Should Race Matter in College Admissions?

The core problem with affirmative action, how it was being practiced particularly at Harvard, is that they were just being racist to Asians. But what was happening is not just like, oh, we're all just like well-meaning people trying to improve the-- I was like, these people had racist views about Asian Americans, but they said that I think that these people's personalities are bad. That's just like your racist. I think it's weird that this has become like a question of like, oh wow, this is a progressive university that is trying to do-- like no, these people have racist views about Asian Americans. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, I'm Matthew Iglesias. And I'm Jerusalem Demsys. You're listening to the argument to show where two friends argue in a respectful nuance, hopefully informative way about politics, policy, and everything else we're interested in. This week affirmative action and Matt has a take. My take is that it's bad. Affirmative action is bad. Yes. Why? I say two parts. One, I don't think it has like large benefits. I'm going to talk about that. Second, I think in a basic way, it is not a good idea to be slotting people into racial and ethnic categories and judging them on that basis. It's not fair to people, and it's not healthy for society. I guess we could just start with the first one. Because I think it's a place where actually a lot of our disagreements would be resolved if there was like really solid empirical evidence about this. But I actually think there is a lot of benefit. Why do you think that's not true? So I mean, there's a few reasons. But I would say that one high level fact that I learned at a certain point in life that changed my thinking, that's really sort of pretty basic is that if you look at law school admissions or medical school admissions, they're doing affirmative action there. You are letting people in with lower LSAT or MCAT scores based on whatever. And in isolation, I don't know who cares, this is not even that many people. But it's a reminder that diversifying the undergraduate admissions process is not actually leveling the playing field. You're just redoing the same process again at the next stage. We haven't to know because LSAT is very precisely quantified that it's there in the law school context. But I think it's sort of a generalized thing. You're not producing some really effective elite formation thing, which I think is part of how this gets sticky that it's in the interests of institutions of higher education to actually exaggerate how effective they are. But I think you're measuring effectiveness weirdly here. I mean, there's ways we have measured effectiveness. We see this with increasing numbers of black doctors, black lawyers. You see these people actually entering the elite. And then you actually see-- and to me, what I'm interested in is when they get there, what do they actually do? And so for me, whether affirmative action is effective or not is a question of, is it effectively improving society? So does having more black doctors make people better off? We have research on this. Black patients have better outcomes with black doctors. We see that black doctors are more willing to go into primary care fields that are really understaffed right now. There's a real shortage of primary care doctors. There's research showing that with black judges on a federal panel changes the behavior of their white colleagues in discrimination civil rights cases, black legislators, and state legislatures have more responsive governments to their constituents' needs in other contexts. I mean, we see this too. India has a reservation system, which is different than affirmative action, some more co-edipase. But Indian female legislators are more likely to respond to female constituents' concerns. And that means there's actually more water infrastructure, because we've been apparently playing about that more than men do. So I just think clearly that's what the outcome is. The idea that you have to continue to do affirmative action later on in the process seems not that important to me. Well, but the question is, how are you getting to that outcome? I don't think it's the case that letting in college students with different SAT scores based on their racial identity is why we have racially diverse state legislators elected. I don't think it's a meaningful linkage between those two-- Oh, we know the same thing, Dr.-- And lawyers, right? Well, no, but I mean, so the lawyer case is an interesting one, because there's this whole thing going back 20, 25 years ago, there was a lot of talk about mismatch hypothesis. And so this is the idea that if you let somebody into a school with a then going to be a below average student, that could have negative impacts on that person in their life. There's a lot of different takes on this, as sort of goes in different directions, depending on what you're looking at. But a particularly telling one is the law school case, because to become a lawyer, you need to go to law school. But then you need to pass the bar exam, right? And so it's very bad to take out student loans and pay law school tuition, and then not pass the bar exam, right? And what happens in law school admissions is that some people who maybe have LSAT scores to get into pretty good law schools instead end up at the top ones. And that seems fine. But some people end up in the kind of bottom-ranked law schools who, by their LSAT scores, shouldn't have gone to law school at all. And then those people have very high LSAT flunk rates, right? So that's like bad for them individually. But it also indicates that the whole process of moving people up the chain is not actually increasing the number of attorneys who are minted. Because at the end of the day, there's this basic competence floor provided by the bar exam. And you get something-- Medical school is not as well studied, but there it's an even stricter line that you have to cross, like the really bad case for affirmative action in medical schools would be you have people becoming doctors who can't practice medicine. Which is not happening. Right, exactly. But by the same token that that's not happening, the whole process is not actually increasing the number of black doctors. It's just shifting the prestige of which medical school they attend, which has no real meaning and impact on society. And then that fact-- so black doctors are more likely to be general practitioners, which is good in a lot of ways, because there's a shortage of GPs and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that's also just to say that medical school students who have higher MCAT scores are less likely to become GPs, because it's not as lucrative. So the whole apparatus is-- Is that creating resentment in ill will, but not actually creating more doctors? Well, I actually think that there's a lot of dispute about whether or not that's true. There's data from Sanders that shows that students who weren't admitted to elite schools didn't just shift to well-matched secondary schools. That there's evidence that they often didn't attend law school at all. Again, that seems like a question of what's-- I don't clear what's going on there. But I think even if you're correct, just put that to the side, there is a question about whether going to these elite schools changes the places that people end up in, right? Because maybe it's the case that you still get the same number of doctors like you're saying, but perhaps you don't get doctors who are able to access specifics who don't go after specific specialties or who aren't into-- don't have the network effects or benefits of being in part of elite schools. We know the best research around what actually happens to people who go to selective schools indicates that it really doesn't matter in terms of lifetime earnings or anything really material, unless you're from a very disadvantaged background, in which case, it ends up mattering a lot. And the reason for this is in the Chetty research, this is also the Dale Kruger research, is that you get the benefits of the network. So it would feel really, really surprising to me that there was no shift in the elite composition of the United States if we got rid of affirmative action. Well, but I mean, what kind of shift in composition you're really talking about, right? I think elite is a vague assertion. I mean, I think again, in your case, doctors' lawyers, I think you would have roughly the same number of African-American doctors and lawyers. And that would be fine, or it might be better to have more, but you would have to work on that further upstream of the pipeline. And then you do get to a position where it's in politics, long before we had the idea of affirmative action, there was a concept of the balanced ticket. So in New York, at the dawn of the 20th century, it was like you wanted to have an Irish guy and a Jewish guy, either as governor and lieutenant governor or something like that, 'cause you're just like, you're doing politics, you're doing representation. And so on and so forth. Or like me Tim Walls to really masculine up the ticket. Yeah, I mean, exactly, though. People talk about that all the time. Joe Biden was old, so he was gonna have Kamala Harris was gonna be more exciting. This kind of stuff is going on all the time. And that happened before. There just wasn't a view that it was like, oh, I need an Irish guy who went to Yale. Right? You know, there's like, you're just fine. It's somebody, like somebody who you like. It's politics, right? And, you know, I think there's no, we're journalists. And I think media is like a really strong case for like, well, we should care about representation, right? Because if you're putting together, I mean, here's the matters which you're trying to do, right? Like at the argument, you're trying to define a vision of liberalism. So you don't want columnists who don't fit in liberalism, but then you want a range of things that could be, right? And you know what that's like, you know, if you're putting together a football team, it's like you need some offensive linemen and you need some receivers. It's not like who's the best, right? You want to have the whole. - Diverse set. - Yeah, like range of things. But like we actually always achieve that in life without this kind of manipulation of the upstream credentials. - What do you mean? - Well, I mean, just like what I was saying, that like in old time ethnic politics, like we were able to do this stuff, like you're able to put together teams of people that you think are good. - Yes, but you mean like not within Harvard or something, you should be like overall in all of society. - Yeah, that it's just kind of like Ivy League stolen valor. - Yeah, that it's like American institutions that require diversity will be unable to function unless we can like rubber stamp them as being pen graduate. - So obviously there's like an empirical dispute here that we're not gonna resolve on a podcast, whereas I actually don't agree that you're gonna have the same numbers of like black doctors, lawyers, CEOs, managers, et cetera, without this. We do see this a little bit evidence in California after the ballot measure that strikes down affirmative action. You see fewer manager level black managers in California as a result of this. Again, it's like some suggested evidence and I don't think it's like fully resolved the entire dispute, but I just don't think it's clear that we know which way it's gonna go. But I think it's also just like important to ask you, like what is the value of going to an elite school? Like what happens to you when you go there? You went to Harvard? - Yeah. - I have no idea what happens in those hallowed-- - It's lovely. Again, I'm mad at you. - But it's really, I mean, because clearly you're saying, like okay, it's not the big of a deal in terms of like producing lawyers, doctors, et cetera, at the composition maybe we would want. Like I assume you agree, it's good that there are black doctors that are treating black patients and they're happy about that. But like-- - There's even black doctors treating white patients. - Really? - Yeah, you know, my son's pediatrician, my dentist. - Like it's okay, we're living in a-- - Diverse society. - Yeah. - But I mean, like really, like to me, it's like I think there's like a weird like Bains which happens with anti-ferent abaction people. Sometimes where they're like, listen, it doesn't really matter if you get to go to Harvard or not. Like you can stuff all of the-- And I'm like, okay, but then why is everyone so worked up about who gets to go to Harvard? Clearly there's like a value here that we're talking about that we should just then define. - Well, I mean, I actually think-- - This is an interesting question, like in the opposite direction, right, which is that if, like part of what they are trying to do when they do admissions at the top levels of elite schools is like, the schools are trying to entrench their own positions in society, right? And I think if you had a universe where like Harvard was admitting on the basis of pure standardized tests, right? And it was much more heavily Asian than it's been much fewer African-American Latino students. Like lots of left-wing people would start becoming like more skeptical of these institutions as institutions. Lots of college professors who tend to have super duper left-wing political commitments would like feel bad about themselves and their lives and what's going on. There would be more criticism of like being a Princeton professor and doing takes on the internet all the time about how leftist you are. And like, I think that would all be like healthy developments for society. Like I'm not surprised that the institutions themselves feel that it's good to be able to do admissions this way. Like I think it is good for them, right? To be able to practice this kind of like political ticket balancing and make sure that, you know, I remember an admissions officer told me like 25 years ago. She was like, look, you know, the way Congress works is we have these majority minority districts, right? Like there's going to be black representatives elected. There's going to be Latino representatives. And we want like as many of them as possible to be Harvard graduates. Like which I think works well for Harvard. But like, I don't think it works well for society. It creates this sense of gamesmanship and unfairness around things. And you have this kind of like really unprocessed, you're a woman Elizabeth Warren did her DNA test. - Famously? - Yeah. And so then that like backfired on her. And then she kind of like apologized. But what she apologized for was like breaking the norms of like how tribal membership function. - Oh, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't mean that like whatever it was. She didn't apologize for like what I think is the thing that a normal person would say she did wrong, right? Which was like she made up or misrepresented her ethnic identity to gain an advantage on the job market. - Right. - I think now we're, okay, there's a few strengths in what you've just said. I mean like one is this question of unfairness and how it is decided, right? Because like I sense that there are a lot of different fair systems you could create for who gets to go to university. Harvard could decide the only people that's admitting are people who want to do computer science. - Sure. - It's not going to admit anyone who doesn't, you know, wants to work in the humanities or it doesn't want to admit anyone who, it only actually wants to work for people who go to, who went to school in Massachusetts. It's only going to admit people from that. Like there are bunches of systems you could create that people would say is like either fair or unfair. So like there's like two ways to think about fairness. One is like is the system someone is using fair? And also within the system they have said they are using are they accurately evaluating people? And then I feel like it's fair. So like for instance, they say everyone above a certain GPA gets in, I had that GPA, did they let me in? And so to me I think that like the former is the place where people are actually getting like confused. Like what is it the purpose of these schools and what should they be doing? From my perspective it is like the goal of like our elite higher education because it has such a large influence on who becomes a member of Congress who ends up running these large Fortune 500 companies who has tons of discursive power at a media. Like when I was at the Atlantic it became like abundantly clear that like in the hiring process we were having like way more Yale people making it to the final round than one would do a normal look at the distribution of people who've gone to Yale and wanted to do journalism and come to the Atlantic. You weren't even able to get some more elite college students from other places in the final rounds of hiring in a couple of instances. And my point is like all of that is true. So the question is like okay, given that that's the system we have like obviously I think we should change that. It would be good if these schools did not have this level of power. But given that that's true we should want these schools to have a cross section of society represented in them. - Right, but so there's a question of like what is the causal impact here, right? Because like with everything in education you have like treatment effects and you have selection effects, right? And it seems to me that overwhelmingly like what is happening is that you know elite segments of society are dominated by like roughly speaking the people who had high SAT scores. And like yes those people tend to go to elite colleges and also when you're scanning people's resumes it's like a cheat sheet, right? Like if somebody can get into Yale that person is probably pretty smart and conscientious. And so that's like giving you some kind of information. That's not to say that like you can manipulate social outcomes by manipulating. - But we see the Dale Krueger research, the Roger Chetty research that shows that his disadvantaged students get like a massive benefit from going to these, you just don't buy that. So huge. - I don't think the scale of those impacts is actually that large. - I mean I think the best. - Well so the David Deming I think had the kind of a latest on this. And his take is that he's showing really large impacts of attending these kind of elite schools. I'm like, I mean the charts say what they say. You know whether you wanna say it's larger small. - I mean yeah so it's just numbers on it. Chetty's data shows that attending an Ivy League school doubles the likelihood of a student from the bottom income quintile for reaching the top income quintile in adulthood. That mobility effect is larger for underrepresented minority students than for white students. That's like a big effect if that's true. - Well okay but here's another one. So the same thing they're showing, okay you predicted main income rank for going to a flagship public school or going to an Ivy plus school. It goes from 76 to 79. So it's like really really small. To try to generate like a large causal effect, they get this other concept, right? Which is well not what's your average income but are you working at an elite firm or at a prestigious firm? And they show really big impacts there, right? So that's the like Yale to Atlantic pipeline that you're talking about. But I feel like that's like self-referential that just like you're characterizing as elite like the institutions that are-- - Are they not elite? Do you disagree? - I mean like we're like playing games now. - It's not that I disagree. It's just I think it's not actually that meaningful for you. Like for the world. world. It's not meaningful. So you're saying that you don't think the world is any different if everyone who writes at a sleep median, so you're just white. No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I don't think that it's that meaningful to say. Like, I think that with the Atlantic, with the Atlantic decides it wants to do in terms of its hiring, in terms of building a diverse staff or not, is like a decision that the Atlantic is capable of reaching on its own as a management question and it's not actually being forced on them by the admissions decisions at the Ivy League. Now, it is true that if these things were happening in secret and like nobody knew what was going on, that it's possible you could have really, really big causal impacts around this, but like, that's not true. Sorry, I just want to clarify here because like, you're saying like, yes, like in media and politics, there's reasons to care about representation happening. You were also saying that, yes, people are used Yale or Harvard or whatever as a way of saying like, okay, this person is clearly conscientious, whatever. But I also think that like, it's true, these schools are doing something like, I think going to Yale can make someone more aware of things, smarter, more access to knowledge, otherwise we're not have had. Like, I think there's, these schools are actually producing some value in the students, particularly for ones who didn't have elite networks to begin with. So like, maybe they're more aware of potential jobs they could take. They didn't know about before because their friends parents didn't have those kinds of jobs. So like, I think they're actually creating a group of people that would not have otherwise existed. Like, people who would know to apply to a fellowship at the New York Times to be a journalist. Like, I just think it's like not true. There's not some shift happening. So I'm a little more skeptical than you are of that. But that is where though, I do think like fairness concerns need to come back into this because if you, to the extent that you do believe that attending, you know, let's say it's Harvard rather than UMass Amherst provides very large benefits to the individual, right? Controlling for their own qualifications, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then I think there's like a real question to ask is like, why is it that, you know, the child of Vietnamese immigrants whose parents work in a restaurant, like, why don't they deserve access to those connections and things like that? And that's also where questions like, you know, um, Barack Obama when he was modding out on the campaign trip in 2008, you know, he said, I don't know that my daughters need to get a special leg up in admissions here. And again, the point there is that, well, if what we're trying to do is give people access to like elite networking opportunities, he wasn't president at the time. But he was already United States Senator and prior to that, a professor in the Chicago law school, well, it's not a question of like even like who needed the help, right? It's that like Sasha and Malia Obama do not need to attend Stanford to get access to elite networking. And there's plenty of white people like living in rural areas and whatever else who don't have access to those elite networks. So if we had a system that was like geared towards some kind of like networking equalization, yeah, I can see a rationale for that. But like that's not at all the way the system up. I agree that I don't think that Malia Obama needed to go to Harvard to meet other Harvard professors. Um, I think that like she already had that covered. I think that seems fair to say. But that becomes more of like an implementation question. We're like, I agree that it is really bad to have an affirmative action system that like is the one that has existed. Um, that says, Oh, we think that if you are a, you know, black millionaire's son, that is more valuable to us than a Vietnamese child of immigrants who's actually poor. Like that's just like, okay, now, yeah, we should fix the system to like actually do that. But like, I agree then there are unfairness concerns. The people who get left out. But I think that that's true whatever system we create. Like some people won't get to go to Harvard and that's really unfair. And like that sucks. And then the question is, who then should we distribute that to and we get back to my original point, which is the real way to define this is whether or the real way to decide who gets to go to Harvard is to say like what makes society better off? I think for me is society better off in a world where there are not racial groups that do not have access to the kinds of social networks that pre-produce the entire elite. No, I think that's worse. Now, I think the meta answer here, which I think most people have is like, it's really bad to have a system where like all of our elite are basically funneled through like four or five schools. And like we probably should fix that. I think that's great. Someone should do that. It seems really hard to do. In the meantime, I think affirmative actions, the way that you can fix that problem. Well, it's okay. Yeah, you were saying like, well, this is an implementation question. Yeah, which okay. I mean, you know, when I think about, you know, the course of my lifetime or the trajectory of this debate over time, right? And Bill Clinton, when he was president, when he was modding out, right? He says, well, we need to mend it, not end it, right? This was when proposition, whatever was passing in California, et cetera. That seems like a good take to me at the time in retrospect. It like it also seems like a good take. Similarly, like what Obama said seems like a good take, right? Like Obama wasn't saying, I think we need to move immediately to a completely like identity blind admission system based wholly on standardized tests. He was making it kind of a common sense like implementation critique point. And yet somehow, like those changes don't get me, right? There's no movement in that direction at either of those points in time, neither of those presidents in their capacity as president actually attempted to make any of these kinds of reforms. And like, it's something that I got increasingly cynical about as time passes, you know, because sure, sure, it's an implementation issue. Sure, I could imagine writing something down that is like more nuanced and that is taking a comprehensive look at things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like nobody is doing that. And I think the Supreme Court in its most recent ruling has like continued to leave the door open to a school saying like we are doing something more nuanced than a just kind of basic like give you an extra 100 points on your SATs. And I will be interested to see how that plays out like if anybody comes up with anything. Yeah, I mean, like I'll say this one, I'm not going to say that I think affirmative action is a popular issue. I think you can just like, you can just look at the idea that like Clinton and Obama are saying this, like I think that's like fine. I'm probably made sense politically for them to do. But putting that to the side, the question of what is actually optimal, like there are a lot of policy areas that I have like views on where they're not doing the optimal thing. I don't think that that means you just like give up on the issue. Right. But I mean, I think it depends like how far from optimal you are, how responsive this system seemed to be to things. I don't, um, Man, this Supreme Court just like, I mean, clearly it was responsive. It was like, okay, if you're not going to fix it, we're going to like literally make it impossible for you to do this current iteration of what you're doing. And like, I think we also should just remember here that like the core problem with affirmative action, how it was being practiced particularly at Harvard is that they were just being racist to Asians. Like what was happening is not just like, oh, we're all just like well-meaning people trying to improve the, I was like, these people had racist views about Asian Americans, but they said that like, I think that these people's personalities are bad. They don't like think that they have like they think like, oh, these are all the same. You're like playing your, uh, you know, violin and you like do math and like what I'm like, that's just like your racist. And like, that's the core problem to address there. And like, yes, like we should fix the system, but I think it's weird that this has become like a question of like, oh, wow, like this is a progressive university that is trying to do like, no, these people are have racist views about Asian Americans. Well, okay, but I mean, again, like, you know, I've been alive. I've been, I've been reading takes. I've been seeing the discourse and, you know, you was a, it was a striking moment to me that as that trial was proceeding and as the evidence was coming out, like I wasn't hearing from progressive minded people. I wasn't hearing from Democrats. I wasn't hearing from like center left columnists. Like, oh, like there's a real problem here. Like something has to, I don't know. I feel like I, like when I reading the evidence that was being presented during the stream court case, I was like, actually shocked and it, it update. I was like, oh, these people are like really racist Asian people. Like I just, I know other people who had that view too are like, oh, seems quite bad. And they shouldn't do that. I mean, I mean, I mean, I, you know, I always feel better when I talk to you. And, you know, I feel like you're a very reasonable person. You know, I remember when the SFFA decision came out and like, you know, I like wrote an article about it, right? And it's like, you know, how could schools change and like, be better and do better things? And I read other stuff that happened. And I would, I would feel better about the world. And like the Democratic Party and center left politics, if like more of the statements there had been saying something clearly bad was going on with this crude anti-Asian discrimination. And we need to think harder, work harder to achieve representation and diversity in our elite without resorting to these kind of practices. What I was actually seeing was a lot of just very flat, you know, Supreme Court bad kind of stuff. And again, I will concede that this is an implementation detail, but I think that if we, you know, expand beyond the college admissions, span, you see actually like a very cynical set of practices in place, right? So, and my son's school at least the last time I looked at it, the school lunch services are provided by a company called Cedexo Magic. And I saw that and I was like, like what is, like I was familiar with Cedexo, which is like a cafeteria, they do, a lot of schools, prisons, hospitals, et cetera. Like what's the magic? And the magic is Magic Johnson. And what happened is is that magic, great basketball player, love Magic Johnson. I think he's become underrated as time has passed. But as a basketball or like a basketball? But as a businessman, he's a smart businessman. He has a company called Magic Johnson Enterprises. And one of the things they do is they have this subsidiary that's 51% owned by Magic Johnson, 49% owned by Cedexo. And it's just a relabeling of Cedexo's cafeteria services, except now it's a minority owned business. So they qualify for some DCPS contracting, you know, set aside thing. They brag on their website about working with so many HBCUs. And it's like, what is being achieved here? Right, now I could imagine somebody's, it's 1965. We just signed the Voting Rights Act. And the DC government is like, we are going to make sure that we are supporting minority owned businesses. And I'm like, yes, I 100% understand what you were trying to accomplish here. Is Cedexo magic accomplishing? What you were trying to accomplish? They're like, I don't think it is. And I think so much of-- - Who cares, man? Who cares? - There are other streets where I'm like, yeah, someone's really missing out here. Like, who cares? Like this is something that was like, yeah, this seems unsuboptimal and like it wouldn't happen. It would be bad if it didn't happen. But I'm like, this is not like every single government program, every single private sector program, anything that you do is going to have like these weird edge cases where something bizarre happens and no one really meant to, like, okay, so like Cedexo now is making money, but also now magic Johnson's making money. Like, I don't, does it, has it affected the school quality? - Well, I mean, you're-- - Because your son complaining about-- - No, no, no, yes, but I mean, that's different. - You know, school lunch is bad. It's kind of a human universal. - Yeah. I think that a lot of people have been asking recently questions about the scope of local government spending in blue areas versus red areas. And I think that as we poke underneath the hood, there's a lot of sort of uncomfortable things happening. There was a good op-ed in New York Times recently, about public sector labor unions. - Friends of the pod? - They're rolling some of this. - Yeah, and I believe it is not that well studied, but it seems to me that you have meaningful cost inflation from these kind of contracting set of sides. And also that there's a lot of questionable assignments that there's a lot of use of people as just cutouts, that this is a kind of a common practice here. Judge Glock wrote a piece for City Journal about this recently. And I will concede it's like a more anecdote heavy piece than like I would want to see. And I read it and I was like, well, I'm gonna get like the real facts on this. And it's the kind of thing you go to your NBR, you go to your chat GPT research. And they're like, they're just not coming up with much. And unfortunately, America's college professor community is pretty skewed toward the left. And I think one of the main ways that that manifests is like what gets on the research agenda in the first place. And there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in the question of like is affirmative action in government contracting like what is it achieving and at what costs seems a little unlawful? - So I think that if there's like some cost for whatever to doing this, that seems bad. And we should not be bloating the government in order to, or taking money from taxpayers, particularly at a majority minority city in order to give magic Johnson more money. That seems like correct to me on the merits. But I think I said this like the reason why I say like who cares is like I think that a lot of what's driving the animosity around affirmative action in all contexts is there's like a sense that there's like some sort of ultimate fair system that exists out there in the ether. And that this is like pulling us away from it. In a way where I'm like there are a lot like almost all the things that we like recognize as reasons why it's okay for someone to get into college is like quote unquote unfair in some respect. I mean there's like broader ones. And I think the lips will agree with it. She's like the cosmic affair is of like who gets to be born America or be an America or go to so like these are like cosmically unfair questions. Like do you have a disability? These are like random luck things that you have no control over that end up defining so many things behind your life turns out. But even like other things are more germane, which is I think gender like I think it's really interesting that like people don't seem to care that much about the massive benefit men get in college higher admissions practices and you know getting to go to college and getting better better better rates of being able to attend college at lower GPAs and SAT scores than women do. And I don't really care about this that much. I think that like it would be good for people to recognize what's happening. But I think there's like a reason why there's not that much of an outcry about this. And it's largely because men are 50% of the country. Most people have dads, brothers, sons, whatever, men in their lives and they're like this seems like reasonable but also I think there's like a meta feeling that like fair is like 50/50. Yeah, there should be 50% women, 50% men. That seems like reasonable to me. And if that's kind of like out of skew we should just make sure that's okay. Like that doesn't seem crazy to people. I don't like the purported justification for all of this is that like college just wanna make sure that like dating markets don't work. But I like don't really think that's why people are generally okay with this as a system. I think it's largely that we've constructed an idea fairness around gender equality, which leads to people to believe that 50/50 kind of makes sense there. - See I actually think I think I should take the dating point more seriously. Because like I think that what is driving a lot of these dynamics in the admissions standpoint really is like the schools themselves operating to maximize like their own interest, right? And so like one reason that you don't see that much complaining about this is that the people, the women on campus who by definition have did get in like they prefer it that way. - Yeah but the people who complain about affirmative action and race are the people who don't get it. So like why are all these women who do, yeah I mean those are the complainants in these lawsuits. There's the people who are like, - Well that's true. - But like why are there all these women who like didn't get into like Wesleyan or whatever. Why aren't they like really pissed that like they but some unqualified dude got in ahead of them? - Well I think we should actually distinguish two things, right? One is like who are the plaintiffs at lawsuits? And so like yes those are by definition the people who didn't get in. But the other is like who's complaining in the discourse, right? - I feel like every admission season you get like tweets about like people who are like, oh I had like 6,500 SAT score. - Sure, sure. I mean you do get that. But I mean there's a persistent controversies about elite admissions and they were louder in the past actually. I mean if you just sort of survey the discourse there used to be more center left. - Yeah. - Center right like columnists and stuff in America complaining about stuff. And it's just usually other graduates of the same elite institutions just complaining about how they work. Or it used to be when you had non-leftist professors it was just conservative professors saying like, I don't like the system. I don't think it's how it should go. I think that you raise a good point that like affirmative action for men in college admissions. Especially not at the top schools but at like the mid-list schools is underrated as a phenomenon. I think it will get more rated. Like I think if people start to complain about this a lot of people who are not currently fired up will say like yeah you're right. - Like now just kind of like doing like what's happening in the discourse. Like what I look at the discourse if what's happening with how men should have access to elite spaces with their entire ed or whatever it is. Like right now it seems the discourse should get towards like more affirmative action for men should exist. Like I think when you look at the concerns of a lot of people which I think there's like reasonable ones about like why boys aren't doing as well as girls and school or academic. - Now you know you're cheating. Like this is supposed to be a different episode. - We're gonna talk about Richard Reeves. - Well that's a whole different episode. But I think there's like this larger push where you see people saying like well actually the school's not fair because it's set up for girls or whatever it is. I think there's like a level here where people have this background assumption that I think is fine to have a society that like generally you shouldn't see massive gender imbalances in places that we think are as important. You don't think we should have 100% women judges. We shouldn't have 100% female doctor. Like I think that's like a reasonable thing to like have a society decide that they don't want that to exist because I think people have sense about like fairness but also like the downstream impact of how that would impact the gender in being treated or interacting with that profession. And so I think that's fine. But I think we should realize like that. like import this logic then to other areas that we care about. I agree, per your, like, one of your first comments on this podcast, that it would be great if we didn't have to, like, care about people's race and that we could just sort of ignore that. Like, that seems like an optimal society we would end up in, where that doesn't actually impact how you are treated or how your life outcomes are. And, like, I think that nobody actually really enjoys being instrumentalized or thought of as, like, a particular member of a group when it comes to, like, government policy. That's not like something people really love. But at the same time, like, we live in a society and the society has already treated people in a certain way, on basis of their gender, on their race, etc. And we have policies that react to that reality. And so I think, to me, like, let's just import our logic here about gender over to race. I mean, I'm more inclined to read it the other way and say that, like, you know, bringing, if it was like 90% of law schools were female, you wouldn't care. Well, I'm not saying would I care what I not care. I'm saying that, like, I think we should ask harder questions about affirmative action for male college applicants. I will also say, though, I mean, again, not to do a Richard Reeves podcast. Richard Reeves is the American Institute for Boys and Men. He has been raising concern about boys doing worse in school, going to college, less, etc, etc, etc. You know, to like try to port like gender discourse into race discourse is tricky. But I feel like a lot of what he's doing is closer to like, respectability politics for boys. Like, he's not saying we need colleges to do even more aggressive affirmative action for male applicants. Like, he is saying like, we as a society need to care more about how boys are doing in elementary school and middle school. I mean, I'm pretty much what extreme questions is that we should we need more male teachers. Yes. And like, this is where we get into what I think is interesting. As you say, one of the differences in this case is there's just a lot of people of both genders. Yeah. Right. Like, we're very well supplied with both women and men. So if you say something like we should try to have more male elementary school teachers, how would you do that? Like, it seems like a hard question. But it's not like, well, you're going to run out of men. Well, no, but I think that probably you're going to have some sort of affirmative action somewhere in that system. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. No, no. But I'm just saying quantitative. Oh. Okay. Yeah. It's like, imagine a world in which the number of male elementary school teachers doubled. Yeah. It's just in the grand scheme of things, not that many human beings involved. Relative to the number of men. Yeah. Right. When you look at sort of individual cases, right, I think you can often say, okay, we have like a strong argument that racial representation in this area, like, may matter, then maybe significant for society. But you also have like an adding up constraint. Right. Like, I remember one time, you know, it's in 2020 when everybody was doing these takes. I was like a national geographic or something, but it was like a squib about how we need to talk about the lack of African Americans in marine biology. And like, one of the questions I had was like, like, do we need to talk about that? Right. This is not actually the same as like, well, are there any black judges? Right? Or are there any black? Well, I'm not sure. Well, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Some marine biologists could talk about it. That seems fine. Well, maybe I've made my professions all white. Like, maybe there's a cost there, who knows? Right. But also if there's like a short supply of like qualified, technically skilled African American scientists. Yeah. Right. We maybe actually need to think about the question of like, where do we want them to be? Do we want the redoctors or do you want them to be like marine biologists? Right. And like, you know, that's a that's a difficult question. And I think I think we'd get kind of awkward. And I think you understand why people don't want to have that kind of conversation. You can just imagine the story of discourse over this. Right. I mean, it's challenging. Yeah. But it's like, you know, when you say, I like, I think that ethnic representation in media and politics has like a kind of very clear rationale. Yeah. Right. But that does imply like fewer people doing something else. So I haven't like read obviously this National Geographic piece or whatever. And obviously, I think like we should talk about something as like a pretty low bar. Like I'm fine with people talking about. I mean, it's fine. We can talk about what you want. But I mean like more, more germine to what you're saying here. Um, I think that it is a good development for society. For people to look at groups that have been disadvantaged in some way in the past and raise the question, why are they underrepresented in this space? Now, what you do after that, I think is like, depends. I sure clearly on what you're saying, like what's going on there. And I think when we think about, um, a lot of professions, we shouldn't expect there to be the large gender and racial gaps that there are if people were free to make the choices they wanted to make, not all professions, people could have like tastes that are different for whatever reason. But like, I don't think it's just the doctors and lawyers and journalists that matter here. I think that this can extend to jobs that many people might have, um, outside of that. Like, for instance, most people are not attempting to be in any of those jobs. And there's network effects that are even more pernicious, I think, in jobs that are not among the elite, like often if like, I mean, this is often a nepotism problem, like, oh, do you want to start a construction company or like whatever it is? Like, there's like, there's all those same problems. And like, it does seem interesting to me, like, hey, there's a lot of lucrative construction jobs popping up as a result of like the inflation reduction act. But like, there are no black construction owned companies. And no, sorry, this is just a hypothetical. Okay, hypothetically, there are no bucket construction companies in the area that were building this new plant in whatever in South Krohanna that seems unlikely. But like, let's just go with the counterfactual. But like in that world, I think it will be reasonable for the government to say like, hey, like, we're about to spend billions and billions of dollars investing in communities. How do we want to do this? Now, as someone who has spent a lot of my time criticizing government for spending like way too much time on this issue, like, I agree with you directionally. Like, I don't want the government to like, when you're trying to just invest in building up the manufacturing capacity of clean energy, like, okay, now we need five more other things you have to like, to care about. But at a macro level in society, like if within these industries, they're having these conversations, that seems actually like a positive development. Like, seems good. The marine biologist, the construction workers, like whatever, them doing that internally to the, to the actual industry is actually I think a better outcome than like top down. Yeah, but I picked my marine biologists, you know, for a reason because it's different from the construction workers, right? Because marine biologists are highly educated, highly trained people, right? So you're drawing in a broad sense. This is the same set of people who might have become doctors or lawyers or politicians or gone into a different branch of research science other than marine biology, right? And like, we just, we know because we can look at the college admissions figures and we can look at the SAT scores and we can look at the high school graduation rates, et cetera, that like the first order reason why African-Americans and Latinos are under represented in any like technical, highly field is that they are underrepresented just in the broad population of like, people who had really good grades in high school, right? And go on and do these things. So you should ask, like, is there a specific racial discrimination happening in marine biology? But you should also just always have in mind the counter hypothesis that there just aren't that many like graduates of selective colleges and universities. And so you get back to, you know, I think like very classic ideas about politics and public policy that like we should talk about like early literacy instruction and, you know, like child poverty and just like really broad generic kinds of questions rather than these like high birth specific ones. I agree with you on that totally back. She don't think it trades off. I don't think the energy spent on like a former election in college is like anything to do with whether or not we have a child tax credit, whether or not we're like doing literacy education in California. These things seem like completely unrelated to me in ways that like I think, and so I mean, I'm not, I'm not going to be able to prove this. Yeah. But like, I think that the point of podcasting right. I think that these things are closely related. What do you mean? I think that there's like a real turn away from like, you know, if you if you read like North North or King, where do we go from here, Kassar community, right? And he is talking about, you know, like what what do we do, you know, if we want sort of uplift for black people in this country. And he's saying like we could just try to like guilt trip white people into helping us out. But like that's not going to work. That's not how democratic politics works. And we're going to need to try to build solidarity with poor white people behind a like generic program of like economic equality. Right. And that's the freedom budget that's fired rusted in the 70s and into the 80s. You know, because King is dead by then, obviously. And I think there's a real turn away from that in the political system. toward this much more elite-focused, you know, representational politics that, like, understandably, low-income white people feel is very bad for them. - Yeah, yeah. - Right, and that, like, it's very divisive and, like, really undermines the possibility of political coalitions whose purpose is, like, generically good public services. - Well, so I don't know. So if a reduction becomes a big deal starting in John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson administrations, like, this is, like, still when you're saying there's this materialist focus in, you know, left politics. So I don't know if it super correlates there. I mean, I agree that if you are, like, a low-income white person, and you feel for whatever reason that the left party in the United States or, like, liberals in general, are, like, concerned with distribution of resources, elite status among high-income people, or just among, like, leaps more broadly. Yeah, like, sure, that would piss you off, 'cause you're, like, even if you don't have a problem with, like, affirmative action, which you probably do, you're, like, why aren't you focused on, like, poverty measures? Like, that's, sure, well taken, that's true. But I don't know if that, like, actually is the reason why, like, what you're identifying is actually the reason why people on the left haven't focused on these, like, larger problems. Like, to me, when I think about why it has just been such a focus on these, like, representational issues, I think there's a lot of criticism of this during, like, the George Floyd era, where people, like, okay, why are we doing all of this? Millions of dollars going towards these PR statements or firms or whatever, rather than actually materially addressing issues of police brutality or whatever. Like, I think it's 'cause it's harder to do the other thing. It's, like, quite hard to, like, teach everyone, like, take a student who, like, doesn't have food at home, adequately, and, like, help them learn how to do math. Like, that's a difficult problem to do. And so people take, like, lower hanging fruit all the time. But I don't think that, actually, it's, there's some sort of, I don't know, decision that's been made by anyone to be, like, I care less about material issues. - No, I mean, it's not a decision, like, but it's a, it's a evolution of the political process or things. And, again, conceding that on some level, this is an implementation issue. But, like, the way the college bargain was struck, right, is, you know, you say, okay, well, we want to make a more diverse class, right? And so the question is, is like, who is gonna bear the cost of that adjustment? And it was structured so that the cost of the adjustment is born by Asian kids and by working, white kids from working class. - Mostly Asian kids, though. - Right. But, you know, it's like, the least burden of adjustment was put on the most privileged set of white children, right? And then a kind of like, vague racial hand waving is used to be like, ah, like white people who are privileged are gonna be like set at a disadvantage and equalized, right? But, there's no actual steps being taken to try to ensure that the cost of the adjustment is born by the most privileged people or that the benefits go to the least person. - By the way, I think the cause, I think you're like the causal arrow, like, sorry, who we're blaming for this is not all the same. Like, so I think that like many progressive advocates of affirmative action policies would prefer a world in which disadvantaged people were going to Harvard or Yale or whatever at the expense of privileged white, I think they would prefer that to be happening. But like, the schools also have a say in this process. Then the question becomes, should you push for affirmative action at all given the schools are like, obviously not gonna stop admitting these like, legacy admits who like give millions of dollars to their school. Like, that's like, there's like, there's multiple actors in this fight. But anyway, I do think that you're striking on something here that's important, which is just like, the zero sum nature of this is like really, really bad for liberals, like usually like the thing that like, upon insolberals in particular, like we like to do is go, okay, let's make more of it. And like, you can do that to some extent. You can make Harvard bigger. That actually has a lot to do with, with, with the ambiasum. In some ways, you should make Berkeley bigger but all these schools bigger and like, you could emit more people reduce temperature. But like, the big country, there are like, lots of high school graduates, big world, lots of them wanna come to America and study here. And like, you're not actually going to be able to make these schools able to facilitate that for everyone, in particular because like, elite status is of course, by nature, somewhat zero sum, even if it can be larger. Obviously, our elite class is larger today than it was six years ago. In some ways because of population growth. But I think that like, what I would ask is like, are you okay with economic affirmative action? Like if people were like, okay, we're just going to let in, we're gonna give you an extra point boost if like your family income is below 50K. Are you like fine with that? - I think it could be okay. I mean, it would depend like what you actually did. - If it was like a clear standard, like if it was a clear standard of like, some kind of economic injustice, and we're going to be like. - I think, I think you can think of a few different ways to try to structure something like that. I have just become, I don't know how to put it, but like, cynical about this, about these institutions, I've cynical about the kind of blame shifting, where you know, I hear things like what you just said, just like, well, you know, like, you know, there's like no true leftist, blah, blah, blah, but like the actual like epicenters of left politics in the United States of America, are elite universities. Like. - But like the cross pressured, right? I mean, in my way, like the different pressures, like it's yours, the other one person. But I have shifted to a stance of like pure, non-constructive criticism of these institutions and the way that they are thinking. - You're going to power into the podcast, and now that's-- - No, no, no, but I mean, I mean, like I will admit it, it's like, I don't have like my proposal, where I'm like, here's how it should be. I'm saying that like, I think that what has been going on is like quite bad, that it is like genuinely hard to justify to the people who end up on the downside of it, that is not having the benefits that it is supposed to have, that is not targeted at helping the people who it is supposed to be helping, and that, you know, the institutions that we are talking about are being run by people who would identify as progressive if you ask them, and like, they've got to do something. They need to fix something. Like, the situation is bad, and they need to change it. - Well, so-- - I think on that-- - I'll agree to disagree, but like, there's a lot of nuance. One could add to this conversation. - Well, I'm surprised that you are not willing to bite the economic affirmative action bullet here. - Which one would be biting it? - I'm saying yes. - Yes, that I want to get-- - Pro that you're pro. - I'm sure, I mean, I am pro. But why-- I don't get why you're so hesitant about it. Like, I get-- you're like, you're just now just like, Matt, 'cause you're like, okay, I'm Matt, these institutions have basically like, fuck this up, and they've been awful to many people and have refused to engage in a kind of self-criticism about this. But like, just on the merits here, it seems like the economic stuff really does address many of your fairness concerns. - Yeah, I mean, like, Richard Colenberg has a good book about this, like, I think it's good. I just, I also feel like it's become a little bit of like, a little bit of a cop-out. - You feel like you still get negatively polarized and it's your own ideas, Matt? - I'm not, I'm not-- - You negatively polarized, I guess I can say, listen, I would applaud if tomorrow, Princeton was like, here is our new plan, right? And it is to help people based on some kind of objective metric of economic disadvantage, which is, you don't wanna make it super gameable, right? Where you can just like manipulate your parents, AGI for one year, apply and get admissions boost. So I think it's like a little bit of a hard question that these smart professors could probably come up with an answer to and I would congratulate them if they did it. I think it is-- - That's been in some hard problems. Like, what if you grew up and you had a bunch of money but then you like lost it all the stock market and like, yeah, I mean, there's-- - Yes, I think it is like a little bit harder than it sounds. But also, it's such an obvious idea that has been floating around for so long and nobody does it. - My actual idea is that we need to do like Texas's 10% thing but not really for the protection reasons but just so we get a bunch of rich people moving in to poor school districts and we just like end residential segregation. - Yeah, so I think-- - So I think it's our-- - I think it's our-- - Explain to listeners, Texas basically says anyone in the top 10% of their class gets to go to, is it any UT school? Is that how it works? - Well, originally it was the top 10% could go to UT Austin. - UT Austin. - And then because Texas' population has grown very rapidly and it became unworkable and it became like top seven%. And then the eighth through 10th were going other-- - Yeah. - Whatever, Texas, the details are complicated but yeah, the idea-- - But like the incentive is like if you're someone who has a kid who's like a smart kid but it's not gonna be a top 10% of your exclusive sub-er. And you're like, oh, let me move them to like the shitty or school district that's in a poorer area and then you end residential segregation. So this is my real take, like we should just do that. - Yeah, I mean, I think there was that-- there's good evidence on that, you know, has its impact on the real estate market. I was thinking about that in DC. So DC has a couple of selective high schools but they're not like strictly test-based. The way the New York Boston Chicago ones are. There's a very fuzzy admissions process and it's a little stressful as a parent because you're like, I don't even totally understand what's happening here. And I was thinking that the city has achieved a lot desegregation of its elementary schools, not all of them, but of many of them. But it breaks down at the middle school level in a pretty problematic way. One way you could solve that is if you said, okay, admission to school without walls is gonna be purely based on tests, but it's gonna be the top, X percent of test takers from each middle school. You then are creating a very strong incentive for like bougie parents to enroll their kids in, troubled neighborhood middle schools, but then like reduce residential segregation, get a more diverse set of parents involved in the schools. - And get a bunch of the benefits from Rod Chetty's research on moving up opportunity. Like I think this is great. - Right, and if you did that, right? And somebody was like, well why aren't you just admitting strictly based on test scores? You could then say, well, look, not only is there some like diversity benefit, but like actually by manipulating the system in this way, I'm like I'm using high school admissions as like a lever to accomplish all these other things in the housing market in the structure. - This actually thing is a really great place to close, 'cause I think it just really clarifies that you and I have like a different view of both the available evidence and what is not actually studied. That I think there's actually quite a large benefit accruing to society from doing affirmative action in elite spaces and like you're like much more skeptical on those benefits. And I think that like, you know, someone comes out with a great study that like clarifies us that being met will both agree to you. I think that would actually shift us in ways that, you know, I think we have values disagreement in other places. - So now we'll be turning to more empirical. - Let's turn to more empirical social science research which will resolve everything. - This is our peer review section. I'm obsessed with this paper. - Okay. - I think it's just so funny. It's actually quite short and it's like 28 pages. It's called Smartphones, Online Music Streaming and Traffic Fatalities. It is a N-B-E-R working paper. The co-authors are Vishal Patel, Michael Leo, Christopher Worsham and Anupam Jena. They're all at Harvard Medical School. And basically they're interested in whether smartphone, like what the impact of smartphones is on traffic fatalities. And they decide to use an interesting measure or instrument which is that like people are probably using their smartphones more the day that Taylor Swift drops a new album or any major artist drops new album. But as you can see from the paper, a lot of them are Taylor Swift out. - I think basically just-- - I'm a little bit concerned because it is like a very much like a Has Taylor Swift killed, like dozens of people. And what they find is that on days where a major popular album drops, traffic fatalities increase by nearly 15%, which is like almost 20 people per day. So like 20 extra people are dying as a result of this because people are distracted on their smartphones so therefore they're in traffic and they're like scrolling to go to the next one or to the next S song or like replay the song they just played. Or just in general they're distracted. I think a big part of this is just that like people are literally just like singing and not paying attention. One thing that's really interesting in the paper is they find like larger effects for certain kinds of people. So the fatalities is larger in absolute terms among younger drivers, male drivers, white and Asian drivers. And also on nicer days, which is like make sense, right? It's very funny. Like when you're in driving your car and you're like, oh let me turn on some music and like really like jam out. Like it's probably not a nice day where you put the windows down so you're like super distracted. So anyway, a lot of suggestive evidence that like, they're not just measuring something else accidentally. But I thought this was a very fun paper. - It's a bit of an, you know, it's an interesting instrument, right? It's a little bit unclear because they do show that like people stream music more on the days when a new album comes out, which makes, that makes a lot of sense. So, but like what are they doing in the car on the days when they're not streaming the new Taylor Swift album? Like that was sort of my. - Maybe like less locked in on the music? - Well, I don't know, because that was not, you know, 'cause my model of like the streaming impact is that I normally listen to podcasts when I'm driving. - Yeah. - But I sometimes listen to music when I'm driving. And so, you know, if my favorite band comes up with a new album, I'm going to shift on that day away from podcasts toward music. - Yeah. - And it'll probably be somewhat sticky for, you know, a period of some weeks. I'm not actually increasing my smartphone use though. I'm just substituting across two different things. - Well, I think sometimes people just don't listen to anything. You never like, you're never like driving in like, in silence. Like that's my question, like that's horrifying to me. Like are people just just driving around in silence and then like the Drake album comes out and they're like, "Wow, instead of sitting here alone like an idiot, like you should be listening to podcasts all the time supporting the content industry." And you know, we're doing video podcasting now, which everybody is. - Yeah. - Do not watch the podcast while you're doing it. - That happens to me in over the time now is watching people watch YouTube videos. - Yeah, I mean, I'm very alarmed by that. - I actually do think the big thing here, what this indicates to me, because they also find that like being alone in the car makes you more like, that's higher, associated with higher fatalities as well. And like, I think people really underrate how easy it is to be distracted when they're driving. Like I think it's like actually something that people don't, like I have a lot of, I mean, I, someone who drives myself like, you're like, okay, like okay, if I look at my phone for a second, it's like not that big of a deal. Like it's like not huge if I like, I'm just switching something over or I'm just checking to see if my husband texted me or like whatever it is. Like that's something I think people often would rate themselves as being like, oh, I'm paying attention. Like I'm not a distracted driver. And I think that that's like one contribution to this paper. But the other contribution to this paper is just sort of like, people are not going to stop listening to me as in the car. So we need to shift over to self-driving cars immediately. Like this is just like, I mean, I was like in these top 10 albums, like yeah, as we've had Taylor Swift's, she's like number one, number nine and number 10 on here. But you also like, - It's three Taylor and three Drake albums, right? - That's true, we're not giving Drake enough. - Don't get, let's, let's not. - Actually Drake maybe actually has more total first day streams because he's, Taylor has a nine and 10 on this list. - We can't just let white people dominate music streaming through some of this. - And therefore the murders of various American. - Let's be fair and egalitarian. - But I mean, like, I don't know. - It's actually a lot of popular black musicians in American history. - Wow. - We don't need it, we don't need affirmative action for movie theater. But I guess like, I feel like you have a rant about self-driving cars in DC. - I mean, I have no, I have no, - We have no rant about this. - We have a mayor's election coming up. One of the candidates has taken a strong anti-wimmo stance, which she claims is for safety. And I mean, I agree with the point that you were making. This paper is looking at the incremental smartphone distraction factor. But per what I was saying about switching, right? Most people are using their phone on some level. It's safely, it's just for listening to music, it's just for the direction. But their phone is there with them while they are driving all the time. Whether Taylor comes out with a new album or not, they're listening to the old Taylor albums, they're better anyway. And when you're thinking about, I think when a lot of people think about, 'cause I've seen the politics, the polling on this, there's a lot of genuine public skepticism of self-driving cars separate from the interest group politics. And people are comparing what they think a robot driver will be like against their idealized version of a human driver. But the really great thing about a robot is however good the robot driver is, it's that good all the time. Right? I'm really fucking tired today because I had to stay up late. If I'm not gonna drive later today, but if I did, I would be driving at less than 100%. The waymo is always 100%. The waymo is never - Stressed out over Trump. - Well, or just a person who would never, ever, ever get a text when they're driving, except they happen to know that their best friend is doing something really, really stressful. And they see that person is calling and now it's like, there's all these exceptions. I wouldn't look off the road and replay a song, but it's Taylor's brand new album. All these things happen, people get drunk, people get 10 years older, and their eyesight gets worse and they haven't updated their glasses. Like the human fallibility factor is like so big and so multi-dimensional. And as you say, like not going anywhere, right? We're not, we've got a rule that like you can't like be fudging around on your phone when you're driving. But like nobody's stopping you from when this podcast ends, like firing up the next episode because, you know, 'cause like you and me, like we're so lovable and distracting and compelling. And people aren't gonna be like, well, you know, I'm driving 70 miles per hour on the highway. I can't afford to listen to this point. So yes, we need the robots. - Well, if you are listening to this while driving, we implore you, wait until you get to a stop light before you switch over to the next episode. - Or use the voice controls. - I hear that that's actually also distracting. - Oh, okay, don't do that. I haven't looked into this at all. - Anyway, I think that's a great place to end it. If you're on the road right now, I'm begging you. Wait until you get to that red light. And we'll-- - Just driving silence like a psycho. - Exactly. All right, we'll see you next week. - Bye.