A bit of an unusual leader article today. As we get closer to the election, we thought it might be a good idea to write down and clarify why we founded PolicySphere and why we believe it's a worthwhile endeavor.

We summed it up as Four Theses: Policy Matters, Good Policy Matters, The Policy Space Is More Influential Than You Think, and The Factions of the Right Are Going To Have To Start To Agree On Stuff.

Read on →

And, of course, as always, we welcome your feedback.

Policy News You Need To Know

#FEMA #Politics — People have been screaming about a recent statement by Secretary Mayorkas to the effect that FEMA "does not have the funds to make it through the […] season," and linking it to FEMA and DHS disbursals to illegal aliens. Mayorkas was not saying that FEMA's bank account was running dry. He was making a point about how the current CR that funds the government runs out in November. It's not a statement about FEMA as such, it's a statement about the budget dynamics in Congress. If Mayorkas should be attacked, it should be for politicizing a national tragedy, not for somehow running out of funds in FEMA's bank account (that's not how government funding works).

#POTUS — We're all supposed to act normally, apparently, but it is still a scandal and an outrage that the current President of the United States is, plainly to the eyes of the world, senile to the point of incapacity to discharge the duties of his office. This is just a statement of fact. We write this because yesterday, the President was asked about aid to states in the storm zone and answered: “Oh, storm zone? I didn’t know which storm you’re talking about." The President of the United States cannot reliably recall the existence of a natural disaster currently engulfing large swathes of several US states.

#Life — Melania Trump recently posted a video on X declaring her support for abortion, stating that she believes there can be "no room for compromise" on the issue.

#Infrastructure — New, timely study from the Pew Trusts: "43% of U.S. roadways were in poor or mediocre condition as of 2021. Backlogged maintenance costs are estimated at $435 billion."

#AI — You may have seen that Meta came out with some new virtual reality smart glasses. These ones are noteworthy because they look like regular glasses and so may end up being much more popular than Apple's bulky offering. Anyway, 404 Media reports that "someone put facial recognition on Meta's smart glasses to instantly dox strangers." As soon as you look someone in the eye, a face recognition tool infers their name. An AI then puts that name through people search services to immediately produce their phone number, address, family information, and so on. The developers did this with off-the-shelf technology. Meta responds that anyone could do this with any camera—this is true, but the difference is that with virtual reality Ray-Bans, it can be done automatically and instantly at scale. Welcome to the future!

#Econ #PeerReview #DEI — In 2014, the economist Lisa Cook produced a study purporting to show through the use of time series regressions that historic racial violence had a negative effect on the production of patents by black inventors. The study was widely cited in the media. In a new article at Econ Journal Watch, Michael Wiebe tries and fails to replicate her findings. Wiebe is extremely polite in how he phrases things, but Cook was able to obtain her results by cherry-picking which patents to include as part of her data set, and the most parsimonious explanation for how she was able to get such a convenient result from such a convenient dataset is fraud. Many such cases in academia, a sector lavishly funded by the taxpayer.

#DEI — Speaking of DEI, female, black applicants who failed the Maryland State Police tests are set to receive $2.75M in backpay from discrimination suit, The Blaze reports. These are applicants who failed such elementary (and completely race-neutral) tests such as being able to run a ten minute mile or touch their toes. But because the results of the tests show disparate impact, the Maryland State Police is going to have to pay up. And is responding in a very predictable way: by "relaxing the standards" for admission. How could this have unintended consequences, we wonder?

#HigherEd — During the anti-Israel protests earlier this year, student activists at UCLA set up a "Jew Exclusion Zone," segregating Jewish students and faculty and "preventing them from going to their classes, accessing the library, or participating in routine campus social life," according to a lawsuit by the great public interest law firm Becket Law. Incredibly, UCLA administration not only allowed this to happen, they even assigned security officers to protect the area. Just disgusting stuff. Universities that engage in blatantly anti-American actions should not receive one dime of taxpayer money or tax exemptions.

#Politics — Ruy Teixera, the (in)famous author of the "emerging Democratic majority" strategy, has changed his tune a little bit, it seems: "It’s getting late enough in the current cycle to venture an assessment of whether the rightward drift of Hispanics is continuing. Short answer: it is," he writes for the website The Liberal Patriot.

#Politics — The more educated Democrats are, the more inaccurate they are at perceiving opinion popularity among Republicans. (From Perception Gap, via Jonatan Pallesen)

Friday Essays

This week, we saw two equally depressing essays on the state of higher education today. The first, a much-shared essay by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, asserts (with evidence), that even elite college students are no longer capable of reading entire books. The other, in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Alan Levinovitz, may be even more important and depressing: it's on a trend that close watchers of the higher ed world have been noticing, but that few dared to discuss publicly: how higher ed's "maximally inclusive approach" to disability accomodations is creating chaos. After "trans," it looks like the next DEI protected class is going to be disability.

On a related theme, the great Abigail Shrier, previously the author of a very important book on "the transgender craze," has now taken on an even more controversial topic: psychotherapy. At the American Institute for Economic Research, Katelyn Walls Shelton reviews her new book, Bad Therapy.

Popular British Substacker Matt Goodwin has written a long, data-rich essay on why "the economic case for mass immigration is collapsing." The data keeps piling up, from numerous countries with different histories, welfare systems, and cultures, that most third world immigrants are a net drain on the public coffers.

Rogier Pielke, Jr. is a scientist who writes the excellent "Honest Broker" Substack. The newsletter started out as a non-ideological analysis of climate science, but has branched into all issues having to do with the honesty of science. He now has an essay on how peer reviewed has been weaponized to serve political ends.

Santi Ruiz writes the excellent "Statecraft" newsletter for the Institute for Progress, and his last one is on a very important topic: How to Build State Capacity.

IM-1776 is one of the sharpest new magazines on the Right. The writer Adam James Pollock writes about JD Vance's "Scots-Irish Futurism" and how Vance "could join a long line of Scots-Irishmen who shaped the future." Given how much of Vance's life and persona are shaped by his roots in the holler, this is an important angle.