Tag Archives: Paul Krugman

Is Social Media A Drug?

Paul Krugman recently compared access to social media to the legalization of heroin–to what would happen if heroin was sold without any restrictions on its marketing or use.

Heroin distribution and sales would quickly become a huge, multibillion-dollar industry. They would become a significant part of GDP, even though heroin harms and often kills those who consume it. Given the increasingly naked corruption of U.S. politics, the heroin industry would be able to purchase massive political influence, enough to block any attempts to limit the harm it does — the harm it knows it does, because heroin industry executives would surely be aware of the damage their products inflict.

Through massive political donations — enabled by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling – and de facto bribery enabled via cryptocurrency deals, the industry would be able to enlist the U.S. government as an ally in its efforts to block regulation in other countries. For example, U.S. officials might threaten punitive tariffs against countries that try to limit and regulate heroin use.

Krugman insists that this fanciful exercise–which may seem “extreme and implausible”–is actually a pretty accurate description of the social media landscape. As evidence, he quotes a report issued in 2023 by the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, titled “Social Media and Youth Mental Health.” (Krugman advises downloading it quickly, before RFK Jr. suppresses it.) That publication summarized the now-extensive evidence that children and adolescents who consume excessive amounts of social media sustain mental health damage.

It isn’t as though the tech “bros” responsible for these platforms are unaware of the damage being done.

In 2021 the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Facebook Knows Instagram is Toxic for Teen Girls, Documents Show: Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public.” In 2024 Meta finally introduced some relatively ineffectual limits on what teens can see.

The Journal reported that Meta’s own internal projections estimated it would earn 10% of its overall annual revenue – that’s $16 billion dollars– from advertising scams and banned goods. In other words, Meta’s platforms are knowingly pushing (and I use the word “pushing” intentionally) “fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.”

And where have our intrepid Senators and Representatives been while these facts have emerged? Evidently, the same place they’ve been hiding while Trump dismantles the federal government.

Krugman writes that last year Congress was on the verge of passing the Kids Online Safety Act, a law that would have been the first to impose any rules on social media. The Act initially had bipartisan support; some ninety-one senators had signed on. But then, Krugman reports, “Mark Zuckerberg and his billions came to town, and the legislation died.”

Once again, other countries have done what the U.S. won’t. The European Union passed the Digital Services Act, which–among other things–requires large platforms to self-police and refrain from engaging in a variety of activities, including “dissemination of illegal content” and matter shown to have “negative consequences” for “physical and mental well-being.” Australia has recently passed a law that would prevent anyone under 16 from having a social media account. (I’ll admit to skepticism about the ability to enforce this, but at least Australia is trying.)

A couple of weeks ago, under its Digital Services Act, the European Union fined Musk’s X 120 million euros, based on several violations of that Act, including the fact that X’s “Blue checks” are a fraud. (X claims that a blue check means that the poster’s identity has been verified. But in fact X sells them and makes no effort to verify identity.) X also refuses to provide information on advertisements sufficient for users to identify scams, and refuses to make its public data available to researchers.

Unlike the EU, the Trump administration is pulling out the stops to support our tech titans’ resistance to European regulation.

Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, has explicitly linked U.S. tariffs on European steel to demands that Europe weakens its digital regulations. If the EU tried to make comparable demands on the United States, we’d consider it an outrageous infringement on our national sovereignty. And I’m pretty sure that making this linkage violates U.S. trade law too. But rule of law is for the little people.

As Krugman argues, unregulated social media is a lot like unregulated drugs. Powerful social media billionaires are preventing us from protecting our children. They are also using that power to dictate U.S. foreign policy, “punishing our erstwhile allies for daring to limit their ability to push their product.”

America is now a digital narco-state.

Comments

Charlie Kirk And That War On Women

In the wake of the Charlie Kirk slaying, Micah Beckwith–Indiana’s Christian Nationalist Lieutenant Governor– reportedly said “From the history of mankind, there’s always been truth-speakers who have been speaking God’s truth and the enemy comes at them – the devil and his lies. They’ll try to silence those people. Charlie was one of those people. He was speaking truth and the enemy, the devil and his minions, try to silence him. I think what’s happening is actually the exact opposite effect. I think what you’re going to see is that there are going to be many more like him that are now going to rise up and start speaking where he left off. There’s a saying in the church throughout Christendom, ‘The blood of the martyr is the seed of the church.”

I was heartened by a recent poll (paywall) that pegged Beckwith’s support in Indiana at a robust 9%. Still, I think it’s worthwhile to examine some of the “truths” that Beckwith thinks Kirk was speaking.

In a recent Substack, Paul Krugman looked at Kirk’s approach to women–an approach that is shared by Christian Nationalists, much of MAGA, and other Rightwing radicals.

Kirk was a counterrevolutionary, a revanchist, who deftly exploited a vision of a lost American gender ideal and the accompanying feelings of dislocation and humiliation on the part of men. Specifically, he wanted to reverse what Claudia Goldin (winner of the Nobel in Economics in 2023) has called the “quiet revolution” in women’s role in American society that occurred between the late 1970s and early 1990s.

Krugman points out that Goldin’s “quiet revolution” didn’t refer to the increasing numbers of women in the paid labor force, a trend that had begun in the 1940s, and had mostly culminated by the late 1970s. Rather, it referred to a radical change in the nature of the kinds of jobs that American women held.

While many women held paid jobs by the early 1970s, young women still tended to see work outside the home as occasional and provisional, as a way to earn modest amounts of money rather than as a fundamental part of their identity. The revolution, according to Goldin, happened when young women began to think about jobs in the same way young men always had — that it wasn’t simply “work” but a career.

As a result, women lived their lives differently. And as Krugman notes, that change has had large ramifications for men. 

The changes in women’s status were results of access to contraception and the passage of anti-discrimination laws, and what Krugman describes as a “multiplier effect”— the more that women delayed marriage and childbirth, the more they trained for careers, the easier it became for others to do the same. And as he also pointed out, “rising divorce rates led many women to doubt whether marriage was a safe haven that obviated the need for an independent career.”

Charlie Kirk argued strenuously that this was all a mistake and should be reversed. Krugman quotes him: “Having children is more important than having a good career.” 

Kirk was calling on America to stop being the society it is and go back to being the kind of society it hasn’t been for generations. Or, rather, he wanted us to enact his fantasy about what our society once was like. If you imagine that America before the quiet revolution was a nation in which all marriages were happy and all stay-at-home wives were contented, you should read Betty Friedan — or the novels of John Updike.

Krugman and others have pointed out that Kirk never bothered to offer serious policy proposals. But his hostility to women’s equality clearly resonated with many young white men — “men who resent their status in modern America and believe that their lives would be better if we returned to an older social order.”

Krugman concluded by recognizing that, in today’s America, we have “a society that appears to be problematic for many men.” There is a reason Kirk’s revanchism grew his support among them.

Appealing to resentments is the whole strategy of MAGA, Trumpworld and Christian Nationalism–not by suggesting ways to ameliorate unsatisfactory situations, not by advancing policy proposals that might mitigate such situations, but by the far simpler tactic of finding some “other” to blame. 

It’s a strategy that evidently works with a significant number of Americans, and it explains the rise of “religious” zealots like Micah Beckwith and clever grifters like Charlie Kirk–opportunists who wage war on women, immigrants, gay people and people of color…

Comments

Suicide By MAGA

Most of us have read about “suicide by cop”–a (hopefully rare) situation where someone desiring death purposely provokes a standoff with police. I don’t think MAGA cult members are that intentional, but I do think the result will be the same. The pandemic was a precursor: data shows that the MAGA science-deniers who refused to be vaccinated against COVID died in far greater numbers than more sane Americans.

Who coined that phrase “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”?

The Trump administration has already taken a meat-ax to medical research, derailing promising research into cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s and other deadly diseases. Those cuts will hurt all of us–Red and Blue alike. But as Paul Krugman recently pointed out, the administration’s radical changes in social spending, immigration policy and tariffs won’t simply hurt tens of millions of Americans — they will land disproportionately on Red, rural Americans.

The first thing you need to understand is that while rural Americans like to think of themselves as self-reliant, the fact is that poorer, more rural states are in effect heavily subsidized by richer states like Massachusetts and New Jersey.

This reality makes it inevitable that the standard conservative fiscal agenda — tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts for the poor and middle class — hurts the heartland more than it hurts major metropolitan areas. But MAGA’s Reverse Robin Hoodism goes far beyond the standard conservative agenda, in ways that will be especially devastating to rural areas and small towns.

I’ve previously posted about Trump’s horrendous “Big Beautiful Bill” that will rob the poor to further enrich the wealthy. The bill contains savage cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, programs that will hurt all poor folks; but will disproportionately devastate Trump-supporting rural areas.

Krugman notes that Medicaid is a far more important program than most Americans realize.

Almost 40 percent of children are covered by Medicaid, with some of the highest percentages in deep red states like Alabama and Mississippi. Medicaid pays for 42 percent of births in America. And more to my point, Medicaid covers a higher fraction of the population in rural than in urban counties. So deep cuts in the program will hit Trump-supporting regions especially hard.

Ditto the impact of the drastic cuts to food stamps.

Many people–even those who are opposed to the “Big Beautiful Bill”– fail to recognize its very foreseeable impact on rural hospitals.  Hospitals in areas with low population density and a high percentage of patients who cannot pay for care struggle to stay open even now. Without Medicaid reimbursements at current levels, most will close. 

Most of us also fail to understand the role that Medicaid and Medicare spending play in supporting what Krugman calls “rural and left-behind local economies.”

For example, the economy of West Virginia no longer rests on coal mining, which employs very few people these days. It would be more accurate to say that the foundation of West Virginia’s economy is federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid. That is, in deep red West Virginia, Medicare and Medicaid are directly and indirectly a major source of income.

We are already seeing the impact of Trump’s immigration vendetta on the nation’s farmers.  Our agriculture relies heavily on hired workers, and some two thirds of those workers are immigrants–most of whom are undocumented. Farmers are already seeing the results of the threat: even workers who are legal residents or native-born citizens feel unsafe from the ICE goons who very clearly think all Brown people are illegal immigrants–so we see growing reports of workers decamping out of fear of arrest and deportation.

And then there’s the trade war.

In case you haven’t noticed, Trump hasn’t yet delivered a single one of the 90 trade deals he promised to negotiate by July 8. China has already retaliated, and others will follow. And U.S. agriculture is highly dependent on exports…

While many are now realizing that Trump’s policies will produce social and economic disaster, relatively few understand that the disaster will fall disproportionately on rural Trump voters. But of course it will. For the purveyor of Trump bibles and Trump meme coins, screwing the little guy has always been his personal style of grift. It remains to be seen if rural Trump supporters will awaken from their naivete.

Krugman is kinder than I am. I have given up any illusion that Trump voters are merely naive or uninformed. I’m pretty sure that MAGA voters are so wedded to their racism and grievance that they will support their own suicide if that’s what it takes to “own the libs.” 

Comments

That “Big Beautiful Bill”

Ever since Trump’s abominable “Big Beautiful Bill” emerged from the House, we’ve been buried in analyses of what it will do–essentially, rob the poor to further enrich the obscenely wealthy. But I continue to think about the initial reaction of Paul Krugman. What did this Nobel-prize-winning economist think in the immediate aftermath of the House passage?

Krugman began by noting that he’d expected House Republicans to pass this “surpassingly cruel, utterly irresponsible budget” in the dead of night, in an effort to escape notice. And as he said, “they tried! Debate began at 1 A.M., and if you think that bizarre timing reflected real urgency, I have some $Melania coins you might want to buy.”

The House has now passed what must surely be the worst piece of legislation in modern U.S. history. Millions of Americans are about to see crucial government support snatched away. A significant number will die prematurely due to lack of adequate medical care or nutrition. Yet all this suffering won’t come close to offsetting the giant hole in the budget created by huge tax cuts for the rich. Long-term interest rates have already soared as America loses the last vestiges of its former reputation for fiscal responsibility.

What struck me most about Krugman’s reaction to this massively irresponsible–indeed, evil–budget was his enumeration of what that budget ought to look like. Krugman isn’t one of the “fiscal scolds” who want to eliminate all deficit spending, but he is worried that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path–a path that this horrific bill will worsen. He acknowledges that the path to fiscal sanity will require some hard choices and tradeoffs. But he also insists that we could immensely improve our current situation with a series of easy choices, “actions that would mainly spare the middle class and only hurt people most Americans probably believe deserve to feel a bit of pain.” He proceeds to list four of them.

First, get Americans — mainly wealthy Americans — to pay the taxes they owe. The net tax gap — taxes Americans are legally obliged to pay but don’t — is simply huge, on the order of $600 billion a year. We can never get all of that money back, but giving the IRS enough resources to crack down on wealthy tax cheats would be both fiscally and morally responsible, since letting people get away with cheating on their taxes rewards bad behavior and makes law-abiding taxpayers look and feel like chumps.

As he notes, Republicans are doing the opposite, by starving the IRS of resources and trying to make tax evasion great again.

Second, we could crack down on Medicare Advantage overpayments. The insurance companies running Medicare Advantage game the system and get overpaid; one recent estimate found that Medicare is at risk of overpaying Medicare Advantage plans between $1.3 trillion and $2 trillion over the next decade.

Third, Krugman advises going after corporate tax avoidance, especially by multinational firms using strategies to make profits that are earned in the United States look as though they were earned in low-tax nations like Ireland. “Such maneuvers cost the Treasury around $70 billion annually.

And finally,

We should just get rid of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut. That tax cut wasn’t a response to any economic needs, and there’s not a shred of evidence that it did the economy any good. All it did was transfer a lot of money to corporations and the wealthy. Let’s end those giveaways.

Would doing all these things be enough to put America on a sustainable fiscal path? Honestly, I don’t know. But they would make a good start toward putting our fiscal house in order. And none of them would involve the “hard choices” fiscal scolds tell us we need to make.

As Krugman concludes, the politicians who aren’t even willing to do these things have no business lecturing anyone about fiscal responsibility.

Krugman doesn’t speculate about why we don’t do the “easy” things, but I will. We don’t do them because we have elected people who don’t consider themselves representatives of the people who voted for them, but obedient servants of the plutocrats who funded them. And nothing will change until enough of those voters send an unmistakable message to the cowards and quislings that “time’s up.”

I’ve previously quoted a scholar whose research suggests that peaceful protests by 3% of a population are enough to send that message. That translates to something like ten million people. Our next chance to achieve that goal is No Kings Day, tomorrow.

Please participate. Time is running out to save the America we thought we inhabited….

Comments

When America Really Was Great…

America really has been great–or at least, greater. Of course, a lot depends upon one’s definition of “greatness.” Donald Trump rather obviously confuses the term “great” with the term “much”–in his limited and twisted worldview, rich people are great because they have lots of money, celebrities are great because they command lots of attention, and countries are great if they control more territory.

So–in Trump’s mind, Elon Musk must be great because he has lots of money. Trump himself must be great because the media is paying attention to him (it’s irrelevant that much of that attention is highly critical–it’s attention!) If the United States “acquires” Greenland and Gaza, and takes back the Panama Canal, that will make America great again.  

People with more (and considerably more active) brain-cells tend to define greatness differently. 

Paul Krugman recently considered the “greatness” involved in constructing the Panama Canal, and the greatness–okay, intelligence– displayed by our decision to turn ownership over to Panama.

Yes, it was a spectacular feat of engineering. But even more important, it was a triumph of medical science and science-based policy. To build the canal, America first had to conquer yellow fever and malaria. This meant understanding how these diseases were spread, then implementing widespread preventive measures that ranged from isolating infected patients with mosquito netting to eliminating sources of standing water in which mosquitoes could breed.

The success of these measures was an extraordinary achievement. But then, for much of the 20th century America led the world both in medical research and in the application of that research to public policy. This one-two punch of knowledge and knowledge-based action led to an incredible decline in the rate of death from infectious disease.

Why did the U.S. decide to turn that “spectacular feat of engineering” over to another country? Because it was in our national interest to do so.

America gave up the canal, not out of a spirit of generosity or wokeness, but because U.S. occupation of the Canal Zone had become a strategic liability rather than an asset. By the 1970s changes in transportation patterns had greatly diminished the canal’s economic importance; its military value was almost nil. At the same time, U.S. occupation of the zone had become a flashpoint for anti-Americanism, and it was obvious that defending the canal against sabotage and potential guerilla warfare would be difficult if not impossible.

Of course, weighing the pros and cons of continuing to own the canal requires the application of intelligence to sufficient accurate information–a process clearly beyond the capacities of our egomaniac co-presidents.

As Krugman also notes, quite accurately, America’s real greatness–the attributes that have earned us the global respect and deference that Trump is busily dismantling–relied to a significant extent upon our leadership in science and medicine.

Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a crank who rejects vaccines in particular and medical science in general, is on track to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The National Institutes of Health have effectively been shut down. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stopped releasing crucial data. If you go to CDC’s website, there’s a banner across the top reading “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders,” which mainly means purging anything that hints at concern over social inequality.

This country didn’t become great by bullying other nations (although we have certainly done our share of bullying). It didn’t become a beacon for the rest of the world because of slavery or Jim Crow, but instead for our constant struggle to fulfill the Constitution’s promises of liberty and equality. 

Donald Trump evidently thinks “greatness” requires picking on trans children, reversing the social acceptance and economic progress of women and minorities, and ethnically cleansing Gaza. He evidently thinks that scrubbing all mention of climate change from government websites will stop the globe from warming, that ignoring scientific facts of which he disapproves will make those facts disappear, and that being the center of attention means he’s important. 

Trump spent four years in the Oval Office and still has no concept of how government operates or what the rule of law means, or what American government is for.

We the People will never be able to teach him anything–he’s clearly incapable of learning. But we can–and must–disabuse him of the notion that he’s entitled to exercise unfettered power.

Comments