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In October 2017, a SWAT team showed up at Jameson Lopp's house in North Carolina,  allegedly because of a fake complaint called in by someone angered by a tweet. So Lopp posted a video of himself firing an AR-15 and then embarked on a journey to disappear in the physical world—unreachable by his enemies and far from the prying eyes of the surveillance state.

Lopp had been obsessed with privacy long before the swatting. He's a throwback to the long-bearded mathematicians and cypherpunks of the 1990s who believed that recent breakthroughs in cryptography could enable levels of personal freedom and privacy beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Many ideas and technological breakthroughs from the cypherpunk movement were eventually folded into bitcoin. Lopp even calls himself a "professional cypherpunk," carrying on the movement's legacy.

In keeping with the cypherpunk ethos, Casa, the company Lopp co-founded, is trying to make it easier for people to hold custody of their own bitcoin instead of storing their money on third-party exchanges, where regulators can impose arbitrary rules. 

After the SWAT raid, Lopp changed his phone number, set up LLCs to hide his true name and address, encrypted his communications, and even bought a decoy house to serve as a physical mailing address, which he needed to satisfy the DMV's requirement for a drivers license. To check his work, he hired private investigators to tail him. 

"We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems," wrote Eric Hughes in his 1993 manifesto. "We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write."

Jameson Lopp is an enigmatic privacy obsessive fighting to keep that dream alive.

Photos: Paul Kitagaki Jr./ZUMA Press/Newscom

Music: "Brotherhood" by Young Rich Pixies via Artlist; "2050" by Cyber Runner via Artlist

The post Can Grandmas Be Bitcoin Cypherpunks? Q&A With Jameson Lopp appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Lowriding has been a part of Southern California and Chicano culture since the post–World War II era when hobbyists started using spare hydraulics from surplus aircraft parts to customize cars to ride "low and slow."

"Owning a car is the American dream," says Denise Sandoval, a professor of Chicano studies at California State University, Northridge. "Lowriding is a great example, just like hip-hop, of people using culture to tell their stories, to mark space in the United States, to say, 'This is what makes us unique.'"

By the '90s, lowriding became associated with crime and gang activity. There were also complaints that it was clogging major arteries and contributing to traffic congestion.

"You begin to see in the '90s, particularly here in L.A., anti-cruising ordinances," says Sandoval. "Black or brown men would be hanging out in the street…and the police could use them to crack down."

Vincent Palacios, who owns a car repair and alteration shop in Lemon Grove, has been lowriding since he was a teenager. He recalls when cruising was first shut down on Highland Avenue. "The police started harassing us…. They would actually measure [the height of the car] with a cigarette pack [to determine] if you were illegal." 

In the past few years, Palacios has teamed up with other lowriding enthusiasts, including Jovita Arellano, the president of the United Lowrider Coalition, and her husband, Marcos "Rabbit" Arellano, to build political support for making cruising legal again. And they were successful: Last year, National City joined several other municipalities in overturning their bans, and the California Legislature encouraged cities to reconsider their policies and start working with the lowrider community. 

To address the traffic issue, Sandoval says hobbyists have started collaborating with law enforcement to identify spaces for cruising that aren't a "public nuisance." State law still permits localities to institute bans, but there's a movement to change that as well.

"For me, lowriding is just enjoying going out on a nice day and hanging out with my friends and hearing great music," says Palacios. "It's a way of life."

News/Archival Credits: NBC; CBS; ABC; KNTV Channel 11 News; Herman Baca Papers; Low Rider Magazine June 1982: Chicano Park Fifth Annual

Music: artlist.io

Photos: Vincent Palacios; Dave Parker; vhines200/Flickr; Johnny Lozoya/Low Rider Magazine 

Special thanks to Arturo Meza II

The post The Rebirth of Lowriding in California appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Caitlin Long wants to start a new kind of bank…based on a very old model.

"A 100 percent reserve bank that would keep all of our cash at the Fed," she says. She was influenced by the work of Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, who saw fractional reserve banking as "a shell game, [and] a Ponzi scheme," arguing that banks should work exactly like safety-deposit boxes, or "money warehouses," required to keep all of their customers' money on hand at all time.

Long has a law degree from Harvard and had a conventional career on Wall Street, working at Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Salomon Brothers. After the 2008 financial crisis, she thought all of the standard accounts explaining the meltdown fell short. In search of a better framework, she discovered the Austrians and Rothbard. 

"The concept here is, let's just turn this into a basic money warehouse to the maximum extent possible within the law," Long tells Reason.

In March 2023, when rumors started circulating on Twitter that Silicon Valley Bank might be in trouble, its panicked customers withdrew $42 billion from their accounts in a single day, leaving it with a negative cash balance. In short order, regulators shut it down.

It was a classic run on the bank, which is a phenomenon that's only possible because of a standard practice known as "fractional-reserve banking," in which the money in your account isn't actually sitting in your account. The money banks hold for you is mostly loaned out or invested. They just need to make sure that they have enough cash on hand to cover any withdrawals. The system works fine—until everyone comes for their money at once.

"A lot more people in the world now recognize that the money in their bank is an I.O.U. to a leveraged institution," says Long. "Most people didn't think about that until recently."

So she founded Custodia Bank, based in Wyoming, which will hold 108 percent of its customers' deposits in cash at all times, serving as a true Rothbardian money warehouse that will also custody bitcoin for interested customers.

In January, the Federal Reserve Board denied its application for a master Fed account, which would allow them to store cash and transact using Fed payment rails like every other major bank. Custodia has sued the Fed to force it to reverse that decision.

"They're basically creating a federal veto that has never in the history of the United States existed," says Long. "And what I'm standing up for and saying is that it shouldn't be politicized, period."

Reason sat down with Long in Miami at the Bitcoin 2023 conference to talk about her case against the Fed, why she believes in full-reserve banking, and how Custodia could help bitcoin go mainstream.

Photo Credits: Minh Nguyen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Lian Yi Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Richard B. Levine/Newscom; Nicolas Economou/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Stefan Fussan, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons; Ken Cedeno/Sipa USA/Newscom.

Music Credits: "Time to Move," by VESHZA.

The post She's Suing the Fed To Open a Rothbardian Bitcoin Bank appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Fifteen years after Satoshi Nakamoto dropped a nine-page white paper on an obscure email list sketching out an idea for a new peer-to-peer digital currency, bitcoin has become a global phenomenon. And nowhere is its pomp and promise more on display than at the blockbuster annual conferences put on by Bitcoin Magazine in Miami Beach.

But it's also had a disappointing couple of years.

Bitcoin was supposed to be an inflation hedge. But after the Fed fired up its money printer during the pandemic and the dollar lost value, bitcoin went in the same direction.

Bitcoin was supposed to be a way to transfer money "from one party to another without going through a financial institution," to quote Satoshi. But 15 years later, a lot of users are still trusting regulated financial institutions to manage their holdings.

Bitcoin was supposed to be above politics, but the community around it has seen bitter in-fighting, and some worry that bitcoiners' intolerance of dissenting ideas has turned it into something akin to a cult.

"It's certainly not the only secular religion out there, but it's a particularly pernicious breed," says Nic Carter, a writer and crypto investor who cited security concerns as his reason for not attending the conference. 

But despite the disappointing price drop and ongoing internecine squabbles, the bitcoiners Reason talked with in Miami seemed convinced that its value proposition—a decentralized money that governments can't censor or destroy—is as strong as ever.

Are bitcoin's troubles a sign that the project is failing, or just the inevitable bumps on an upward trajectory that will one day result in monetary freedom for the entire world?

Reinventing the Financial System

This year's conference attracted about 15,000 attendees, a drop from more than 35,000 in 2022, according to the organizers. One attendee described a "noticeable, dramatic difference" in the energy and crowd from the previous year, during which bitcoin's price was about $15,000 higher.

Those in attendance this year were more likely to be bitcoin's true believers.

"I'm not a fan of the mania bull run phases because of the type of people that it attracts," says Jameson Lopp, a developer who co-founded the bitcoin storage company Casa. "We might call them the tourists or the LARPers or, in many cases, the scammers." 

Caitlin Long, founder of a bank aiming to serve bitcoin-holding customers, agrees with Lopp that "scammers" and "grifters" pervade the space, saying: "There's a big chunk of crypto that needs to burn on a raging funeral pyre."

Just a few miles away from this year's conference is home court for the Miami Heat. The venue changed its name to FTX Arena after the crypto platform paid $135 million for the naming rights back in 2021. In January, when FTX collapsed into bankruptcy and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was charged with fraud, the signage was removed.

Many bitcoiners believe that any cryptocurrency other than Satoshi's original creation should be referred to as a "shitcoin," and that the "crypto industry" is a cargo cult run by scammers, who have the mainstream media and much of Silicon Valley fooled.

Exhibit A: Sam Bankman-Fried.

"He's a criminal. He should go to jail," says Peter McCormack, host of the What Bitcoin Did podcast. "People who conflate what [FTX] did with bitcoin have got it entirely wrong." 

Bitcoiners also see the FTX collapse as a reminder that you can't trust bankers or tech-founder media darlings, like Bankman-Fried, to take care of your savings, whether they're outright scammers or not.

"Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve," Satoshi wrote in 2009.

The message: Trust nobody, and become your own bank—which bitcoin makes possible.

Another reason to be your own bank is to avoid financial censorship, so that everyone from third-world dictators to D.C. regulators is prevented from telling you how you should spend your money. The fall of FTX precipitated a crackdown in Washington that was meant to send a "very strong anti-crypto message," in the words of former Rep. Barney Frank (D–Mass.).

"FTX certainly gave [financial regulators] political cover to do this," says Nic Carter, who coined the phrase "Operation Chokepoint 2.0," a reference to the Obama-era policy of bullying banks into denying accounts to payday lenders, pornographers, firearms dealers, strippers, and other fully legal industries that regulators would rather see disappear.

"They opened up the toolkit and they went to their favorite tool, which is politicizing the instruments of finance."

Operation Chokepoint 1.0 was carried out by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren—and now she's become the Senate's most vocal bitcoin critic.

"Rogue nations, oligarchs, drug lords, and human traffickers are using digital assets to launder billions in stolen funds, evade sanctions, and finance terrorism," Warren said in December when promoting a bill that would extend the state's power to surveil people's finances.

Warren "doesn't understand bitcoin," says McCormack. "She's part of the corrupt political structure you have in the U.S., and she's anti-human. She's anti-freedom."

Caitlin Long, who spent 22 years in corporate finance, says she's been "trying to clean up" the crypto industry because it's full of "affronts to private property rights." She founded Custodia Bank to be the antithesis of the company run by Sam Bankman-Fried, whom Long clashed with onstage at the same bitcoin conference back in 2021.

FTX allegedly squandered a lot of its customers' deposits by leveraging it to make risky crypto investments. Custodia, in contrast, plans to go a much farther than even a regulated retail bank by keeping 108 percent of its customers cash and bitcoin on hand at all times as a "full reserve" bank. Thus, it won't have any need for federal deposit insurance.

"Leverage is never good in crypto. Period," says Long. "All of those crypto lenders, I knew were going to fail. Why? Because there's a finite number of bitcoin. All you're doing is creating fractional reserve bitcoin, and that's all going to come back to haunt you when inevitably there's gonna be a price correction and everybody wants the real thing."

And yet the Federal Reserve rejected Custodia's application to become a member of its network, on the grounds that its "crypto activities are highly likely to be inconsistent with safe and sound banking practices."

"So the crypto industry was proposing a solution to the inherent instability of the banking sector, and yet that solution was denied because the Federal Reserve didn't want to give a crypto-focused bank access to the payment system," says Carter. "It's extremely perverse."

Long is suing the Federal Reserve to force it to reconsider. But part of Satoshi's vision was to create a system in which regulatory approval wasn't necessary. Bitcoin is the first digital currency you can hold yourself, so why do we "need to trust a third-party middleman" at all?

"Read what Satoshi said: Trusted third parties are security holes," says Lopp, whose company Casa helps customers safely self-custody the secret passwords, or keys, necessary to spend their bitcoin. If you lose them, the money is as good as gone. But if you're not holding them yourself, are they really yours?

The bitcoin writer and evangelist Andreas Antonopoulos coined a popular saying in the space: "Not your keys, not your bitcoin."

Lopp acknowledges that because of the work and risk involved "most people don't want to be their own bank." But he insists that it's crucial for anyone worried about financial censorship to "self-custody" their bitcoin.

"If you want to be able to operate in such a way that you don't have to ask permission from a third party, then you do have to take on some responsibility," says Lopp.

Self-custody especially appeals to bitcoiners worried about Operation Chokepoint 2.0 and the plight of the Canadian truckers who occupied Ottawa last year to protest a cross-border COVID vaccine mandate.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded to those demonstrators by using emergency powers to force financial institutions to freeze all funds sent to support the cause.

So a group of activists used bitcoin as it was meant to be used, getting the equivalent of about $630,000 to the truckers. Since the funds didn't go through the traditional banking system, they were hard for Trudeau to stop. An activist filmed himself handing out seed phrases—the code words used to access self-custodied bitcoin. This grassroots solution was imperfect, laborious, and in need of improvement, but in the end…it worked.

A world where most people hold their own bitcoin keys would be a world far more resistant to financial censorship and surveillance, but is it really possible? Lopp says universal self-custody is unlikely and unnecessary for bitcoin to succeed.

"I think we will have a diverse ecosystem and range of custody," says Lopp. "What really worries me is if too much of the Bitcoin goes into too few hands, especially if they're, like, regulated companies that can be easily targeted by nation-states."

And that, for many at this conference, is the entire point of bitcoin: effective resistance to authoritarian government action.

The Bitcoin Religion

Walking around the conference, all of the elements of the bitcoiner's creed were on full display, a creed which Carter says has turned into a religion with its own heroes (Ross Ulbricht), doctrines ("bitcoin, not crypto"), saints (Satoshi Nakamoto), and heretics.

Carter was in Miami this year during the conference but says he didn't attend any of the sessions because of safety concerns. Much of the community turned on him when it was revealed that his investment fund had a stake in cryptocurrencies other than just bitcoin. So he penned a "eulogy for bitcoin maximalism," declaring that "there's an awful sickness pervading" the space.

"I have been full-time bitcoin for 10 years, and I've dedicated my professional and personal efforts to the sector tirelessly that whole time," says Carter. "And yet, because I'm more of a bitcoin moderate, a lot of the hardline bitcoiners don't like me. But I think what we need to realize is our enemy is not inward." 

Carter was also troubled by bitcoin maximalists he's seen praising Securities and Exchange Commission chief Gary Gensler for cracking down on crypto exchanges that offer so-called "shitcoins" as he parroted one of their favorite lines.

"Bitcoiners should be trying to win in the free market," says Carter. "They should not be trying to utilize instruments of state power to suppress their perceived adversaries."

Lopp has also been on the receiving end of bitcoin-maximalist rage, after Casa made the business decision to expand its service to help owners of the cryptocurrency ethereum self-custody their holdings.

And in 2019, a teenager called in a SWAT raid on Lopp's home, according to Lopp, because the kid didn't like his opinion about how the bitcoin protocol should function. In response, Lopp shared a video of himself firing an AR-15 on Twitter. Then he took extraordinary steps to make himself practically invisible, impossible to track down in meatspace.

"It's a result of social media," says Lopp. "You can instantly go from being essentially a nobody…to being someone who has attracted the ire of millions of people."

An art gallery at the conference displayed work demonizing Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, and the World Economic Forum's Klaus Schwab. Most of the religious imagery present in the gallery was shrouded in irony, but as with so much of digital life, it was hard to tell where the joke ended.

"I don't believe that there's any moral status in your portfolio. And there is a faction within bitcoin that believes that the only moral asset to hold is bitcoin itself," says Carter. "The bitcoin religion is not a universalizing one. It actually just concentrates the membership and they become increasingly radical and disconnected from the real world."

Lopp isn't so sure that bitcoin's increasingly strident subculture is entirely negative.

"There are certainly a lot of people who get turned off by some of the vitriol, whereas other people get interested and sucked into it," says Lopp. "But if anything, I think it may be overblown. The vast majority of people who use bitcoin don't know about any of that. They just see bitcoin as a thing that they're using. It's not something that they have adopted from a cultural standpoint." 

As the quasi-religious fervor around bitcoin has grown, so too has the potential for a bitcoin voting bloc that could help counter Operation Chokepoint 2.0 and other government attacks on the industry. Ronald Reagan once courted the religious right; in 2023, a parade of once and future presidential contenders made the trek down to Miami to pander to the bitcoiners. Tulsi Gabbard, the former Hawaii congresswoman, showed up, as did longshot presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamay.

Perhaps nobody better captured the mood than Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who in his keynote speech repeated the anti-elite, populist messaging that's central to the bitcoin creed.

"Control of the population starts perhaps as a means but becomes an end: perfect control over society," says Kennedy. "Bitcoin is a bulwark against this expansion and intrusion."

Is It Money?

"Bitcoin has many purposes, but to me the simplest is the most basic, which is that it's an honest ledger," says Long. "Why do people save? They want a store of value that's honest and cannot be manipulated."

In the original white paper, Satoshi described bitcoin as "a peer-to-peer electronic cash system." But 15 years later, it still isn't widely used as a medium of exchange. At first, the problem was technical; the network couldn't process more than about seven to 10 transactions a second. Now a decentralized payment technology called the Lightning Network is endlessly scalable and has made paying for a cup of coffee with bitcoin fairly seamless—but not a lot of people are doing it yet.

Chris Hunter is the founder of Bitcoin Beach Wallet, a Lightning-based wallet that launched in El Salvador shortly before another politician who's capitalized on his association with this community—President Nayib Bukele— announced here at the 2021 conference that his country would become the first in the world to adopt Satoshi's invention as legal currency. Hunter says the implementation was rushed, leading to a bad product launch that left many Salvadorans suspicious of bitcoin.

"There [were], understandably, technical missteps, and that was quite unfortunate because the average person in El Salvador or anywhere around the world doesn't really understand Bitcoin," says Hunter.

Salvadorans—like the residents of most poor countries—prefer to hold and spend the U.S. dollar, which despite the recent spike in inflation still has a much more stable value than bitcoin. Hunter says it's unlikely that a government will be able to mandate bitcoin use from the top down, as El Salvador's government attempted.

"In terms of adopting bitcoin as legal tender, what really matters is: Do we get bitcoin in the hands of people? Do they use it as everyday money?" says Hunter. "The only way that bitcoin is going to move forward and get mass adoption is through bottom-up, grassroots movements."

So will bitcoin ever become a commonly accepted medium of exchange? That's partly a bet that technologies like the Lightning network will continue making it easier and easier to use—and it's also a bet against the dollar, as exploding U.S. debt puts increasing pressure on the Federal Reserve to inflate the money supply.

For 15 years, bitcoin has been eulogized hundreds of times by mainstream journalists, and yet it has always come back, surviving exchange collapses, government antagonism, and bitter wars within the community. As the drama unfolds, roughly every 10 minutes a new block of transactions is broadcast to this decentralized, unstoppable, censorship-resistant, global software network that anyone can use. Which is just as Satoshi envisioned it.

"This is really supposed to be a neutral technology and platform where anyone who follows the rules can use it regardless of if anyone else disagrees with who they are and what they're doing," says Lopp. "There is a saying, which is, 'Bitcoin is for enemies.'"

Photo Credits: Silas Stein/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Camilo Freedman / SOPA Images/Si/Newscom; Camilo Freedman/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Michael Debets/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Chedly Ben Ibrahim/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Camilo Freedman/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; John Lamparski/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Ryan Walter Wagner/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Ken Cedeno/UPI/Newscom; Rod Lamkey - CNP / MEGA / Newscom/RSSIL/Newscom; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; rollcallpix152307; Olivier Douliery/ABACAUSA.COM/Newscom; OwenDB/Black Star/Black Star/Newscom; Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/Newscom; VENEZUELA'S PRESIDENCY / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/Newscom; Kevin Dietsch/UPI/Newscom; Michael Brochstein/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Chris Kleponis - Pool via CNP/Newscom; MIGUEL LEMUS/EFE/Newscom; Danita Delimont Photography/Newscom; Matias J. Ocner/TNS/Newscom; MATIAS J. OCNER/TNS/Newscom; Omar Marques / SOPA Images/Sipa/Newscom; MEGA / Newscom/TANAS/Newscom; Andre M. Chang/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; John Angelillo/UPI/Newscom; Louis Lanzano/UPI/Newscom; MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO / GDA Photo Service/Newscom; AP Photo/Ira Schwarz

Music: "El Monte" by Luke Melville via Artlist; "Still Need Syndrome" by Yarin Primak via Artlist; "Out of Flux" by PUNKD via Artlist; "Notize" by Density Wave via Artlist; " Elevation" by Stanley Gurvich via Artlist; Vuelta al Sol by Tomas Novoa via Artlist; Civilization by Icarus via Artlist; "All STar" by ANBR via Artlist; "Ultra Light" by The Cliff via Artlist

The post Bitcoin's Greatest Test appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Is the world getting better? Or is it on the verge of collapse?

Stefan Sagmeister emphatically believes that things are looking up, and his art exhibition "Now Is Better" showcases a bold new way to convince the world that he's right. He takes actual paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, disassembles them, and creates new works by juxtaposing them with data visualizations of just how much things have improved since the good old days. 

Some works chart the incredible decline in deaths on the battlefield, from famine, and from natural disasters while others map how much cheaper food and lighting have become in real terms. One piece documents the explosion in the number of guitars per person on the planet—an indicator of growth in leisure and entertainment—while another charts the persistent belief that crime is always rising despite its well-documented decline.  

A heralded graphic designer who has designed album covers for Jay-Z, The Rolling Stones, and Lou Reed, Sagmeister has won two Grammy Awards, including one for his design of the Talking Heads' boxed set Once in a Lifetime. Born in Austria in 1962, he's called New York City home since the 1990s. He draws on sources such as Our World in Data, Human Progress, and the work of Steven Pinker, who has written the foreword to a book version of the "Now Is Better" series coming out later this year.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Sagmeister tells me why it's so important to acknowledge and defend material progress, why art and commerce aren't enemies, and what he loves about the New World he's adopted as his homeland and how that ties into the "Now Is Better" project.

Photos: Morteza Nikoubazl/Polaris/Newscom; Stefan Sagmeister

The post 'Now Is Better,' Says Legendary Designer Stefan Sagmeister appeared first on Reason Magazine.

As a gangly kid who had just arrived in the U.S. from Cameroon, West Africa, 16-year-old Joel Embiid had a lot of the gifts he'd eventually put to use in the NBA: the height, the athleticism, the massive 7-foot-6-inch wingspan. 

But the one thing he couldn't do was actually shoot a basketball. 

Embiid didn't get into the game at all until he was 15. Today, he has become not just the lynchpin of a championship-chasing team in Philadelphia, but he's also arguably the best basketball player on the planet. And he was recently named the NBA's Most Valuable Player for the current season.

It's possible that this would never have happened if it weren't for Youtube.

In a 2016 interview with Sports Illustrated, he shared a secret to his success: learning to shoot long-distance shots by watching, in his words, videos of "regular white people" on the internet.

Yes, Embiid is a big dude, but there are a lot of those in the NBA. What sets him apart is his ability to do more than just stand under the basket and dunk. For a 7-footer, he's got an incredibly efficient jump shot.

During his career, Embiid has sunk more than 33 percent of his three-pointers. No one is going to confuse him with Steph Curry, but that's a better three-point shooting percentage than Michael Jordan, and it's miles ahead of other guys Embiid's size, most of whom hardly ever score that far from the basket. 

And for that he credits YouTube.

You and I are unlikely to become professional basketball players by watching hours of white dudes shooting three-pointers tonight. Sorry.

But you might learn how to repair a leaky toilet or install a utility sink in your basement by watching YouTube. I did.

Every day, untold numbers of other people accomplish less audacious tasks because of the knowledge that others make freely available via all sorts of online platforms, from Wikipedia to TikTok. The incredible amount of free knowledge that's available online is staggering. And that knowledge confers agency on anyone who's willing to use it. 

Are there cranks on YouTube spreading silly conspiracies and crazy uncles on Facebook sharing QAnon memes? Of course. 

But when politicians call for regulating social media and other online platforms, they risk throwing out a lot of the good with the bad, often in the name of protecting children. They ought to consider the other side of that equation too. Being exposed to unfamiliar ideas can sometimes be scary—but, like it was for a 16-year-old Embiid trying to refine his untapped athletic potential, it can also be game-changing.

Photos: RAY FOLI / UPI Photo Service/Newscom; Marty Jean-Louis/Sipa USA/Newscom; Brian Rothmuller/Icon Sportswire DHZ/Brian Rothmuller/Icon Sportswire/Newscom; Sports Press Photo//Sipa USA/Newscom; Sports Press Photo/Georgia Soares/SPP/Sipa USA/Newscom; Stephen Nadler/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom

Music: "Ace" by Candy Apple Red via Artlist; "I Am Not Your Doll" by Francesco DAndrea via Artlist; "Theevs" by The Good Life via Artlist

The post Joel Embiid Became an NBA Superstar by…Watching YouTube? appeared first on Reason Magazine.

If you want to get a politician to change the subject, ask them how they're going to deal with the federal debt, which is growing to be bigger than the U.S. gross domestic product and has us on a path to fiscal disaster. Economists across the political spectrum agree that large, persistent, and growing annual deficits and the national debt depress long-term economic growth, the one known way to increase living standards.

When Reason asked GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy what he would do to cut spending, he said he'd focus instead on supercharging the economy so that we can grow our way out of it. Unlike Joe Biden and Donald Trump—who have both sworn that they won't touch a penny of Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of debt—the millennial and self-described limited-government conservative at least acknowledges that debt is a problem. He just won't commit to any spending cuts to deal with it.

"We've [had] more than 4-plus percent GDP growth for most of our national history," he says. "If we get back to…three-point-something, actually, most of those fiscal problems are completely gone."

But that's not right. According to quarterly data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, we calculate that annual GDP growth has averaged 2.7 percent since 1970, helped along by a rapidly growing labor force thanks to immigration, the baby boom, and women going to work. Let's say Ramaswamy gets elected for two terms and unleashes economic growth that pushes the U.S. economy up to 4 percent GDP growth through 2033. Would most of our fiscal problems be "completely gone"? Not even close. 

According to our calculations, the CBO projects that GDP will grow by 2 percent per year over the eight years of the next two presidential terms. Even if you double that to 4 percent annual growth—a rate more than double what it's been so far in the 21st century—we'll still be swimming in a sea of red ink.

In a recent report, CBO estimated that for every 1.2 percentage points that GDP exceeds its projected level for 2033, the deficit would be $51 billion smaller in that year. By that measure, if GDP growth ran 4 percent instead of 2 percent over those eight years, the projected deficit in 2033 of $1.4 trillion would be cut roughly in half, to $700 billion.  

In other words, the government would still be running deficits every year, and the federal debt would keep growing. 

These guys want to steer clear of the third rail of American politics—Social Security and Medicare entitlements that already comprise 30 percent of annual spending—and will jack up to about 40 percent over the next decade. But we have to make them grab it fully with both hands. 

If we don't start seriously cutting spending and scaling back eldercare entitlements, we're not going to balance the budget or stop growing the debt.

And our economy is headed for disaster.

Photos: Jeremy Hogan/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; CNP/AdMedia/Newscom; Vincent Ricci / SOPA Images/Sipa/Newscom; Saquan Stimpson / CNP / SplashNews/Newscom; BONNIE CASH/UPI/Newscom; Nicola Marfisi / Avalon/Newscom; IAN HALPERIN/UPI/Newscom

The post Vivek Ramaswamy Is Wrong About the National Debt appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Who's that sliding into your Twitter DMs? Is it the federal government? Well, according to Elon Musk, who took over the social media platform last year, government bureaucrats were routinely taking a close look at users' content.

Thanks to the Twitter Files, a collaboration between Elon Musk and independent journalists, as well as the Facebook Files, my own investigative project for Reason, we now know that social media companies constantly faced pressure to censor speech—and that pressure was coming from the government. The State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and even the White House all targeted legitimate online speech. Federal law enforcement agents flagged tweets and posts for deletion under the guise of protecting national security.

And no one should be surprised. The feds love to invoke national security, and then take away more of your rights and pretend they're keeping you safe.

Well, guess what: They're at it again. Following a massive leak of U.S. intelligence documents that were posted on Discord, another social media platform, the Biden administration wants more power to monitor online chat rooms.

A senior administration official told NBC News that the government "is now looking at expanding the universe of online sites that intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities track."

That's bad. We know where it will lead: More government surveillance of the American people, and eventually, more censorship of political speech. In the runup to the 2020 election, for example, the FBI warned social media sites to be wary of Russian-based disinformation. But then they also started flagging joke tweets written by Americans that happened to be about the election. 

You see, the feds just can't help themselves: They'll use the new powers we give them to pressure the internet to shut down dissent. We've seen it happen time and again. 

So let's keep the government out of our chatrooms. And watch out for your DMs.

Music: "New Car - Instrumental" by Rex Banner via Artlist

The post Elon Musk Warns Tucker Carlson: The Feds Are in Your Twitter DMs appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Homelessness has been rising in America's West Coast cities for more than a decade. Entire blocks of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland are occupied by tent encampments plagued by violence, drug overdoses, and disease.

But the problem is concentrated in a handful of cities; nationwide the homeless population has been shrinking for a decade. To figure out why some places are so much more successful than others, we took a trip to Texas where the homeless population declined almost 30 percent over the last decade. (It grew by more than 40 percent in California in that same time span.) Today, the Lone Star state counts 90 homeless people per 100,000 residents. In California, the problem is almost five times as bad.

Not only does Texas have vastly different politics and policies from the West Coast, but it's also home to three large cities with three very different approaches to homelessness: Austin, San Antonio, and Houston.

From a privately run village of tiny homes just outside Austin to a nonprofit serving San Antonio's homeless with an intensive, no-excuses treatment and skills training program to a single, centralized provider in Houston that's streamlined its approach to quickly house thousands of the city's homeless residents, what we found in Texas was innovation.  

But the federal government doesn't fund innovation. For decades, it's committed to a one-size-fits-all approach known as "Housing First." States like California have followed suit, leaving many charities with a choice to either fall in line or turn down millions in federal and state grants.

The result: More people living—and dying—on the streets as governors and big city mayors promise that the much-awaited free, permanent housing is just around the corner.  

Our first stop was the city of Austin, where progressive activism exists in the shadow of a conservative state house. It's a boom-and-bust town—a magnet for business and tech innovation, which has lured some of Silicon Valley's top performers. When the ultrarich moved in, housing prices started to resemble San Francisco's, and the homeless population climbed.

Policy-wise, Austin has a lot in common with West Coast cities, which helps explain the huge encampments here. But Austin has an advantage that San Francisco and Los Angeles don't: When you walk over the city line, you're in a more typical Texas municipality, where light-touch regulation allows innovative approaches to thrive.

The outskirts of Austin are home to Community First! Village, a 51-acre community of tiny homes. The project doesn't rely on federal money and, therefore, isn't bound by rules imposed by Washington.

Alan Graham, who founded Community First! Village, attributes homelessness to a lack of a supportive network of friends, family, and neighbors. He seeks to rebuild that network by giving formerly homeless people the opportunity to live in a community again. The homes are intentionally designed with large front porches within a walkable community to encourage socialization among neighbors.

"The single greatest cause of homelessness is a profound catastrophic loss of family," says Graham. 

To live here, residents have to respect the law and follow rules like keeping pets leashed, keeping junk off their driveways, and keeping drug use out of the common areas. But behind closed doors? That's their business.

"What we always wanted is for people to live the way that people want to live," says Graham. "Here in the United States of America, we have an extraordinary number of freedoms. We don't want people coming into our homes seeing what we do in the privacy of our own homes."

Graham says there's one rule above all others: You must pay rent. The monthly rent for one of these houses is between $240 and $440 depending on the size and amenities, which residents typically pay out of their monthly social security or disability benefits. Graham says that before the pandemic, they collected 99 percent of rent owed.

"It turns out that people that have skin in the game are bought into the game far more than people that don't have skin in the game," says Graham.

Mobile Loaves & Fishes, Graham's nonprofit, launched Community First! Village with about a dozen homes in 2015 and has since expanded to more than 300. The goal is to reach 500 units by the end of this year to meet the growing demand, while also breaking ground on 127 acres across the street and inside Austin, an expansion underwritten by $35 million of funds from the federal American Rescue Plan Act that will eventually make way for 1,400 more homes.

Community First! Village is located just outside Austin city limits. Graham says it would have been impossible to build it on the other side of the line.

"We are blessed with the reality that there is no zoning, no discretionary land use authority outside of a municipal boundary," says Graham. "And that's a big deal because that's the only tool that NIMBY[s] can sink their teeth into." 

"NIMBY" stands for "not in my backyard"—a term used to describe activists who lobby to block new real estate development. Within Austin city limits, developers have to contend with zoning restrictions and preservation laws which have made it hard to meet the huge increase in demand caused by wealthy professionals fleeing coastal cities.

Residents thwarted plans to rewrite the zoning code, which would've allowed more vacant or underutilized properties to be transformed into multifamily housing units with nearby retail. In contrast, existing strict business and residential demarcations make such mixed developments more difficult.

A common refrain among urbanists and disgruntled residents is that Austin is like San Francisco in the '90s: Those who migrated to the city and bought houses early stand to gain from the soaring prices, but many others are getting priced out or pushed farther from the city center.

"The city of Austin itself, which is probably where the most [local] demand [for housing] would be, is hyper NIMBY," says urbanist Scott Beyer, who has studied the interaction between zoning laws, housing prices, and homelessness. He points out that Austin's suburbs have stayed relatively affordable despite large population growth.

Still, many Austinites don't appear to see the relationship between the zoning and land use changes they oppose and the fact that affordability is getting worse and worse.

But such land use restrictions—especially zoning—shaped the ability of each city we visited to respond to its homelessness problem.

Another crucial aspect was the strings attached to government funding. As the operator of a faith-based charity not reliant on federal funding, Graham is free to experiment, including by coming up with cheaper ways to build his tiny homes. Some tiny homes are 3D printed, while others are prefabricated, and still others are bare-bone shacks that don't contain any plumbing and require residents to use shared kitchens and bathrooms.

"People want our government to be risk-free, and as a result of asking [the government] to be risk-free, it lacks innovation," says Graham. He says the average unit in Community First! Village costs about $80,000.

Federal funding requires that homeless service providers conform to the policy approach of Housing First, which focuses on getting clients into apartments as quickly as possible. Services can then be offered as an option, but they're not stipulated, nor is "readiness" for independent living assessed. Graham says this approach is limiting.

"[Housing First is] an important piece of the puzzle, but it can't possibly be the only piece of that puzzle," says Graham. "We need community first."

But Community First! Village may have its own limitations. The pandemic put extra stress on them as an eviction moratorium made enforcing basic rules more difficult, and one resident told us safety concerns have grown along with the population of the neighborhood, raising questions about whether or not to hire a security team, which would be costly and could change the entire nature of the community.

And although they are quickly scaling up, Community First! Village only serves a fraction of Austin's estimated 4,600 homeless population. The city of Austin's lead homelessness agency accepts money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and is therefore subject to the same federal mandates that operators in California are.

Most concerning for many Austinites is the growing visibility of the unsheltered homeless population. In 2019, before the pandemic, the City Council repealed Austin's 23-year-old anti-camping ordinance, which led to so much street camping that voters reinstated the ban with a 2021 referendum called Proposition B.

Austin's combination of street camping, artificially constrained housing supply, and a network of homeless service providers hamstrung by federal guidelines has led to the city beginning to resemble some of the worst failures of the West Coast.

And that brings us to San Antonio, which blazed its own path for helping the homeless.

"We weren't so interested in feeding someone overnight or putting them up overnight…. Our goal was to make them different people, have a different life, and be able to participate in our society," says ​Phil Hardberger, who served as San Antonio's mayor from 2005 to 2009, a period in which the city's homeless population grew by about 1,000.

But he helped to reverse this trend by partnering with Valero's founding CEO Bill Greehey to build a nonprofit homeless service provider called Haven For Hope on a 22-acre lot owned by the city. To build the campus, Greehey raised more than $100 million, mostly from the private sector, and contributed lots of his own fortune.

Today, Haven For Hope offers room and board, health care, child care, and even a kennel, as well as a comprehensive life skills program that includes job training, mental health counseling, and addiction treatment.

To live in the dorms on the main campus, residents have to agree to learn practical life skills, make it to class, attend counseling, stay clean, and continue along the path to independence.

For people unable or unwilling to follow the program, or who just need immediate assistance to get off the streets for a night or two, there's a separate area called the Courtyard, which offers security, heat, food, laundry, and a shared indoor space with beds. The same counseling and treatment services are offered on this side, but they aren't mandatory.

The nonprofit serves about 85 percent of San Antonio's homeless population, serving about 7,000 people a year. According to internal reports, Haven re-houses about 1,000 clients a year. Ninety-one percent have stayed in their new homes after a year.

Kim Jefferies, Haven for Hope's president and CEO, says that private funding has given them the flexibility to offer services better tailored to the needs of their clients.

Shelters that rely heavily on federal funding are subject to more restrictions because of the one-size-fits-all "Housing First" mandate championed by Democrat and Republican administrations.

The Housing First movement started in the 1980s and took off amid the George W. Bush administration's "compassionate conservatism" agenda.

President Barack Obama completed the pivot to a federal Housing First policy with the HEARTH Act of 2009, which made focusing on rapid re-housing a requirement for those receiving federal funds

The result was predictable: Federal money was spent on pricier permanent supportive housing, and the use of temporary emergency shelters decreased. Facing a critical lack of beds, shelters started turning people away.

In 2018, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling that enforcement of anti-camping laws in cities lacking emergency beds was cruel and unusual punishment and thus unconstitutional. With major cities lacking adequate beds and therefore the legal right to prohibit street camping, entire neighborhoods of Los Angeles and San Francisco turned to squalor.

San Antonio doesn't allow street camping, though like in any large city, it's possible to find encampments nestled beneath overpasses. Jefferies says they work with city officials to notify homeless individuals of their options in advance of an encampment sweep.

"And so [San Antonio doesn't] allow [street camping]. So I think that is helpful in our success in getting people off the streets," says Jefferies.

Beyer says that there should be "a hundred different models" for homeless provision because homelessness is complex, is caused by many different factors, and often requires different solutions. In a recent policy report he co-authored for California's Independent Institute, Beyer analyzed some of the problems with Housing First.

"The intentions were good, but I think also the outcomes could have been quite predictable in a sense," says Beyer. "If you're funding people to live on the street in a state of disrepair… and you say that even despite living like this, you're gonna get free housing… it seems like you would encourage a lot more of that behavior."

Beyer argues that mandating Housing First has crippled policy innovation in major West Coast cities and that the nonprofit sector would benefit from more experimentation in their approaches to mitigating the problems that lead to homelessness.

"I think a lot of that innovation is getting squelched when we have a federal government that only allocates grants based on this one very specific model that we call Housing First," says Beyer.

Jefferies estimates a Housing First approach would work for about 15 percent of the approximately 7,000 homeless individuals who come through Haven For Hope every year.

"[The other 85 percent] need different kinds of stability before they move into that model," says Jefferies. She says that because San Antonio invested heavily in emergency shelter beds in contrast to HUD's shift towards Housing First, the city was better able to adapt. "The approach followed the funding, and so we can have different interventions for different people because we're not totally reliant on the federal government to fund it."

Three years after L.A. voters passed a $1.2 billion bond measure to help the city's homeless population, the city had completed just 1 percent of the promised 10,000 units. And the average cost of building each apartment was about half a million dollars. At the high end, the cost of each exceeded $800,000.

Union Rescue Mission, one of the city's largest and oldest homeless service providers, didn't get any of that funding—because it didn't conform to the Housing First approach mandated by the state of California. Union Rescue Mission CEO Andy Bales told Reason in 2019 that city officials laughed at him for suggesting a different approach.

"Some of my counterparts who depend on [voter-approved referendum fund] money, they're afraid to speak the truth," says Bales. "They can't speak the truth, otherwise they would get in great difficulty and be defunded…. I think pride and arrogance is really holding us back from doing some of the needed things we need to do to immediately solve this issue."

But the winds have changed. In late 2021, an L.A. County supervisor appointed Bales to help oversee the county's response to homelessness.

"Don't be afraid of the dogmatic Housing First, permanent supportive housing people," advises Bales. "Don't be afraid of the NIMBY."

There is one city in Texas where Housing First is working well.

As The New York Times reported last year, Houston has reduced its homeless count by more than 60 percent over the past decade, while placing more than 25,000 people in permanent units.

So how did America's fourth largest city succeed by going all in on Housing First while Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland have failed so miserably?

Ana Rausch, vice president of program operations at the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County, says it partially has to do with appointing a single agency as the first point of contact for any homeless person seeking help. While many cities have several organizations in this role, Rausch says this centralization makes it easier to efficiently route clients where they need to go and to track outcomes.

She says that the housing readiness approach in San Antonio, which has a metro region population about​ one-third the size of Houston's, wouldn't scale.

"You're basically paying to leave people homeless in a courtyard [in San Antonio]," says Rausch. "See which costs more. I've been doing this for 23 years, and the Housing First approach works." 

Several studies have shown that Housing First does better at keeping chronically homeless people with serious mental illness off the street than more intensive "housing readiness" interventions.

But other research has cast doubt on its effectiveness, its impact on health outcomes, and whether its results hold up over time.

Besides limiting innovation in homeless services, governments also make housing artificially expensive. Rausch says that the reason Housing First works in Houston but not in Los Angeles has everything to do with the cost of building.

"You can't have your cake and eat it, too, and that's what's happening in L.A.," says Rausch. "They need more affordable housing. They need more physical units built, but they can't do it because they're in their own way."

Houston is famous for not having zoning. Townhouses run up against multifamily apartment buildings sitting atop ground-level businesses. A crematorium neighbors high-end condominiums. Skyscrapers loom over single-family neighborhoods in a city where you just don't have to ask much permission to build.

"We really have never cultivated this sort of NIMBY mechanism in Houston," says Tory Gattis, an urbanist who specializes in Houston land regulation. The result of the city's laissez faire approach is that despite massive population growth over the past decade, housing prices are stable. That's because it's difficult for interest groups to stop a development project.

Houston also has no urban growth boundaries, unlike its West Coast counterparts, meaning that in addition to growing upward, housing can easily spread outward to accommodate both affordable city and suburban living. Without zoning, growth boundaries, or excessive environmental review laws, neighborhood groups can't easily block new housing projects on adjacent land, but master-planned communities and longstanding neighborhoods can create and enforce private deed restrictions to prevent homeowners from suddenly turning a single-family house into a four-story building without community input. Gattis says this is a compromise that more cities would be wise to pursue.

"Protect your single-family neighborhoods. That's where your biggest political opposition's going to be, and that's what Houston's allowed with the deed restrictions," says Gattis. "But then let all the rest of your land open up, whether it's commercial or industrial. Let it go multifamily. If that's what the market needs, let it go."

So a major reason Texas has a lower homeless population than California traces back to zoning and construction costs. Housing First works in Houston because it's so cheap to build. Austin is expensive like a coastal city, but the unincorporated swath of Travis County outside of city limits provided Alan Graham with a spot for his tiny home community.

What's also working in Texas is a willingness to give local social entrepreneurs the flexibility to craft policies that best serve their homeless populations, instead of adhering to one-size-fits-all federal policies.

"The whole regime of government funding of homeless [response] I think drives out a lot of private philanthropy," says Beyer. "I think there would be a lot of market appetite for solving homelessness from the philanthropic sector. That does not happen because people just assume the government is supposed to do it."

Graham believes that there's a role for government but that it shouldn't be micromanaging through overly restrictive grants.

"We believe that government should play a subsidiary role to we, the people in mitigating these profound human issues that are out there like homelessness," says Graham. "But we've abdicated this to the government as a society, and we're reaping what we're sowing." 

Music Credits: "Inborn" by Piotr Hummel via Artlist; "Crossing the High Desert" by Lance Conrad via Artlist; "Kill or Be Killed Showdown" by Lance Conrad via Artlist; "Hope and Heisenberg" by SPEARFISHER via Artlist; "Crystalline" by Leroy Wild via Artlist; "Diamonds" by Livingrooms via Artlist; "Deadman Pass" by The Talbott Brothers via Artlist; "Beer House" by Alex Grohl via Artlist; "Martha" by Swirling Ship via Artlist; "Wanderer" by The Talbott Brothers via Artlist; "Finding My Memories" by Yehezkel Raz via Artlist; "Railroad" by Max H. via Artlist; "Who Goes There" by Falconer via Artlist; "Ross Landing" by David Benedict via Artlist; "Country Roads" by Kick Lee via Artlist; "Grey Shadow" by ANBR via Artlist

Photo Credits: DPST/Newscom; John Marshall Mantel/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; JIM RUYMEN/UPI/Newscom; TERRY SCHMITT/UPI/Newscom; Mike Kane/SanAntonioExpress/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Bob Daemmrich/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Scott Coleman/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Taylor Jones/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; FRANCES M. ROBERTS/Newscom; RICHARD B. LEVINE/Newscom; Mario Cantu/Cal Sport Media/Newscom; Jana Birchum/Polaris/Newscom; Bob Daemmrich/Polaris/Newscom; Curt Teich Postcard Archives / Heritage Images/Newscom; Jamal A. Wilson - Pool via CNP/Newscom; Michael Ho Wai Lee/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Brittany Murray/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Wu Kaixiang / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Julie Edwards / Avalon/Newscom; David Crane/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Peter Bennett/Citizen of the Planet/Newscom; Facebook/Haven for Hope; Facebook/Coalition for the Homeless of Houston; Flickr/Eric Garcetti (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0); Flickr/Steve Shook (CC BY 2.0)

The post Why Homelessness Is Worse in California Than in Texas appeared first on Reason Magazine.

In February 2022, the World Journal of Oncology published an article by a team of 13 researchers claiming that vapers are about as likely to get cancer as people who smoke traditional cigarettes. 

Citing this article, Stanton Glantz, a tobacco-control activist and retired professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, claimed that not only are there "some carcinogens in e-cigarette aerosol," but "now there is also direct evidence that people who use e-cigarettes are at increased risk of some cancers."

And then the World Journal of Oncology's editors retracted the study because "concerns have been raised regarding the article's methodology, source data processing including statistical analysis, and reliability of conclusions."

The study is indeed riddled with errors. One section, for example, says 2.3 percent of cancer patients in the study vaped and 16.8 percent smoked traditional cigarettes, while the table cited in that passage showed 1 percent of cancer patients in the study vaped and 46.1 percent smoked traditional cigarettes.

As Reason's Jacob Sullum has noted, the retracted study also suffered from another basic flaw, shared by other studies that weren't retracted but probably should have been: It doesn't take into account when its subjects started vaping versus when they were diagnosed. An analysis in Internal and Emergency Medicine cited 11 studies with this problem. As Sullum notes, this is also the reason that a 2020 study claiming to show that vaping causes heart attacks was retracted.

These studies use large observational databases to see if vapers are more likely to have health problems than nonvapers. Although the National Center for Health Statistics claims that the data are representative of the overall population, they're actually not well-suited to studies of this sort. The data are based on self-reports that are often wrong and may contain missing or inconsistent entries. Important information wasn't collected. The databases are not random population samples because only about half the invited subjects agreed to participate and it's likely that certain groups are over- or underrepresented because ​​they face different incentives when deciding whether or not to sign on.

The retracted study claimed a large sample size with data on 154,856 subjects. For assessing the cancer risk of vaping versus traditional smoking, what we should be looking at are vapers who never smoked traditional cigarettes, yet have cancer. There were 180 vapers with cancer in the study. But based on general population percentages, probably fewer than 100 had never smoked traditional cigarettes. That's too small a sample to draw robust conclusions. The median age of vapers in the study was 25, versus 62 for traditional smokers, and they had very different breakdowns of income, race, sex, and medical conditions. Adjusting for all these factors would require a minimum of 1,000 observations.

The editors of the journal and the paper's peer reviewers failed to notice the study's many flaws prior to publication, but they ultimately concluded that it was bad enough to retract. Even so, it's worth dwelling on its problems because they're typical of what we see with statistical studies on this topic and others like it.

If researchers can query the same datasets and arrive at completely bizarre results that are as strong as or even stronger than the ones they're reporting, they're doing something wrong. In this case, the authors claimed active vapers had 2.2 times the risk of cancer as the control group. But their logistic regression showed that people who never used cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamines also had a 2.2-times-higher risk of getting cancer. Why didn't the authors run with this finding—that cocaine might be a cancer preventative? Because it's absurd and would have brought ridicule.

According to the researchers' data, being white raises your cancer risk by 2.6 times. Having a middle income of between $25,000 to $65,000 raises your risk 2.3 times. The authors didn't report these spectacular findings either. This paper is among the worst of the anti-vaping studies that managed to get published in respectable, peer-reviewed journals and cited by regulators and legislators. But even the best studies haven't surmounted a key statistical issue, and they tend to distort the evidence to make vaping look dangerous.

The Internal and Emergency Medicine analysis noted 11 flawed studies that linked vaping to various diseases. Some of those studies relied on surveys that don't report when respondents began vaping. But the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study reports age ranges for initiation of smoking and vaping as well as diagnoses. Based on that survey, the authors of the Internal and Emergency Medicine article found that subjects diagnosed with cancer typically started vaping after they were diagnosed with their conditions. In fact, just 4 percent of e-cigarette users were definitely diagnosed after they started vaping. By contrast, about 98 percent of smokers were diagnosed after they started smoking. Overall, 99 percent of cases involved people with a history of smoking, and just 2.3 percent of vapers diagnosed with one of the four health conditions covered by this study had never been cigarette smokers.

The tiny population of vapers who never smoked traditional cigarettes and who started using e-cigarettes before being diagnosed with a health condition is hard to identify, unrepresentative of the general population, and likely too small to draw conclusions from. No amount of tricky statistical work can overcome this basic data issue.

There's another problem with the way the results of these studies are reported. Even if it does turn out that vaping has negative health consequences, it still may be a net positive for users who otherwise would go back to traditional cigarettes. And banning e-cigarettes altogether would cause some people to turn to the black market to get their vaping fix. Then they would have no idea what they're sucking into their lungs because there would be no quality control. In 2019, underground manufacturers of marijuana vapes mixed vitamin E acetate into their products, which likely explains why 2,807 people ended up hospitalized and 68 died.

Proving that traditional cigarettes cause cancer, which they do, required two types of data: observational studies and experimental studies. First, people noticed that cancer patients were more likely to be smokers than noncancer patients, and then careful experimentation teased out some of the mechanisms by which smoking led to cancer.

Observational studies, even without data issues, can show only an association, not causation. Although most vaping studies claim only an association, journalists, activists, and public officials are quick to assert causation. Experimental studies can show causation but can't measure the practical extent of an issue or possible offsetting factors.

One experimental study of vaping that drew press attention was published in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine under the title "Molecular imaging of pulmonary inflammation in electronic and combustible cigarette users: a pilot study."

One problem with this particular paper is that it studied only 15 people: five vapers, five users of traditional cigarettes, and five people who don't smoke at all. However carefully you select groups of five subjects, they can't represent a broad enough cross-section of users to draw any solid conclusions. That would require hundreds of participants. This experiment also relied on screening volunteers and made no attempt at randomness or sampling the range of the population, meaning that each of the three groups of five subjects differed from each other in important ways.

The paper did not show that vaping causes lung damage—in fact, the researchers didn't check for that. Instead, it looked at "biomarkers," or chemicals thought to be associated with lung damage. By that measure, they found no difference between the five vapers and the control group of five people who had never vaped or smoked.

The study did find that uptake of a chemical thought to react to a biomarker for lung damage was higher in the five vapers than in the control group. But the five cigarette smokers included in the study had a lower uptake of that chemical than the controls, which makes the conclusion suspect since we know traditional cigarettes cause lung damage. Most likely, this correlation can be attributed to random chance. And this was a pilot study, meaning it was aimed not at generating firm conclusions but at testing procedures and determining which hypotheses could be tested in a subsequent study.

The authors mentioned more than 30 statistical tests at the 5 percent level of significance, and they may have conducted more. A 5 percent significance level means there is a 5 percent chance of getting a positive result by random chance even if there is no association at all in your data. With 30 tests, you should expect 1.5 positive results even if vaping is unrelated to lung health. The authors got two positive results out of 30, which is hardly strong evidence of anything. And the two results are among the least direct in terms of linking vaping to lung damage. The more direct tests of biomarkers failed to find any differences among the groups.

A classic prohibitionist argument is that while a controversial activity may not be harmful in itself, it leads to bad things. In the case of vaping, several studies suggest that young vapers are something like seven times as likely to smoke traditional cigarettes in the future than similar young people who don't vape.

An oft-cited paper in this area, "E-Cigarettes and Future Cigarette Use," is typical of the genre. Out of 298 Southern California 17-year-old high school students who didn't vape, only 11 percent were smoking cigarettes a year later. Among those who were vaping at 17, 40 percent had taken up old-fashioned cigarettes at 18.

The paper did a lot of additional analysis, but this is the basic statistic driving the conclusion. To the authors' credit, they were careful to label this as an "association" between vaping and future smoking rather than claiming that vaping caused future smoking. Yet when this paper was cited by regulatory authorities, they interpreted it as causal evidence and therefore as a justification to restrict vaping.

There are reasons to be skeptical about this kind of research. Not everyone is honest when they fill out a survey, especially young people asked about activities that are frowned upon. And only 14 percent of the students interviewed at age 17 participated in the follow-up survey a year later. The missing students might be systematically different from the ones recorded in the study.

It's also plausible that teenagers who vape differ from teenagers who don't in ways that independently affect their likelihood of smoking. Perhaps the type of kid who vapes at 17 is more likely to smoke at 18. In that case, restricting vaping among 17-year-olds probably won't reduce smoking at age 18. In fact, some 17-year-old vapers will switch to traditional cigarettes or turn to underground purveyors of e-cigarettes, which would pose a much more serious health risk. There is plenty of evidence that many smokers use vaping to reduce or quit smoking. In fact, adolescent smoking has continued to fall as adolescent vaping has increased.

Another anti-vaping argument is that it has negative mental or social health consequences. Studies like "Electronic cigarette use and mental health: A Canadian population-based study" suffer from the same issues as studies linking vaping to future smoking. It's easy to show that vapers have more psychological and social issues than nonvapers, but that's only an association. An obvious alternative explanation is that troubled kids are more likely to vape—either as a form of self-medication, or because they have less regard for adult opinion and rules, or perhaps because they are less supervised or have less to lose by acting in a deviant way.

Even if we did have good observational studies suggesting that vaping is reliably associated with future smoking, or that vaping is associated with mental and social problems, we would need experimental studies to support causal claims. Most real experiments are unethical since participants would have to be randomly assigned to vape or avoid vaping, which is why researchers look for natural experiments.

A good example of a natural experiment is "Intended and unintended effects of e-cigarette taxes on youth tobacco use." The authors used data on youth smoking and vaping rates in 10 states and two large counties that enacted e-cigarette taxes between 2010 and mid-2019. They found that taxes were associated with a reduction in vaping among young people. But they were also associated with an increase in young people smoking traditional cigarettes. That's good evidence that vaping and smoking are substitutes. If vaping led to smoking, a decrease in vaping would lead to a decrease in smoking.

Several other natural-experiment studies reinforce the idea that vaping and smoking are substitutes, although the rate of substitution seems to vary in different populations. While we still have a lot to learn in this area, the evidence to date suggests that discouraging vaping will lead to increased smoking and very likely worse public health.

This research suggests that the 15–20 percent e-cigarette tax, which was part of the original Build Back Better Act though was eventually taken out, probably would have reduced youth vaping by about 3 percent and increased youth smoking by about 2 percent. Given the evidence that vaping is far less hazardous than smoking, more teens smoking instead of vaping doesn't represent an improvement in public health. None of this research shows that vaping is safe, and it doesn't rule out the possibility of negative health effects that haven't yet been found. But in public policy, the most important question is: "Instead of what?"

In real life, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. There's overwhelming evidence that if the alternative to vaping is cigarette smoking, vaping represents a huge improvement for public health. Government officials generally fail to reason in these terms. They tax, ban, and regulate as if their policies exist in a vacuum, citing statistically dubious studies to support their preconceived policies.

Photos: Douglas Graham/Newscom; Peggy Peattie/TNS/Newscom; Stanton Glantz by Noah Berger

The post Do Studies Show Vaping Causes Cancer? No. appeared first on Reason.com.