We begin today with Jim Tankersley of The New York Times, writing about the internal debate among President Joe Biden’s economic aides. In dispute: Whether to use Tuesday’s State of the Union address to emphasize some of the unfulfilled items on Biden’s economic agenda, or to only tout successes.
President Biden’s top economic aides have battled for weeks over a key decision for his State of the Union address on Tuesday: how much to talk about child care, prekindergarten, paid leave and other new spending proposals that the president failed to secure in the flurry of economic legislation he signed in his first two years in office.
Some advisers have pushed for Mr. Biden to spend relatively little time on those efforts, even though he is set to again propose them in detail in the budget blueprint he will release in March. They want the president to continue championing the spending he did sign into law, like investments in infrastructure like roads and water pipes, and advanced manufacturing industries like semiconductors, while positioning him as a bipartisan bridge-builder on critical issues for the middle class.
Other aides want Mr. Biden to spend significant time in the speech on an issue set that could form the core of his likely re-election pitch to key swing voters, particularly women. Polls by liberal groups suggest such a focus, on helping working families afford care for their children and aging parents, could prove a winning campaign message.
Alana Semuels of TIME magazine wonders why CEOs are “fear-mongering” about an economic recession, given that most economic indicators are doing better than expected.
January’s unemployment rate was 3.4%, a 50-year low, as the U.S. economy added 517,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—more than double the 188,000 that economists had expected. Aside from the information sector, which contains both tech and media and lost 5,000 jobs from last month, just about every other industry added thousands of jobs—or hundreds of thousands, in the case of leisure and hospitality companies.
[...]
A recession is a “significant decline in economic activity” that is spread across sectors and lasts more than a few months, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and is officially determined by the agency. But many of the data points that the NBER uses to call a recession, including job growth and gross domestic product, have been strong of late. U.S. gross domestic product grew at a rate of 2.9% in the fourth quarter of 2022, following a 3.2% growth-rate in the third quarter. And there were 11 million job openings in December 2022, the government said earlier this week, more than in any of the four previous months.
That is to say, by most standard metrics, the U.S. economy is doing just fine. And the parts that have looked weak are directly related to how CEOs are feeling. About 98% of CEOs surveyed by the Conference Board going into the fourth quarter of 2022 said that they expected a U.S. recession. The reasons why are not entirely clear, but could be related to how the federal government has responded to recent inflation.
Carmen Reinicke of CNBC notes one indicator of the overall strength of the job market and the economy: The Black unemployment rate fell in January.
Friday’s January jobs report showed that employers added 517,000 jobs during the month, blowing past a Dow Jones consensus estimate of 187,000. At the same time, the overall unemployment rate fell to 3.4%, the lowest since 1969.
Looking at the data on Black workers shows some potentially promising signs.
The Black unemployment rate is sensitive to the labor market strengthening, which may be part of the reason it fell to 5.4% from 5.7% in January. Unemployment rates for white and Asian workers increased, though they remain at lower levels.
Other good signs in the report include the labor force participation rate and employment-to-population ratio, both of which increased in January for Black workers.
Dan Balz and Emily Guskin of The Washington Post look at a new Washington Post-ABC News poll that indicates little enthusiasm for a Donald Trump-Joe Biden rematch in the 2024 presidential election.
Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 49 percent say they prefer someone other than Trump as their nominee in 2024, compared with 44 percent who favor the former president. That too is statistically unchanged from last September.
More than 6 in 10 Americans (62 percent) say they would be “dissatisfied” or “angry” if Biden were reelected in 2024, while 56 percent say the same about the prospect of Trump returning to the White House for a second time.
Slightly more than one-third (36 percent) say they would be “enthusiastic” or “satisfied but not enthusiastic” if Biden were reelected while 43 percent say the same about a possible Trump victory in 2024. But negative sentiment is also notable. More than one-third (36 percent) say they would be angry if Trump wins while 30 percent say that about a Biden victory. Fewer than 2 in 10 are enthusiastic about Trump (17 percent), and just 7 percent are enthusiastic about Biden.
In a hypothetical matchup between Biden and Trump, 48 percent of registered voters today say they would favor Trump to 45 percent who say Biden, a gap within the poll’s margin of error. About 9 in 10 Democrats back Biden and about the same share of Republicans back Trump. Among independents, 50 percent favor Trump to 41 percent for Biden.
Mara Gay of
The New York Times excoriates The College Board for its decision to surrender to the whims of Florida Gov. Ron DeSatan on the Advanced Placement African American Studies course.
The College Board, though a nonprofit, is a fixture in the country’s education infrastructure. Taking its courses and succeeding on its exams has long been a way for savvy high school students to make themselves more attractive to the most selective colleges and, upon acceptance, win college credit.
The inclusion of Black history into this enterprise is a meaningful act.
[...]
The College Board could have sent a powerful message by standing with these Americans. Instead, its gestures at accommodation threw them under the bus, right along with bell hooks. A basic reading of the history board officials say they champion would make it clear that such accommodation will satisfy no one.
The question now is whether the majority of Americans in the middle, and at institutions like the College Board, are able to see the backlash clearly, not as some kind of culture war sideshow, but as the very lifeblood of the anti-democratic, sometimes violent political movement gaining currency in the United States.
Greg Sargent of The Washington Post features Midwestern Democratic governors as antidotes to Florida-style crackdowns on education.
Democratic governors can do more to advertise their states as places where Florida-style school crackdowns go to die.
Some Democratic governors — not just in coastal states but also in Midwestern ones — are beginning to test this idea. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has seized on DeSantis’s latest culture-warring — Florida’s decision to ban an Advanced Placement course in African American studies — to articulate a contrasting vision for what topics should be permitted in classrooms.
This week, Pritzker
singled out DeSantis as an “extremist,” after the College Board
introduced a revised AP course in Black studies in response to DeSantis’s attacks. Florida
nixed the old version for including topics such as “intersectionality” and “queer studies,” and the new version
removes explicit mentions of those or downgrades them to optional topics.
[...]
In coming months, Pritzker will grow more vocal on this front, a source familiar with his thinking tells me. He will amplify the case that restricting classroom topics works against kids’ interests and risks stunting intellectual growth, and that a more open approach sharpens their arguments and thinking, making them more competitive in the quest for higher education.
Danielle Allen, also of The Washington Post, gives an example of what she calls the need for “democracy renovation,” based on the model she knows best: her family.
As I grew up, civic engagement was all around me. My father had 11 brothers and sisters. Six family members, including my dad, migrated to California in the late 1950s and early ’60s, fleeing the Jim Crow South and seeking new opportunities and true freedoms. I grew up in a huge network of aunts, uncles and cousins, where participation was the rule. And they engaged across the political spectrum. In one glorious year in my youth, my aunt was on the ballot for Congress in the San Francisco Bay Area for the Peace and Freedom Party while my dad was running for the U.S. Senate from Southern California as a Reagan Republican.
Family gatherings were amazing forums for debate. My dad and aunt would go at it. He tall and skinny, bald, with a wreath of pipe-smoke curling around his head; she gay, built like a Mack truck, and with an incredible belly laugh. They agreed on what they were after: empowerment for themselves, their families and their communities. But they disagreed mightily on how to get there. My dad argued for market freedoms and civic virtues; my aunt for public-sector investment across society and experiments in living.
But they never broke the bonds of love. They debated the ideas, but they never fought the people. It was always clear that they would be there for one another, come what may. And both were empowered. They shaped their own fates and contributed to shaping the fates of their communities. That empowerment visibly nourished them. I could see it in their bearing, their energy and their success. This is where I learned my ideal of what democracy is, and why it matters.
Then our democracy became personal to me — for both its value and its failures.
Sophie Gardner of POLITICO sees the murder of a newly elected Sayreville, New Jersey, councilwoman this week as indicative of the dangers of online and offline violence directed at women in politics.
Dwumfour, a Republican, was only 30 years old. She was still a newcomer, serving her first term on the Sayreville Borough Council after being elected in November 2021. Her former campaign manager Karen Bailey Bebert told the New York Times that Dwumfour was an “inspirational woman” who was excited to get into politics at a young age.
Though the motive of the New Jersey councilwoman’s killer is still unclear, the story joins an array of high-profile headlines in the past few years that detail incidents of violence, or attempted violence, towards women in politics. Last week, a video was released of Paul Pelosi being struck in the head with a hammer by an intruder who intended to kidnap Nancy Pelosi. In July, a man with a loaded gun was arrested outside the house of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). Neighbors told The Washington Post that they heard him yell “go back to India” and threaten to kill Jayapal. And In 2020, several men were convicted for their participation in an elaborate plot to kidnap Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in the name of their anti-government ideals.
These are just some of the attempts at violence that materialized in real life, but a large sect of harassment towards female officials happens online and goes unreported.
I’m not even going to blame Ms. Gardner for the “… in 2020, several men were convicted ...” line; a decent editor was supposed to catch that error.
Miles J. Herszenhorn of The Harvard Crimson reports on the ouster of one of the foremost experts about online misinformation, Dr. Joan Donovan, by Harvard Kennedy School Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf.
Donovan was told she has until summer 2024 to end the Technology and Social Change project and depart from her role at HKS, according to the staff members. Donovan, who is not a tenure-track professor, has led the project since its inception in 2019 and serves as the Shorenstein Center’s research director. Donovan has also taught at HKS as an adjunct lecturer in public policy.
In addition, Donovan was told her prominence at the school led Elmendorf to end her time at the Shorenstein Center, two HKS staff members said.
HKS spokesperson James F. Smith confirmed in an emailed statement that the project is ending.
“The Technology and Social Change project is winding down — through an extended transition — because it does not have intellectual and academic leadership by a full HKS faculty member, as required of all long-term research and outreach projects at HKS,” Smith wrote.
Ben Smith of Semafor assesses the legacy of Dr. Donovan.
Donovan's departure from Harvard will mark the end of an era. She was the among the most visible of a group of academics and journalists who argued that false claims spread on social platforms by the populist right posed a central danger to American society. Her message was embraced by Democrats, and she testified before the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
But the notion that non-partisan researchers can separate "misinformation" from political argument has itself become bitterly contested, and Donovan sometimes drew criticism (including from me, in the New York Times) for what some saw as overreach.
Donovan was also a successful academic fundraiser, and her profile and the scale of her work often overshadowed other projects at the Kennedy School.
Maximiliana Wayne of the Modern War Institute at West Point says that ChatGPT technology will also increase the risk of misinformation and disinformation.
Before ChatGPT, inquisitive internet users would type inquiries into search engines like Google and browse search results, identifying a satisfactory answer to the query or synthesizing information from multiple sources into a satisfactory answer. Now, with ChatGPT, internet users can get instantaneous responses to natural language queries and requests, but responses that are unsourced, ultimately eliminating the possibility of having alternative viewpoints influence their perceptions.
Not only is the chatbot prone to producing misinformation and factual errors, but it is also predisposed to providing false information that sounds plausible and authoritative. Despite ongoing efforts to improve this issue, OpenAI’s CEO acknowledged that building a system in which AI sticks to the truth remains a major challenge. Individuals with little media literacy training or understanding are susceptible to consuming content that is incomplete or simply false, reflects biases, or is even intentionally fabricated.
Technology analysts highlight ChatGPT’s potential to manipulate its users “into doing things against their best interests.” This, then, can enable election manipulation, disruption of democratic processes, and dissemination of false information—regarding, for instance, the origins of COVID-19—by covertly influencing users to spread malicious content without realizing it. This type of technology is vulnerable to adversaries who may be inclined to pollute the data in their favor ...
Finally today, Heather Cox Richardson writes for her “Letters from an American” Substack about the downing of the Chinese spy balloon.
It seems logical that assessing what information the balloon was trying to gather would tell our intelligence services a great deal about what the Chinese feel unable to gather in less visible ways. This afternoon, senior defense officials seemed to confirm that observation. CNN national security reporter Natasha Bertrand wrote that such officials told reporters: “The surveillance balloon's overflight of US territory was of intelligence value to us... we were able to study and scrutinize the balloon and its equipment, which has been valuable.”
Republicans have used the balloon fiasco to score political points, flooding media with statements about Chinese spying on the U.S. and complaints that no one would have tried such a thing under former president Trump. On Thursday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said, “Biden should shoot down the Chinese spy balloon immediately…. President Trump would have never tolerated this. President Trump would have never tolerated many things happening to America.” (In fact, Trump tolerated at least three similar events, and as a member of the Homeland Security Committee, Greene should know this.) Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) complained that “[t]he administration failed to protect our border and now has failed to protect our skies.”
It’s Saturday night, so I will be a bit snarky: they need to get a grip. A key aspect of any country’s national security is spying, and of course China and the U.S. are spying on each other. Shooting the balloon down as soon as it was spotted would have endangered Americans and made learning anything from it more difficult.
Have a good day, everyone!