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Quitting is massively underrated, says Annie Duke, an author, doctor of psychology, and former professional poker player who holds a bracelet from the 2004 World Series of Poker.

Her latest book is Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away. Using examples ranging from Muhammad Ali's refusal to retire from boxing earlier in his career to the over-budget, much-delayed California high-speed rail project to catastrophic American wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, she makes the case that blind commitment to grit and stick-to-it-iveness routinely leads us down the wrong path is our careers, politics, and personal lives.

She talks about misleading mental tics like the sunk-cost fallacy, the cult of identity, and the endowment effect, and how to understand and reverse them in our personal lives, our work, and our politics. She earned her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, getting her degree in 2023 after taking a 30-year break from academia. We talk about how her experience of knowing when to quit in poker—and higher education—informed her high regard for knowing when to head for the exits.

(To see a Reason interview about Duke's previous book Thinking in Bets, go here).

The post Why We Need To Quit More in Politics, Work, and Life appeared first on Reason Magazine.

After their invention in the late 1800s, sneakers became a pop-culture staple by the 1970s and '80s with models like the Adidas Superstar, Puma Clyde, and Nike Air Force 1. But it wasn't until the release of the Air Jordan in 1985 that sneaker fandom became an international obsession and evolved into a disruptive shoe market. 

Resellers all over the world feed sneakerheads' voracious appetite for shoes. Some act like speculative investors, stocking up on inventory as a bet that prices will rise, sometimes yielding enormous profits. Others sell their own, re-imagined versions of the popular shoes, making up part of a growing segment of the market characterized by both creativity and controversy. 

Take for example Naady, who sells his re-imagined versions of the Air Jordan 1 under his independent clothing label, Global Heartbreak. Along with his childhood friend Teeb, Naady has been designing their customized sneakers.

 "My father owned a clothing brand since I was a little kid, so when I grew up, I just became a sneakerhead. I wanted to customize my own sneaker," Naady tells Reason. 

While at first glance the shoe might look like an Air Jordan 1, a closer look will reveal the differences—from original colors and details to a unique logo. Instead of the famous Nike Swoosh, Naady's shoes have a broken heart pierced by a needle. 

In today's decentralized, makers' economy, Naady was able to contract directly with a manufacturer in China to produce his inventory despite running a small, independent clothing label.

"I'm sending 'em a file of exactly what I want. I ask the manufacturers to send videos of the whole process from scratch. You could get a good sneaker for about $65. We sold a hundred shoes at $150. We didn't even triple profit. I don't like to break pockets. I want the people from where I'm from to be able to purchase it. We made money back, but it was more so about pushing the art," Naady continued. 

Although Naady and Teeb don't produce enough shoes for Nike to take notice, the sneaker giant has been cracking down on derivative designers like them. The most prominent lawsuit is against the trendsetting Japanese fashion brand A Bathing Ape (BAPE for short). 

"BAPE was most known in sneakers for making the BAPE STA, which is a version of the Air Force 1 that replaces the Nike swoosh with a shooting star logo across the side. If you look at the shoe and you know anything about sneakers, you know immediately that's based on the Air Force 1," explains Brendan Dunne, editor of the leading online sneaker magazine Sole Collector and co-host of the YouTube sneaker show Full Size Run. "You don't have to be a sneaker obsessive to see the things that these models have in common."

Nike sued BAPE over the design in January 2023, calling the BAPE STA a knockoff of the Air Force 1 and arguing that BAPE was infringing upon Nike's intellectual property and trade dress. Ultimately, Nike asked the court to stop BAPE from selling the shoes. 

"This action from Nike comes amid a wave of recent litigation where they're trying to swat down all these makers who create these shoes that look a lot like Nike shoes and are very much based on the success of Nike shoes," Dunne adds. 

Dunne believes that Nike has begun to aggressively crack down on derivative shoes because there are "more of them than there ever were before."  But the reinvention of its popular shoes might actually be a good thing for Nike.

"We usually think that copying destroys incentives to innovate. But in the fashion world, copying is actually what creates the incentives to innovate," says New York University Law professor Christopher Sprigman, who co-authored the book The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation.

"Copying helps set trends. Trends sell fashion. Copying is what helps kill trends. Copying is what helps set the trend that comes next. So, the fashion cycle runs, and the fashion industry's successive waves of innovation depend on copying," Sprigman adds. 

"I feel like from an artistic standpoint, everything comes from something. Nothing's truly original. Yeah, this is something you've seen before, but it doesn't take anything away from it being personal to us," Teeb explains.

Yet, there is a big difference between sneaker derivatives, such as BAPES or Naady's designs, and replicas, which attempt to mimic Nike's models by remaking them exactly as the originals, argues Sprigman.

Most sneakerheads dislike illegal replicas, but "reps" are often so much more affordable than the real thing, that many sneaker lovers buy them anyway.

"A lot of the money spent these days on replica sneakers has to do with recreations of shoes that are not authorized by the companies but still look exactly like and feel exactly like or as close to exact as possible," says Dunne.

Nike has the legal right to go after replicas, according to Sprigman, but believes that trying to stop these counterfeits is fruitless and also a form of class bias. On the contrary, Dunne believes that it's still in Nike's best interest to take legal action against knockoffs and replicas but "feel[s] like Nike's battle against bootleg makers is a game of Whac-A-Mole more than anything else." 

BAPE is still selling sneakers, and the company has filed for dismissal of Nike's lawsuit. A handful of other cases have been dropped or settled out of court, with derivative designers agreeing to stop selling their products. 

While it is not clear if Nike's legal campaign will succeed in shutting down this creative segment of the sneaker market, artists like Naady only see their businesses expanding, continuing to use popular shoes as inspiration for their designs.

Photos: AP Photo/Joe Holloway Jr., Tonya Wise/London Ent/Splash/Newscom

Music: Artlist: Luc Allieres - Struttin/Mansij - Cortado/ZAC - Cautious - Instrumental Version/Tamuz Dekel - Blue Beings/Steven Beddall - I Need You - Instrumental Version/Phury - Fifth Avenue

The post Why Is Nike Stomping On Independent Creators? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

After a dozen years of legal tussles, seven years in the crosshairs of ambitious prosecutors, and five-and-a-half years fighting a federal case that saw his business forcibly shuttered, his assets seized, and his longtime partner dead by suicide, alt-weekly newspaper impresario Michael Lacey was found guilty Thursday on just one of the 86 criminal charges levied against him in connection with the online advertising platform Backpage. But the government's fanatical pursuit of Lacey and his four other Backpage co-defendants is far from over. 

Lacey, an award-winning investigative journalist, was found guilty of international concealment money laundering, which could land him in prison for up to 20 years, and not guilty of international promotional money laundering. But after a week of contentious deliberations, the jury could not come to agreement on the other 84 charges, prompting U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa to declare a second mistrial in this case. That means Lacey could face a third federal trial essentially for the crime of running a classified ads site that knowingly enabled and profited from illegal, if consensual, transactions involving sex.

Thanks to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, the speech and conduct of website consumers is considered to be the legal responsibility of the speakers themselves, not the owners of the platform. This has been a thorn in the side of politicians and other would-be censors ever since. In 2013, Kamala Harris and 46 other state attorneys general sent a joint letter to Congress urging a rollback of Section 230; the letter started like this: "Every day, children in the United States are sold for sex. In instance after instance, state and local authorities discover that the vehicles for advertising the victims of the child sex trade to the world are online classified ad services, such as Backpage.com."

Seven weeks before her election to the U.S. Senate, Harris, along with her Texas counterpart Ken Paxton, brought the first criminal case against Lacey, his partner Jim Larkin, and other executives at Backpage, who were paraded in a Sacramento courtroom cage wearing orange jumpsuits. That case was tossed out by a judge who pointed out: "Congress did not wish to hold liable online publishers for the action of publishing third party speech….It is for Congress, not this court, to revisit." 

But just three days before leaving the A.G.'s office for the Senate, Harris filed yet another Backpage case, which was yet again thrown out (partially) because of Section 230. Once in Congress, Harris helped push through the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, which does peel back Section 230 to make websites liable for the "facilitation" or "promotion" of prostitution by their users, even though prostitution itself is not a federal crime. 

This latest retrial did not rely on FOSTA, but the defense was barred by the judge from even bringing up Section 230, on grounds that the law is only applicable to state crimes, not federal crimes. That was one of many odd bench rulings in the case; the defense filed five unsuccessful motions for a mistrial, with a sixth still pending over possibly exculpatory material withheld by the prosecution until after closing arguments had been made. 

As part of the jury verdict Thursday, former Backpage executives Scott Spear and John Brunst were found guilty of conspiracy to facilitate prostitution, as well as on over 20 counts apiece for money laundering, plus an additional 18 prostitution counts for Spear. The two men could very easily spend the rest of their lives in prison. The other two defendants, Andrew Padilla and Joy Vaught, were found not guilty on their 51 prostitution counts, with Vaught's attorney Joy Bertrand saying after the verdict, "My client should have never been in this case. She was charged and pressured to cooperate and assist the government, and she had the courage to say no," and also, the case "should never have been brought…[because] it's an offense to the First Amendment." Bertrand also added, "They come after this platform, they come after other platforms next….This affects everybody."

This precedent, in combination with FOSTA's degradation of Section 230, means that publishers of websites that include user-generated content are considerably more vulnerable to being held criminally liable for the conduct of their customers. It will chill speech, by design. Politicians wanted first Craigslist, and now Backpage, to get out of the online sex-ads business; now that activity has moved to more shadowy areas of the black market. 

This has had bad consequences for sex workers, sex consumers, and vice cops alike. When Backpage was still active, the federal government praised it in detail for assisting law enforcement in identifying sex traffickers and other criminals. In 2021, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded in a report that the FBI's ability to identify victims and sex traffickers has decreased significantly because, "with backpage.com no longer in the market, buyers and sellers moved to other online platforms, and the market became fragmented."

All of this heavy-handed prohibitionism has come in the name of fighting underage sex-trafficking, yet literally none of the criminal charges against Backpage during these many years has had anything to do with the stuff. In fact, the unsubstantiated accusation that the company was a party to sex trafficking is why the first federal case was declared a mistrial in 2021—prosecutors couldn't stop using the phrase.

Mike Lacey and the late Jim Larkin, with nearly a half-century between them fighting free speech battles against intrusive politicians, both insisted from the outset of their legal odyssey that the Backpage prosecutions were an attack on the First Amendment. Yet this case, and the lives prosecutors have wrecked, has received scant national attention from journalists and free speech advocates. Decades ago, gleeful smut-peddlers like Larry Flynt were hailed as First Amendment heroes and given the Hollywood biopic treatment; these days, the mere act of publishing sex ads online is enough to send most potential free speech allies scurrying for the exits. Lacey and Larkin deserved more from us, and the government deserves to do much less.

Music Credits: "Blue Beings" by Tamuz Dekel via Artlist; "Im on Your Side" by IamDayLight via Artlist

Photos Credits: Jose Luis Villegas/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Hector Amezcua/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Joel Lerner / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; US House TV via CNP/picture alliance / Consolidated News Photos/Newscom; Associated Press

The post Backpage: The Monumental Free Speech Case the Media Ignored appeared first on Reason Magazine.

"I'm under no illusion that humanity will completely eradicate the racial tribal instinct or racism or bigotry itself. But I feel that colorblindness is the North Star that we should use when making decisions," argues Coleman Hughes during a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City.

Hughes is a writer, podcaster, and opinion columnist who specializes in issues related to race, public policy, and applied ethics. His new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America is about returning to the ideals of the American Civil Rights movement because our departure from the "colorblind ideal has ushered in a new era of fear, paranoia, and resentment." When his recent TED talk was seen as "hurtful" by some TED conference attendees, for example, he discovered that TED actually suppressed his presentation. Hughes describes how that situation left him concerned, "that TED, like many organizations, is caught between a faction that believes in free speech and viewpoint diversity and a faction that believes if you hurt my feelings with even center left, center right or, God forbid, right-wing views, you need to be censored." 

The post The End of Race Politics appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Behind the scenes of a traditional bathhouse in Brooklyn, something extraordinary is taking place: The pools, heated to 104 degrees, are not warmed by conventional means but by computers mining for bitcoin.

A profit-seeking drive for energy efficiency has caused bitcoin miners to pop up in unexpected places, such as Jason Goodman's New York bathhouse, where the cost of heating his pools is about the same as it was before he plugged in the bitcoin miners, but now with the bonus of earning bitcoin.

Goodman credits traditional bathhouses for helping him through a tough time when he first moved to New York City. He started Bathhouse in 2019 because he wanted to re-create the life-changing experiences he underwent for the "hardcore sauna-heads, for those who are trying to optimize their performance, longevity, and overall health." 

And then he had a cutting-edge idea of how to make it better.

"It kind of clicked in my mind," Goodman adds. "Bitcoin mining is really important. Bitcoin mining produces heat as a byproduct. I buy energy to create heat. That's interesting." 

Instead of cooling the mining computers with fans, Goodman submerges them in a specially engineered fluid that doesn't conduct electric current but, instead, absorbs the heat that the computers produce. A heat exchanger then transfers it into hot water that moves directly into the pools. "I was able to make hot water very easily," Goodman explains. 

Bitcoin mining wasn't designed for heating hot tubs. It was designed to facilitate a new type of digital money with a supply that no single entity can alter or control. A central bank cannot create new ones—they can only be mined by computers scattered around the world running the bitcoin protocol, and there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. These computers compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle that the protocol makes just hard enough to ensure it's solved roughly every 10 minutes. Solve the puzzle, unlock a block of transactions to be validated and added to the blockchain, and earn bitcoin. 

The more computing power someone has, the better their chances of earning bitcoin. But more computing power means using more energy. 

"Bitcoin miners are in a relentless, unquenchable search across the globe for the cheapest possible energy," explains Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation and author of Check Your Financial Privilege.

"Be energy neutral and earn bitcoin. That was what we wanted to prove to ourselves," Goodman tells Reason. "A dream scenario would be that every hotel, every major residential building, every major office building starts converting their boiler system or their heating system or their hot water system over to a system…like we're using and have a massively distributed hard-to-control mining network."

For bitcoiners, keeping the process distributed and hard to control is the whole point. As Caitlin Long, founder of bitcoin-focused Custodia Bank, explains, the main purpose of bitcoin is to have an honest ledger where people can store value that cannot be manipulated.

Bitcoin mining ties the world's first decentralized digital currency to the physical world. But bitcoin remains borderless, seeking to exploit inefficiency wherever it can, whether that's a Brooklyn bathhouse, an unmarked warehouse in Venezuela, or the small rural town of Washington, Georgia. 

Mayor Bill DeGolian of Washington welcomed CleanSpark, one of America's largest bitcoin miners, to his town because it allowed the miner to buy energy at a bulk discount. 

"They're buying a lot of power from the city. And that's what helps the city…with what we're selling to CleanSpark, the amount of power they buy per month from us is more than all of our other commercial and residential customers combined," DeGolian said. 

At its Norcross operation, an 87,000-square-foot facility on the outskirts of Atlanta, CleanSpark is using the same immersion cooling technique that Goodman uses in his bathhouse to cool 4,300 bitcoin miners. The technique allows the company to spend less money to power the A.C. needed to cool the giant rooms where they keep the computers.

"We're removing that environmental factor where ambient temperature goes up and down and we constantly fight the environmental curve," Bradley Audiss, senior director of operations at CleanSpark in Norcross, tells Reason. "Immersion is very much a flat line as compared to air cooled that has the fluctuations which are primarily tied to hot temperatures."

For some, bitcoin is the real Green New Deal. According to Gladstein, bitcoin subsidizes renewable energy because "the projects are made profitable by the ability to monetize that energy right away….So rather than monetizing [public] debt [by printing money], we can have the market kind of power this process."

But critics still consider the energy that is going to mining to be a complete waste. Some countries have banned bitcoin mining, and the Biden administration wants to tax it heavily. Even Goodman felt the backlash when he announced he was heating the bathhouse with bitcoin mining. 

 Bitcoiners say the ability of miners to sponge up and then release energy at a moment's notice makes the grid more reliable, which is why utilities partner with them. Take Texas bitcoin miner Marshall Long. His mining company's partnership with Texas' grid manager helped avert a summer blackout.

"What makes miners particularly good is because I'm not only a large user, I'm a granular user. So I don't have to turn off my entire load at once," Long said. "I can just turn off one miner or 200 miners or 2,000 miners in order to respond to certain things that are going on in the grid throughout the day."

"We're starting to see with…bulletproof scientific evidence that…bitcoin miners are actually helping and not hurting," Long added. 

Miners aren't shutting down during peak hours out of altruism but because of market incentives. CleanSpark, for example, monitors energy prices on a minute-by-minute basis and shuts down the moment its operation starts to become unprofitable, freeing up power for the rest of the grid. 

Even in places like Venezuela, where bitcoin mining boomed thanks to the government subsidizing energy to near-zero cost, bitcoin is forcing energy innovation. Miners are taking responsibility for fixing power lines that the government fails to maintain. 

"We take care of the electrical infrastructure so that it is not damaged," explained a major Venezuelan bitcoin miner who fled to Miami and asked to remain anonymous. "For example, if we see that we have a voltage problem or an electrical factor in the area that affects us and can affect the community or the area where we are, we will try to improve it as much as possible, because if we do not improve it, our miners will not work well." 

Bitcoin is too decentralized and too enriching for even the most powerful governments to stop at this point. The choice America faces isn't whether to allow mining to exist or not, but whether to welcome it here in a vibrant market economy where it can bootstrap new energy sources and its byproducts can create economic value.

Music by "Isolated" by Theevs via Artlist; "Vuelta al Sol" by Tomas Novoa via Artlist; "Density Wave" by Aviad Zinemanas via Artlist; "Better on the Other Side" by Flint via Artlist; "Outrun" by WEARETHEGOOD via Artlist; "Full Access" by Jimmy Svensson via Artlist; "Timelines" by Charlie Ryan via Artlist; "Light Reflection" by Luke Melville via Artlist; "Beer House" by Alex Grohl via Artlist; "Secret Weapon" by Evgeny Bardyuzha via Artlist; "Left Unturned" by Jamie Bathgate via Artlist

The post The Future of Energy? Brooklyn's Bitcoin-Heated Bathhouse appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Swedish historian Johan Norberg is author of The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World, which caught the eye of Elon Musk, who tweeted, "This book is an excellent explanation of why capitalism is not just successful, but morally right."

Norberg wrote the book to combat a growing belief on the right and the left that libertarian values of individual autonomy, property rights, limited government, and free enterprise are failing to raise living standards and need to be ditched in favor of more centralized power and control over virtually all aspects of our lives.

A senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Norberg shows that life is actually getting better for all of us—especially the world's poor—and that economic globalization, political liberalization, and cultural freedom are the main drivers of that improvement. He talks about how liberals and conservatives get the past wrong, why he's not worried about China's supposedly unstoppable economic growth, and why the cases for free trade, free expression, and more immigration need to be constantly updated and renewed. He also explains why he's a libertarian and not an anarchist. Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke to Norberg in Washington, D.C., in late September. 

Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below. 

Reason: Many Americans are saying, "Well, you know what? Since China joined the World Trade Organization in the 21st century, we have just seen massive deindustrialization. The Midwest is beyond the Rust Belt. Everything has gone to hell in the United States." That's not really true, right? 

Johan Norberg: The middle class is shrinking, but that's because it's moving up. If you look at those indicators, and specifically, if you look at not just dollars and cents. We should do that too because it is important to lay to rest the whole idea of wage stagnation, which was really a period in the 1970s and the 1980s when many sectors had increased wages much faster than productivity. They had to scale that back or they would've been destroyed completely.

After 1990, we've seen rapid wage increases in the U.S., 30 to 60 percent depending on whether you're taking full compensation, including nonmonetary like health insurance and stuff. Also, it's important to mention goods and services. It's not dollars and cents. We want to be able to buy something—most amenities that were considered luxuries just decades ago are now getting close to 100 percent distribution in the United States. People under the poverty threshold in the U.S. now have more amenities like T.V. sets, washing machines, dryers, and of course, computers and cellphones than the average American had in 1970.

It seems like not everything was destroyed. Why is that? Well, one reason is that we did deindustrialize, meaning fewer people have to work in factories to create the goods we want. We haven't deindustrialized in an absolute sense. We produce more now than probably at any other station in America's history, but it's been a success story. It's a rise in productivity, which means that we can make the goods with automation, make the goods more competitive and affordable to most people. That's what successful countries do.

There is a great section in The Capitalist Manifesto where you talk about the myth of working in Detroit in the 1950s and how the peak of industrial workers in the United States as a share of the labor force was actually in the 1940s. It was already declining in the 1950s. Can you talk a bit about that?

Yeah, it looked good compared to the rest of the economy because it was awful working in agriculture and in domestic traditional industry. Comparatively it was better than in many other places. Now we have this kind of nostalgic, gross, tinted image of what it was like. It's important to go back, and there are some historical projects interviewing the workers who really did the job and they're telling us, first of all, I do this so that my son will not have to stand and work in a factory like this because it is awful. It's dangerous, it's dirty, and you can lose an arm or two if you're not careful. 

Also, very insecure jobs, very rapid turnover. When I look at different cohorts, it turns out that there was one cohort in Detroit in 1953. They had fairly secure jobs, got a good decent wage, unionized, and so the whole myth of Western manufacturing is based on one city in one year. What did they get, the ones who got those best jobs? Well, adjusted for inflation, they get what you would get as a starting wage in an Amazon warehouse today. 

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that fewer men between the ages of 25 and 54 are actively in the labor force?

If people are able to work and want to work, it's a good thing, they should. They shouldn't be doing other things. That has been declining, but it has been declining for a very long time. That's important to point out. This is not something that happened when China entered the World Trade Organization, and it did not happen with NAFTA. It started after the Second World War basically, and it was actually much faster. The increase in men outside of the labor force was at a much higher rate in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s than in this era of globalization. It tells you that there's something else going on other than just competition. It seems like we are pretty bad at retraining and having the kind of mobility in the work force that we would want, but most of these people are then counted as disabled and they're in various programs rather than standing in the work force.

You actually went around the United States and talked to people who were on welfare. What did you find?

Well, I learned that you have to be very smart and hardworking to be poor and unemployed in the U.S., because the systems are so incredibly complex and they come from a wide variety of sources and they're based on different metrics. They then are also discounted and lost at various points when you make more of an income than you used to. What they told me is that it feels hopeless. It feels like there's nothing they can do to change their situation. One of them told me that, doing the calculations from four different benefits systems, if she increases her wage from $29,000 to $30,000, many of the benefits she receives would disappear, leaving her actual take-home income cut in half, so that she just makes $15,000.  t. In a way, the marginal tax rate for the poor and unemployed is much higher than for the rich.

They know that it's hopeless, basically, to go out there and sacrifice time, energy, and transportation costs to get a job because they notice that they don't make money.

Is there an easy solution to that problem?

Well, I wish. Welfare's complicated—there is no perfect social benefit system. The moment you start paying people when they are unemployed and disabled, you also subsidize it. You also buy more of it and it's difficult to get out of it, but there are versions of a negative income tax that would at least make sure that you always keep more of what you earn. So that you don't have to do all these calculations and feel like it seems impossible. 

Is that an argument for a universal basic income or a negative income tax? 

It seems like a UBI would be incredibly expensive if everybody's supposed to have it or it wouldn't help the poorest as much. Perhaps some sort of negative income tax ensures or supports wages for the poorest. It seems like a better way to go about it.

Can you quickly define what "deaths of despair" are, and what did you find when you started looking into what's going on with that?

Well, it's a famous and depressing concept coined by Angus Deaton and his wife Anne Case Deaton, "deaths of despair." And they're including various sorts of self-harm, broadly speaking. Could be drug overdoses, alcoholism, or suicide. I think when we look at it, this is kind of controversial among scholars because when you look at it might be that we're just talking about a drug overdose epidemic, but that's the real thing that sets this apart. What they mean and what many take away from it is that there's something related to how people live, a sense of despair that makes them live in this kind of self-destructive way. This has increased dramatically. Why is that? Many say it's strange as the society gets richer and more open, some blame it then on ruthless capitalism and free markets. 

As Angus Deaton points out himself, you can hear it in the very word of globalization. It's global. It happens everywhere. All these forces, but it seems like it's specifically happening in the U.S. rather than in other places. More economically free countries in the West have not had the same increase in deaths of despair to this extent.

Inequality is flat in the United States or declining globally. So how do you explain the "deaths of despair"? 

Well, I mean, one thing is this might be very much a drug overdose epidemic rather than anything else. Perhaps there are things related to drug laws and the unsafe drugs that are being used. So this is one angle. 

The other thing is that we know that it's bad for your health and you shorten your life if you feel like you're worthless; it's impossible to change your situation. You're not needed anywhere. This is, I think, one of the greatest challenges to modern welfare states like America's, because it seems like economically, I mean, it's all right. We can probably afford to have a larger group of people outside of the work force. We can pay for it all and hand them benefits and they stay at home. This sense of being rejected, not needed anywhere, and not being able to change your life circumstances.

Another accelerator supposedly in the decline of lifestyle or standards of living in the United States has to do with China. Could you talk about your view of China? 

Right. There is one unifying narrative about China that I get a lot from both the left and the right and the center, and it's that they're so incredibly smart. They have a plan for everything, how to invade our markets and take our jobs with the very clever industrial policy and picking certain companies, subsidizing them, and dumping their goods here and buying.

I must say the worrying implication is that so many Americans say we have to imitate them. We have to be like that in order to beat them. That's one reason why we get the support for protectionism and industrial policy right now. They do have industrial policy. They are trying to pick winners. They're trying to get the heavy hand of the government back into the economy. That's a fairly new phenomenon. This started to happen around the global financial crisis and especially after Xi Jinping took power. This is not what's making China rich. This is what risks making it poor. It's a terrible destruction of resources that is going on. You can see that they're handing the subsidies, the cheap credits to the least productive companies, and they become less productive once they do this. It's very important, I think, to get the history of China's economic rise right.

Is China still on the rise?

Oh, I think so. For sure. China had a good run. It was an impressive rise, and it happened precisely in the areas where they began to liberalize and open up big time. It was a success of market forces in China. Now that's over. They've begun to retreat. The government is back in business, and that's really undermining business, and it comes at a very bad time. 

China is still a very poor country. I mean, it's just that it's big, but it's as far as the Dominican Republic or Gabon, so they would need, if they wanted to go on the trajectory of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, under their good years, they would have to grow 5, 7 percent per capita for a couple more decades. That is not happening. 

How has widespread pessimism about the environment affected how people view their future? 

Actually, what we've seen again over the past two decades is one of the greatest achievements when it comes to the environment ever. I mean, it's fairly recently we started to care about nature and about the future. Now in the past decades, we've reduced most of the pollutants, emissions. We are beginning to see growth of forests again in rich countries, in most countries actually around the world. We're beginning to see rewilding going on, cleaner water in all those areas—tremendous achievements. 

Where does this happen? If you go to the Environmental Performance Index, looking at 40 different indicators of environmental conditions around the world, they point out that GDP per capita is a pretty strong explainer for what's going on. The richer you are, the more you can also afford to care about the planet. 

We get richer and then we demand a cleaner environment, does that limit what happens in the marketplace? 

Quite right. It does. It's not always the case. Some of this is driven by consumers and by businesses just wanting something better and cleaner, but quite often it's also some sort of mandates or taxes.

You engage with Patrick Deneen, an American academic who's an illiberal right-winger who says, "Liberalism has been tried and it fails and it fails partly because it generates loose connections and we don't know how to live our lives." Is he onto something?

I don't think he is. He makes a very strong case rhetorically. He explains that we're becoming increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves, replete with rights and defined by our liberty but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone. Of course, we can all understand what he's getting at because life is tough. 

There's an epidemic of headlines saying that there's a loneliness epidemic, but when researchers look at it, it's very difficult to find something like that. Yes, we spend more time alone than we used to. There are more single households than before, but it seems like we enjoy that. It seems like actually single households and people who spend less time with others also, often say that they're less lonely than others. It might be that we're also choosing our relationships in ways that make them more fruitful and important to us, and we adapt them to our individual lives. 

Overall, when you really look at the data, it doesn't seem like we are seeing a rise globally when it comes to mental illness or loneliness or anything like that. What we have been seeing is that many conditions that we saw before, we've started to use other terminology to describe them, often a mental illness terminology.

You were saddened, you had to lay down for two weeks. That's what we used to say about parents when mom was feeling bad. Now it's depression, now it's a clinical condition, and that's something else. For good and ill, I think we're overdiagnosing some of these things. We might have turned too often to doctors when we should talk to a friend, but I also think this is a way in which we take some of these problems seriously for the first time. 

In my parents' generation, they would never talk about how they felt and their mental conditions. You'd go to a doctor if you lost a leg, but you would never do it if you broke your heart or anything like that. In some ways the stigma is gone, even though it might result in over-diagnosis, it's also a sign that we actually care and we're trying to do something, and then we get the right therapy. Cognitive behavior therapy, it has excellent results. Doing that is not a sign of a sick society. I think it's a sign of a healthy society.

Why are people so pessimistic about living in the time that we live in now?

Yeah, that is exactly the reason why I wrote this book, because it's an uphill battle right now, and I've noticed that you tend to ruin good dinner parties by explaining that we're not going to die, and I understand we should care about global warming. Look, 40 countries have been able to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in absolute terms while growing their economies in the past decade.

People are often invested in their problems and in the problems of the world, and it's part of their identity and the fact that they care about it, it's important to them. Telling them that, "Look, it's actually better than you think," might be threatening ironically. When you look at every single data point, if you're talking about extinction of mammals or if you're talking about carbon dioxide separately, if you're talking about poverty in Bangladesh, people pay attention to those things and they listen to the data and they're interested in the story.

Do your children seem optimistic about the future?

Well, they do come home from school and tell me that we're going to die suffocating in plastics from the oceans as well. There is that, and I noticed that among the generation. However, I don't know why, if it's genetics or something else, but they tend to be on the more optimistic side than their classmates and think about solutions to things. 

For example, my oldest son is sort of always trying to make school projects about nuclear power and how we can make it cheap and safe, and this will give us unlimited energy for the future.

Do you think nuclear power is going to make a resurgence?

I think so, but we're going to need something better. I think actually we ruined it the last time around by having the government pick nuclear power as the winner. That's what we thought in the 1960s. Let's just build them right now, big, expensive, because the technology wasn't right there. It became too expensive and difficult to continue with it. Let's hope we don't repeat that mistake because at least on paper, there are some kind of promising, smaller-scale, cheaper solutions.

We have to be the masters of our own destinies. And I took for granted how incredible and liberating that is. Has everyone forgotten that idea? 

Yeah, I'm fond of this old Eastern European proverb: If you don't have food, you have one problem. If you have food, you have a thousand problems. Obviously, you start to think about your life and every aspect of it, how you're going to make sure that things work out for the best. Obviously, that's anxiety-inducing. 

If you don't have those options, if you don't have those freedoms, those who say that they have the least chance to change their lives and decide what to do when it comes to education, career, and so on, then it shows up in clinical diagnosis, then it turns into mental illness. There are different versions of anxiety, and some are better than others, but I do understand the temptation. 

We come from a long prehistory of living in bands and tribes and someone telling us what to do, and sometimes it feels liberating just having that strong man telling you, "I know the answer to the question," and it takes some novels and some research to really find out that the way in which we really create more decent societies and more fulfilled lives is not to just follow that one rule, but to find the way within us.

It's important to point out that there are many different versions of meaning, and I think we can pick that up by looking at polls, because all these claims from Deneen and others, they're very rarely backed up by any kind of empirical data. They just point out that you should all be miserable because how could you vulgar people ever find meaning and tackle Tuesday and bad TV shows? That's why intellectuals shouldn't run our lives, because they have another set of preferences than we do in another meaning of life. We can pick up in polls how people are doing in individualist societies compared to collectivist ones, rich societies compared to poor ones. No matter what intellectuals say, it shows up again and again, a very clear pattern: People say that they're happier in rich, free societies, individualist societies. They feel less lonely than they do in poorer and less free societies, and they also think that they have more friends they can rely upon. They also say that they're more willing to help others when they are in need. All these indicators, once you stop being so myopic and just looking at one year in the U.S. but look around the world, comparing different systems, different populations, then you see that we're actually not in the best of possible worlds, but the best one so far.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

The post Capitalism Made Us All Richer. So Why Are We Unhappy? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

"We've taught young people that any of their missteps or any of their heterodox opinions are grounds to tear them down. That's no way to grow up." 

That was journalist Rikki Schlott speaking before a sold-out crowd on Monday night at a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City. Schlott, 23, teamed up with Greg Lukianoff to co-write The Canceling of the American Mind.

Lukianoff, 49, is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and co-author with Jonathan Haidt of the bestselling  The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Schlott is a fellow at FIRE, a New York Post columnist, and a co-host of the Lost Debate podcast. 

Cancel culture, they argue, constitutes a serious threat to free speech and open inquiry in academia and the workplace, and is best understood as a battle for power, status, and dominance.

Watch the video of the full event, and find a condensed transcript below. 

Reason: What's the elevator pitch for this book? Why is it relevant now?

Rikki Schlott: Well, I think it's twofold. On the first front, people are still saying that cancel culture does not exist, which is absolutely crazy and defies all statistics fundamentally. But also, cancel culture is not just about the people that are torn down, it's about the epistemic crisis that it creates and the devastation of the body of common knowledge that we all share, and also the undermining of trust between people. 

And for me as a young person, the undermining of being able to grow up and have the freedom to fumble and make mistakes as well. So I think it's important on a ton of different levels.

Reason: What is the working definition of cancel culture?

Greg Lukianoff: Basically, we're trying to give the historical era that we're in a name. I'm a First Amendment lawyer. I'm big on the history of freedom of speech. And a lot of what we call mass censorship events have names. So Alien Sedition 1798, the Red Scare One in the 1920s, Red Scare Two, also known as McCarthyism, the Comic Book Scare, etc.  

So basically we're proposing more or less that this be a historical definition of a unique and weird period where there's been a lot of people losing their jobs because of their opinion. That's really one of the things we're trying to show, is that this is on par with any of these previous moments of mass censorship, and actually exceeds them in terms of the numbers of professors fired.

Reason: Can you elaborate more on the number of firings you are referring to? 

Lukianoff: So real quick through the stats. Our definition is: the uptick of campaigns beginning around 2014 to get people fired, de-platformed, expelled, and the culture of fear that resulted from that. And I think it's always important to root numbers in comparisons. 

When I started at FIRE, I actually landed in Philadelphia at 9:10 in the morning on 9/11. All of my first cases were involving people who said jerky or insensitive things about the attacks or people who said, "Let's go get those terrorists." So it was a bad period for academic freedom. There was a moral panic, and it actually followed the normal M.O. of mass censorship events in history. There was a national security crisis. That's usually the way it goes—it's either a national security crisis or a large-scale war that you have these mass censorship events. And 17 professors were targeted for being canceled, as we would say, which basically means punished for their speech. There were more students as well, but we were pretty small at the time, so we know that we probably only know a fraction of the students who got in trouble. Three professors were fired. That's really, really bad historically. All three of those professors, by the way, were justified under things that weren't related to speech. 

For the cancel culture era, we're talking over 1,000 attempts to get professors fired or punished in some way. About two-thirds of them resulted in someone being punished. About one-fifth of them, so about 200, resulted in them losing their jobs. During McCarthyism, the number of people who lost their jobs due to being a communist is about 63. They count other people who lost their opinions in this massive study that they did right towards the end of McCarthyism, and there were about 90 fired for their opinion overall, which is usually rounded up to 100. 

We now think that they're probably somewhere between 100 and 150 fired from 2014 to mid-last year, July. We know this is a crazy undercount as well. According to our survey, one in six professors say that they've either been threatened with investigation or investigated for their academic freedom. That means the numbers are absolutely colossal. Students, about 9 percent of them, say that they've actually faced sanctions for their speech. That's an insanely huge number. And about one-third of professors say that they've been told to avoid controversial research. So we know that we're only seeing a portion of it.

Reason: The first case study in your book is at Hamline University. Can you remind us what happened there and why it exemplifies cancel culture?

Schlott: There was a professor named Erica López Prater who decided to show an image of the prophet Muhammad in one of her courses, which is considered sacrilegious by some people who follow Islam. And so she said in her syllabus that that was going to be in a class. She told people that you could get an excuse from class if it's untenable for you to see that. She warned them multiple times ahead of time. She gave ample warning in every way, shape, and form, and also just told everyone that, "The only reason I'm showing you this is because there are some sects of Islam that do not find this offensive. This is a piece of art that was commissioned by a Muslim king."

She ended up being squeezed out of her job for doing that because one student did show up to that class and decided afterward that she was offended. And the president of the university came out and said, "This is beyond freedom of speech, this is just offensive." And it was a perfect example of cancel culture just defying common sense, defying just pluralism and democracy on a very fundamental level. And so that's why we decided to call this one out as our opener because pretty much everyone condemned it in the end. It was unbelievable. And Hamline did have to reverse course.

Reason: The happy ending there is that the university president kind of got pushed out. What was the reaction of other academics? 

Lukianoff: This was a positive case in the sense that people really came to her defense. The idea that she wasn't rehired in the face of it is really stunning. Penn America was involved, of course, FIRE was involved, the American Association of University Professors came out and condemned it. So it was a moment of some amount of unanimity, but it somehow wasn't enough at the same time.

Reason: What role do psychotherapists play in cancel culture?

Lukianoff: This is near and dear to my heart because my experience with Coddling of the American Mind started with me being hospitalized for depression back in the Belmont Center in Philadelphia back in 2007. The idea that you would actually have psychotherapists who think they should intervene if you have wrongthink in your mind when you're talking one-on-one with them is about as horrifying as I can imagine. It's no exaggeration to say I'm not sure I'd still be here if I actually had a psychotherapist who corrected me.

As far as a chapter that we could easily expand into its own book, and maybe we should, the psychotherapy stuff scares the living hell out of us. I know we talked to a number of practitioners. In terms of what I've heard from the existing clinical psychology programs is that they will pain over the nightmare scenario of, "What if it turns out the person I'm treating is a Trump supporter or a Republican?" And of course, the answer is, "Then you treat them compassionately," not, "You have to drop out."

Reason: Rikki, you were coming of age in the era that you guys are writing about. Have you experienced the mindset of "If you are a bad person, you have bad ideas"?

Schlott: Well, for me personally, I was in high school in the lead-up to the 2016 election and we just had a scourge of cancel culture explode even though we were still teenagers. I, at the time, was more worried about boys and acne than Trump, but I saw that en masse scale for the first time. It was really frightening to me. And frankly, as a result, I self-censored for a while, and by the time I got to NYU, I knew I was in an ideological minority as a right-leaning libertarian here in New York City. I actually started hiding books under my bed when I moved in because I was a new freshman and trying to make friends. Thomas Sowell and Jordan Peterson were under the bed—banished. 

I think it's so important to realize that there is a crisis of authenticity with young people who are growing up, who were supposed to explore different ideas and be an anarchist one day and a communist the next day and figure it out in the end, but we've taught young people that any of their missteps or any of their heterodox opinions are grounds to tear them down. That's no way to grow up. You cannot be a young person and grow up in a graceless society.

I think it's important to realize that there are a whole host of young people who did not come from this squeaky wheel, the tyranny of the minority group of people who do show up in institutions and scare the life out of everyone. But the fact of the matter is, whether it's young people or American people at large, 80 percent of Americans think political correctness has gone too far. The vast majority of people do not want to live in a world where they're tripping over tripwires at every turn or censoring their speech or biting their tongue for fear that someone will give them the worst possible interpretation of what they said. This is a tyranny of the minority, and courage is contagious, and there is strength in numbers, and I think that we really can fight back with that knowledge

Reason: Can you explain what the Woodward Report was?

Lukianoff: It was so terrific, and Yale specifically disavowed it in court. The Woodward Report was this wonderful report that came out in the 1970s. It was a stirring defense of the importance of freedom of speech, even for speech that we find deeply offensive. It was supposed to be kind of one of the things that really set Yale apart, and they haven't been living up to it for a long time. But one thing that was kind of sobering to see is them actually going to court in a case where actually it was more of an attack on the right, that they were in a litigation against this one professor, and they specifically disowned the Woodward Report, basically saying in court that, "That's just puffery. We didn't really mean any of that."

Reason: What is the right wing version of cancel culture?

Schlott: Yeah, actually, it surprises most people to hear that about a third of attempts to get professors censored or fired are coming from the right and are attacks on professors to the left of the students. That tends to happen less in the really shiny institutions that garner the headlines and more at smaller schools, but it's still meaningful.

There's intergroup cancel culture in a way that I think is really frightening on the right. We talk about David French, for example, who's maligned for having some different views about Trump and conservatism. I think, especially in the post-MAGA era, there's a reflexive response to anyone who might be critical of Trump or to doubt Trump to cancel them or to squeeze them out. We talk about Megyn Kelly as an example of that, who gave me my first job in media, and was squeezed out from the right and then from the left—a demonstration of how one person who is or at the time was in pretty much the center right area could be canceled by both sides.

Reason: Where does right-wing cancel culture come from?

Schlott: I mean, I would say as someone who is right-leaning, and who grew up in a context where I now realize I wrongfully associated illiberalism with liberalism just because of the context of the years that I grew up in. I've realized that the left completely left freedom of speech, which used to be a fundamental principle of theirs, up for grabs. And anyone could grab that mantle and say, "Here's the restorative, pluralistic democratic vision to move forward." But instead, I think that we've seen quite a lot of people on the right just fight illiberalism with illiberalism and fists with fists in a way that is just so infuriating.

Reason: How has cancel culture erupted in the last few weeks in response to the war between Israel and Hamas? Do you think that Harvard students should lose their jobs over their opinions on Israelis and Palestinians?

Lukianoff: It is still cancel culture. I mean just the fact that it's cancel culture that many people agree with doesn't make it not cancel culture and I don't like blacklists. I like to actually deal with people individually, find out what they really think about something, and give the benefit of the doubt. 

Now to be clear, do companies have the legal right to hire who they want? Yes, and I oppose laws actually saying that they have to hire, but I do want people to take a deep breath, take some distance and say to themselves, "What if we live in a country where every company was also not just a widget shop, but also a political shop, and the boss's politics decided who got to keep their job?" And it's not that fanciful because that's what it started to look like in 2020 and 2021 where people were getting fired for just having mildly critical Black Lives Matter statements. So I want people to consider what the world would look like if essentially you have a First Amendment, but you can't have a job if you actually honestly say your political opinion. 

I will give one caveat though to the Harvard students. I think that a big part of the problem we have as a country is that we too reflexively hire elite college graduates. I think this creates serious problems. I think you should try to find out when you're hiring from elite college campuses by asking, "Okay, no, I understand you have a view that I find abhorrent. Can you work with people who disagree with you?" 

Reason: Universities love to shoot their mouths off about all kinds of things. In your perfect universe, would universities never talk about anything other than higher education? Is the problem that they're making too many statements, or that they are not making the right statements, or that they're just hypocritical?

Lukianoff: In my perfect universe, every university would adopt a 1967 University of Chicago C Report, which is a very strong admonition not to take political positions. We are not the speakers, we are the forum for the speakers and the thinkers, which I think is the right attitude to have about higher education. 

Reason: What can we do about cancel culture? 

Schlott: Yeah, this is the conclusion of our book where we really make the case that we all need to buy into this free speech culture. That the only way we can supplant cancel culture is by going back to the old idioms that so many Americans were raised with, like, "to each their own." This is a free country, everyone's entitled to their own opinion. Because I think we've underestimated just how far we've drifted away from that. Parents have not realized that they need to be aggressively mindful in instilling those values into a generation of young people who've been taught the absolute opposite, whether it was in K-12 or on college campuses, that words can wound and always trust your feelings, and that you can insulate yourself. You need safe spaces and trigger warnings.

We all need to buy-in to fight back against this tyranny of the minority of people who want to tear other people down to exercise cheap ad hominem attacks and dodge actual meaningful conversation. Because that's the only way, if we actually want to move forward in a diverse and pluralistic society, we need to be able to have civil conversation and dialogue about the touchiest and most contentious issues. And unless we actually, mindfully fight back against cancel culture, we are just going to slump down into dangerous and illiberal tendencies.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

The post Why Are College Kids Terrified? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

About twenty-three years ago, public health officials began to notice increases in what would later be called "deaths of despair," referring to suicides, deaths from alcoholism, and drug overdoses. Public health officials and legislators responded by seeking to limit opioid prescriptions for non-cancer chronic pain. Their tactics included violent raids and criminal charges against doctors deemed to overprescribe pain relief. Opioid prescriptions for non-cancer chronic pain fell dramatically. 

The war on pain drugs turned out to be a colossal failure. So-called deaths of despair rose even faster, and millions of Americans with chronic pain have had trouble obtaining prescriptions that would ease their suffering because doctors fear losing their licenses. Meanwhile, the government doubled down on failed policies, citing deeply flawed statistical studies and misrepresenting data. 

Even the phrase "deaths of despair," coined by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, is woefully imprecise: Different types of deaths often get muddled statistically and even definitionally. Who can determine the intentions of drug and alcohol abusers? Who knows if social pressures, mental issues, or the substances involved were the ultimate cause of death? Moreover, many deaths officially ruled as accidental are likely either deliberate suicides or resulted in part from a lowered will to live.

The attack on opioid prescriptions for non-cancer chronic pain began to advance around 2010, and intensified thereafter. The crackdown coincided with—and perhaps caused—a rapid growth in heroin overdose deaths, and later, an explosion in illegal synthetic opioid deaths, primarily fentanyl, an illicitly manufactured substance added to or substituted for heroin to meet the increasing demand for illegal opiates. This pattern of events is illustrated in a graphic put out by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Indeed, overdose deaths from commonly prescribed opiates increased rapidly from 1999 to 2010, but the chart doesn't tell us how many of the victims legally obtained the opiates. The chosen scale also omits the fact that drug overdose deaths have been increasing at a fairly steady rate since 1979, with no obvious changes associated with the rise and fall of opioid prescriptions for chronic pain. The chart does show how overdose death rates from commonly prescribed opiates did not decline much after 2010, although legal prescriptions went down dramatically. This suggests that these deaths may have involved individuals who bought illegally manufactured opiates, or that the people who lost pain medication as a result of official actions were not the ones liable to overdose.

The increase in deaths of despair obviously merits some policy attention, but labeling it an "opioid crisis," as is common nowadays, profoundly misstates its nature, timing, and likely causes and solutions. To justify restricting opioids for non-cancer chronic pain patients requires specific evidence that people prescribed opioids for pain are the ones dying of overdoses. There's quite a bit of negative evidence on this score, but public health officials have seized on a few positive studies to support their claims.

One influential and heavily cited 2011 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, "Association Between Opioid Prescribing Patterns and Opioid Overdose-Related Deaths," uses a classic prohibitionist tactic. The authors use a sample of 750 Veterans Health Administration (VHA) patients who received opioid prescriptions for pain and later died of opioid overdoses, and compare them to a random sample of 155,000 other VHA patients who received opioid prescriptions and did not die of overdoses.

Since all subjects in the study were prescribed opiates for pain, this analysis can't tell you anything about whether those prescriptions are associated statistically with an increased risk of overdose death. Determining that connection would require comparing patients with similar pain diagnoses and matching them for factors such as age, sex, and prior substance abuse. But doing so might not be very informative anyway. Forty percent of the patients who died of overdose had been diagnosed with substance abuse disorders in the 12 months before getting an opiate prescription. Sixty-six percent of them had been diagnosed with some psychiatric disorder. These individuals were more likely to die from overdose or suicide than other patients in the sample. If someone is at risk of overdosing or committing suicide and has opiates, they are more likely to use them than someone without opiates. Thus, suggesting that many opioid overdose deaths might be substitutes for other methods of overdosing or suicide.

The authors did find that patients who were prescribed larger amounts of opiates were more likely to die of overdoses than patients with lower doses. This discovery was used to support CDC guidelines strongly discouraging larger doses. However, the evidence should be interpreted cautiously since the study does not use any controls: The patients prescribed higher doses presumably were in more pain than lower-dose patients, and may well have differed in other ways, such as type of pain or the length of time they had suffered from it. Controls matched as closely as possible to subjects are a basic requirement of good science.

The study has an even more fundamental gap in its analysis: It did not account for quality of life increases in the 99.96 percent of opioid patients who did not overdose, or the bad things that might have happened to the many patients with chronic pain who were denied opioid prescriptions, or given doses too small to control the pain.

Another influential study was "Opioid Prescriptions for Chronic Pain and Overdose: A Cohort Study," which was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Almost comically, it had nine authors but only six patients who died of opiate overdoses—a sample size too small to reach any broad conclusions. The study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (another comic note is the article mislabels its sponsor as the National Institute of Drug Abuse, suggesting it is made up of junkies rather than researchers). While sponsors do not dictate methods or results, patient treatment issues should be the province of health researchers (like the Veterans Affairs Health Service Research department that funded the previous study), not people focused on fighting drug abuse.

The article begins by rejecting prior work in the field: "The association between prescription opioid exposure and overdose risk has been inferred from uncontrolled case series of autopsies subject to selection bias or from ecological time series studies in which individual-level associations cannot be examined." It criticizes studies like the prior one, which fails to use controls, and statistical analyses like the CDC's claim that if opioid prescriptions and opioid overdose deaths are simultaneously rising, the prescriptions must be causing the deaths.

Despite the small sample size, the authors claim statistically significant results after adjusting for smoking, depression, substance abuse, comorbid conditions, pain site, age, sex, recent sedative-hypnotic prescription, and recent initiation of opioid use. This is logically impossible. There are not even enough observations to estimate the adjustments, much less make any conclusions with statistical confidence. In any event, the authors conclude that whether their results, "were due to patient differences or direct effects of higher doses was not established."

Despite being a decade or more old, these studies continue to be cited by public health officials and policymakers. For example, the 2017 President's Commission On Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis relied on studies published before 2014—usually with data collected before 2011—to claim that opioids prescribed for chronic pain led to abuse. The reason is simple: as the war on opiate prescriptions for non-cancer chronic pain caused prescriptions to decline 60 percent, the number of deaths from opiate overdoses—and also from deaths of despair in general—continues to grow. Moreover, careful, controlled research showed clearly that medically supervised opiate pain management was both safe and effective. The prescription-opioids-caused-the-crisis narrative can only be sustained by relying on old studies. 

The cockeyed logic of the President's Commission is illustrated by its section, "Pathways to Opioid Use Disorder (Including Heroin) from Prescription," which references a 2017 article, "Psychoactive substance use prior to the development of iatrogenic opioid abuse: A descriptive analysis of treatment-seeking opioid abusers," that studied people who had sought treatment for opioid abuse. The study's main conclusion was that "only 4% of those who experienced their first opioid via a physician's prescription were truly drug-naive. Rather, more than 95% had significant psychoactive drug experience prior to being prescribed their first opioid." In other words, people who were prescribed opiates and later sought treatment for abuse had almost always begun taking drugs before their prescriptions.

Instead of interpreting the study as evidence that prescription opioids are not the source of drug abuse, the President's Commission claimed that the study "highlights the need for clinicians to screen patients for prior drug use histories." Essentially, the commission would refuse opiates for pain relief to people who have used drugs in the past. To draw such a conclusion would require an entirely different study—one that compares drug-using patients with non-cancer chronic pain who were prescribed opiates versus those who were not prescribed opiates.

The only article cited that supports any claim that opioid prescriptions led to opioid deaths was the 2012 article "Opioid Epidemic in the United States," which summarizes the results of a 2010 drug survey in overheated blustering language. Literally, the only evidence presented that opioid prescriptions for chronic pain were responsible for opioid overdose deaths was this figure:

The CDC also cited the same figure in 2016—although they prettied it up with colors—to justify new "guidelines" which have since been scaled back. The underlying argument was that the simultaneous rise in all three lines—opioid prescriptions, opioid treatment admissions, and opioid deaths—must have been caused by opioid prescriptions. Of course, this pattern rapidly reversed when opioid prescriptions fell dramatically and the other two measures continued to increase, but that didn't stop officials from using it.

Even back in 2009, before the reversal, this chart did not support the contention. It only shows that the three things are correlated, but does not demonstrate causation. Moreover, it only shows that the three things increase in time—lots of things increase in time without any causal interaction: world population, consumer prices, my age, etc. The chart suggests that the rates of increase are about the same, but that's due to choosing units—all three lines are measured in different units. The chart shows treatment admissions and death both increased by about 4 percent from 1999 to 2009—but that's 4/10,000 for treatment admissions, ten times the 4/100,000 for deaths.

Although there are still many things we don't know about pain management and drug abuse, we do know that long-term pain management is possible with opiates and that the benefits are extraordinary for people suffering from non-cancer chronic pain without unacceptable levels of addiction and abuse. Opiate overdose deaths are very infrequent among people given prescription opiates and have no prior history of drug abuse or psychological problems. The rise in opiate overdose deaths seems to be part of a general deaths-of-despair pattern that began at least a decade before increases in opioid prescriptions for pain management and has not been affected by the decline in those prescriptions.

The post The Shady Statistics Behind the War on Painkillers appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Every year, over 25 million tourists flock to the iconic National Mall in Washington, D.C. Yet as they explore some of the nation's greatest museums and monuments, visitors often find themselves faced with limited dining options, which boil down to either pricey cafes at the Smithsonian museums or food trucks parked along the Mall.

The food trucks have, unsurprisingly, become a favorite among tourists. "The diversity is incredible. The food is so well cooked. You could see they really poured their hearts into it. The prices are extraordinary. You can't beat it," Jason, a visitor from Massachusetts who bought a gyro from a food truck nearby, tells Reason. 

Yet to serve the hungry tourists at the Mall, D.C.'s food trucks have to pay a hefty price, since their operation is technically illegal. To serve their customers and make a living, food truck operators often have to park in illegal spots along the Mall, or stay parked in legal spots after their meters have expired. They are often fined up to $300 a day by the D.C. parking police.

Food truck operators also face fierce competition for coveted parking spots. Vendors like Maged Naeem, who runs Chicken Friendly just outside the National Museum of American History, resort to parking dummy cars overnight to keep their prized spots, ultimately leading to more parking tickets. 

Meanwhile, the fines rack up. In 2022 alone, the city collected $467,000 in parking tickets along the Mall.

This wasn't a problem until the COVID-19 pandemic. Before lockdown restrictions and work-from-home policies, the food truck business was booming in other parts of the district, particularly with the lunch crowd.

"That wasn't only just good for the food truck owners, although it was great for them. It was good for the city as a whole. Right? Get more options for customers, tastier options, more awareness of different cultures and their cuisines, better choices for tourists. It was wonderful for everyone," explained attorney Justin Pearson, who directs the National Street Vending Initiative at the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm. 

The pandemic destroyed much of the food truck scene in the district. While trucks can still legally operate in other areas of D.C., foot traffic has dropped significantly, driving many food truck owners to close shop, Pearson added.

"The pandemic obviously closed all of the office buildings. That lunchtime business went away overnight virtually," Doug Povich, owner of the Red Hook Lobster Pound food truck, which went out of business in 2020, tells Reason. "Trucks then had to find other places to vend."

Now, the only spot in D.C. that continues to have reliable lunchtime foot traffic is the National Mall. The challenge for the food trucks, however, arises from the division of authority in the area: The roads where the food trucks park fall under the jurisdiction of the district, while the sidewalks where the transactions take place are overseen by the National Park Service. The D.C. government therefore lacks jurisdiction to create legal parking spots for the trucks along the sidewalk.

Neither the National Parks Service nor the district is willing to assume enforcement responsibilities, meaning the trucks technically remain illegally parked. 

"There's inter-bureaucracy apathy, I guess. Nobody wants to be in charge of actually taking care of the trucks down there," Patrick Rathbone, owner of the Big Cheese Truck, tells Reason.

Until the district and the National Parks Service come to an agreement on operating permits, food truck operators will remain stuck in the middle, continuing to pay large fines as they serve the hungry lunch crowds at D.C.'s National Mall.

Music: "Prelude Carmen" by Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra via Artlist; "Life's Journey Begins" by idokay via Artlist; "Thoughts" by ANBR via Artlist; "Cherubinos Aria Voi che sapete" by Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra via Artlist; "Little Things" by ANBR via Artlist

The post D.C.'s Food Truck Underworld appeared first on Reason Magazine.

In 2001, Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg burst onto the international scene with his bestselling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist. The onetime member of Greenpeace said that climate change is real and that human activity is clearly contributing to it, but he said the best science didn't support the apocalyptic visions put forth by people like Earth in the Balance author and former Vice President Al Gore.

Lomborg went on to create the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank that applies cost-benefit analysis to problems facing the global poor and works with Nobel laureates, policymakers, philanthropists, and researchers to develop pragmatic, relatively low-cost solutions to issues such as tuberculosis, malaria, lack of education, and access to food. 

His new book is called Best Things First and it presents what Lomborg says are "the 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest people." He argues that for about $35 billion a year—a little more than half of what the US spends annually on humanitarian aid—these policies would save 4.2 million lives and generate an extra $1.1 trillion in value every year.

Nick Gillespie caught up with Lomborg in New York City during the latest meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. We talked about Best Things First, his view of the current environmentalist movement, and why politicians and the media continue to fixate on the possibility of future climate apocalypse rather than helping the global poor in the here and now.

Photo Credits: World Travel & Tourism Council, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Mark Reinstein/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; James Colburn - Pool via CNP/picture alliance / Consolidated; Dominika Zarzycka/Sipa USA/Newscom; elmar/Newscom; U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Gabriel R. Piper, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Basil D Soufi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Tyler Anderson/Naitonal Post/ZUMApress/Newscom; New America, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; JOHN ANGELILLO/UPI/Newscom; Karla Ann Cote/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; BONNIE CASH/UPI/Newscom; Chris Kleponis/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Gerardo Romo/Newscom; Jeremy Miller/AusAID, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Christian M. Mericle, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Carlos Sanchez/Polaris/Newscom; imageBROKER/alimdi / Arterra/Newscom; Dstringer71, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Music Credits: "Let's Get Itm" by Captain Joe via Artlist.

The post Bjorn Lomborg: Why Do We Fixate on Climate Rather Helping the World's Poor? appeared first on Reason Magazine.