall on a very different side of the spectrum, it creates this problem where like you can't say on an individual level, like you must assimilate to the British norm.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like that wouldn't make sense.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's like but also people don't want to have their social norms radically unsettled because people care about what's normative.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think the thing, I mean, my perspective obviously like there's like the part of me, which is part of this conversation, which is focused on I really think that having a high immigration society is very good for the United States.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I think it's like just like just normatively good in general.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so, like, there's like part of this, which is we don't want this to seem like people coming here uh means that you have to give up everything that you like about America.

<v SPEAKER_00>But the other part of this is just many shifts that happen as a result of new people are unknown.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so much of my and your work is around making people okay with a level of uncertainty and how their like environment changes, whether it's on housing, where, yeah, like you're right, you don't know who's gonna live in that new apartment building.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like you don't know what they're kind of gonna be like, what it's gonna do.

<v SPEAKER_00>It'll change the composition of your community.

<v SPEAKER_00>So much of like what changes um uh uh the composition of, you know, DC, as we were saying, often has to do with housing stock and like what's available and who's who's gonna be able to live there.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I just want, you know, this largely works out well.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like this is my point.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like you're right, there'll be some frictions, but like probably there's some there are also some frictions in these small towns where like nobody moves there, like things don't go perfectly there as well.

<v SPEAKER_00>And people have this sort of like sense that like kind of stagnation or like the specific kind of person coming here and being exactly the same is is like going to reify all the things you like about America.

<v SPEAKER_00>But often like the things that you enjoy about America came as a result of these sorts of frictions, and that that was like what led to like a more positive outcome.

<v SPEAKER_00>So whether we're talking about food or music or art or culture or economic growth and prosperity or different businesses or whatever, like these are the result of the friction between what becomes native-born Americanism after a course of like assimilation over 100 years and new entrants.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like this is a balancing act.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like there are some things that I think would be definitely worse for America to become like.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like we have to have that kind of like debate about what kinds of immigrants, you know, we want to select for when they're coming to the United States.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, but I do think that like there's some level at which I think my message is sort of chill out.

<v SPEAKER_00>It will be okay.

<v SPEAKER_00>In the same way that I say to like left nimbies, chill out.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's okay, you know?

<v SPEAKER_01>My question to you though is what can we do beyond urging people to chill out?

<v SPEAKER_01>Is there more of the things that you're doing?

<v SPEAKER_01>Is there a respectability politics arguing?

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, because you started with with the Hamid thing where he's like, he's saying he doesn't want to be defensive and say, oh look, look how good a job Muslims do of immigrating.

<v SPEAKER_01>And and you're disagreeing.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>I mean, I'm saying like I I have a lot of pride in being American, and I just don't think it's that embarrassing if someone goes like, you know, like, you know, I've had experiences where people are like, you should, you know, told my family to go back to where we came from.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I was like, no, we belong here.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like that to me is like, I don't feel embarrassed by that.

<v SPEAKER_00>I don't feel defensive about it.

<v SPEAKER_00>I'm like, that person should be embarrassed by their behavior.

<v SPEAKER_01>Aaron Ross Powell But do we need to do something different in our formal education, in our public culture?

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, do we need to be more positive about America?

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, for sure.

<v SPEAKER_00>To make this work, something that like I've written about a lot, about just like reclaiming patriotism as a part of the American story.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, there are many American stories.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think part of the reason why there's been kind of discomfort amongst the left or center around America is because it's become defined, America has become defined as like this negative thing.

<v SPEAKER_00>So, of course, you are not gonna be patriotic about something that's built on the backs of slaves, on the unpaid labor of women, on the exclusion of labor uh uh LGBTQ folks and working class people.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, of course, like when you're thinking about America in that vein, many of which these stories are literally true.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, you're not gonna be like, now it's time for me to be rah-rah and expect people to come in.

<v SPEAKER_00>But there's just a question of then, like, what story of America do you want to tell and ask people to be a part of?

<v SPEAKER_00>Because I'm not telling people, like, yeah, like come join our culture of exclusion and backbreaking like uh slavery and poverty.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, that's not, I'm talking about the part of America that fought against that.

<v SPEAKER_00>That was like, no, we are an open society of people who come from lots of different places in the world and who want to provide material prosperity for everyone who works hard.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like that story is like a progressive story.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's a story of like suffragettes, and it's a story of African-American civil rights leaders, and it's a story of LGBTQ activists, a story of like normal working class people, and like it's a story of everyone who's ever been here who has said like there are things that we can do better, and we're gonna work to make that a better place.

<v SPEAKER_00>And to me, it's like, I think that there's a there's a difficulty and a tension that a lot of um people who you know are on my side of the political spectrum have with this idea of not being like that that by not constantly acknowledging the harms that you are undermining the pain and suffering that people went through.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I just want to like liberate, like I do when someone says like I love America, I do not hear, I enjoy the fact that there are like ice agents storming around looking for immigrants like you to throw out.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, that's not how I feel about that.

<v SPEAKER_00>I don't think most people understand it that way.

<v SPEAKER_00>So we're like ivory towering ourselves into this like weird situation where people can't acknowledge that, yeah, things are complicated, but stories themselves are often oversimplifications.

<v SPEAKER_00>So what story do you want to tell?

<v SPEAKER_01>But can we can we spice the take up a little?

<v SPEAKER_01>Because no, because I hear this thing about of course, America has flaws, but we celebrate the people who who work to overcome those flaws, et cetera, et cetera.

<v SPEAKER_01>And and that's true.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like I I support that.

<v SPEAKER_01>There's a reason there's a Martin Luther King Day and a statue and stuff for him.

<v SPEAKER_01>But I want to get to a higher gear of positivity than that.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like something that I've been really struck by in the past 10 years of the discourse is that obviously there is racism and racial conflict in the United States of America, but that's true in other countries as far as I'm aware.

<v SPEAKER_01>That like the existence of ethnic conflict is an aspect of the human condition that I feel like progressive America often uh depicts as a aspect of the American condition.

<v SPEAKER_00>Or the Western condition.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, in a in a way that isn't really true.

<v SPEAKER_01>And that the United States of America, relative to other places, is like a quite direct like is now in its real life lived experience presently imperfect, but actually better than like the vast majority of the world.

<v SPEAKER_00>Well, I think the reason why there's such pessimism about this anyway is that because America is so powerful outside, like different differently than other countries, like way more powerful than other countries, like the scale of the harm we can do is often larger, even as a scale of the benefit.

<v SPEAKER_00>So I think that people are often reacting like, oh wow, like yeah, but you know, Botswana isn't like doing colonialism elsewhere.

<v SPEAKER_00>There aren't Botswana in company, it's mine, I don't know, I'm just saying in a small country.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like there aren't Botswana companies in like Thailand that are doing things that can be reported on that are labor market violations that we would consider bad.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so I think this is like largely a all often a function of the negativity bias of what stories kind of get told.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I mean, I'll agree with you, like America is good, like full stop.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>Because I, to me, that's sort of the turn that I think needs to be made.

<v SPEAKER_01>Not that we need to hide from people flaws and imperfections, not that we shouldn't be always working to better ourselves and so on and so forth.

<v SPEAKER_01>But that, you know, I I I was I always thought there was like a lost opportunity for Kamel Harris to talk about her parents being immigrants, not just people of color, but immigrants of color who, you know, they were like sort of left-wing activists in their day, but they still came to America, presumably because they thought America was a better place to live than where they were living previously.

<v SPEAKER_01>And there's something to that, you know, like that is a part of the immigrant experience that can be imparted to Native people, you know, just as you say, like second generation people teach their parents something about America.

<v SPEAKER_01>Immigrants teach Americans something about America.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think this is part of why I've been so kind of like I I I did not realize how over I thought I thought that this whole discourse about the left being anti-patriotic was overblown because no one ever tells me not to be patriotic.

<v SPEAKER_00>So and that's because of my uh immigrant privilege.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, maybe so.

<v SPEAKER_01>And yeah, I mean again, I always I always thought about my my grandfather in this regard, who was super duper duper left-wing guy, but was like a kind of like a super patriot in his way.

<v SPEAKER_01>And he was, you know, because he was very acutely aware of the problems of other countries.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, he had a he had a more cosmopolitan perspective on the problems of America, which he just did not see as like you, you know, they were uniquely significant to the extent that he'd lived in America.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>But that was because he, because he was an American, he cared about the problems of America.

<v SPEAKER_01>Because he was someone who was knowledgeable about the world, he was like aware of America's present-day virtues, not just like efforts to, you know, per forge a more perfect union.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I think that is, you know, you have these polls where they ask, like, you know, are you proud to be an American?

<v SPEAKER_02>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And, you know, Democrats fluctuate according to whether or not Donald Trump is president.

<v SPEAKER_01>But even when Joe Biden is president or at like a lower level, um, yeah, I just pulled this up.

<v SPEAKER_00>So we have roughly um, it's actually not that bad.

<v SPEAKER_00>58% say they're extremely slash very proud to be an American.

<v SPEAKER_00>Not the worst.

<v SPEAKER_00>In 2013, it was 85%.

<v SPEAKER_00>So that's pretty big jump.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, I could give you like a philosopher answer.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, how why should I be proud to be an American?

<v SPEAKER_01>It's not something I did personally, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

<v SPEAKER_01>But I'm proud of America.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>I'm like proud to be a part of this grand saga that we have.

<v SPEAKER_01>Because I think that I don't approve of Donald Trump's presidency, but he has not single-handedly like made America terrible compared to other things.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, people are living their lives.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, most of the time.

<v SPEAKER_00>My story about this is that I went to get uh what was in Boston for the first time.

<v SPEAKER_00>I don't remember what held up.

<v SPEAKER_00>I must have been like a maybe a late teen or early 20.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I'd gotten, I got a don't tread on me hat, and I just thought it was like, I was like, this is an American hat.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like I was just like, oh, this is great.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, you know, we'll put up the image of like that.

<v SPEAKER_00>And then I walked in, I was like the day one of wearing this hat in Washington, DC.

<v SPEAKER_00>I like walked into some cop and someone was like, why are you wearing that hat?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, what's wrong with you?

<v SPEAKER_00>And because apparently it's like a symbol of like what was it, like the tea party symbol or something like that.

<v SPEAKER_00>And again, like, my bad.

<v SPEAKER_00>You know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_00>Didn't mean to signal that.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I think, you know, everyone who's listening to this, like, we're we're airing this like right before July 4th.

<v SPEAKER_00>Don't let every single patriotic symbol of America get co-opted by the right.

<v SPEAKER_00>I'm begging you.

<v SPEAKER_00>It's not gonna be good vibes if like you can't have American flags that people assuming that you're like a right-wing trust.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, I, you know, I was at a at a swim meet and I saw like a dad um ahead of me in the stands, and he was wearing this American flag shirt.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I was thinking to myself, you know, I'm surprised to see like a MAGA person.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um You're the problem.

<v SPEAKER_01>You're looking at this thing.

<v SPEAKER_01>And then I checked myself.

<v SPEAKER_01>I was like, maybe this is just a patriotism-pilled lib who, you know, showing the flag.

<v SPEAKER_01>No, I didn't, but I I just said, like, I'm gonna reframe this for myself.

<v SPEAKER_01>I am gonna choose to believe that here in Fairfax County, Virginia, like the reason this dad is wearing the flag is he's proud to be an American.

<v SPEAKER_01>I'm proud to be an American too.

<v SPEAKER_01>We're singing the national anthem, you know, it's it's amazing.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like what why not?

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>Uh, but it but it wasn't my instinct.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, even as someone who will do these pro-patriotism takes, um, I mean, I guess maybe I need to get an American flag shirt myself.

<v SPEAKER_01>I need to, I need to be the change.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um I heard like recently, I have no idea if this is true.

<v SPEAKER_00>Someone told me that like they don't say like when I was in school, K-12, we said the Pledge of Allegiance every single morning.

<v SPEAKER_00>And apparently they don't do this as much in some schools anymore.

<v SPEAKER_00>No.

<v SPEAKER_00>And this doesn't happen anymore.

<v SPEAKER_00>Is it in Jose's school they don't say the pledge of the American American American?

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, I think in Blue America, the pledge is done.

<v SPEAKER_00>Okay, well, I I mean I grew up in Blue America, we said the pledge, and like that was a I I think we should bring that back.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, I mean, I bring back the pledge.

<v SPEAKER_01>I pledged allegiance too.

<v SPEAKER_01>Well, so no, when I was in K-8, I pledged allegiance, and then I went to a more progressive school for high school, and there was no no pledging.

<v SPEAKER_00>Well, kids in our school were allowed not to let sit, and I thought it was very subversive that I would always stand.

<v SPEAKER_01>So that was my were there a lot of sitters?

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Okay.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>I always thought it was weird.

<v SPEAKER_00>I I felt the pledging allegiance.

<v SPEAKER_00>Maybe they don't act.

<v SPEAKER_00>I feel like now I'm misremembering.

<v SPEAKER_00>We definitely did this in elementary school.

<v SPEAKER_00>Maybe I didn't do it in high school.

<v SPEAKER_00>I don't really remember anymore.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, I mean, by the time you were in high school, we were pretty deep into woke.

<v SPEAKER_00>Deep into woke.

<v SPEAKER_01>Woke territory.

<v SPEAKER_01>No, but I mean, I think that's actually a great example.

<v SPEAKER_01>Because I I feel like everybody understands, right, just sociologically, that it would be left-wing to say that kids shouldn't pledge allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands.

<v SPEAKER_01>But like, why?

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, I mean, I mean, sociologically, I understand why, but but conceptually, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, do progressives want to say, well, we're promoting disloyalty to the American Republic?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, I think we don't.

<v SPEAKER_01>And we want to get on our high horse about January 6th and all this other stuff, rightly so.

<v SPEAKER_01>But then, okay, people should pledge allegiance to the American Republic.

<v SPEAKER_00>I will say that's the complaint.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, it's a little bit, I understand feeling a little bit, man, kind of sucks right now to pledge allegiance while, like, you know, don't I get I get like why people feel, but I'm like, you have to reframe this.

<v SPEAKER_00>We need to reframe this.

<v SPEAKER_01>But when general, I think when Mullen whatever says, said, you know, we swear an oath to the Constitution, not to one man.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like it's very important.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, this is not like a Hitler youth pledge, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like you pledge allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands.

<v SPEAKER_01>One so, you know, it's like quite explicitly not a pledge to the elected political leadership of the country.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's a pledge to the republic and to the nation.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I I think unless you can it's it's like quite bleak, actually, to have reached a point where it's just taken for granted that it would be not progressive to do that when people can't articulate like a reason.

<v SPEAKER_01>I think if you did the other thing and you were like, Well, Blue America, they're very disloyal.

<v SPEAKER_01>You'd be like, that's bullshit, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like, no, like we're Americans too, but so so pledge.

<v SPEAKER_00>All right, how about with Justin?

<v SPEAKER_00>Can you play the uh uh Ose Can you see for us while we go into peer review?

<v SPEAKER_00>We'll just we'll assume that it gets played for all you listeners.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, so this is peer review.

<v SPEAKER_00>This is our uh part of the podcast where Matt and I talk about a recent or just interesting white paper that is causing discourse or that we would like to cause discourse.

<v SPEAKER_00>Matt, what do you have for me?

<v SPEAKER_01>This one is hot off the presses is the iPhone birth control, causal evidence from ATT's 2007-2011 carrier monopoly.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um there's a lot of discourse about smartphones, their impact on things, including fertility.

<v SPEAKER_01>Uh, this is an interesting one.

<v SPEAKER_01>They take advantage of the fact that when the iPhone was new, the only way to get an iPhone was to have an ATT plan.

<v SPEAKER_01>And ATT coverage varied from place to place.

<v SPEAKER_01>There's places you could go where having ATT was just terrible, you would get terrible service, or you couldn't get service at all.

<v SPEAKER_01>So that meant that iPhone adoption varied according to the availability of the ATT service network, uh, which Caitlin Myers and Hooper think they can use to do sort of a causal analysis of the iPhone's impact.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, they say the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33 to 52 percent of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15 to 44 based on extrapolating uh from this county-level rollout.

<v SPEAKER_01>That's a um that's a really large effect and uh an interesting effort at research design.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I think it's spread like wildfire because it um confirmed it confirms just something a lot of people sort of suspect in their gut that you know everybody, everybody being on their apps all the time has had big, um somewhat undesirable impacts on American society.

<v SPEAKER_00>I will note here that the um statistically significant effects, large effects are largely amongst very young people.

<v SPEAKER_00>So births falling 4.5 to 8% at ages 15 to 19, and 3.2 to 6.6% at 20 to 24 in covered counties.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like, I think that everyone can agree the 15 to 19 number seems like largely straightforwardly positive.

<v SPEAKER_00>I will go ahead and say that at least the 20 to 22 number is like straightforwardly positive.

<v SPEAKER_00>I will grant that the 23-24, we can have some debate.

<v SPEAKER_00>I had some people telling me, like, no, it's bad that 23 and 24 worlds aren't having children.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I don't know, it kind of depends on why.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, but like I thought that the like smartphone thesis seemed less plausible given those age shifts, because it's like, how many young people were getting that iPhone that early that felt at the time that that was a very older person access to?

<v SPEAKER_00>You know what I mean?

<v SPEAKER_01>I'm thinking 2008 was quite expensive.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, and also just like you wouldn't give your kid something like that.

<v SPEAKER_00>It just is not it felt kind of weird to me.

<v SPEAKER_00>And also, like there was like, of course, the birth rate was falling even before then.

<v SPEAKER_00>And there's like a very random weird thing where there's like a null effect for black women for some reason.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I just have there's not really an explanation for why that would be.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, why would the iPhone not affect black women's fertility?

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, just seems kind of weird.

<v SPEAKER_00>So, like, I again, like this, I I'm not an economist.

<v SPEAKER_00>I did not like go through this with like a rigorous, like eye to detail.

<v SPEAKER_00>I would buy that like largely every single thing, which makes it easier for people not to talk to each other and instead have fun at home alone, would like reduce uh fertility rate because it will reduce partnering.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so like that has that effect.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, if you're just like not going to a party and you're staying at home and watching TV, um, that necessarily means you're not having sex either, and so you're not gonna have a kid.

<v SPEAKER_00>And so, like, that all like makes sense to me as like a broader story here.

<v SPEAKER_00>But like, I just think it's really interesting to think about the US in the context of the rest of the world.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, the iPhone has spread or smartphones have spread basically universally at this point, and yet you still see like large variations in birth rates, even if you do see kind of like a large-scale decline in most countries.

<v SPEAKER_00>But the fact that there is difference indicates to me that like technology is interacting with culture in some way that is um, I think right now still kind of unexplained.

<v SPEAKER_01>So I tried to develop a sophisticated methodological critique of this paper.

<v SPEAKER_01>No dice?

<v SPEAKER_01>No, no.

<v SPEAKER_01>I I I I think I think it may just be wrong.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, really?

<v SPEAKER_00>Why?

<v SPEAKER_01>I mean, the problem is that Oh, yeah, there's also a a porn one of the part of the part of the uh Well, so they've tried to bolster it by but with this porn thing.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um but the question of where ATT coverage existed during this time period is not a random subsample of the United States.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yes, right.

<v SPEAKER_01>ATT is a big company, they can count.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so they made sure that their network is really good in the Boston Washington corridor, all across the Pacific coast, all throughout France.

<v SPEAKER_01>Florida, in the Texas Triangle, in the Chicago, Milwaukee, Great Lakes Population Center.

<v SPEAKER_01>And then it's very spotty in rural America.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, they kind of got to it late.

<v SPEAKER_01>They, they, depending on how close you were to cities, there's a part of rural Texas that's just between the big cities, and it has coverage.

<v SPEAKER_01>Also, ATT as a company is headquartered in Texas.

<v SPEAKER_01>So their coverage there is better than elsewhere.

<v SPEAKER_01>The others in this paper are aware of this, that it could just be an urban rural split.

<v SPEAKER_01>And they're doing like a lot of math to try to counteract this.

<v SPEAKER_01>I think there's always a question when you deal with that kind of thing is it working?

<v SPEAKER_01>Because there's a million different papers which claim to show that there's a large causal impact of sometimes it's NAFTA, sometimes it's opioids, you know, on like voting for Republicans.

<v SPEAKER_01>But these are all just different ways of reiterating that like Ohio swung a lot to the right during a specific 10-year period.

<v SPEAKER_01>Because like a lot of different things happened in Ohio during that span of time.

<v SPEAKER_01>And it's it's just challenging.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's difficult, it's difficult to do this.

<v SPEAKER_01>It's a hard problem because you can't say what is co-correlating with what?

<v SPEAKER_01>They show that, you know, as people get smartphones, they access internet porn more.

<v SPEAKER_01>So that's like a plausible hypothesis.

<v SPEAKER_01>But then as you say, why would early i early iPhone adoption was not concentrated among teenagers?

<v SPEAKER_01>Yes.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Like that's not true.

<v SPEAKER_01>So what are we really getting at here?

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, I I think and the effect size that they find is so big, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>And it doesn't that, you know, these things pick up because like it sounds true that smartphones have led to like less coupling and and maybe less sex and maybe fewer babies, but like 50% of the It'd be kind of incredible if it was true.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>Like that that's just that's a lot, and I don't know, man.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, it that's kind of like, you know, it makes the paper more interesting if you have these kind of high-end impacts.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um I did want to say in the teen question though, i i it's not so much, I mean, the impact is negative across the age spectrum, which is different from you know, you might think, I mean, when I was a teen, there was a lot of like anti-teen pregnancy messaging.

<v SPEAKER_01>And I took it at the time, at least that like the goal of that messaging was to like shift people's fertility plans forward.

<v SPEAKER_01>If that messaging caused a large decline in the teen birth weight and a small decline in the 20-something birth weight, and a still a decline in 30-somethings, you would say, okay, something has gone wrong with the like Well, there's more births in the 30 range now.

<v SPEAKER_01>There are, but but they're saying that their estimate of the causal impact of the iPhone is negative across the entire spectrum, but concentrated in teens, which is different from saying, you know, it just like it shifted people, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Because we do see that shift happening, which is, you know, fertility treatments and different life plan, so on and so forth.

<v SPEAKER_01>So they're not they are saying that the iPhone is just moving you uniformly, negative, um, even if it's concentrated among teenagers.

<v SPEAKER_00>I always have a hard time with these papers because I'm just like, yeah, it probably seems good if people spend less time on their smartphones, like just large, like I'm just gonna hook out ahead and say, like, that seems correct.

<v SPEAKER_01>You've become a weird phone abstentionist.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah, I've my butt but I do think that like it's fine to be like, I think iPhones or smartphones in general are like bad for you without having to like buy these like really big stories about how they're causing like every problem in the universe.

<v SPEAKER_00>So I'm just like, you know.

<v SPEAKER_00>I just I just like I think that's often this gets cast between like, you're like a pro smartphone, like Taylor Lorenz believes it's caused all the benefits of all humanity to accrue to people who get these these devices versus like the Jonathan Heights where like it's causing every single problem known to men.

<v SPEAKER_00>And I'm like, you know, I'm gonna say this.

<v SPEAKER_00>Seems bad in general, but has some positives in some cases.

<v SPEAKER_00>And like if everyone used it less, that seems like it would be largely good.

<v SPEAKER_01>I just wonder with some of this stuff.

<v SPEAKER_01>You know, I think I think there's a theory that the printing press like caused Protestantism, which in turn caused the Thirty Years' War.

<v SPEAKER_01>And so all these people died.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, so that's bad.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_01>Uh on the other hand, a lot of important long-term benefits accrued from the printing press.

<v SPEAKER_01>On the third hand, if your takeaway from like the downsides of the printing press was like we shouldn't have books in our house, that actually wouldn't shelter you from the 30 years' war at all.

<v SPEAKER_00>No, for sure.

<v SPEAKER_00>But I just mean like I think that the there are individual harms to being on the smartphone a lot.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, I don't know, like I just watch parents on their phones next to their children.

<v SPEAKER_00>I'm like, that seems bad all the time.

<v SPEAKER_00>Like, you know.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah, that's me.

<v SPEAKER_01>You can find me doing that all the time.

<v SPEAKER_01>Um, I agree.

<v SPEAKER_01>As a childless adult.

<v SPEAKER_01>I'm just I'm just I'm judging.

<v SPEAKER_01>Right.

<v SPEAKER_01>I I mean, I'm just saying that I think in the in the phone's discourse, yeah, we're not always really distinguishing clearly between what are we saying are like individualized harms and like downstream negative consequences.

<v SPEAKER_01>Because I'm in, I mean, on the one level, yes, clearly, I think almost everybody at the margin is like on their phone a little, myself included, is on their phone a little bit too much and should like talk to somebody or exercise or fucking go to sleep or something like that.

<v SPEAKER_01>But there's also this question of the macro impact on society, yeah, right?

<v SPEAKER_01>Of shifting to a world in which we are getting all this like app-based communication, people are dating differently.

<v SPEAKER_01>We talked about one thing.

<v SPEAKER_01>The media, like you changing your media consumption habits won't change the fact that the media has been fundamentally altered by smartphones and social media, and we're not gonna uninvent it.

<v SPEAKER_00>So I actually think that, you know, this is hot take prediction coming in.

<v SPEAKER_00>I think that like reduced smartphone use and like increased use of more dumb phone technology is gonna become like a class signifier.

<v SPEAKER_01>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>Yeah.

<v SPEAKER_00>This is my take.

<v SPEAKER_01>So I'll be I'll be a working class champion.

<v SPEAKER_00>You will be a working class champion scrolling on Twitter on your desk bed.

<v SPEAKER_00>Just tweeting, tweeting all the time.

<v SPEAKER_00>Um, well, if you enjoyed this conversation, uh please subscribe to the argument, tell your friends about it, like, comment, and have a happy July 4th.

<v SPEAKER_01>Happy birthday, America.

<v SPEAKER_01>We're Patriots now.