There are silly statements that are mostly useless– these can be found aplenty on Candace Owens’ channel, for example.[1] And then there are silly statements that can be very instructive to consider.
Bret Weinstein is one of a frightfully long list of extremely influential podcasters who all end up supporting Trump and voicing skepticism about vaccines.[2] His X account has over a million followers and his YouTube channel has half a million subscribers.
One thing I’ve noticed about this group is that they each fill a kind of niche in the misinformation ecosystem. Joe Rogan is the “just asking questions” guy, portraying himself as someone without an explicit agenda (while lamost invariably pointing in some very clear directions), whereas Tucker Carlson portrays himself as the opposite, someone with clear values trying to push a particular ideological product (while in fact being an inveterate ideological opportunist). Get your totally bonkers conspiracy theories and explicit antisemitism from Candace Owens, or get more genteel versions with Megyn Kelly.
Bret Weinstein, a former professor of evolutionary biology, aims to fill the niche of “the intellectual” or “the scientist.”[3] His podcast involves conversations with his wife, Heather Heying, who is also an evolutionary biologist and former professor. Their tone tends to be measured and intelligent, even though the opinions he holds are often anything but measured or intelligent.
In the 2024 election, Weinstein actively advocated for Trump (after previously supporting RFK Jr.), and more or less since then he he has been full of these sorts of non-apologetic-apologetics about it, especially after the start of the war with Iran, which Weinstein vehemently opposed (all screenshots from his twitter):
For those who missed it, Trump responded to the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife by blaming it on the victims’ so-called “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
But the tweet that really caught my eye was this one:
The wonderful thing about this tweet is that while the talk of a “cabal” (which Weinstein seems to think now controls Trump) is nonsense to the point of self-parody, Weinstein is really getting at a key problem with populism, and the lack of accountability populist leaders enjoy.
See, you could hardly choose two words that are more antithetical to accountability than “mad king.” A king, obviously, is not accountable to his subjects, at least not in terms of the regular political system. And someone who is mad is just as obviously not as accountable, since they are not behaving rationally and their actions are not driven by normal incentives.
If your plan was to hold a politician accountable after they prove themselves to be a mad king, you are not very good at planning.
Listen to Trump supporters who have even the slightest bit of principle and you’ll constantly see this pattern of deep disappointment and even outrage at his actions, followed almost inevitably by a return to the fold or at least a quiet resignation. MAHA supporters who prioritize environmental protections and see the EPA gutted under Trump; supporters of the Israeli government trying to make sense of Trump acting unilaterally against what they see to be Israel’s interests; anyone for whom the Epstein story was a top issue; and of course anyone who supported Trump under the premise that he wouldn’t start wars in the Middle East. This pattern repeats again and again.
But Trump, mad king that he’s always been, does whatever he feels like at a given time, and a fundamental feature of his presidency is that his long-term support remains robust. He literally bragged about this back in January 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”[4] No one can say they weren’t warned.
Which means that he never has any incentive to pay any attention to what his critics are saying. And of course he’s even less accountable now compared to his first term, because he won’t be running for re-election, and he doesn’t much care how the Republican Party fares in the midterms. In fact, the area many of his critics care about most– foreign policy– is the one least constrained by Congress (certainly in recent years).
It’s important to emphasize that this lack of accountability is a feature, not a bug, of populist politics. The entire premise of populism is that the political system has been captured by elites and special interests, and so we need a leader (pretty much any leader) who is independent of thse influences. The only lever of accountability that maintains any legitimacy in populist rhetoric is elections, which supposedly represent the “will of the people” over institutions filled with unelected figures (courts, media, “deep state,” etc.). All power is given to the leader who wins the election, precisely so that he can be free of all those other influences. But precisely that freedom also insulates the populist leader from any accountability outside elections.
Your opportunity to hold Trump accountable vanished the moment you voted for him.
Now consider the caricature Weinstein paints of the Democratic Party– a “cabal.” The grain of truth here is that power in the Democratic Party is much more diffuse– there’s a large number of stakeholders, interests, figures and constituencies that a President Biden or Harris would want to be answerable to. But this makes them far more accountable than Trump ever was. On immigration, on the Gaza war, on economic policy, Biden and Harris tried to strike a delicate balance between different groups, and indeed changed tacks when the situation changed significantly (as seen most clearly in immigration policy).
This is one of the great advantages of “establishment politics” over the populist kind. Unfortunately, people like Bret Weinstein often learn only belatedly how voiceless they are under the mad king they elected.[5]
***
[1] Not that I’ve ever listened in directly. I do listen to a lot of vile stuff, to try to understand it, but Owens’ strain just doesn’t seem at all interesting.
[2] Weinstein is one of the ones who says his criticism is limited to Covid vaccines rather than vaccines generally, as far as I can tell, but that’s no great virtue.
[3] Or at least, he’s one such figure trying to fill that niche. Jordan Peterson also tries to do this, but ends up gunning for the slot of “philosopher” rather than “scientist.” Not too successfully in either case.
[4] Of course Trump was wrong about this– if the person he shot were a voter of his, he’d lose exactly one voter.
[5] There is a separate question here, which is what exactly in the years up to 2024 made Weinstein think that Trump wasn’t the “mad king” he saw in that most recent post.
[Disclaimer: I am not an expert on fascism or political history, these are just my thoughts about appeals made to a general audience]
Michael Lipkin, my good friend whom I have never met, and I agree on almost everything of importance in US and Israeli politics. So to avoid creating a little two-person echo chamber, I’m seizing on this opportunity to underline one area where we disagree.
In a recent blog post, Michael approvingly cites the article “Yes, it’s Fascism” by author and journalist Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic, arguing the term should be applied to Trump:
I wasn’t a big fan of the last essay of Rauch’s that I read, “The Constitution of Knowledge” from 2018, and I think he misses the mark again here. This is just one example of a much wider problem of these kinds of “definition wars.”
Rauch’s accusation of “Fascism” is an extreme case, not merely because fascism has no agreed-upon definition, but because its sole use in the public sphere is based on a logical fallacy, as I’ll try to show.
First, when we call a movement or a figure fascist, what do we mean?
Most obviously, if fascism had a generally agreed-upon definition, even a vague one, we could be referring to that. So for example, the word “totalitarian” has a meaning– an authoritarian regime that tries to control all aspects of a person’s life, private as well as public. This definition doesn’t have clear boundaries, but at least it has some fundamental meaning that one can discuss.
There is no such equivalent for fascism. Wikipedia brings up a nice quote of historian Ian Krenshaw that trying to define fascism “is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.” In that Wikipedia link you can see a long list of definitions of fascism, and as you can see, they are not only inconsistent but often contradictory (and many, many elements in many of the definitions clearly don’t apply to Trump). Pretty much the only commonalities are that fascism is authoritarian, that it is affiliated with the right (whatever that means), and that it is nationalist (itself a hard-to-define concept). George Orwell famously wrote “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable'”; he wrote that in 1946, and you’d think that if fascism ever meant anything, it would have been then. Rauch himself writes:
The term is hazily defined, even by its adherents. From the beginning, fascism has been an incoherent doctrine, and even today scholars can’t agree on its definition.
So if we can’t agree on even a vague definition, how do we determine who is and isn’t fascist?
Well, we could look at the people and movements who used the term to describe themselves, and ask ourselves what those have in common. We do this with the term “Right-wing,” for example; it’s not really a coherent ideology, as right-wing parties vary radically over time and space, but at least in theory we can ask what they all have in common that causes them to self-define with that term.
Ideally, you’d have a reasonably large group of self-described fascist regimes such that you could examine what essential factors set them apart. But we don’t.
The one major movement and regime that is indisputably fascist is that of Benito Mussolini. He didn’t invent the term (which derived from the Latin fasces, an axe projecting from a bundle of rods, a symbol from Ancient Rome that had been used previously in political contexts), but his use of the term fascism to describe his movement made it the fountainhead of that political term.
As far as I can tell, no other major regime ever called itself fascist.
The two other regimes commonly called fascist, those of Germany’s Hitler and Spain’s Franco, didn’t call themselves that, though Hitler was by all accounts heavily influenced by Mussolini. There were a few politicians who did call themselves fascists, such as the Oswald Mosley‘s infamous British Union of Fascists, but these rarely if ever took power.
So what does Rauch do?
First, he does assume certain historical regimes are fascist, contrary (as far as I can tell) to academic researchers who are divided on the subejct. Thus he writes “Italy’s original version differed from Germany’s, which differed from Spain’s, which differed from Japan’s,” yet you can see many disagreements about the term “fascist” applying to Spain and Japan.
Then, because fascism doesn’t have any kind of definition of its own, Rauch takes a grab-bag of elements– e.g. glorification of violence, politicized law enforcement and undermining elections– which he considers characteristic of fascist regimes, and suggests parallels in the Trump administration. Some of these parallels are a bit of a stretch, as when he quotes Stephen Miller (by any measure an odious figure) as saying “We live in a world that is governed by power” and notes “Those words…could have come from the lips of any fascist dictator.” Or calling Trump’s attempts to annul birthright citizenship as “blood and soil nationalism” (relatively few countries in the world have birthright citizenship). Other elements apply easily to administrations we do not generally consider fascist– it is not hard to think of other US presidents who engaged in territorial and military aggression, attacked news media, and politicized police enforcement. One can call all these presidents fascists, but that would severely dilute the weight we generally associate with the term.
Rauch freely admits that many characteristics of fascist regimes are absent in Trump’s administration:
One can object that there are elements of classical European fascism that are not found in Trumpism (mass rallies and public rituals, for example)…The exercise of comparing fascism’s various forms is not precise. If historians object that Trump is not a copy of Mussolini or Hitler or Franco, the reply is yes—but so what? Trump is building something new on old principles. He is showing us in real time what 21st-century American fascism looks like.
The answer to “So what?” is that this undermines the entire exercise.
There are lots of similarities between Trump’s regime and Mussolini’s. Both tried to undermine elections, and both had six letters in their first name. There are also differences: Trump was successfully removed from power in a democratic election, whereas Mussolini was executed by partisans. Moreover, Trump was born in Queens, New York, whereas Mussolini was born in a small town in Italy. It may seem facetious to describe things this way– obviously these factors are not of equal weight– but I’m trying to underline that without a discussion of what the fundamental traits of fascism are, which Rauch never discusses, these parallels are entirely arbitrary. Perhaps most crucially, while Trump obviously wants dictatorial powers and has moved in ways legal and illegal to expand his powers, courts and other institutions have prevented him from exercising power on the level of Mussolini or Hitler. Is fascism defined by attempting to gain absolute power, or actually exercising it? We usually don’t call a leader a “dictator” if he consistently pushes against limits on his power but doesn’t succeed. To claim that fascistic authoritarianism is about intent or attempt rather than success is something that needs to be substantiated.
How can you differentiate between “building something new on old principles” and “building something new that does not fit the old label”? You can’t, not without discussing what the fundamental principles are and what the disposable ones are.
This brings us to the fundamental fallacy of Rauch’s approach.
Absent a clear definition, the only function of the “fascist” claim is to project back from Mussolini et al. onto Trump, to evoke the evils of those regimes when considering Trump’s. But this is a fallacy: if A is like B in certain aspects, that does not make A like B in all aspects or in the most central aspects. This is exactly the kind of misguided thinking that tarnishes all politicians who call themselves “socialist” (e.g. Bernie Sanders) with every evil of Stalin. Rauch may want to imply that the parallels he sees between Trump and Mussolini indicate that evils akin to the Mussolini regime may be just around the corner under Trump, unless he is stopped. But this just doesn’t follow, since it could easily be argued that the differences between the regimes– for example, the fact that the courts have yet been able to limit Trump’s power– are precisely what prevent a darker future.
The sad thing is that, like many “definition wars,” the “fascist” discussion puts criticism of Trump on the shakiest ground possible. It negates your most powerful advantages– the demonstrable evils of the regime– and moves the debate to bloodless discussions about the porous boundaries around definitions and how this or that academic characterized Franco’s Spain. It’s like planning an archery competition where you have a masterfully crafted bow and your opponent has a the crudest weapon imaginable, and deciding to conduct it in a foggy swamp with zero visibility and unsure footing. And it gives the other side opportunities to note how many of these characteristics may apply to Biden, Obama or Clinton, and because the choice of elements is arbitrary, trying to claim that some elements are more central than others is a slippery task. The claim of fascism is less than the sum of its parts; Rauch and co. would get much farther keeping the focus on those bad elements themselves rather than putting them in a blender and claiming that the resulting coloration and texture sort of remind one of fascism.
For this post, resisting my usual tendency toward verbosity, I’m just going to present two public statements by Donald Trump about his own presidency, which I think mostly speak for themselves, though they didn’t seem to get much attention.
Just to clarify, this is the President of the United States indicating that if the Supreme Court rules against his signature economic policy, which he clearly thinks is a serious possibility, it would bankrupt the country (“impossible to pay”) such that ‘WE’RE SCREWED.’
I really don’t know that anything needs to be added to this post to comprehend the utter failure and sheer insanity of this policy, even before the court rules (of course tariffs are an awful policy even if the court rules them constitutional, but that is a longer post).
In the full quote, Trump said that for wealthy people who own homes, “We’re going to keep them wealthy, we’re going to keep those prices up, we’re not going to destroy the value of their homes so that somebody who didn’t work very hard can buy a home…I want to protect the people who, for the first time in their lives, feel good about themselves, that they’re wealthy people….There’s so much talk about ‘We’re going to drive housing prices down,’ I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people who own their homes.”
Again, just to parse this: This is the president stating in the clearest possible terms that his interest is protecting the wealthy over the less wealthy who, in his eyes, clearly “didn’t work very hard.” For this reason he wants housing prices to increase further, specifically to put housing out of reach to less wealthy people.
I’m not saying that there’s anything here that wasn’t known before.
But the fact that supporters can continue arguing that tariffs were a good policy idea and that Trump cares about working-class Americans when statements like these are floating around, to the extent that these statements barely made an impact, tells you a lot about our present political moment.
I don’t know many (plausible) good things that can happen in this world that would do more good than the Khamenei tyranny in Iran being replaced by democracy. The fall of Putin, certainly, and the fall of Kim Jong Un, sure, but democratization of Iran is way up there, and cannot democratize (by definition) until the theocracy falls. Apart from Russia, I don’t know if there’s another country in the world whose foreign influence is as violent and damaging as Iran’s.
At any given time, there is at most one person who knows what Donald Trump will decide to do. That person is Donald Trump. I write “at most” because more often than not Trump has no idea what he’ll do himself.
Lindsey Graham obviously knows this.
Yet he writes to the people of Iran “Help is on the way.” He has no idea what Trump will or won’t do. In fact Trump promised over a week ago to intervene if the regime killed protesters; the regime killed protesters, and so a couple of days later Trump again promised to intervene if the regime killed protesters; the regime kept killing protesters, so now Trump again is promising to intervene if they kill protesters. In other words, Trump has three times drawn a red line and three times the regime has crossed it. He may yet intervene, but has ruled out boots on the ground, so it remains to be seen what form an intervention would take, and it’s not at all clear that it would help the people of Iran. Certainly his intervention in Venezuela has not helped the people in any way so far.
Graham could call on Trump to intervene with force. Certainly that is Graham’s preference. But he has no leverage over Trump, so in this space of uncertainty, he turns to the people of Iran, encouraging them to continue protesting and “help is on the way” even though he really has no idea whether help will come. But the people of Iran, not him, are the ones who will pay the price if Trump decides not to intervene (or to intervene in a manner that doesn’t take down the regime).
It is playing with people’s lives to sound good on twitter, and it is wrong.
***
“America First” means prioritizing American interests in foreign policy, to the exclusion of all else, especially anything to do with the lefty term “human rights.” When Trump says that he will intervene militarily if the Iranian regime shoots at its own people, he is putting down his “Make America Great Again” hat and picking up his “Make Iran Great Again” hat. And I do mean that literally:
To be clear: I would love it if Trump were to prioritize the welfare of protesters and their human rights in the world, though as mentioned throughout this post, I don’t think Trump really does in this case (or any case). But it’s another case where Trump will represent both an ideology (“America first”) and its polar opposite (militarily intervening in a Middle Eastern country on behalf of non-Americans) and lose little support. Another data point for “The Many Tents of Trump.”
***
The Iran protests are playing out much as the Arab Spring protests did, so it is worth considering the lessons of the Arab Spring.
I remember that when the Syrian Revolution, which became the Syrian Civil War, broke out, someone wrote about how “Syria is not like Iraq.” The argument was that the fall of Saddam Hussein led to a bloody civil war because of the internal ethnic and religious divisions in Iraq, where Shia Muslims were only about 60% of the population and Sunnis were about a third, whereas in Syria Sunni Muslims are about 74% of the population. Of course, Syria’s situation did become much like Iraq’s, with a bloody civil war that lasted over a decade, and widespread massacres and violent conflicts based on ethnicity and religion. There are various separatist movements in Iran, and it is hard to know how these might respond to a collapse or severe weakening of the regime.
(If I don’t sound as ebullient as I should be about the protests, it is precisely because I was ecstatic when the Syrian revolution began, as I was at the start of the Arab Spring, the Sudanese Revolution, the election upsets in Myanmar and Congo, and…well, the long-term effects of these revolutions and upsets have made me more cautious).
Given that Trump has promised “no boots on the ground,” Libya presents an even starker lesson. In 2011, the Obama administration joined a NATO-led intervention in Libya that resulted in the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi, one of the more repulsive dictators of the day. This intervention has not been hailed as a roaring success in the years since, even though it accomplished its primary goal (averting Gaddafi’s planned massacres of his own people) and toppled a vicious dictator without a single American casualty or “boot on the ground.” The reason (apart from petty politics) is what happened after the intervention: the Libyan Civil War, which has essentially been raging since 2014 between a warlord in the east and a weak UN-recognized government in the west. Libya has become a failed state. This does not, in my view, mean that the intervention was wrong: arguably the situation would have been significantly worse had Gaddafi been allowed to conduct his massacres. But when I briefly spoke to a Libyan man about a decade ago, he said he genuinely regretted the fall of Gaddafi, because the situation had become even worse. As with Venezuela, if you actually care about the people, you need to care not only about what happens to Khamenei or his cronies, but what happens the day after they fall, and the month after, and the decade after. And that’s something you can’t know from a Trump tweet, because he definitely cares not one whit about the people themselves (as he proved in the Venezuela intervention).
***
A (non-Iranian) friend posted a video championing Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Shah of Iran and “the Crown Prince of Iran,” and portraying the Pahlavi dynasty as the representative of the “2,500 year Persian civilization.”
Don’t do this.
To be clear, I’m conflicted about Pahlavi, and seeing as I’m neither Iranian nor an Iran expert, I want to be careful with my assumptions. But so long as you are not Iranian or an Iran expert, I think you should be wary of pro-Pahlavi propaganda (especially anything referring to 2,500 year civilizations).
On the one hand, Pahlavi is an opposition figure to a detestable regime, which deserves respect, and there are some mixed views of how much support he actually has within Iran: Two years ago, The Economist wrote that “His network within the country is limited. His own dedication has been questioned.” Yet his status as the Crown Prince makes him a conceivable “focal point” of the opposition to rally around, which could be good as a transition if this regime falls.
However, let’s keep our head on our shoulders here.
The Pahlavi dynasty was absolutely not a “constitutional monarchy that bridged Iranian civilization with modernity” or any such nonsense, as that video suggested. The Pahlavis took power in 1925 and were ousted in 1979. The last shah was a corrupt despot whose failures were one of the prime factors, if not the prime factor, behind the 1979 revolution. “There had been a crackdown against political opponents, seeing thousands imprisoned and tortured by his feared SAVAK intelligence service,” as one report had it. His son of course is not guilty of these things, but we don’t need to romanticize the Shah’s rule to support his dissident son, just as we don’t need to romanticize the Romanovs just because we’re criticizing the Bolsheviks.
Moreover, let’s be careful. This is exactly the kind of situation where we can be easily misled by a campaign to make it seem like this protest movement favors Pahlavi. I’ve seen many friends tout a disconnected video of people shouting (allegedly) “long live the shah” or the like. This is exactly the kind of “information” that is susceptible to manipulation– a few dozen people said to represent a movement of millions. Pahlavi has a lot of resources and a life goal to seize exactly this kind of moment. I don’t want to cast too many aspersions on him, as I don’t know his character well enough, but the flipside is also true: the people posting this content mostly are not experts on the intricacies of Iranian politics. So unless you know this issue well, please keep the focus on the people and the regime that is oppressing them, and let them decide whether to center the former dictator’s son in their future.
And certainly, certainly, don’t suggest that the protests are merely an outgrowth of Pahlavi’s urging, as the writers of this community note on twitter seems to think:
Whatever you think about Pahlavi, he is not the reason Iranians are out in the streets. That is a gross perversion of the truth.
***
Last and possibly least: In these situations, of massive human rights abuses unrelated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I often see knee-jerk questions of “Where are all the human rights organizations and the UN?!” Or, as some call it: “No Jews, no news.”
And of course stories of the protests and the repression against them are front-page stories on CNN, BBC and NYT, among others.
This is not to say that there is no bias in these institutions and media. But it is taken much, much too far by people who simply don’t follow these organizations and so have not the slightest clue what they do and don’t condemn. Some of these organizations move slowly, investigating facts before making unequivocal statements, and so expectations that they will respond instantaneously are simply misguided.
Just over six years ago, I posted “Generation of Miracles,” probably the most “me” thing I’ve ever written, at least publicly. It was an informal overview of miraculous transformations that I felt were underway in some of the most fundamental struggles of humanity– health, freedom, peace and prosperity. It seemed that we might be on track not merely to ameliorate some evils that have been plaguing humanity throughout its history, but literally to eradicate them.
For some time, I’ve wanted to revisit this post, both for what still seems true, and what seems to have been disproven, or at least requires significant clarification. It remains the case that scintillating and miraculous advances of humanity remain underreported, while the most evil developments are well-known; so I do hope this provides some optimism for those who seek it in these dark times. But I would be remiss not to mention the ways in which some evils are growing more powerful.
*** Health
The inspiration to my original post was– what else?– Malaria.[1]
An article in the Lancet from 2019 that I had read for research purposes suggested that on current trends, malaria would be all but eliminated [2] in countries outside Africa by 2030 and nearly eradicated entirely by 2050. Given that malaria infected an estimated 263 million people worldwide and killed perhaps 600,000 in 2024 alone, per the World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report, that would be among the greatest humanitarian feats in world history.
So what has happened since 2019 on that front?
The answer is that there has been incredible progress– but also some worrying obstacles.
Let’s start with this graph from the updated report:
We see that malaria deaths per 100,000 people at risk declined nearly by half between 2000 and 2015, but that progress since then has stalled: slight progress by 2019 was reversed during the Covid-19 epidemic in 2020, and since then progress has resumed. These numbers may seem small, but do keep in mind that the number of people at risk is estimated at 4.3 billion people, so this change indicates that over 51,000 lives were saved in 2023 alone due to the decrease in mortality rates since 2015.
Moreover, malaria deaths have decreased in literally every single year since 2000, with the exception of the genuinely exceptional Covid-19 year of 2020. So while this advance has slowed, it has continued.
Other signs of progress abound. Perhaps the most fantastic developments since the previous post has been the development of two vaccines against malaria approved by the WHO, both of which are judged as cost-effective and reduce mortality among children substantially even in areas where other malaria interventions (like bednets) have been deployed. One study found a reduction of all-cause mortality in children of 13%, which is astounding. Another good sign is the increasing number of countries that have eliminated the disease: Ten countries since 2019 by my count, though none are in Sub-Saharan Africa. The impression one gets is of malaria being eliminated almost everywhere outside Sub-Saharan Africa, with slower and more uneven reductions on the continent.
This presents the under-5 mortality rate (deaths of children before their fifth birthday, per 1,000 live births) in the world since 1991. Every single year– literally without exception– this number has gone down, not only in the world generally but in Sub-Saharan Africa, the worst-hit region. Steven Radelet noted in The Great Surge (one of my all-time favorite books) that “[between 1980 to 2015] the rate of child death has declined in every single developing country in the world where data are available. There are no exceptions.”
Life expectancy in Africa has been steadily increasing since 1950, and today it is estimated at 63.8– roughly where Europe was in 1952. That is far too slow an improvement– but the gap has slimmed substantially, even as Europe’s life expectancy has continued to grow.
So despite having experienced one of the worst pandemics in history since I wrote the last post, it is fair to say that for the time being, the health miracle is continuing, if less dramatically than in the 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s. And technological progress against disease, as the incredible story of the Covid-19 vaccines indicates, is if anything as strong as ever.
The most troubling development in the opposite direction is the serious reductions in foreign aid, including health aid. I’ve already written about the horrific and unconscionable cuts made to US aid under Elon Musk’s DOGE, which has led to so much death and suffering it is genuinely always worse than you thought. But the US cuts, while the most vicious and most irresponsibly executed by far, are not unique; the UK, Canada and Germany have also sharply reduced aid, in what seems like a global trend rather than a Trump-Musk idiosyncrasy.
This is definitely a setback to global health; the cuts to PEPFAR alone may have caused tens of thousands of deaths from HIV/AIDS already.[4] But as much good as foreign aid for health has done, I don’t think that many economists would credit it with most of the progress described above. Moreover, two factors may yet reverse this trend. First, the next US administration may reverse these cuts; foreign aid enjoyed bipartisan support before Trump. Second, even now court decisions, Republicanpushback and Musk’s departure could lead to a softening of the cuts. Lastly, private philanthropists may fill some or all of the funding gap; to put the numbers into perspective, Bill Gates indicated his foundation may give on average $10 billion per year for the next two decades, double what it distributed over the last 25 years; this alone is roughly a quarter of USAID’s annual budget before it was shuttered. These sources won’t bring back to life those who have died and can’t fully replace government funding in the short term, as so much of the existing infrastructure in many countries was tied to government programs, but it may soften the blow in the long run.
On health, it seems, the miracles will continue.
*** Freedom
Look at my bookshelf, and you’ll notice a rather odd theme. “How To Be A Dictator“; “How To Stand Up To A Dictator“; “Spin Dictators.” It is no exaggeration to say that I really like reading about dictators and dictatorships– and few news stories excite me as much as hearing that another one is being toppled.
In my 2019 post, I wrote: “Within a generation, we will see the eradication of absolute dictatorship from our world. Sounds fanciful?”
As I explained, I chose the term “absolute dictatorship” carefully, and emphasized: “Sadly, this does not mean we are about to see some universal flowering of freedom and tolerance.” Absolute dictatorship, like absolute monarchy, is a specific form of government, and can include much unfreedom; the United States in the 1830s, for example, was definitely not an absolute monarchy but it certainly was not fully free.
Let’s be clear: Even in 2019, it could not be said that freedom was unambiguously improving. FreedomHouse.org, a website I use frequently to measure global freedoms, showed that in every year between 2005 to 2024, more countries saw deterioration in their freedoms than saw improvements. The changes have been especially stark in the most populous countries in the world: China’s authoritarian grip has only tightened over the last decade, while India was downgraded from “Free” to “Partly Free” in 2021 due to a number of authoritarian turns under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The percentage of the world’s population living in free countries decreased from 40% in 2019 to 20% in 2024.
Yet the story is more complex than that. There are two types of “unfreedom,” in the way FreedomHouse calculates its scores, that do not correspond to absolute dictatorship. Most notably, lawlessness, anarchy and state failure– which in some ways can be considered almost the opposite of absolute dictatorship– are penalized heavily. Take Libya in 2024, for example; at 10/100, it scores only a smidgen better than China (9/10), but the two regimes could not be more different. Since the revolution in 2011 at the height of the Arab Spring, and especially since 2014, Libya has had no strong central government, indeed it has two competing governments and much lawlessness in between. The same is true for many of the worst performers on the list, including Somalia, Yemen, and both Sudan and South Sudan; not a surfeit of centralized authority, but rather a lack of it.
The other factor is that of increasing populist authoritarianism, or “illiberal democracy.” These regimes have elections, and while there might be irregularities, leaders tend to be genuinely popular– but they stack the deck against the opposition and exert control over media, judiciaries and political rivals. The United States, for example, is emphatically a less democratic place than it was in 2019. This doesn’t even depend on your political perspective: Either you believe, as you should, that in 2020 a sitting president attempted to reverse an election in which he lost, or you believe that the incoming president did reverse an election in which he lost. The United States remains a democracy by any measure, but it is veering in an authoritarian direction, and as the most powerful country in the world by far, that is deeply concerning.
But easily the greatest tragedy for democracy in the world over the past decade is the deterioration in India under Narendra Modi, who became Prime Minister in 2014. When I wrote my original post, India was marked a “Free” country, with a score of 75; today it is marked as “Partly Free,” with a score of 63. It is not difficult to see why. Modi’s government revoked the special autonomy status of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, and if you want a sense of why that feels like democratic backsliding, note that the government shut down all communication lines— landlines, mobile, cable TV and internet–before the move, and some of these services were only restored a full year later. Given that India by one count has more people than the entire world of liberal democracy combined, that is a staggering loss.
Source. You can see the massive shift in 2017 when India was categorized as an electoral autocracy rather than an electoral democracy.
Overall, I’m not sure I was wrong in my original post when I suggested it was feasible that “Within a generation, we will see the eradication of absolute dictatorship from our world.” There are relatively few countries in the world that explicitly have absolute autocracy as their model, meaning that they don’t even pretend to abide by elections or constitutions. China, Saudi Arabia, Monaco [5]– the examples don’t come easily. Note that in that diagram above, the number of people living under “closed autocracies” has remained quite steady over the last half century, even as the world population has more than doubled. And I still think it’s much more likely that China and Saudi Arabia become democracies in the next 10-15 years than that the United States or France become dictatorships.[6]
What I got wrong was how easily I named this a “miracle.” The last decade has shown just how awful regimes can be without being explicit autocracies. Many Libyans will say that life was better under the brutal autocrat Muammar Qadhaafi than under the state of semi-anarchy and low-burning civil war that succeeded him.[7] And catastrophes in the United States, Israel and other increasingly illiberal regimes demonstrate how much damage can be caused by illiberal democracies. Perhaps what I got most wrong was how powerfully persistent illiberal democracies and “electoral autocracies” could be. My working assumption was that these populist regimes would be very bad at governing (which I still think is true) and that this would lead to a massive loss of popularity when things went awry (which has been clearly disproven). Both Trump and Netanyahu lost an election (in 2020 and 2021, respectively), which gave their voters an opportunity to turn the page on them; but they returned with a vengeance in the very next election.
So while the vision of the end of total autocracy still has much to stand on, the enthusiasm attached to it does not.
***
Peace
In my original post, I noted that the president of Colombia had declared “the extinguishing of political armed conflicts from [the] entire [Western] hemisphere” with the signing of the 2016 peace deal between his government and the FARC. Inspired by this point, I noted that nearly all remaining conflicts in the world seemed to be concentrated in a particular slice of the world– as if we were slowly eradicating war.
I wrote “Interstate war—i.e. war between the armies of two states—has essentially disappeared from the world already (with minor possible exceptions depending on what you call the situations in Ukraine, North Korea and Kashmir).”
Before you give me credit for predicting the war in Ukraine, bear in mind I was referring to the conflict already underway, as Russian forces had invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine back in 2014.
Still, the idea that interstate war was gone for good cannot now be supported– even if you exclude the war in Gaza, in which one side (Hamas) is not an internationally recognized government. Wars between Armenia and Azerbaijan and Israel and Iran, in addition to the Russia-Ukraine war, make clear that interstate wars are still part of our lexicon. Meanwhile civil wars in Myanmar, Ethiopia and Sudan, among others, have erupted just in the last five years, with horrific consequences. While the vast majority of these conflicts are still in that boxed-off region (with some exceptions like Myanmar and Mozambique), it’s hard to say war is dying down.[8]
There is one glimpse of progress I see in our time, though I admit it is a shaky proposition: at least relative to the previous century, wars seem to be getting much less lethal. This is not to downplay for a moment the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Sudan, Ukraine and Ethiopia. However, for the sake of comparison, note that (for example) the Second Congo War (1998-2003) is estimated to have killed perhaps over 5 million people; the Ethiopian Civil War (1974-1991) and Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) may have killed some 2 million each; and even tiny Liberia suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths during its two civil wars (1989-1997 and 1999-2003) despite its population at the time being under 3 million. If you read historical accounts of conflicts from the second half of the last century, you’ll notice how regularly conflicts come up with over one million estimated deaths that you likely never heard of (the Mozambican Civil War of 1977-1992 was particularly noteworthy in this regard). And of course the first half of the twentieth century was even bloodier.
So war may be getting somewhat rarer and less lethal, which is good news– but it was much too soon to declare that interstate wars were already clearly becoming a thing of the past. I do still think this is a closer possibility than most people consider, but this is based more on hunch than on evidence.
***
Prosperity
The book that got me into economics was “The End of Poverty” by economist Jeffrey Sachs (thanks to my mom who bought me the book when I was in high school). That book casts a dispiriting shadow over 2025, because that is the year by which Sachs claimed extreme poverty could be eradicated.
Extreme poverty, sadly, still exists.
Barely.
Maybe.
Depends on how you count.
When Sachs was writing in 2005, the World Bank had a rather tidy definition for extreme poverty: it meant living on less than $1 per day. By that measure, according to Our World in Data, the vision is virtually complete: only about 1% of the world’s population today is estimated to be living on less than $1 per day:
Admittedly, this source clearly has lower numbers than Sachs started with, since he wrote of 1 billion people living under this poverty line in 2001, whereas OWID’s sources put it at 230 million.[9] Also admittedly, there has been little progress under this count in the last twenty years– the percentage has gone from 2% to 1%, but there has been no progress since 2012. So this level of extreme poverty has been mostly eradicated, but it has been rare for decades.
Partly for this reason, the World Bank today uses a different measure (you can read about the change here): $3 per day, using 2021 dollars (adjusted for inflation and price differences between countries, etc.). From his broader category, you can see the miraculous progress in recent decades: whereas over 40% of people were poor by this definition in 1990, today it is about 9%. If that doesn’t bring tears to our eyes, well, something is wrong with our tear ducts.
As a side note, next time you hear that the great mistake of the last half-century was “enabling the rise of China” (as if the rich world gave its permission), remember that the rise of China involved the elimination of extreme poverty (for all intents and purposes) in a country of 1.4 billion people that in 1961 had a similar income level per person as Ethiopia. Economic growth in China ranks among the greatest miracles in human history.
But that miracle has stalled since I wrote that post in 2019.
To be clear, economic growth has continued apace: the average person in the world is today about 10% richer than they were in 2019. Yet progress against extreme poverty has slowed significantly, after increasing slightly due to Covid-19 in 2020:
The two major loci of extreme poverty today are South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The progress against poverty in South Asia continues to be miraculous, while poverty rates in Sub-Saharan Africa are similar to what they were 12 years ago:
Just to clarify what I mean by miraculous: I used to say that there are four countries in the world outside Africa that tend to have socio-economic indicators on par with those in Sub-Saharan Africa: Haiti, Yemen, Afghanistan and Nepal. Indeed, per these data, in 1995 fully 70% of Nepal’s population lived on less than $3 a day, well above the average in Sub-Saharan Africa. Today, as the average in SSA hovers around 46%, the number in Nepal is…2.4%. The World Bank called this progress “unparalleled” and noted “it has virtually eradicated extreme poverty.” That same miraculous progress can be seen across South Asia, such that the vision of eradicating poverty there is very achievable. And just to put things into perspective, recall that there are about as many people in India as in all Africa.
But the persistence of extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, and the slow progress over the last six years, belies the idea that the end of poverty is imminent. It is still very possible, and I do hope we can see it in our generation, but we are not “on track” to complete that goal in the coming years as we were in 2019, just as the slowdown was beginning.
*** A Generation of Miracles, If You Can Keep It
If I were to give a “scorecard” to these four miracle-spheres, I would say that progress on health remains miraculous, and some medical breakthroughs (malaria vaccines, mRNA vaccines, etc.) and the continued spread of existing health interventions indicate that these miracles will continue. Freedom is the weakest link: total autocracy isn’t spreading, but functioning liberal democracy isn’t either, and I had underestimated the destructiveness and persistence of the alternatives. Both peace and prosperity are mixed bags, with some clear positive spots– the lower frequency and lethality of wars and the near-eradication of extreme poverty in South Asia– but clear warning signs as well– especially the interstate wars in the last 5 years and the slow progress against poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa.
My overall sense is both heartening and depressing: The Generation of Miracles that I described in 2019 is within reach, but we have veered off course. The eradication of malaria is within sight, but we have not dedicated the (modest) resources required. Voters in liberal democracies have voted for authoritarian populists, weakening democracy at home while empowering dictators abroad. Standing decisively by Ukraine in its war with Russia could have provided a powerful deterrent effect against future warmongers, but support was inconsistent and mixed (in my view). And the end of poverty has been achieved in nearly the entire world, proving that it can happen anywhere– but at the worst possible time the rich, liberal world is turning away from the developing world.
Above all, this is a call to action. If no progress had been made in the last 5 years, perhaps action might have seemed futile, as indeed many people are convinced that poverty, disease, war and tyranny are just eternal facts of life in the developing world. If, conversely, progress seemed inexorable, that could be enervating as well: we might think no special attention is needed, since these miracles will be achieved regardless.
Instead, the generation of miracles is a possibility, not a promise. It is our generation’s privilege and responsibility to make that vision a reality.
***
[1] Etymology bonus: mala aria, Italian for bad air, because of the idea that you got malaria from breathing in the bad air in swamps and marshes.
[2] Technically, “elimination” of malaria is reducing cases to zero in a country, while “eradication” is doing this for the entire world. So “eradicating malaria in a country” is technically an oxymoron– to eradicate malaria is to eliminate it from all countries.
[3] The question “Why have outcomes in the developing world improved fantastically specifically since 1991?” is left as an exercise to the reader.
[4] As I note in my previous post, the numbers at this source should not be considered to be at all precise, but they probably convey the correct order of magnitude.
[5] As I mentioned in a previous post, with thanks to a note by economist Dani Rodrik, Monaco has the odd distinction of being a “liberal autocracy”– its prince has essentially total power over the country, but he rules liberally, with rights and freedoms to the people on par with liberal democracies (except the ability to choose their leader freely). A fascinating case study, if very much an outlier.
[6] Indeed, who knows whether it will still be called Saudi Arabia? There is no inherent reason for the country to be named after the family that has ruled it for the last century. I personally find that grotesque. But that of course will depend (Godwilling) on the wishes of the citizens themselves.
[7] I would caution against being too confident about this point, as the opposite perspective definitely exists, and I’ve spoken for example to a Syrian who is still glad his country rebelled against the Asad regime, even though it led to a horrific civil war. But I’ve heard and seen Libyans express this opinion so I can be confident about attributing this to “many Libyans.”
[8] I do think there was a window after the Russian invasion of Ukraine where it seemed like the war might be a kind of “war to end all wars,” because it demonstrated how a war that should have been easy for the assailant turned out to be a catastrophic failure, and thus a warning to e.g. China in considering a war against Taiwan. But the lack of decisive support for Ukraine has weakened this impression, and given the reputation of the last declared “war to end war,” it’s probably best to retire this concept for now.
[9] In fact the discrepancy seems to be even greater than that because OWID’s numbers use 2021 dollars, which are worth less than dollars from 2001, so the $1 per day line Sachs used was likely a higher bar than the one OWID is using. I didn’t invest the time to understand this discrepancy because it is a minor point here.
Disclaimer: While I studied economics in graduate school, I never studied minimum wages or public economics. Thus, while I may have greater ability to parse the economics literature on minimum wages than the average person, I am no expert on the subject, and most of my views are from the perspective of a well-informed layman.
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York City, has proposed raising the city’s minimum wage from the current $16.5 per hour to $30 by 2030, with some further increases after that point.[1]
As I hope to show, you can be strongly in favor of lifting US workers out of poverty– as I am– and still be skeptical of some proposals to increase the minimum wage. At the same time, many opponents of the minimum wage too easily default to economic absolutes that are thirty years out of date. The economic debate over the minimum wage is a fascinating look at how economic theory and empirical evidence both clash and evolve, and how the most minute details can have enormous impacts for some of the most vulnerable populations. I won’t be writing anything new to people who know the debate well (sorry econ folk!), but I hope to expose more people to just how rich that debate is– and how much we’re missing when we reduce everything to tweets and memes.
Econ 101
When you raise the price of a good or service, the quantity demanded goes down[2]. So if you raise the price of labor (wages), the quantity demanded of labor (employment or hours worked) goes down– meaning some employers will fire their employees or cut their hours.
It’s just that simple. Econ 101.[3]
Econ 102
There’s a reason economics is taught beyond Econ 101.
The laureates of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2021, AKA the winners of the 2021 Economics Nobel Prize, “David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens – have shown that natural experiments can be used to answer central questions for society, such as how minimum wages and immigration affect the labour market.” High on the list of papers that won Card the Nobel prize is “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,” written by Card and Alan Krueger in 1994. Krueger tragically died in 2019, and as Card himself noted, it is “unambiguously clear” that Krueger would have shared the prize had he been alive.
The paper compared fast-food restaurants in New Jersey, which raised its minimum wage in April 1992, with fast-food restaurants close by in eastern Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage had not increased. The authors argued that the PA restaurants provided a natural control group to those in New Jersey– they were geographically close, part of the same fast-food franchises, and looked broadly similar before the minimum wage hike. Their economic analysis showed that the NJ restaurants didn’t cut jobs relative to the PA “controls” despite the NJ minimum wage hike, though food prices did rise in NJ relative to PA. The lack of an employment effect was dramatic, however: “Our empirical findings on the effects of the New Jersey minimum wage are inconsistent with the predictions of a conventional competitive model of the fast-food industry.” In other words: these results don’t fit the immediate Econ 101 intuition.
One of the potential explanations the paper puts forward is that the Econ 101 intuition does not necessarily apply in a market where there is imperfect competition, and in particular where the restaurants have some market power in the labor market. The key word here is monopsony, which you can think of as just a monopoly, but where there is a single buyer (the restaurant) and lots of sellers (potential workers). The Econ 101 intuition is based on the idea that different restaurants will compete against one another for the same pool of workers, and in this bidding process they will offer higher and higher wages until the point where costs meet revenues– hence there are zero profits in a perfectly competitive market. In that case, when wages rise because of a minimum wage hike, firms would be losing money by continuing to hire some of those workers, and would be better off firing them, replacing them with machines or closing shop entirely.
But if you have just one firm (or few enough firms that this process breaks down), they can initially offer low wages to generate a profit (this is exactly the same logic that allows a monoply to charge high prices and thus generate profits, only flipped). Wages can then be increased via a minimum wage without employment decreasing– in fact employment can increase, if it draws more workers into the labor force. (See footnote 3 for links to a more detailed economic argument.)
Case Closed! Right?
Card and Krueger (1994) and many other papers in the subsequent literature have been used by pundits and politicians to argue that minimum wages do not actually reduce employment.[4] Here is Robert Reich, Clinton’s secretary of labor, in a post titled “Robert Reich Destroys Minimum Wage Myths”:
Let’s put aside the fact that the four links under “abundance of research,” “Researchers,” “Effect of Minimum Wages” and “multiple studies” all lead to research authored or coauthored by one economist, Arindrajit Dube (who is, to be clear, one of the leading economists on the subject).
The main thing to realize about Reich’s general statement “research shows that increases in the minimum wage do not reduce the overall number of jobs” is that it is obviously false.
It is useful in situations like this to imagine the extreme example. We will immediately see why placing a minimum wage of $100/hour would lead to massive job losses. Right? And the reasons go back to the basic “Econ 101” logic: employers hire workers because those workers generate revenue that is at least as high as their wages. At some wage level, the worker’s wages cost more than they produce in revenue, so the company would not want to hire them. The arguments for raising the minimum wage rest on the assumption that firms pay workers less than those workers produce in revenue, so if you raise the wages a little, it’s still worth it for the firm to hire the worker, and the raise could simply mean lower profits rather than fewer jobs. But the term “a little” is key here: for every job, there is a wage rise that will make that job unprofitable to the firm.
Indeed, every sensible paper on the matter will say as much, including the papers and articles cited by Reich (and everyone else). The analysis Dube conducted for the United Kingdom, which Reich cites, states “Of course, eventually a higher minimum wage will lower employment. Exactly how far one can push the minimum wage before job losses start becoming pronounced is an empirical question.” Dube concludes that “the best evidence suggests that the employment effects are small up to around 59% of the median wage”– implying that above that level, we’re in uncharted territory. And the paper that Dube cites in the first article Reich links to states clearly: “Of course, there is some level of the minimum wage at which employment will decline significantly.”
So How Much is A Little?
I think it’s important for people outside a discipline to know where there is a consensus on a certain topic, an when there is widespread disagreement.
Among economists, for example, I don’t know of any serious economic researchers who support the type of tariff policy Trump has pursued this year.[5] That doesn’t mean it must be true–consensuses can be wrong– but it’s useful to know that opposition to this approach to tariffs is a consensus among academic econoists today, with negligible exceptions.
The same is not true about the effects of minimum wages. It is a fiercely debated topic, and there is no wall-to-wall consensus. The most one can say with certainty is what we’ve already covered: that there is definitely some point at which minimum wages will reduce employment, and that in some areas minimum wages were raised and we didn’t see reduced employment. Past that, opinions differ sharply between researchers, and indeed change over time.
In other words, for decades to 2015, economists agreed less and less with the idea that minimum wages lower employment, and specifically in 2015 only 26% agreed that a $15 federal minimum wage (more than double the current level) would substantially lower employment. To be clear, this does not mean there is a consensus in the other direction; in fact, in the latest survey the largest group of economists was simply uncertain:
Indeed, one person who expressed trepidation about a $15 federal minimum wage was Alan Krueger himself, coauthor of the landmark study described earlier. In an op-ed in the New York Times in 2015, Krueger wrote[6]:
Research suggests that a minimum wage set as high as $12 an hour will do more good than harm for low-wage workers, but a $15-an-hour national minimum wage would put us in uncharted waters, and risk undesirable and unintended consequences.
New papers on the minimum wage are coming out constantly, month after month. Just to get a sense of the churn, here are a few working papers– meaning not yet published– by economists affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research. A paper issued in July argues that California’s $20 minimum for the fast-food industry may have led to 18,000 fewer jobs. Another issued in July argued that higher minimum wages lowered some employment outcomes for young adults with cognitive disabilities. A paper from January doesn’t find that minimum wage increases cause low-skilled workers to seek jobs. Etc.
Research has delved deeper into questions that go beyond the simplistic question “Do minimum wages reduce employment?” As one paper notes, there are other aspects that might be affected beyond employment, such as product prices, job benefits apart from wage, etc. Firms prohibited from lowering wages may cut costs in other ways, just as rent control can cause landlords to skimp on things like maintenance.
So if anyone tries to tell you that the economic research on the effects of minimum wages is clear, know that there’s no such consensus. But what is clear is that these effects will be massively different from industry to industry, state to state, person to person, year to year. If minimum wages can be helpful where you have monopsony, well, some industries are more competitive than others, so the effects might be positive in some industries and negative in others. Effects in a city, where wages are almost always much higher but more firms are often competing for the same consumers, will be different from those in rural areas (this is one to be more wary of an increase of the federal minimum, which is inherently less responsive to local factors). Workers who lose their job but have easily transferable skills may recover more quickly than workers who are worse off. And minimum wage hikes during a recession, when people are desperate to get any job they can get their hands on, may be worse than during a boom. The question is not whether minimum wage rises are good or bad, but whether this minimum wage rise, at this time and in this place is good or bad for each set of workers (and that’s if we only care about the workers!). To answer that question well, you need to engage very seriously and in depth with some very contested economics research. And because some people will likely lose even as most people win, you need to make value judgments: how much income for the top (say) 95% is worth it if the bottom 5% lose their jobs? These are difficult, complex questions requiring a lot of nuance.
And of course, remember that minimum wages are just one way to try to help low-income populations. Many other ideas exist, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, Universal Basic Income, subsidies, or just lowering taxes. The uniqueness of minimum wages is that the employer is the one initially served the bill, which has its benefits (it doesn’t draw directly on government revenues) and costs (some of the pain will be passed on to employees and consumers).
Back to Bernie…and Zohran
In 2021, Bernie Sanders proposed legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office published an analysis of the predicted impacts of such a policy. The CBO estimated that the policy would increase government debt by $54 billion (because some government-paid employees earn the minimum wage), employment would be reduced by 1.4 million workers and the number of people in poverty would go down by 900,000 people.
Sanders’ response? He rejected the findings and stated that the “good news” is that the projected budget deficit meant that the bill could be passed in a special procedure in the Senate. He cited a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank, that made the same absolutist claim we saw from Robert Reich: “Do minimum wage increases cause businesses to employ significantly fewer workers, threatening the incomes of the low-wage workforce overall? The answer from empirical research on previous minimum wage increases is a clear “no.”” But of course no such rule is true: it depends substantially on the myriad factors already mentioned. And a jump from $7 to $15, on a federal level, is (arguably) completely unlike small changes in specific cities or sectors.
A second point in that study is telling. “Even accepting at face value the [CBO’s] job loss estimate implies that about 95% of the low-wage workforce would benefit from the policy.” This is undoubtedly true. In virtually any conceivable minimum wage rise, more people will keep their jobs than will lose them, and those will benefit from a higher wage. You can absolutely argue that this is worth it: some people in some areas and industries will lose their jobs, but many other people will benefit. And again, the CBO estimate does state that poverty overall will decrease by nearly a million people, despite 1.4 million people losing their jobs.
But to have that kind of conversation, we’d need to go beyond absolutist statements and knee-jerk reactions. We’d need to acknowledge that the minimum wage question isn’t (just) about pitting the welfare of workers against the welfare of employers; many workers (and consumers) could be hurt by large minimum wage increases as well. Politicians like Bernie Sanders, at their best, hold fast to genuine empathy for vulnerable populations. When they don’t give a second thought to the idea that one million of them might lose their jobs, even as other workers gain, that is a betrayal of their most fundamental principles.
So what about Mamdani?
Well, I have good news and bad news.
The bad news is that the proposal of the likely-next-mayor-of-New-York-City plows straight through any semblance of caution. His proposal is essentially to double the minimum wage in NYC, to a level that is fully 50% higher than any minimum wage in the country. Talk about uncharted waters. And remember the Economic Policy Institute, which was so favorable to Sanders’ proposal? It called Mamdani’s proposal “bold” in the headline of an analysis, but notes “We are cautious about extending the general conclusions of minimum wage research on employment to a $30 minimum wage in New York City. The proposal is more ambitious than the levels that economists have studied extensively.” In particular, if Adrinajit Dube’s analysis concluded that unemployment effects were probably muted until the minimum wage hits 59% of the median wage, Mamdani’s proposed minimum wage would probably be about 76% of the median wage in 2030. This is incredibly irresponsible, and it says a lot about the candidate that he would portray this as a pro-worker proposal when it puts a massive number of workers at risk.
(Side note: I also think it is a bad idea to automatically tie the minimum wage to inflation, but I didn’t take the time to look up the debate on this matter, so for now it’s just my personal impression. Minimum wages can cause price rises, since one way employers can make up for lost revenue in wages is to raise prices. So if minimum wages are tied to price rises, you could have exactly the kind of feedback loop that generates really bad bouts of inflation. There’s a good case to be made for periodic increases of the minimum wage so that it maintains its value over time, but it seems like a very bad idea for this to be automatic, and when Mamdani adds automatic increases for productivity growth as well, this sounds to me like a recipe for disaster).
The good news is that it says a lot about the candidate, but probably little about the actual future. As the article that Mamdani used to describe his policy itself claims, the mayor doesn’t have the power to determine minimum wages, as that is done by the New York State legislature. For what it’s worth, Mamdani (probably) can’t do a bunch of other things he promised, either.
[1] This post is going to be solely about minimum wage policy, not about the myriad other aspects of Mamdani’s campaign. Not because those other aspects are unimportant or less important, but because I found I had less to contribute on those other topics.
[2] There is often confusion between the terms demand and quantity demanded that leads to all sorts of mix-ups. If you ever got stuck in a loop like “If demand goes up, price goes up, but if price goes up, demand goes…down?”, this is what I’m talking about. I initially wrote a very long note with a graph and everything to explain this, but that made things even more confusing, so let me explain by example. Imagine demand for a piece of gum is as follows: at a price of $1, 1 piece of gum will be bought; at $0.5, 2 pieces of gum will be bought; at 10 cents, 10 pieces of gum will be bought, etc. The quantity demanded is 1, 2, 10, respectively. Demand overall is the whole function that associates price to quantity demanded (1/p, where p is price, in this case). If, say, Taylor Swift starts chewing gum at her performances, maybe gum chewing becomes the thing and everyone demands more at every price: so at $1, people buy 2 pieces of gum, at $0.5 people buy 4, etc. We’d say demand has risen (to 2/p), meaning for each price, there is higher quantity demanded. But demand itself doesn’t rise or fall with price; price is the input demand gets to determine the quantity demanded. So if demand goes up, price and quantity demanded should both go up– but that’s the end of the cycle.
If I confused you further, I do apologize.
[3] A fuller explanation would get into wages being set by supply and demand and how a minimum wage drives a wedge between these, deadweight losses and more. This gets into the weeds more than I thought was necessary here, and economics blogger Noah Smith wrote this up and the counterargument much better than I ever could, so if you want more economics, here’s his post on the matter from 2021 and a follow-up addressing some pushback.
[4] I distinctly recall a pundit writing at some point an absolute statement along the lines of “Research shows that raising the minimum wage doesn’t reduce employment,” but I haven’t been able to find it.
[5] You can definitely find economists who support some tariffs: Dani Rodrik, for example, sets himself apart from most mainstream economists by stating that they can have some role to play in certain circumstances if done right. But as Rodrik repeats in that interview and elsewhere, what Trump is doing bears no relation to those very particular circumstances and approaches where tariffs can be useful.
[6] Of course, given inflation and increased wages, the effects of a $15 minimum wage would be very different today compared to 2015, and given the research that has accumulated since 2015 one can’t assume Krueger would have said the same today.
When I write that Nick Fuentes is literally a neo-Nazi, it is because he opens speeches with things like “I love Hitler” and blames the lack of unity in the US on “organized Jewry in America.” And because he’s a holocaust denier, and some of his comments on that are so disgusting that I don’t want to link to them. And many, many other things, from the most despicable comments about women and LGBT people you can imagine to just about every other despicable idea you can imagine. I’m not even going to bother backing that up because honestly you can find more by just googling his name than I can possibly even describe here, but his wikipedia page should more than satisfy anyone who isn’t yet convinced or aware.
And this neo-Nazi is a rising star in “conservative” circles.[2]
As you may have heard, Fuentes was interviewed this week by Tucker Carlson. This is not exactly fresh ground for Carlson: he interviewed another holocaust denier a year ago and good luck explaining videos like “The Kabbalah Plan to Summon the Antichrist Exposed” in any innocuous way.
Sadly, the normalization of Fuentes also isn’t new, though the Carlson interview shows that it is gaining steam. Sitting congresspeople– Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene— attended the political conference he founded, the America First Political Action Conference. Gosar’s explanation is a good indication of the problem: “We thought about it, and we thought: There is a group of young people that are becoming part of the election process, and becoming a bigger force. So why not take that energy and listen to what they’ve got to say?”
Meanwhile, as I noted in a previous post, Fuentes was hosted by powerful figures in Texas GOP politics. And we all remember the 2022 dinner between Trump, Ye[3] and Fuentes in 2022. After these incidents, the figures mostly distanced themselves from Fuentes. Carlson feels no such compunction, and the president of the Heritage Foundation– one of the most influential think tanks in conservative circles– defended Carlson and called his critics a “venomous coalition,” even while saying he abhorred some of Fuentes’ views.
Even before doing the Tucker Carlson interview, which has been watched by 5 million people on Youtube, he was interviewed on other major podcasts, including Patrick Bet-David (3 million views) and Dave Smith (2 million views). Across these interviews, you can hear both the hosts and Fuentes himself remarking on the momentum in his direction.
To get a sense of the following Fuentes has recently amassed, consider that the ADL noted he had 724,000 followers across his social media platforms as of March 2025. Today he has over a million followers on X-Twitter alone.[4]
For the sake of comparison, Ezra Klein– one of the most influential pundits affiliated with “liberal” circles– has about 2.4 million followers on X-Twitter.
Why is a neo-Nazi gaining prominence over the last couple of years? I don’t know. I have thoughts, but nothing I can state with confidence. Which is why I present this not as part of a grand theory or a deeply thought essay, but simply as a data point, something to be aware of in our politics today.
[1] So much so that I initially titled this post “A literal Nazi’s star is rising” but changed it because Fuentes is not in fact (to my knowledge) the member of any Nazi party.
[2] The fact that someone who says he’s a big fan of Stalin is still considered right-wing (even if “far-right”) says a lot about the subject. But that’s for another day.
[3] It is very strange to use this name for the person who until 2021 was known as Kanye West, but this is my literalist mind again: he legally changed his name, so that’s how I’ll refer to him.
[4] I still don’t understand why people didn’t respond to Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter as X by calling it ex-Twitter or X-Twitter.
For the love of all that is holy, what in the world is going on?
Time Magazine has just published the headline “Trump Loses Nobel Peace Prize He Shamelessly Campaigned For.” To be clear, the only known case of someone losing a Nobel Peace Prize was when Mother Teresa’s luggage got accidentally rerouted to Argentina on the way back from Oslo in 1979. The idea that Trump not receiving the prize means he “lost” it is simply madness. Almost every headline about the Nobel peace prize seems to either focus on, or include reference to, Trump not winning. USA Today went with the truly baffling “Donald Trump does not win the Nobel Peace Prize for resolving various conflicts,” and to be clear, yes the article does take seriously that Trump resolved various conflicts. It’s as if we all just decided this was a normal idea and the only real question was which way it was going to fall. Trump treated the peace prize as he did the cover of Time Magazine and treat it as yet another example of meaningless bravado, we discussed it as a serious idea.
I understand completely why heads of state would nominate Trump for the prize, since it’s a costless gesture that may well get you a leg up in whatever negotiations you’re in. The fact that this can work is, itself, a testament to just how cheap Trump considers the whole concept of peace. But the idea never had any merit. It’s bizarre to even write this. With all due respect to nuance and thoughtfulness, this one was never close.
Let’s go through a few of the claims in favor of this absurd idea.
Carter got it, didn’t he?
I think the main image most people have in mind when considering Trump a serious candidate for the peace prize is this one:
If Carter got the peace prize for the Israel-Egypt peace deal, and Bill Clinton got the prize for the Oslo agreements, there’s a clear precedent for American presidents getting the peace prize for brokering a major peace agreement between other countries or leaders.
Of course, Bill Clinton didn’t get the peace prize.
And Carter didn’t get the prize with Sadat and Carter.
Think about that for a moment.
I was not able to speedily find a quote, but I recall from the book Peace in the Making, detailing the correspondence between Begin and Sadat, that both leaders genuinely credited Carter with playing an indispensable role in the peace talks. The Egypt-Israel peace agreement was not only one of the most momentous occasions in Israeli history, it shifted the entire Israeli-Arab conflict. The peace deal has held strong decades later and Egypt remains a powerful, if cold, Israeli ally. As I wrote in my previous post, this was one of the most justified Nobel prizes ever.
Yet Carter didn’t get the prize for his role.[1] He won it in 2002, nearly a quarter century after the Begin and Sadat, “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” If you’re wondering what that last part means in practice, consider Guinea worm disease, an excruciating condition. As an NPR article notes: “When Carter got involved in Guinea worm eradication in 1986 there were 3.6 million cases. Now, nearly four decades later, that number has plummeted. Between January and early December 2024, there were just 11 human cases of Guinea worm reported worldwide.” The article describes how Carter’s involvement was pivotal. This is the kind of work Carter and The Carter Center were doing for decades after he exited the presidency.[2]
Many peace agreements have been signed in the past one hundred years, and American presidents, by virtue of being the most powerful individuals in the world, were involved in many of them. But you have to go back to Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 to get an award to an American president for mediating a peace deal, and that prize itself is controversial. Wilson got it “for his role as founder of the League of Nations” (ironically, given the United States didn’t join), not to mention his Fourteen Points is one of the foundational documents in the history of peacemaking and international diplomacy. And again, do note that Clinton did not receive the prize for the Oslo agreement. Whatever we think of the prize today, the Nobel committee thought Arafat, Rabin and Shimon Peres were deserving of the prize, but passed over the guy in the middle of the (in)famous Oslo handshake. For that matter, Clinton also didn’t get the prize for the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan (neither did King Hussein of Jordan; Rabin of course got it that year with Arafat and Peres).
So…yeah. It is actually extremely rare in the annals of the prize that an international mediator gets a peace prize for a peace deal between other parties.
Obama got it, didn’t he?
Yes, and that was a really stupid prize.
It’s one of the most criticized prize in recent history. At least some members of the committee seem to have regretted it. The same source notes that Obama considered not going to the ceremony.
The “Well Obama won it!” is an argument for giving it to just about anyone. It is not an argument for giving it to Trump.
Kissinger got it, didn’t he?
Yes. And this is a good time to note that this– not the Arafat prize, not the Obama prize– is likely the worst prize in Nobel history, and the one that would be most similar to the Trump prize. As Tom Lehrer put it: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.”
Kissinger won the prize in 1973, alongside Lê Đức Thọ, the (North) Vietnamese revolutionary who attended the Paris Peace Accords, which brought peace between South Vietnam and North Vietnam. If your reaction is “But there was no peace between South Vietnam and North Vietnam,” congratulations, you have all you need to reject Trump’s claim to the Nobel prize on the basis of the just-announced Gaza ceasefire.
Reading reactions to the 1973 prize is a cynical gift that keeps on giving. Kissinger himself apparently said: “I figure it like Groucho Marx said ‘any club that took him in he would not want to join’. I would say that anything Lê Đức Thọ is eligible for, there must be something wrong with it.” Thọ himself rejected the prize, writing sensibly and presciently that “Peace has not yet really been established in South Vietnam.” This was something of an understatement, as South Vietnam ceased to exist about a year and a half after the prize was given.
One reason the prize was so reprehensible was that the two laureates represented a complete rejection of the idea of peace through diplomacy and cooperation. North Vietnam was a murderous dictatorship that committed unspeakable acts of violence and human rights abuses. Whatever you think of Kissinger– and I am squarely in the camp that sees him as a terrible stain on 20th century US history– I don’t think it’s controversial that he considered human rights considerations secondary to the accumulation of US power.[3] That is an understanding of “peace” that I think should be completely rejected.
The Gaza Ceasefire
Back to Oslo.
The accords, not the city.
The 1994 prize to Arafat, Rabin and Peres, and especially to Arafat, is one of the most controversial prizes, and for good reason. Arafat was a terrorist, and the “efforts to create peace in the Middle East,” did not, in fact, create peace in the Middle East. You could say that the this wasn’t known at the time, and you could even argue (as I would) that there were positive aspects of the Oslo accords, but these criticisms are valid.
Now consider the question: Should Clinton have won the award with the other three? I’ve already mentioned that he didn’t, but should he have?
I think most would argue that if Arafat and Rabin shouldn’t have won, it’s hard to argue that Clinton was so deserving. Either this was a great step for peace, or it wasn’t, and if the parties themselves were undeserving, I don’t know of many people who would say that mediating between them is deserving of the prize.
Which is why I think it’s hard to claim that Trump should get the peace prize if Izz-addin Al-Haddad and Netanyahu shouldn’t. And because I don’t think there is a person on this planet who likes the idea of those two figures shaking hands at the gala in Oslo, I don’t see how anyone thinks that mediating the ceasefire between them represents some kind of peace agreement. It is much more like the 1973 Kissinger-Thọ prize than the 1979 Begin-Sadat prize.
Let’s be honest here. Some of the greatest supporters of giving Trump the Nobel prize for the Gaza ceasefire agreement— which is all it is at the moment– like the agreement not because it represents peace between Israel and Gaza (or Hamas or Palestine or whatever) but because it looks to them like a surrender document by Hamas. They might argue that this represents “peace through strength,” but a moment’s thought will make clear that peace prizes aren’t given for winning wars, even if these lead to peace. Neither FDR nor Truman nor Churchill (and certainly not Stalin) won the Nobel Peace Prize, despite ending arguably the most horrific war in human history.[3] The idea I’ve seen floating around that Trump should win the prize for (among other things) bombing Iran into submission during the 12-day war is the kind of leap of logic that I can’t imagine happening with any other president.
Speaking of other presidents, many Israelis support giving the peace prize to Trump because the ceasefire agreement promises (Godwilling) to lead to the release of dozens of Israeli hostages. This will indeed be a wonderful development. But it raises the obvious question of why the previous ceasefire agreements, which led to the release of 148 live hostages and which were all negotiated under Biden[4], did not merit even a discussion of a peace prize for him.[5] You might argue that the ceasefires under Biden didn’t lead to an end to the war, but we have no idea whether the current ceasefire will hold, and indeed all that has been signed so far is an agreement much along the lines of the previous ceasefires. Like the 2025 ceasefire negotiated under Biden, there are two stages to the deal, the first being something like a ceasefire with a hostage-prisoner swap, and the second being a more expansive deal. Many of the strongest supporters of the current deal like it precisely because they think the second part– which involve eventual Palestinian control over Gaza and amnesty for all Hamas operatives, among other things– will never happen. An argument could be made that an agreement for the last few dozen hostages is more difficult to achieve than an agreement for the previously released 148, but this is at the very least not obvious. And to be clear, the January 2025 ceasefire did include provisions for the release of all hostages in a later stage. You’d need to get into the nitty-gritty of the agreemnts and make rather elaborate claims to place Trump’s ceasefire agreement over Biden’s, and yet as mentioned nobody even imagined talking about a peace prize for Biden for the ceasefires his administration mediated. The reason is not the content of the deal; the reason is that Biden never thought to “campaign” for a Nobel peace prize, nor should he have.
Remember
One of the peculiar characteristics of populist politics in our time is that every moment seems to reset everything that came before. All that ever matters is what is happening now and what might happen just around the corner. Previous promises and actions disappear into irrelevance. Which is why memory is one of the most important allies in the fight against wrongdoing.
As mentioned, in March of this year, a ceasefire was in effect, and the first stage was completed as agreed. The Netanyahu government decided not to proceed to phase 2, after which the war entered one of its most horrific stages, with a block on all humanitarian aid entering Gaza for two months, followed by another two months of relying heavily on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.[6] Putting aside what one thinks of this move, it was met with something between tacit to overt support from the Trump administration. Trump’s previous “plan” was to relocate all of Gaza’s two million residents and tried to ignore Hamas completely; this is the literal opposite approach of the “20 points” that preceded the current ceasefire deal, which include the point “We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.” One cannot effusively praise Trump of September 2025 without recognizing that Trump of February and March 2025 took the exact opposite approach, and that approach did an inordinate amount of damage.
The Abraham Accords
With all that we’ve gone through here, we can address the only argument in favor of a Trump Nobel prize that has any semblance of sensibility, which is his mediating the “Abraham Accords” between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain in 2020, followed later by Sudan and Morocco. Unlike the Gaza ceasefire, these are actual peace agreements, and I think many supporters would be happy to see the leaders of those countries receive the prize.[7] Whether Trump’s involvement was essential is a matter of debate, and whether selling the UAE 50 F-35 fighter jets in return for the agreement is in the spirit of the peace prize, but it’s at least a valid claim.
But remember again that US presidents don’t generally get Nobel prizes for mediating peace deals. Keep in mind also that these countries were never genuinely fought Israel, and there were already significant defense ties before the Abraham accords. So it’s again noteworthy that few (as far as I know) spoke of giving the prize to the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, who have signed a peace agreement to end a bloody 35 year conflict, but many supported giving Trump the prize even before the recent Gaza ceasefire was signed, based in part due to his claim that he mediated that agreement.[8]
And All That Other Stuff
I wrote in my previous post that having blood on one’s hands does not disqualify one from the peace prize. But there’s obviously a calculation to be made here: the lower the value of the “peacemaking,” and the greater the violations against peace, the less deserving the candidate is.
As mentioned, the only “peace credit” attributable to Trump is mediating the Abraham Accords, and because the accords themselves were much less consequential than, say, the Israeli-Jordanian treaty (which did not yield any Nobel prizes), and because Trump was the mediator rather than one of the two parties, the peace value here is relatively low.
At the same time, other actions taken by Trump during his two administrations (so far) have been radically contrary to the values of peace. The list here is long, and I feel that it would require a whole slew of arguments to persuade anyone to whom this isn’t already obvious. I’ve already noted how its policy toward Gaza was the polar opposite of the ceasefire agreement until just a few weeks ago, such that if the ceasefire represents peace, the administration’s prior moves represent the opposite. The administration’s shifting attitudes toward the Russia-Ukraine war and to North Korea show a similar disregard for any kind of value system. Of course there is also the minor fact that he tried to overturn a democratic election and pardoned those who tried to violently overthrow the government. But just to take the most recent example: during the same month of September when the Gaza ceasefire began to take shape, the United States bombed multiple Venezuelan boats, killing over a dozen people. By the administration’s own account, it was intercepting drug smuggling, and announced that it was now engaged in a “non-international armed conflict.” Whatever one thinks of this action, to blow up boats of alleged drug smugglers is the precise opposite of what the peace prize should stand for.
The 2025 peace prize went to María Corina Machado, a brave Venezuelan dissident who has sacrificed her liberty and risked her life to challenge the autocracy of Nicolás Maduro, one of the world’s most repressive dictators. This is a fantastic choice, and I fervently hope that next year we can talk more about the deserving candidates who promote peace and justice in the world.
***
[1] Apparently the Chairman of the Nobel Committee said that Carter should have received the prize for mediating that agreement.
[2] Incidentally, one of the great institutions of lifesaving philanthropy in the world, up there with the likes of the Gates Foundation, is the Clinton Foundation, especially the Clinton Health Access Initiative. As with the Gates Foundation, you can’t spend all that much time working in development and global health without bumping into grants by the Clinton Foundation. I wish we lived in a world where these incredible initiatives, like the Carter Center’s global health work, were better known. And if you’re concerned about the “pay to play” allegations thrown at the Clinton Foundation, do look into it before drawing conclusions (you can start with the wikipedia page– not because it’s reliable, but it can get you started on sources). It’s not like the foundation was shut down after being found to have conducted “a shocking pattern of illegality” or something.
[3] Churchill won the Nobel prize for literature in 1953, for both his speeches and his historical writings.
[4] The ceasefire between January-March 2025 overlapped with the beginning of Trump’s administration.
[5] To be clear, I don’t think Biden should have received the prize or even been a serious candidate– but I don’t think it makes sense to consider Trump a serious candidate for the ceasefire agreeement and not even give a thought to Biden.
[7] Sudan’s agreement remains unratified; the country was led by an unelected government and was in the midst of the crisis that later became the Sudanese civil war.
[8] The prize should absolutely not have been given to the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, to be clear: the agreement came about because Azerbaijan launched an offensive, took control of the disputed territory and led to the exodus of nearly all Armenians from it. Again, we should not be giving prizes for “winning wars.”
On October 10th, the Norwegian Nobel Committee will gather in Oslo City Hall and announce that the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded to someone or some people who are not Donald Trump.[1]
Or Greta Thunberg.
Hopefully.
Every year I try to think whom I’d like to see get the prize, not because it is such an important question, but because it is a good exercise. There are always– always!– people and groups “worthy” of the prize. If we don’t have them in mind, we are missing something.
There are some principles that guide me in preferring one possible candidate over another, so I thought I’d go over these ideas, reflect on how these ideas fared in the last couple of decades of laureates, and add a few possibilities that I’d be glad to see win the Nobel. These principles are not all relevant to each potential pick, and indeed are sometimes in conflict, so they are more of a scorecard than a strict filter.
Principle Number One: Give to People Who Need the Spotlight
The Nobel Prize is worth about $1 million, but we all understand that it’s the exposure that is really valuable. For this reason, the best prizes are those who elevate figures we might never have heard of otherwise, or those who can benefit materially from the spotlight– and the worst prizes are household names for whom the prize is just another resume item.
Some of the most disappointing prizes have failed on this point. Kofi Anan and the United Nations in 2001, Barack Obama in 2009 and The European Union in 2012 were all prizes to universally known figures and organizations to whom the spotlight meant nothing. In terms of this year’s candidates, this category alone is a reason to dislike candidates like Thunberg and Trump, whom I think are undeserving for other reasons, but also a reason to de-emphasize some candidates who have done genuinely good things. Ideally the prize would also be timely, strengthening those who are right now fighting against an evil current and empowering those whose efforts have a particular momentum.
Angela Merkel has been touted as a candidate, and in many ways she would be an excellent candidate specifically for these times. She was a kind of anti-populist, highly effective leader whose bold move to accept over one million asylum seekers at the height of the EU migrant crisis remains one of the exemplars of political leadership in my lifetime.[2] But Merkel is a well-known figure and it’s not as if she has no other opportunities to get attention.
A prize the world deserves, but not the one it needs right now. Picture source.
Thankfully, the last two decades have featured paragons of peace who were mostly unknown outside small circles. Two of the most beautiful picks were in 2014 (Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi) and 2018 (Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad)[3]. One man and one woman, from different countries but united by a common struggle, those who are known primarily for what they endured and fought alongside those who led organizations and institutions to address the struggle systematically. Honestly, tears come to my eyes just thinking about these inspired decisions. The awards in 2011 (to Liberians Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbwoee[4] and Yemeni Tawakkol Karman) were also excellent in this regard.
Principle Number Two: Give to Peacemakers, When Possible
This may seem obvious, but the peace prize is not very often given to people who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses,” as the original prize description has it. In fact, I count only about three times since 2000 when the prize was given primarily for peace deals. One, Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari in 2008, is not a favorite of mine; the press release for the prize speaks to Ahtisaari’s involvement in a long list of disparate conflicts and causes, but it’s very hard to discern his personal impact (though this is in part just ignorance on my part). It feels more like a prize for European diplomacy than anything especially impactful. I have written about the 2019 prize to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed before: enthusiastically when the prize was announced, more somberly a year later after the horrific Ethiopian Civil War broke out. The third prize, to then President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos in 2016, also feels like a mixed bag, especially as it was given five days after Colombians rejected a peace deal in a referendum (the final peace deal came nearly two months later without a second referendum). Looking farther into the past, I feel it’s clear that the prize to Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat[5] in 1979 was one of the best prizes ever given, and that’s true even though both leaders had much blood and human rights violations on their hands. Similarly, giving the prize to Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Clerk in 1993 didn’t absolve the two of past wrongs, but was a quintessential peace prize.
The truest peace prize? Sadat, Carter and Begin. Picture source.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure 2025 has good peacemaker candidates in this literal sense. The main peace moment of the year, as far as I can tell, was the ceasefire and dissolution of the PKK early this year, and I don’t think anyone suggests giving the prize to Abdullah Öcalan and Erdogan. So this criterion is mostly aspirational.
Principle Number Three: Give to People On the Ground
The best prizes are those that go to people who have sacrificed, who have put their wellbeing or even their lives at risk for the purpose of peace. The prize to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, a Philippine and Russian journalist respectively, in 2021 fit this well; I don’t know much about Muratov, but Ressa led a courageous fight against the increasing authoritarianism of Rodrigo Duterte while remaining in the country, at great personal and professional risk.[6] This is also one reason why I appreciate the prize given to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in 1999 far more than the prizes in 2024 (to Japanese anti-nuclear group Nihon Hidankyo), 2017 (to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) and 2013 (to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons). These latter organizations are fighting for good causes, but I don’t know that their members are engaging in self-sacrifice on the level of Doctors Without Borders, who often operate in impossibly difficult conditions with incredible courage and dedication. It is also a reason why one of the best prizes was to Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1964; most people do not realize just how concretely he was aware each and every day that his activism might end his life, until one day, it did.
A highly admired prize that is still underappreciated. Picture source.
Principle Number Four: Give to Dissidents
It is not obvious that dissidents should be prime candidates for the prize. They don’t fit Alfred Nobel’s description in any direct way, and the connection between resistance to oppression and peace is unclear. Yet these are some of the best prizes, and indeed, linking democracy to peace is valuable precisely because it is not entirely intuitive. Narges Mohammadi in 2023, Liu Xiaobo in 2010 and Shirin Ebadi in 2003 were great choices, not least because they placed the violence and authoritarianism of the leaders who oppressed them under the spotlight. I wish Alexei Navalny could have received the prize before he died, and I still think Nicholas Kristof’s idea of awarding the prize to Loujain al-Hathloul is promising precisely because it will remind the world of the crimes of Saudi Arabia’s Muhammad Bin Salman, who is trying so hard (and succeeding) to endear himself to the world.
Alexei Navalny: A missed opportunity for the prize to speak truth to power. Picture source.
So who should it be?
I will start with a pick that, well, violates all the above criteria. Every last one. It goes to a famous man with only tenuous connections to peacemaking and who is a comfortable billionaire who can hardly be considered a dissident.
A fantastic pick, if you ignore everything I just wrote. Picture source.
Bill Gates has done to philanthropy what Norman Borlaug (laureate of the 1970 award) did to agricultural research, harnessing it to save lives on an unimaginable scale. He did this by placing enormous emphasis on evidence and research, and by focusing on global health and development. This would be a very timely award: at a time when foreign aid, global health initiatives and vaccines have come under attack, the Gates Foundation has been an incredibly potent champion of all these causes. And by insisting on rigorous evidence as the basis for philanthropic giving (as anyone in the development field can testify), his work revolutionized the way people give as well as providing an extremely deep research base that all people can utilize. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the entire subfield of development economics would not be the same without his work.
Moving to more conventional ideas…
One of the leading names being tossed around as a candidate is the Sudan Emergency Response Rooms, who were suggested as candidates by the Peace Research Institute Oslo. They now top the list for many prediction websites. I would be overjoyed if the prize could spotlight work being done in Sudan amid the horrific civil war underway there, though I’m a little puzzled about this particular choice. The ERRs, as I understand it, are decentralized, community-led WhatsApp groups (“Rooms”) for coordinating aid. That is amazing work, but I haven’t seen a clear indication of who the prize would actually be given to if they were to win. In any case, if they or another Sudan-based group were to win, that would be a fantastic choice in every respect.
This would be as good a year as any to give the prize to peacemakers in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not least because some people reading those words are likely to think immediately “There aren’t any.” I personally would favor an award going to Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Jewish organizations, where the cooperation is not merely incidental but fundamental. Most prominent of these is the Parents Circle – Families Circle, at the heart of which is a particular model: when Israelis and Palestinians are exposed to the grief of members of the “other side” who have lost family members to the conflict, it humanizes the other side. Again and again in the stories of Palestinian peace activists, you will find that a shift occurred when they had interactions with Israelis that were not those of a soldier to a potential threat. If this sounds naive, I urge you to watch this talk by Palestinian nonviolence activist Ali Abu-Awwad, “A Painful Hope,” who attributes his transformation from a revenge-minded youth to a nonviolence activist in large part to this approach.
Indeed, my favorite candidate for the prize– though not one I expect– may be Roots-Shorashim-Judur, founded by Ali Abu-Awwad and Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger. Peace work, at its best, smashes stereotypes and renders the impossible possible; and I don’t know that there are many images that would do more to break that ground than a Palestinian from the Hebron area speaking in favor of peace and reconciliation, followed by a religious settler saying the same. These are people who could use the spotlight, who are peacemakers, who are on the ground. Regardless of what you think about giving them the Nobel prize, please consider donating to them. And if you’re concerned about what is happening on US college campuses, do check out their campus affiliate, Atidna.
In writing this post, something happened to me, which I hope you can sense too as a reader. I was reminded. Reminded of all the incredible amount of good that is being done in this world, at great political, financial and often physical risk. Work that is dedicated to helping people nonviolently, to improve the welfare of strangers without harming anyone else, to embrace hope and cooperation over hate and despair. In every warzone and every pocket of poverty, there are far more peacebuilders and healers and self-sacrificers than there are warmongers and murderers, even when the latter have the upper hand by the strength of weapons and fear. How many of these incredible people do we hear about? How much does it distort our view of the world to hear constantly of the tyrants and not of those who fight peacefully for freedom?
So I’d like to tell you about one more person, though not one who will be receiving the peace prize.
Luc Nkulula died in a fire on June 10th, 2018, aged 32, “One of Congo’s bravest campaigners for democracy and free elections,” as The Economist described him in its beautiful obituary. I’ll end with a passage from that piece:
In the ramshackle back-streets, still strewn with cooled lava rocks from the volcano Nyiragongo which rose behind the city, he would talk idealistic politics ten to the dozen. As a boy he had yelled about any injustice, and he still could, but anger did not drive him. He rebuffed it with an impish smile, or a positive spin. Even when dressing down Mr Kabila [Joseph Kabila, then the autocratic President of the Democratic Republic of Congo] he managed to be more or less polite, because that petty oppressor was not the problem. The whole system was rotten and unfree, and each man and woman had to strive to make it better. For his part, he had learned responsibility fast; his mother’s death in 2010 had suddenly made him the protector and provider for his sister, then 12, who still lived with him. Amen remembered how he had smiled at her even as he burned, and as he yelled at her to run away.
Dignity was what every Congolese most deserved: the right to respect, free expression, free association, a free vote. Why should anyone hesitate to ask for these? Only because fear had invaded everybody—fear that someone you knew might be killed, or agents would take your laptop and phone, or that the “forces of order” would stop you for walking in the street after 6pm and “resolve the situation” for money. Even demanding clean water had got him arrested. Asking for elections had been met with tear gas and live rounds. Intelligence goons trailed him; neighbours distrusted him and each other. Lucha lacked the numbers and organisation to make the difference he wanted. But should he therefore shut himself up in some little box, terrified of changing the future?
[1] This post was mostly written before the announcement of the deal between Israel and Hamas. I still think there is exactly one person reading this who feels that Trump should get the peace prize, so I’m not going to put too much effort in explaining this one, but I’m happy to write a follow-up if more of you disagree on this point. If you are wondering what Trump is talking about when claiming to have ended seven wars, see here. I will note that Trump was so invested in the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which he claims to have resolved, that he declared peace between Aberbaijan and Albania.
[3] Yousafzai’s “I am Malala” is inspiring and much less difficult and somber than you might expect. Murad’s “The Last Girl” is for all intents and purposes a holocaust book, and I recommend it, but you should be prepared for that.
[4] Gbowee’s book “Mighty Be Our Powers,” is recommended, though I feel the book is less impressive than Gbowee herself, whom I had the privilege to listen to in person when she spoke at Columbia University.
[5] The book “Peace in the Making” shows the correspondence of the two leaders, which brings to the fore a few important things about the peace deal. One is that, at least in my reading, the two leaders were sincere in their desire for peace and negotiated in good faith. The second is the central role of Jimmy Carter, which both sides considered indispensable to the success of the talks, even though Carter didn’t receive the prize for these actions (he received the prize decades later, in 2002, for the important work of the Carter Center, which among other things contributed to nearly eradicating Guinea worm disease). The third is that, in my view, Begin broke the part of the treaty regarding Palestinian autonomy.
[6] Ressa’s book, “How to Stand Up to a Dictator,” is highly recommended, not least because she discusses fighting “illiberal democracy,” including manipulation of social media and harassing free press, rather than more blatant types of dictatorship.
In August 2022, I decided to write a blog post about the burning issue on everyone’s minds at the time: Agricultural policies in Sri Lanka. I never wrote more than a few hundred words and didn’t publish the post, which pinned the disastrous policies on the populism of the country’s nepotistic administration, but I did give it a working title: “Populism: Left, Right and Always Wrong.” The idea was to criticize populism not as a specifically right-wing phenomenon, as is often done in the American context, but as an ideology that has right-wing and left-wing manifestations and should be opposed in both.
I am, for a host of reasons, eternally skeptical of populism. But I think that title was wrong. Populism is something that, given the right circumstances, I can support. So can all of us.
This is a useful exercise because whenever we encounter an idea we oppose, we should always try to imagine what the “mirror image” case is– what is the equivalent on “my side”? This is an activity that is too rare these days, so as someone who so frequently criticizes populist politics, it is important to show the other side.
***
First, let me explain what I mean when I write “populism,” which has no agreed-upon definition and is often used by pundits either as a pejorative term for politicians they don’t like or as a synonym for “popular,” neither of which is particularly helpful. When I write “populism,” I mean a specific set of political beliefs that suggest a particular solution:
“Elites” in the country have control (usually through financial power) of major institutions such as politicians, media and the judiciary.
These institutions therefore serve the interests of the elites, which diverge from those of the majority of the population. Sometimes the elites are portrayed as serving the interests of another country entirely.
Problems in the country are not symptoms of difficult trade-offs or complexity, but rather a lack of will on the part of these institutions stemming from these divergent interests.
The solution is for a leader who is not beholden to these elites and has direct support from a majority of the population, to rise to power, purge these institutions of compromised elements and replace them with true civil servants, who can in turn easily solve the major problems facing the country because they have the will to do so.
The leader can be a total insider or a total outsider, someone with decades of political experience or non, as long as they position themselves as opposing the “elites.”
There are all sorts of interesting characteristics that come with these basic tenets, but I hope it’s clear how these aspects map onto movements like Trump in the US, Netanyahu in Israel and Erdoğan in Turkey without caricaturing these movements.
***
In a previous post, I wrote that everyone should watch the show Servant of the People, which seems to still be streaming on Netflix. For any of you who are unfamiliar, it’s a brilliant satire portraying a history teacher who goes viral after cursing out the country’s corrupt politicians, gets elected president, and then contends with the challenges of being president as a kind of “everyman.” It is funny, incisive and one of the best political shows I’ve ever seen. If it sounds a little too detached from reality, I’ll add that the show is set in Ukraine and stars then-comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who leveraged that show and attacks on the country’s corrupt politics to become president.
One reason I think it is such a fascinating watch is that, for the vast majority of us, Zelenskyy’s victory (in the show and in real life) represents a genuine and even inspiring populist victory. The setting could not be more fitting for the populist narrative. Three shady oligarchs, whose faces are constantly obscured so you can only hear their cynical voices and see them eat their opulent dinners, are portrayed as controlling the country’s politicians. So much so that when Zelenskyy’s character wins, each oligarch is sure that he was a puppet for one of the other two. The character has no political background, is completely clueless, but is a good guy trying to do good, and that sets up much of the satire of the show. We are cheering for him, just as we (or most of us) cheer Zelenskyy himself, who fought a corrupt establishment that was indeed heavily influenced by a malevolent foreign power. Is it despite the fact that Zelenskyy had no political background before rising to power, or because of it?
When it comes to Ukraine, most of us are populists. That’s because the logic of populism really does make sense when its premises are true. If the entire system is corrupt, sometimes it is more important for the leader to be brave and uncorruptible than it is for him to be competent and experienced. At the very least, it is easy to see the appeal in such a scenario.
***
My friend Michael Lipkin pointed me to the essay “The Constitution of Knowledge” by Jonathan Rauch, which another internet commenter recently pointed me to as well. I’ve been searching for exactly this kind of source in recent years: a serious document to make sense of how people are processing information in this populist age. Immediately as I started reading it, however, I felt a growing unease and disappointment. Here is a representative passage:
Though nowhere encoded in law, the constitution of knowledge has its own equivalents of checks and balances (peer review and replication), separation of powers (specialization), governing institutions (scientific societies and professional bodies), voting (citations and confirmations), and civic virtues (submit your beliefs for checking if you want to be taken seriously)…The community that follows these rules…is by no means limited to scholars and scientists. It also includes journalism, the courts, law enforcement, and the intelligence community — all evidence-based professions that require competing hypotheses to be tested and justified.
Essentially the essay tells us to trust these institutions while rejecting “trolls,” who operate outside these systems and disseminate fake news.
I broadly agree with Rauch that this is how things should work. But we are missing a deep problem if we fail to understand where this logic fails. And to do so, look no further than the United States in 2025.
When dealing with health misinformation, many of us do urge people to trust institutional sources of knowledge– the CDC, FDA, etc.– over people who “do their own research” or anti-establishment figures. Yet in 2025 we can see where this logic fails. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is Robert F Kennedy, Jr., and he is trying to take control of various health institutions by replacing existing figures with loyalists. The American Medical Association, for one, released a statement indicating that trust in this source of information for physicians and public health officials has now been compromised.
The intelligence community is a much more obvious example. I don’t know how many people have a consistently trusting attitude toward the intelligence community, but with Trump loyalists and conspiracy theorists now filling the number one and number two spots at the FBI, I don’t think many of us would trust even official information coming out of this organization. I think law enforcement is an even more obvious case.
The courts and media are more complex examples in the United States context, for different reasons. The US Supreme Court has lost a lot of trust in recent years, especially among Democrats and Independents, probably due to the fact that six of the current nine Supreme Court justices were nominated by Republican presidents, the controversy over the nomination of Merrick Garland, and specific landmark decisions made by the court, especially the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Some claim that the court has now been captured; I would argue otherwise, but certainly the impression is shared by many.
Meanwhile US media are so decentralized that it is hard to claim that they have been captured in any meaningful way, but some warning signs have emerged, like the Paramount settlement with Donald Trump over the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. As far as I understand, there is no legal interpretation under which Trump had a case, but the idea has been floated that this was an attempt (or a deal) to avoid the possibility of the Trump administration blocking a long-standing acquisition deal that Paramount is interested in. Continue this trend just a few more years and it’s clear how all these institutions in the US could be captured more or less completely. In other countries dominated by populist politics, like Venezuela under Chavez and Maduro, capture of media and the courts is much more obvious. For captured science, look no further than Egypt’s “miracle cure for HIV,” as developed by its military scientists.
In such cases, the forces of truth are often not to be found in the halls of government or established institutions, but among dissidents and anti-establishment figures, people like Maria Ressa and Alexei Navalny. Some of these will be castigated by the regime as trolls, and some will be independent bloggers rather than institutions.
***
The key point I’m trying to get across is not that we should be agreeing with the anti-institutional stream of current US politics. I’m as much of an institutionalist as anyone; there’s an unwritten post in my head titled “In praise of Mainstream Media.” But this approach is not universal; there are reasons that this is the right approach in this time and place, and as mentioned, there are a lot of caveats to this approach. Most of us have some issue or issues where we disagree with the prevailing ideas being propogated in most media outlets, or where we think some institution or other is wrong not only on the merits, but for some fundamental reason. Many populists have simply been convinced– incorrectly, in my view– that this kind of capture and bias is much more widespread, entrenched and malicious in the United States at this time. The goal must be to undermine that belief, to figure out how to persuade these groups that these institutions had not been so compromised as they’ve heard, and that the leaders they are supporting are much more so. I don’t know how to do that, but I know that attacking the very concept of populism universally is a dead end. Because given the right circumstances, we are all populists.
