Dear Friends,
Iris’s sister, brother-in-law, and niece are paying us a visit from Guadalajara and it has been a lovely excuse to show off California’s splendors. The state’s population has been shrinking for over a decade now — a trend that turbo-charged during the pandemic — and I thought about those poor souls who fled to air-conditioned shopping malls in Houston while I looked out at Big Sur’s McWay Falls majestically pour down into the coral blue Pacific Ocean.
Not that I blame them. As I wrote back in January, Iris and I have thrown away nearly $400,000 in rent over the past eight years for relatively small two-bedroom places.1 As David Leonhardt wrote in yesterday’s NYTimes Morning newsletter, Americans are finally “responding rationally to financial incentives and building lives for themselves in new places.” Even better, housing is (finally) a national political issue and emerging politicians are gaining political clout by taking on the NIMBYs.
Let’s compare
Naturally, much of our conversation over the past week has revolved around the differences between Mexico and the United States. We all know that there is no shorter path to despair than social comparison. But when it comes to learning, I’m a huge fan of comparison.
“Is social media bad?” is as a useless question by itself. Compared to what? We’re always doing something — watching TV, sitting in meetings, pooping — and none of those things are good or bad. But they may be better or worse than other things we could be doing at the same time.
In a recent podcast conversation with Kevin Kelly, Russ Roberts lamented that everyone on his morning bus commute was staring into their cell phones when they could have been connecting with one another. And so, ironically, he pulled out his phone and Tweeted his complaint. We can all relate to the impulse; I’ve probably done it myself. Kelly responds:
I spent a lot of my time as an adult on buses — primarily in Asia. And, I've seen tremendous numbers of people--this is all pre-phone, pre-Internet--on buses sitting there, as you say, staring out the window, not talking to anybody. There would be people on the streets sitting, squatting, doing nothing, absolutely nothing except for whatever was in their heads. I'm not sure that staring ahead is preferable to actually interacting with a phone and maybe someone else or an idea. I think it's probably better, and that's why people are doing it. They would prefer to interact with a phone rather than just stare ahead and daydream or whatever they were doing.
Now, it is true that we need solitude to create things, and that could be crowded out. But, the fact that people are on a bus looking at their phones is not evidence that it is worse than staring out the window.
Show me the evidence that this is actually worse. Compared to what? Smartphones compared to newspapers or books or staring out the window or what? We know that there’s some harm in social media, but compared to what? Compared to Fox News? Compared to cable TV? Let's see the evidence.
It is by comparison that we understand what makes something unique. Alexis de Tocqueville was a great observer of the United States in the 1830s because he could compare it with his own country emerging from the Second French Revolution.
Why is San Diego so rich and Tijuana so relatively poor when the two cities have the same geography and demographics? That question made for a very good book, one of the best I’ve ever read.
Why is the American economy so insanely strong and resilient? Perhaps it doesn’t feel that way until we compare it to Europe, as Matt Yglesias recently did. Will India become the next global superpower? It’s hard to say, but we can sure learn a lot by comparing it to China.
When I think about the next chapter of my career, I have a hunch that it will involve some societal comparison. I love Shelby Grossman’s teaching curriculum of concrete cases of democratic erosion for American undergraduates.2 Wouldn’t it be fun to teach the same course in Mexico and take advantage of Google Translate and automated translated captions in Zoom to have Mexican and American undergrads work together to analyze threats to US and Mexican democracy?
My friend Andrés recently pointed me to a class he’s teaching as part of Symbiosis, a cross-border, collaborative training program between bilingual journalism students in Mexico and at Arizona State University. Just imagine all the fascinating investigations waiting for a cross-border team of reporters: the fentanyl crisis, Central American & Venezuelan immigration, competing with China for manufacturing, political polarization, lithium mining, the dual 2024 elections, access to abortion, and on and on.
Last week, I caught an interesting presentation comparing the effects of participatory budgeting in schools in Arizona and Mexico and another presentation about new gender-based violence protocols in Sao Paulo and Mexico City. What are the effects of these programs, and how/why do they differ from one place to the next? Typically, the researchers don’t even know about concurrent research happening in other places to start comparing.
And I’m especially interested in what Mexico and the rest of the world can learn from the positive and negative experiences of biometric national ID in India and Brazil’s Pix digital payment system.
Comparing ourselves to others is a recipe for unhappiness. But comparing our rules, processes, and cultural norms with those of other societies is a useful way to reflect on what we want to change (and what we should perhaps appreciate more).
👏 Kudos: Nate and Ivan follow Cesar Chavez
I had a chance to catch up with my friend and fellow cyclist Nate Matias last week. Nate, who is currently in town as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, has a smart new piece in Nature arguing that academic researchers ought to be far more inclusive in how they study algorithms’ effects on society. He is ultimately optimistic that “adaptive algorithms can deliver widespread benefits to society, and that their harms will someday become manageable.” But first, he foresees a 10- to 20-year research challenge to adequately understand “human-algorithm behavior.” I told Nate that a lot of researchers seem eager to put new labels on an old field. For me, this is simply the next chapter of the human-computer interaction field, which has existed since the 1970s. Nate’s contribution reminds his fellow academics to not forget the “human” part — not just as subjects to study, but also as participants in research design and oversight.
Next month, Nate will join another common friend, Ivan, for a 500+ bike ride that follows the path of the 1966 Farm Worker’s March.3 Ivan is a gifted photographer and the two will together report on the economic and environmental possibilities of the Central Valley as it adapts to the effects of climate change.
🎵 A Playlist: Conceiving the 2000s
I’ve recently been enjoying Revaz’s indie rock playlist. He says that it stretches a quarter-century, but most of the songs are from 2000-2010 — what Noah Smith calls the “Pause Decade”:
I don’t have evidence to back this up, but it seems like we Americans have a very cohesive idea of “the 90s”, and we’re starting to get an idea of “the 2010s”, but the years between those are just kind of a jumble. Part of the reason for that is that the decade is split down the middle along two very clear lines. The housing crash and Great Recession turned good times into bad times, and the election of Obama turned a Republican era into a Democratic one. It really makes sense to talk about 2000-2007 and 2008-2012 as two distinct eras, making up two halves of a “long 2010s”.
In other words, I think of the 2000s as the Pause Decade. Young Americans got to pretend it was still the 90s, sitting in their rooms and enjoying the fruits of the peaceful and still-prosperous world created by the nation’s successes in the late 20th century.
I hope that you have a comparatively great week,
David
As we look over our budget each month, I truly fail to comprehend how people live here with kids. Which I suppose is why so many of them leave.
Shelby and her colleagues found that enrolled students became more optimistic about democracy in America after studying it in other countries.
Both Nate and Ivan are skeptical about charismatic leadership, so I’m curious to see how they treat Chavez’s complicated legacy in their reporting.