Utterly Moderate Podcast

Before we begin, don't forget to check out Lawrence Eppard's new book, The Poisoning of the American Mind, and to read the newest piece in the Connors Journal on single parenthood in the U.S.

Now on to the podcast. . . 

Kimberly Wehle, a constitutional law expert at the University of Baltimore's School of Law, joins the Utterly Moderate Podcast to discuss her new book,  Pardon Power: How the Pardon Power System Works—and Why.

Wehle and host Lawrence Eppard discuss a variety of topics, including:

• How the pardon power looms large in the current presidential election.
• Why Wehle believes the pardon power is necessary to retain.
• The constitutional limits of and possible reforms to the pardon.
• Both good and bad historical examples of the pardon's use.
• Whether it might be used (appropriately or inappropriately) to help the Jan. 6 rioters, Hunter Biden, or to self-pardon Donald Trump (and whether a self-pardon is even constitutional).

Enjoy the conversation and please consider JOINING OUR MAILING LIST!

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

Single parenthood has risen dramatically in the United States over time. Today, 34% of all children live in a single parent household, up from 9% in 1960.

There are regrettable negative consequences of these statistics, as The Bulwark’s Mona Charen notes:

“[C]hildren in mother-only homes are five times more likely to live in poverty than children with two parents. And children in father-only homes were twice as likely to be poor as those in married-couple homes. Poverty is not conducive to thriving, but even for kids who are not poor, those who grow up with only one parent fare worse than others on everything from school to work to trouble with the law. And the consequences of fatherlessness are more dire for boys than girls. Boys raised without fathers and/or without good adult male influences in their lives are less likely to attend college, be employed as adults, or remain drug-free.”

And as the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz writes:

“Kids in single-parent homes have lower educational achievement, commit more crime, and suffer more emotional problems, even when controlling for parental income and education. Not only do young men and women from intact families (regardless of race and ethnicity) get more education and earn higher earnings than those raised with single mothers; they also do better than children who have a stepparent at home. Children growing up in an area where single-parent families are the norm have less of a chance of upward mobility than a child who lives where married-couple families dominate (regardless of whether that child lives with a single parent or with married parents). The evidence that the prevalence of single-parent households poses risks to individual children and communities goes on and on.”

There are large variations in single parenthood rates by race/ethnicity, with 63% of Black children, 50% of Indigenous children, 42% of Latino children, 24% of non-Hispanic White children, and 16% of Asian American children living in single parent households.

University of Maryland economist Melissa Kearney has published important research on how family structure impacts American children, including her new book, The Two Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind:

“The most recent research, much of which incorporates advanced statistical techniques, continues to show that children who are raised in single-mother households tend to have lower levels of completed education and lower levels of income as adults, even after statistically accounting for observable demographic characteristics (for example, where the family lives or the mother’s level of education)” (p. 52).

In Table 1, Kearney shows how children of single parents differ in their life chances compared with children of married parents. For children of college-educated mothers, for instance, 57.0% have a college degree by age 25 if their mother was married, but only 28.6% of those raised with a college educated single mother.  

In Figure 1 you can see, as Mona Charen alluded to, the strong correlation between the dominant family structure in a neighborhood and the upward mobility rate of children raised there.

Even for children who themselves are raised in married parent households, they are statistically more likely to struggle in adulthood if they are raised in a community where there is widespread single parenthood. If you want to dive deeper into this subject, this paper from the Connors Institute has got you covered.

Table 2 shows the large variations in poverty rates between American families with different structures. Taken together, all of these data strongly suggest that parents really matter.

We discuss rising single parenthood and its consequences for children on the most recent episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast.

Joining us in this discussion is Kay Hymowitz, a research fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She writes not only on family issues and childhood, but also poverty and cultural change in America.

Hymowitz is the author of the books The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back (2017), Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys (2011), Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age (2006), and Liberation’s Children: Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age (2004), among others.

Don't forget to sign up for our FREE NEWSLETTER!

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, the authors of the brand new book, The Poisoning of the American Mind, talk about the book and its implications for America. 

So what is their argument?

A significant amount of research suggests that most people seek out news and information sources that mirror their worldviews, avoid ones that don’t, and interpret information using cognitive filters that force an alignment with what they already believe. As social psychologist David Dunning writes, “Each of us possesses certain foundational beliefs—narratives about the self, ideas about the social order—that essentially cannot be violated. . . And any information that we glean from the world is amended, distorted, diminished, or forgotten in order to make sure that these sacrosanct beliefs remain whole and unharmed.” 

As they document in their brand new book and their free online documentary of the same name, the evidence suggests that this problem afflicts both conservative and liberal Americans.

Conservative Americans tend to place their trust in very few sources of news and information, and those sources tend to be low-quality, like the openly partisan Fox News. Conservatives also tend to cocoon themselves within a partisan media ecosystem of like-minded low-quality outlets, an “internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenge[s] it.” 

Liberal Americans are more likely than conservatives to trust legitimate journalistic outlets, but those sources often unknowingly spread misleading claims that they truly believe are backed by “the science.” Why do they believe this? Sometimes it’s because the outlet doesn’t fully grasp the preponderance of the evidence on the issue at hand. But too often it is because irresponsible experts, who news outlets should be able to trust, said “the science” backed their claims when it didn’t.

Consider the following statements that many on the left assume are backed by “the science”:

• Discrimination is a primary cause of the gender pay gap (this is more than likely not true in America today).
• Gender affirming care reduces suicide risk for gender dysphoric individuals (the weight of the empirical evidence does not support this claim at the moment).
• Police officers kill a disproportionate number of African Americans due to racial bias on the part of officers (this is a claim being vigorously debated and without a clear answer at the moment).
• We can reliably identify microaggressions, whether they are motivated by racial bias, and whether they cause harm (the evidence for this claim is extraordinarily weak).

None of these claims are backed by strong evidence. At best, the research is mixed, not clearly pointing in one direction or the other. At worst, the evidence supports the opposite conclusion. But many on the left believe these statements are backed by “the science” because prominent academics have made big, irresponsible claims that go far beyond what the preponderance of the evidence supports. 

In Poisoning, the authors give equal attention to epistemic failings on both sides. They believe the evidence shows that Americans across the political spectrum fall for questionable assertions from sources that they believe to be trustworthy and authoritative, sources which often present the information in a manner that appeals to the sacred beliefs of consumers’ in-groups. 

They make no assertions about which side’s epistemic failings are “worse” due to their honest inability to quantify such a thing—and they are not sure it matters as much as some may think. Both red and blue America face epistemic crises that act like serious illnesses that sicken American society—even if you could measure which one makes us feel “worse” as a nation, the reality is that either one would make our country seriously ill, and experiencing them simultaneously is a nightmare.

In Poisoning the authors discuss not only the misleading information that is hurting American, but a variety of possible ideas for how to get ourselves out of this mess.

You can buy the book, watch the free documentary, and read the other work they have published on this topic.

And of course don’t forget to sign up for our FREE EMAIL NEWSLETTER in just one click!

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

Given how much our democracy and country have been through, we thought on this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we would lighten things up a bit and talk about something that perhaps we all might have some positive feelings about: one of our founding fathers. 

It is July after all, America’s month of celebrating our independence.

In the spirit of July and America and trying to find some positivity right now, on this episode we bring you a replay of our conversation with George Washington University historian Denver Brunsman. He previously joined the show to share his insights on the life and career of George Washington, as well as his general reflections on the study of history and its place in the modern university. 

Enjoy the conversation and don’t forget to sign up for our free email newsletter in one click!

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)
• "Washington Post March" by the U.S. Marine Band (publicly available on YouTube)

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, host Lawrence Eppard and Connors Institute co-director Jacob Mackey discuss techniques and shortcuts that you can use to spot real expertise in a world where people with expert credentials are sometimes frauds and where people without expert credentials are often very knowledgeable. They also discuss crucial techniques for examining your personal biases and the limits of your own knowledge.

This conversation is based on two really good readings, and we hope you will not only listen to this episode but go to these websites and read these short but very illuminating pieces:

• “Spotting Real Expertise” by Spencer Greenberg in the Connors Newsletter (click HERE to read).
• “Strategies for Consuming News” by the Connors Institute (click HERE to read).

Enjoy the episode! And PLEASE subscribe to our newsletter in just one click!

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

Before we talk about this episode, we hope you didn’t miss the latest research from the Connors Institute on the gender pay gap. Check it out now!

We talk quite a bit on this podcast about some of the things that many liberal and conservative Americans believe that just ain’t so.

In fact, we just released a free online documentary about this titled The Poisoning of the American Mind. 

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Wilfred Reilly, political scientist at Kentucky State University, to talk about misleading claims that have made their way into educational curricula in the U.S. Friend of the show Jacob Mackey joins the conversation as a special guest cohost.

Our guest, Dr. Reilly, is the author of several books, two of which are particularly informative in this discussion:

• Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About (2020), which addresses such things as:
  • The fact that, contrary to many current claims, men and women are different.
  • There is no epidemic of police murdering unarmed Black Americans.
  • “Pay gaps" between big groups, when several important variables are controlled for, are very small.
• Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula (June 2024—preorder now!), which includes the following chapters:
  •  Lie #1: “Brutal ‘True’ Slavery Was Virtually Unique to America and the West”
  •  Lie #2: “The ‘Red Scare’ Was a Moral Panic That Caught No Commies”
  •  Lie #3: “Native Americans Were ‘Peaceful People Who Spent All Day Dancing’”
  •  Lie #4: “Hippies Were the Good Guys, the Sexual Revolution Was Great for Women, and the Vietnam War Was Unpopular and Pointless”
  •  Lie #5: “The Founders Counted Slaves as Three-Fifths of a Person and the Only Victims of Lynchings Were Black”
  • Lie #6: “European Colonialism Was—Empirically—a No-Good, Terrible, Very Bad Thing”
  • Lie #7: “American Use of Nukes to End World War Two Was ‘Evil’ and ‘Unjustified’”
  • Lie #8: “Unprovoked ‘White Flight,’ Caused by Pure Racism, Ruined America’s Cities”
  •  Lie #9: “‘Southern Strategy’ Racism Turned the Solid South Republican”
  • #10 Bonus Lie: The Continuing Oppression Narrative

Enjoy the conversation, and don’t forget to subscribe in just one click to our FREE EMAIL NEWSLETTER!

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

Before we talk about this week’s podcast episode, don’t forget to check out the Connors Institute’s new documentary, The Poisoning of the American Mind, an illuminating film about how conservatives and liberals in America regularly fall for misinformation and disinformation.

On this week’s episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, we are joined by everyone’s favorite astrophysicist, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Dr. Varoujan Gorjian, to discuss a number of science-related topics, including:

• The looming problem of space junk, man-made objects littering low-Earth orbit that are bound to cause problems in the future—like when one piece of space junk fell to Earth recently and smashed through the roof of a home in Florida.
• How freaked out Utterly Moderate host Lawrence Eppard was by an asteroid that recently came too close to Earth for Eppard’s liking.
• Whether Dr. Gorjian has seen any famous scientists get embarrassingly drunk at academic conferences (will he name names?).
• The ongoing search for Earth-like planets.
• The recent solar eclipse that swept the nation and whether an esteemed astrophysicist like Dr. Gorjian gets excited by them anymore (spoiler: he really does!).
• The awesome discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope.
• The interesting scientific puzzle of the Hubble Tension.
• And of course, Barbenheimer.

Enjoy, and thanks for listening!

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

We’ve talked a lot on the Utterly Moderate Podcast about how both liberals and conservatives in America are bombarded with misleading information on a regular basis.

On the left, unfortunately, a lot of this bad info comes from an academic research community which is overwhelmingly liberal. A recent study found the least imbalanced discipline to be engineering, which was still 62% liberal professors. Political science was 89%, psychology 94%, and sociology 98%, while some disciplines had no political conservatives at all. 

This significant one-sidedness means that the people doing the research as well as the people checking to make sure that research is high quality before it is published all have similar ideological blind spots, and this is allowing too much misleading information to make it into the public discourse, where it is often perceived by average citizens as being backed by solid evidence when that just isn’t so.  

On this episode host Lawrence Eppard is joined by anthropologist Michael Jindra from Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs to talk about this problem and hopefully offer some ways to save the social sciences from themselves.

Check out just some of the great insights Jindra has to offer in his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “When Ideology Drives Social Science.”

And don’t forget to sign up for our CONNORS NEWSLETTER! It’s just one click and it’s FREE!

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, we are joined by Dr. Sallie Baxendale to help us think about how we might make such judgements. She also goes into detail about ways in which the scientific process can go wrong, as it has been in some areas of gender-affirming care in recent years, as Joshua Cohen discusses in Forbes:

“In the U.S., a politically partisan divide is shaping up between states that allow for and guarantee access to youth gender-affirming care and states that ban such treatment altogether. Twenty-two states have passed bans on the use of cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers and surgery in minors.

In Europe political divisions on this topic aren’t nearly as conspicuous as they are in the U.S. Rather, the debate is much more fact-based. An increasing number of countries have conducted systematic reviews of evidence to determine the benefits and risks of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. And the findings from these reviews—that the certainty of benefits is ‘very low’—have informed changes in policy regarding treatment of gender incongruence in minors. . .

All things considered, according to European health authorities and medical experts, there isn’t yet a medical consensus for the use of pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in gender dysphoric minors.

And so authorities are ‘tapping the brakes,’ shifting from care which prioritizes access to pharmaceutical and surgical interventions, to a less medicalized and more conservative approach that addresses possible psychiatric comorbidities. . .

In the U.S., on the other hand, talk of introducing guardrails like the ones being incorporated in Europe is sometimes met with being branded ‘transphobic’ or a ‘science denier.’”

You can read about Dr. Baxendale’s own troubling experiences with this field of research in her recent UnHerd article.

Dr. Sallie Baxendale is a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University College of London’s Institute of Neurology. She has over three decades of clinical experience working with people with epilepsy in London and Oxford, is the current chair of the International League Against Epilepsy Diagnostic Methods Commission, and serves on the Board of Governors for the International Neuropsychological Society.

As you listen to this fascinating episode, also make sure to subscribe to our FREE NEWSLETTER!

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Jacob Mackey to discuss two big gender-related stories in the news.

The first story is positive, and we have covered it in the Connors Newsletter—a big new research study shows that we have made great progress combatting sex discrimination in the labor market. This is great news!

Then there is a difficult and troubling story. According to leaked internal files from WPATH, a leading global organization which advocates for transgender health care, WPATH has not been completely forthcoming about their internal concerns about the evidence behind gender affirming care for minors as well as the ethical issues surrounding informed consent for such care.

The first part of this conversation is really positive, while the second half is a difficult subject that we hope we treat fairly and with an appropriate level of concern. Thanks for taking a listen.

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined again by Lisa Selin Davis, a writer who covers issues related to gender and gender affirming care.

Davis joins the program to discuss a recent UnHerd article “Why did three journals reject my puberty-blocker study? Trans children deserve to know the facts,” written by Sallie Baxendale, a clinical neuropsychologist at University College London.

Baxendale details an academic article she wrote about the state of the research on whether puberty blockers are harmful to people’s cognitive function. Baxendale argues that the responses that she got from peer reviewers suggest that ideology is clouding the judgement of the experts responsible for making sure that the best science is available to transgender children and their families when they are making life-altering decisions.

Lisa Selin Davis discusses this article and its broader meaning within the larger conversation about whether some sciences are allowing ideology to get in the way of doing the best research possible.

Enjoy the episode and don't forget to sign up for our FREE EMAIL NEWSLETTER!

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we discuss recent controversies at and concerns about colleges and universities in the United States—from highly publicized instances of campus unrest to a lack of intellectual diversity among faculty to hypocrisy on free speech.

This episode’s guest is Jacob Mackey, associate professor at Occidental College and coeditor with host Lawrence Eppard of The Poisoning of the American Mind, which is due out later this spring.

Check out the podcast episode and also check out two reports that were recently released from the Connors Institute, the “Connors Institute Media Report Card” and “Place Matters.”

In the media report card Connors researchers take a rigorous look at numerous news and information sources in the U.S. and evaluate their bias and accuracy. Check it out yourself to see which outlets made the grade and which ones missed the mark.

In “Place Matters” Connors researchers examine the impact of neighborhoods and communities on American children’s chances of success. The efforts and choices of the individual children themselves of course matter for their success, as do the efforts and resources of their families. But this research shows that the neighborhoods and communities where children are raised matter a great deal for their success as well—take a look at the report yourself and also take some time to examine your own neighborhood!

And don’t forget to subscribe in just one click to our FREE EMAIL NEWSLETTER!

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

Before we get to today’s episode, check out this article about the Connors Institute in The Sentinel newspaper!

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Robert VerBruggen from the Manhattan Institute to discuss a new documentary which claims to disprove that George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, as well as a new research study which claims to disprove that income inequality in the U.S. has been rising since the 1960s.

The documentary in question, The Fall of Minneapolis, was produced by Alpha News, an organization that has a history of low-quality journalism that is often inaccurate, biased, and misleading. Podcast host Lawrence Eppard and guest Robert VerBruggen will discuss the claims in the documentary and why they fall short.

They also discuss a new and important research study which calls into question whether income inequality has really been rising since the 1960s like we have all been led to believe. While this new paper does not completely disprove the argument that inequality has in fact been increasing, it raises serious concerns about how certain we can be about the dominant narrative that inequality has been rising out of control.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our FREE email newsletter in just one click!

Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)
• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Since this Utterly Moderate episode is both our Christmas program and our 100th PODCAST EPISODE, we thought we would try to be as uplifting as possible.

In that spirit, we are being joined by Johan Norberg, author of a number of books including Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future.

In that book, Norberg presents extensive data documenting how the world has gotten much better over the centuries across several measures, including freedom, life expectancy, poverty, violence, hunger, sanitation, the environment, literacy, and more.

The book helps us not only to avoid being so doom and gloom about the state of the world, but to identify the reasons why we have made so much progress in the first place, avoid derailing those efforts, and help us build on them for a better tomorrow.

Enjoy this conversation, and very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.

Sign up for our FREE NEWSLETTER in one click at ConnorsInstitute.org.

Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)

• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)

• "Remedy for Melancholy" by Kai Engel (Free Music Archive)
• "Silent Night" by Piper Kull (used with artist's permission)
• "O Holy Night" by Piper Kull (used with artist's permission)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jim Swift from The Bulwark joins the Utterly Moderate Podcast to discuss the fraught nature of the immigration debate in the U.S.

Both sides in the immigration debate have important points to bring to the table, and good faith discussions and compromises are badly needed. Unfortunately, such efforts often get sidetracked by misinformation and disinformation about this thorny issue.

Swift discusses a story of his that had a number of important issues—legal immigration, unauthorized immigration, and disinformation—all wrapped into one.

Enjoy the conversation! And don’t forget to subscribe to our FREE EMAIL NEWSLETTER in just one click at ConnorsInstitute.org!

Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)

• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)

• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Leading American poverty researcher Mark Robert Rank joins the Utterly Moderate Podcast to discuss his Poverty Risk Calculator, the record-low poverty rates that the U.S. saw in 2021, Dr. Rank’s research on the risk Americans face of experiencing poverty throughout their lives, a new book he has coming out on luck, and more!

Rank has spent his career studying poverty, economic inequality, and social policy in America and teaching about these topics at Washington University in St. Louis, where he has been a faculty member since 1985.

Much of his research has focused on the life course risk of poverty in America. Using data from hundreds of thousands of Americans taken from a longitudinal study that began in the 1960s, Dr. Rank and his research collaborators have been able to estimate the likelihood that the average American will experience poverty at some point in their lives.

This research shows that around 59% of Americans will experience at least one year under the official poverty line at some point in their lives.

While Rank has published his research findings in a number of academic articles and books over the years, it occurred to him that it might be possible to use this body of poverty research in order to develop a tool that would allow individuals to estimate their own risk of poverty.

The idea is similar to a doctor’s ability to predict your risk of heart disease. Using several pieces of information (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.), your doctor can make a reasonable estimate of your chances of having a heart attack in the next decade. These numbers are based on statistical patterns derived from a very large sample of families that make up the Framingham Heart Study, the longitudinal study of cardiovascular health that began in 1948.

Could this be done with poverty data? Working with his colleagues over the course of hundreds of hours of programming and designing, Rank developed the Poverty Risk Calculator. You can try it for yourself.

Using the calculator, individuals enter background information on five dimensions (age, race, gender, education, and marital status), and receive a 5-, 10-, and 15-year probability that they will experience at least one year of poverty during these time periods. Individuals can also calculate their odds of experiencing near-poverty and extreme poverty.

The calculator is designed so that individuals can also easily compare their profile with others’ side-by-side in the same graph to examine how the risk of poverty varies by different characteristics. The impact of each variable is profound, and one can readily see how poverty is affected by, for example, changes to one’s race, education, or marital status. This allows users to observe the impact of key social dimensions on life chances. Try it for yourself and see how even a single change can drastically alter your personal risk of poverty.

By utilizing the calculator you can see that the risk of poverty for many Americans is significant. While the likelihood of poverty may be low during any single year, across multiple years, individuals observe that their risk can rise substantially. 

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Episode Audio:

• "Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)

• "Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• "Last Dance" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)

• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Friend of the Connors Forum and frequent Utterly Moderate guest, Lee McIntyre, has a new book out titled On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy, a “powerful, pocket-sized citizen’s guide on how to fight back against the disinformation campaigns that are imperiling American democracy, from the bestselling author of Post-Truth and How to Talk to a Science Denier.”

McIntyre argues that there is an effort in this country to destroy facts and make America ungovernable. In the book, he walks through how the war on facts began, how bad actors deny obvious realities and wield disinformation to manipulate American citizens, and ten everyday practical steps that we can take as ordinary citizens to combat disinformation. He also addresses the important steps our government must take to fight what McIntyre calls a “scourge” of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our society.

This episode features highlights from a previous conversation we had with both Lee McIntyre and frequent Utterly Moderate guest Tom Nichols, author of the great book The Death of Expertise.

The Connors Forum is an independent entity from the institutions that we partner with. The views expressed in our newsletters and podcasts are those of the individual contributors alone and not of our partner institutions.

Episode Audio:

• "Cloudbank" by Podington Bear (Free Music Archive)

• "Reading by Lamplight" by Maarten Schellekens (Free Music Archive)

• “Algorithms” by Chad Crouch (Free Music Archive)

• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

• Mitt Romney January 6th speech (publicly available on YouTube) 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we discuss both the pros and cons of nuclear power, especially as it pertains to combatting global climate change.

The international community is attempting to keep the world from warming no more than 1.5-2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century.

While there have been incredible efforts to achieve this—efforts that have likely taken the worst-case warming scenarios off the table—we are still on track for closer to 3.0 degrees warming by 2100 instead of 2.0 degrees.

Some would argue that the expansion of nuclear power would go a long way toward closing that gap.

Friend of this show and frequent guest, The Bulwark’s Mona Charen, has written that:

“The world’s demand for energy is not going to diminish, but only increase in the coming century. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates world energy demand will increase 50% by 2050. . . The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] countries cannot in conscience deny development to the world’s poorer nations. Nor can we delude ourselves that renewables, at the current state of technology, can take up all the slack created by giving up fossil fuels.

Amazingly, there is an existing technology that can produce the energy the world needs without harming the climate. And yet we hesitate.

Nuclear power is the key to limiting climate change and hobbling some of the world’s worst aggressors.

If we’re serious about both problems, we’ll clear the air of superstitions about nuclear power. Nuclear power plants cannot explode like nuclear bombs. They require much less land than solar or wind. Nuclear waste can be safely buried. The U.S. Navy has been powering ships with nuclear reactors since the late 1950s. According to the Naval Post: ‘U.S. Nuclear Powered Warships (NPWs) have safely operated for more than 50 years without experiencing any reactor accident or any release of radioactivity that hurt human health or had an adverse effect on marine life.’

Nothing is perfect. One death from radiation exposure at the Fukushima power plant has been noted by the Japanese government: a worker who died of lung cancer in 2018, seven years after the tsunami and meltdowns. But if we are in a new hard-headed era, we will evaluate trade-offs like adults.

Are we serious about choking off the source of Putin’s power or not? Are we serious about combating climate change without illusions that wind and solar will do the job? Nuclear power can be a major part of the solution to both challenges.”

Our guest on this episode, Robert Zubrin, has written a new book on this topic titled The Case for Nukes. We hope you enjoy this conversation about an important issue facing our world.

And don’t forget to subscribe to our FREE EMAIL NEWSLETTER!

The Connors Forum is an independent entity from the institutions that we partner with. The views expressed in our newsletters and podcasts are those of the individual contributors alone and not of our partner institutions.

Episode Audio:

• “Please Listen Carefully” by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Star Blessed Night” by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
• “Draw the Sky” by Paul Keane (licensed through TakeTones)
• “Algorithms” by Chad Crouch (Free Music Archive)

• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Headliner and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

On today's program, we discuss both pros and cons of nuclear power

Speaker A: Utterly moderate is the official podcast of the Connors forum. Visit us at connorsforum.org and be sure to subscribe to our free email newsletter while you are there. Please listen carefully. Carefully, carefully. Hey.

Speaker B: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the program. This is the utterly moderate podcast. And I'm your host, Lawrence Eppard. On today's program, we are talking about both the pros and the cons of nuclear power, especially when it comes to tackling climate change. So if this isn't something that you pay a lot of attention to and you're not really familiar with what the international agreements are, basically what countries around the world are trying to do is by the end of this century. We are attempting to keep the world from warming no more than 1.5 to two degrees Celsius above where we were before the Industrial Revolution. And it's pretty amazing how much work has been done in the international community to tackle climate change. It's been pretty amazing. And the worst case scenarios, it looks like, are off the table because of international cooperation. But there's still a lot of work to be done. We're still closer to three degrees of warming rather than two degrees of warming, and we really need to close that gap. And there are many who would argue that nuclear power is one really important tool in our arsenal to help us close that gap. Mona Charon, who you probably know is a frequent guest on this show, and a friend of this podcast. She has written the following about nuclear power quote the world's demand for energy is not going to diminish, but only increase in the coming century. The US. Energy Information Administration estimates world energy demand will increase by 50% by 2050. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries cannot in conscience deny development to the world's poorer nations. Nor can we dilute ourselves that renewables at the current state of technology can take up all the slack created by giving up fossil fuels. Amazingly, there is an existing technology that can produce the energy the world needs without harming the environment. And yet we hesitate. Nuclear power is the key to limiting climate change and hobbling some of the world's worst Aggressors. If we're serious about both problems, we'll clear the air of superstitions about nuclear power. Nuclear power plants cannot explode like nuclear bombs. They require much less land than solar or wind. Nuclear waste can be safely buried. The US. Navy has been powering ships with nuclear reactors since the late 1950s. According to the naval Post us Nuclear powered warships have safely operated for more than 50 years without experiencing any reactor accident or any release of radioactivity that hurt human health or had an adverse effect on marine life. Nothing is perfect. One death from radiation exposure at the Fukushima power plant has been noted by the Japanese government, a worker who died of lung cancer in 2018, seven years after the tsunami and meltdowns. But if we are in a new, hard headed era. We will evaluate trade offs like adults. Are we serious about choking off the source of Putin's power or not? Are we serious about combating climate change without illusions that wind or solar will do the job? Nuclear, power can be a major part of the solution to both challenges. End quote.

Robert Zubrin has written a new book on nuclear power

Speaker B: Our guest today, Robert Zubrin, has written a new book on this topic titled The Case for Nukes, where he argues that, quote, the bottom line is this we are going to need to produce a lot more energy, and it will need to be carbon free. The only way to do that is with nuclear power. In my book, I go into great detail about how nuclear power is generated, new technologies coming online, and what all of this will mean for the future of humanity, including space exploration. End quote. Robert Zubrin, we are so happy to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker A: Thanks for inviting me.

Speaker B: No problem.

You have a new book called The Case for Nukes about global warming

Speaker C: So you got a great new book out called The Case for Nukes how We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, open and magnificent Future. So let's start with what's your background? What's your training? What brought you to write this book?

Speaker A: Well, I actually have a doctorate in nuclear engineering. I've only worked, a fraction of my career in the nuclear industry. Mostly I've worked aerospace. But, now we have this whole global warming alarm. There are people who are pushing solutions which are basically reactionary, essentially rigging up fuel prices to, deter people of limited income from using fuel or electricity. That's what it amounts to. And, I think that's unethical. And furthermore, it hasn't worked. We've doubled our carbon emissions in the past 30 years, just as we did in the 30 years between 1960 and 1990. We doubled it. We doubled it between 1930 and 1960, and we doubled it between 1990 and then 2020 because people don't want to be poor. And not using fuel essentially amounts to poverty. and the answer is straightforward. It's nuclear power. And, it's very unfortunate that the groups who are, making the greatest alarm about global warming are fighting against nuclear power.

Speaker C: All right, so you, propose the answer, at least in terms of a bridge technology, until we do something like fusion or whatever in the future, might solve this problem.

One of the disadvantages of nuclear power is it has been made expensive

Speaker C: So let's talk about advantages and disadvantages. Let's start with disadvantages, and you can tell me what you make of it. So, one of the disadvantages is it has been expensive to build. Correct?

Speaker A: It's been made expensive. the first nuclear power plant we built in this country took three years to build. Now, it takes 16. And, this has been the result of hostile regulation. and if you look at the numbers, and I present them in my book, the Cost to Build a nuclear power plant has gone up precisely in proportion to time squared. Okay? Construction time squared is the cost of the nuclear power plant. Anything can be made, prohibitively costly. If the FAA were run like the NRC, there would be no airlines. If a city government banned parking in the city, they would say it was impossible to park. Or they would say you can only park in places where it's $100 an hour to park. And they say, well, gee, parking costs $100 an hour. Well, you can make anything cost, excessive amounts through regulation. And that's what we've had with nuclear power.

Nuclear power is the only power which has such a small amount of waste

Speaker C: Another disadvantage people point to, and I want you to tell me if I'm making too much of it, not enough of it. You give us your take on the problem of nuclear waste. So what's the problem? And do you think it can be overcome?

Speaker A: Well, it's ironic that they single out nuclear waste as a problem because nuclear power is the only power which has such a small amount of waste that you actually can store it. The idea of sequestering and storing the waste from coal fired power would be absurd. And of course, fossil fuel in any kind, it sends its waste right into the atmosphere. and the waste products from making photovoltaics are enormous in the way of, ah, fluorine compounds. It caused massive fish kills and damage to public health in China, where these things are made. nuclear power, on the other hand, the amount of waste is, minuscule, and we could reduce it still more by reprocessing the waste. Ah, but of course, the, anti nukes have been first in line to, prevent that. But there's no technical problem with disposing of nuclear waste. The French reprocess and then store their waste. The US. Military, the nuclear navy, stores its waste in salt caverns in New Mexico. the, anti nukes have had no effect on implementing that solution because the Navy needs nuclear submarines and they're just not willing to have their program sabotaged. So the anti nukes have focused on preventing any storage of civilian nuclear waste. And they claim they're interested in safety. How can that be when they are saying, we would prefer to have nuclear waste stored at nuclear power plants in the suburbs of major cities rather than under a mountain in the middle of the desert? Nevada.

One of the fears about nuclear waste is the possibility of a meltdown

Speaker C: All right, so you say nuclear waste can be solved. You say that, the cost can be brought down with changes to regulation. One of the fears, and I want you to talk about this fear and how we should contextualize it, is, of course, the danger of a meltdown. So tell us, is that a reasonable fear? How should we think about that danger?

Speaker A: Okay, meltdowns are possible. That is, while a pressurized water reactor, which is pretty much all the reactors we have in the United States, cannot, have a runaway chain reaction because it needs the water in order to sustain the chain reaction. And if the water boils too much, the reaction shuts down. There is still waste heat left in the reactor, that is from radioactive, waste particles in the fuel. And they continue to give off heat whether the reactor is running or not. And so if the water is gone, you'll have heat and there's no cooling, the fuel will melt down. And the anti nukes said, well, gee, it will melt down. It'll melt down right through the steel pressure vessel, which is eight inches thick, and then through the concrete containment, vessel, which is 8ft thick. we actually had, ah, a meltdown at Three Mile Island. And what happened was the core did melt down and it hit the steel pressure vessel and it melted its way about one inch into the steel, and then it stopped. It didn't penetrate the steel pressure vessel. It never even reached the containment building, let alone China. So this is, a, greatly, overhyped, situation. it is an engineering concern. The Three Mile Island reactor was lost. It was a loss of investment, but there was no harm to the public.

Speaker C: One of the examples, people point to is Chernobyl. But, that was very different technology and very different, political and leadership context, right?

Speaker A: Correct. Chernobyl was not a pressurized water reactor, as I mentioned. you, see, to make the chain reaction work, you got to slow the neutrons down. It's called moderating the neutrons. They're going too fast. They go right by nuclei without splitting, okay? So you got to slow them down. So we use water to slow down the neutrons. And, the advantage of that is, if the reactor gets too hot, the water turns to steam, it can't slow the neutrons down anymore, and the reaction shuts down. So it's physically impossible to have a runaway chain reaction in a water moderated reactor. Chernobyl was not a water moderated reactor. It was a graphite moderated reactor. And graphite doesn't turn into vapor. it's solid. And so, it didn't have, this negative feedback. And in fact, the reactor operators did a crazy experiment in which they set off, a runway chain reaction. and then furthermore, another thing that Chernobyl reactor didn't have, which all, reactors in the civilized world have, is a containment building, okay? So all it had was an ordinary, building. And so when the reactor had a runaway chain reaction, it blew a hole in itself and a hole in the side of the building. And now you had the hot graphite exposed to air. And, so the graphite caught fire. And so this reactor was not only unstable, it was flammable, which is crazy. so you had the whole reactor literally go up in smoke and scattering, radioactive waste products, all over the landscape. the firefighters that were brought in to put the fire out were exposed directly to this cloud of radioactive material being, turned to radioactive smoke right at the reactor. And so about 80 of them were killed. then the fallout came down over a wide area. There's no documented, fatalities from that fallout. but a large area was evacuated and, has turned into an incredibly, flourishing wildlife reserve. but also, the response the Soviet authorities was completely incompetent. And, more could be said about that. But basically, the people who died at Chernobyl were not victims of nuclear power. They were victims of the Soviet Union.

Speaker C: Now, this is, totally anecdotal. I don't have any data to back this up, but when I speak to environmentalists today, I do see their perspective on nuclear softening a bit. Do you see that happening in the US. Or am I overstating that?

Speaker A: Well, you have a certain faction in the Democratic Party. It even has an organization called the Third Way. say, well, why aren't we going to nuclear? it's clean energy. It's the common sense answer. if you actually believe that global warming is an existential crisis that is, one that threatens the existence of the human race, it should take a lot of convincing to tell you that the hazard from nuclear power no nuclear power plant in the United States or, actually anywhere outside the Soviet Union has ever killed anyone. Not even at Fukushima, where, several nuclear power plants were destroyed by an earthquake and tidal wave. there was still no one, who got a harmful radiological dose outside of the plant gate. So here you have a situation where you've had over a thousand nuclear reactors on land or sea for the past.

Speaker C: 60 years not harming anyone now, beyond the benefits. So, no pollution, no greenhouse gases. you write in your book that also, could help opening the space frontier. So tell us what your argument was there.

Speaker A: Well, I mean, look, here's the thing. All the chemical elements that you need to make anything are on Mars, for example. But as is usually the case on Earth, with some exceptions, they're there in a useless form. In other words, you have iron, but it's in the form of iron oxide, silicon in the form of silicon dioxide and so forth. well, those can all be turned into useful resources if you have energy. Okay, now, what's the energy? Well, they don't have fossil fuels on Mars. You can make them, but it would take energy to do it. There's no waterfalls. the air is too thin for wind power to do much. You can do solar power on Mars, but it's only 40% as strong as it is on Earth. And on Earth, it's not terribly attractive. so it's significantly worse on Mars. So what are you going to do for power? Nuclear power. And if you look at the universe, the vast majority of it is far away from any star. so, the vast majority of the universe is dark. so whether you want to develop Mars or do interstellar travel or anything, you're, in general going to be operating out of range of effective solar power. It will take nuclear power to, develop space.

Robert Zubrin says fusion is a doable thing

Speaker C: Does, Robert Zubrin watch movies? Did you happen to see Oppenheimer by any chance?

Speaker A: Yes, I did. And in fact, I wrote a review of Oppenheimer, favorable, for the, online magazine Quillette. they actually had two reviews, one by another person who focused on the artistic merit of the movie. I focused on, they asked me the question, is it, realistic? And, my answer was fundamentally yes. There's only one significant technical error in the film and that's its obsession over this question of whether people were worried that the first atom bomb would ignite the atmosphere. there was no such concern. I mean, Edward Teller did bring it up that we should do that calculation to make sure that that would not happen. But once the calculation was done, he was quite satisfied. and in fact, there was no chance whatsoever, that that could happen. fission of nitrogen would not release any energy at all. And fusion of nitrogen, occurs so slow that the various loss mechanisms would quench the reaction virtually immediately. what people were worried about at Trinity was whether it would work. Because you got to realize this is an incredibly complex thing and they're testing it for the first time. I ran an R and D company for 27 years and it's pretty rare that something new works the first time, but it did.

Speaker C: before I let you go, the future, is it going to be fusion?

Speaker A: Well, eventually, yes. I, think we will have improved, versions of fission. I think we'll have breeder reactors, I think loth thorium reactors. These things are on the way. but definitely fusion, is a doable thing. and right now, really, as a result of the success of SpaceX demonstrating, entrepreneurial approaches to reusable space launch vehicles, in other words, doing the impossible, so to speak investors have taken a look at advanced vision and fusion and said, maybe the reason why we don't have it is the wrong people are doing it. maybe the problem is institutional. And so you have both advanced fission and fusion entrepreneurial companies getting large amounts of funding from investors and these people are moving ahead on very fast timelines. So while, fission has stagnated, since its initial golden age of the think, we're going to have new kinds of fission reactors and we're going to have fusion as well.

Speaker C: Robert Zubrin. He's got a new book. It's called The Case for Nukes how We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, open and magnificent Future. Robert, thank you so much for joining the program.

Speaker A: You are most welcome.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are going to be talking about something called the “replication crisis.”

Most people will not be familiar with this since it has been happening in academia but we promise it is not only quite intriguing and full of juicy details but it also has some pretty big implications for the larger society.

So what is the replication crisis?

In the past 15 years or so it has been discovered that many research findings in major academic journals actually don’t hold up to scrutiny.

When an academic publishes a study they are required to describe their research methodology in detail. If another researcher tries to conduct the same study using the same methodology, this is an attempt at “replication.” If the replication finds the same results, this is further evidence that the original study was on to something. If they don’t find the same results, it suggests that the original study may not have found the thing that it had claimed to find.

In 2005, John Ioannidis, a professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine, published an article that got a lot of attention titled, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

In it he wrote that:

“There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. . . this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.”

Then, in 2011, there was a significant controversy over a paper by social psychologist Daryl Bem that claimed that people can have “precognition,” or ESP, and backed up this claim using the accepted methods of his field of psychology. This led many researchers to question dominant research methods, how the peer review process could fail so miserably, and whether this problem was much bigger than a few papers.

In 2015, researchers published an article in the prestigious journal Science in which they detailed their attempts to reproduce 100 psychology studies. Alarmingly, they found that they were only able to successfully replicate 39 of those studies. Other similar efforts since then have also shown that many major published studies that have become accepted facts cannot be replicated and should be called into question.

Over the past few years, academic fields have been grappling with the replication crisis and debating ways to strengthen the guardrails in academic research and publishing so that fewer flawed studies become accepted knowledge.

On this Utterly Moderate episode we are joined by Rutgers University psychologist and friend of the show Dr. Lee Jussim to discuss all of this.

Don't forget to subscribe to our FREE NEWSLETTER!

The Connors Forum is an independent entity from the institutions that we partner with. The views expressed in our newsletters and podcasts are those of the individual contributors alone and not of our partner institutions.

Episode Audio:

• “Please Listen Carefully” by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Star Blessed Night” by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
• “Draw the Sky” by Paul Keane (licensed through TakeTones)

• “By Grace” by Podington Bear (Free Music Archive)

• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this Utterly Moderate Podcast episode we tackle a sensitive issue that is hard to find a clear, definitive answer to: does race play a significant role in fatal shootings of civilians by law enforcement in America?

Our guest, Robert VerBruggen, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has done important work on this topic, including his March 2022 report: “Fatal Police Shootings and Race: A Review of the Evidence and Suggestions for Future Research.”

Based on the best available evidence, he finds the following:

“The data certainly rebut the most extreme versions of the Ferguson narrative, which originated in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in that city in 2014. In surveys, many people say that they think American cops kill 1,000 unarmed Black men every year, but the real number averages out to more like 20, and it’s even lower than that if you just look at suspects who weren’t attacking someone when they were shot.

About a quarter of people shot by the cops are Black, which is about double the Black share of the overall population—but it’s in line with many other benchmarks you might compare it to, such as the Black share of arrestees, or cop-killers, or homicides. In other words, the overall racial breakdown of people shot by police isn’t surprising, given the demographics of crime.

But these are just simple numbers, and there are more complicated methods you can use to try to find bias. That’s where the story gets more nuanced. For example, it’s worrisome that the Black share of unarmed people shot and killed by police is a bit higher than the overall Black share of police killings. And one study I found especially troubling showed that, in one city, White cops are several times as likely as Black cops to fire their guns when they’re sent to 911 calls in Black neighborhoods.

As a whole, these data don’t support the extreme narrative—and that’s important—but we still have much to learn.”

In summary:

• When you take into account how often the police will respond to crime calls involving different racial groups, the weight of the evidence does not suggest, nationally at least, that Black Americans are being targeted by law enforcement for fatal shootings.
• It is important to remember that (a) we need much better data and the evidence is not conclusive, (b) there may be more or less racial bias depending upon the area of the country that you look, and (c) there are many examples of unjustified police killings of Black Americans, regardless of the national trends, and those of course deserve scrutiny.

VerBruggen goes into much more detail about his work in this area and others in this episode.

To see Robert VerBruggen’s full portfolio of research with the Manhattan Institute, follow this link.

The Connors Forum is an independent entity from the institutions that we partner with. The views expressed in our newsletters and podcasts are those of the individual contributors alone and not of our partner institutions.

Episode Audio:

• “Please Listen Carefully” by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Star Blessed Night” by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
• “Draw the Sky” by Paul Keane (licensed through TakeTones)

• “Moonlight Reprise” by Kai Engel (Free Music Archive)

• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Utterly Moderate is the official podcast of the Connors Forum. Visit us at Conners Form Talk and be sure to subscribe to our free email newsletter while you were there. Please listen carefully. Careful, careful now. Hey. Hey everyone. Welcome back to the program. I am your host, Lawrence Safford, and this is the utterly moderate podcast, the place where you can get aggressively nonpartisan and reasonable examinations of important issues.

Thanks for joining me today. I hope you are well as we prepare to say goodbye to Summer and hello to the fall season. Depending upon who you are, that may be good news or bad news. You may be happy to say goodbye to summer or sad. But regardless, I'm glad you're here with us today. And on today's episode we are going to tackle a topic that is very sensitive and has been really perplexing to me for a long time, and that is the role of race in police shootings in America.

Now, as you are well aware, there have been several highly publicized police killings of black American civilians in the past decade. And from those killings, there has emerged a narrative that the police in this country are more likely to kill black Americans compared with whites. And if you remember, and I'm sure you do, the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, that's perhaps the event that really amplified this narrative.

Now, for me personally, it's really easy to see why people would jump to this conclusion. For me, it's extremely hard to watch the video of George Floyd's death without having had just incredible visceral reaction to how unnecessary his death was. When you see that video, especially in the context of America's history of race relations, it's really tempting to jump to that conclusion that police in America are targeting black Americans.

But when I went looking for the actual data on this, the actual empirical evidence, it really honestly led me to confusion. There are so many different people making wildly different claims about whether there is or is not racial bias in police killings. Now, as far as I can tell, there seems to be more consensus about racial bias in other categories of misconduct.

So when it comes to, say, whether police use excessive force, there does seem to be racial bias. There. But when it comes to the specific question of police killings, the picture is much less clear. And so I reached out to somebody who's done important work in this area. Robert VerBruggen. He's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and I encourage all of you to read his work, including the March 2022 report, quote, Fatal police shootings and race, a review of the evidence and suggestions for future research and quote and I'll hyperlink that in the show description.

So for a little background, in 2014, when Michael Brown was killed, we knew very little about the true number of people who were killed by police in America. Since that time, however, there have been significant efforts to count these killings and to do it comprehensively and to collect basic details about each incident. These data, along with information provided by police departments, have led to a massive amount of research into the question we're asking today, which is, is there racial bias in the killings of civilians by American police?

Now, when he's reviewed all of these new data for Burge and comes to the following conclusions, quote, The data certainly rebut the most extreme versions of the Ferguson narrative, which originated in the aftermath of Michael Brown's death in that city in 2014. In surveys, many people say that they think American cops kill a thousand unarmed black men every year.

But the real number averages out to be more like 20, and it's even lower than that. If you just look at suspects who were not attacking someone when they were shot, about a quarter of people shot by the cops are black, which is about double the black share of the overall population. But it's in line with many other benchmarks you might compare it to, such as the black share of arrestees or cop killers or homicides.

In other words, the overall racial breakdown of people shot by police isn't surprising, given the demographics of crime. But these are just simple numbers, and there are more complicated methods you can use to try to find bias. That's where the story gets more nuanced. For example, it's worrisome that the black share of unarmed people shot and killed by police is a bit higher than the overall black share of police killings.

In one study I found especially troubling, showed that in one city, white cops were several times as likely as black cops to fire their guns when they were sent to 911 calls in black neighborhoods as a whole. These data don't support the extreme narrative, and that's important. But we still have much to learn. End quote. So to sum up what VerBruggen has found in the evidence, he says, When you take into account how often the police respond to crime calls involving different racial groups, it is not likely that at least nationally, black Americans are being targeted by the police in fatal shootings.

But he says it's important to remember that, A, the evidence is not conclusive and we need better data on this. B, there may be more or less bias depending upon where you are in the country. And see, it's important to remember that there are many examples of unjustified police killings of black Americans, regardless of national trends. And those, of course, deserve scrutiny.

Now, this is such an important topic. It's a sensitive topic, and we've got to get it right in our public discourse. So I'm really pleased to have Robert VerBruggen on the show today. Robert, welcome to the program. Great to be here. So before we dive in, I brought you on today because I personally have really wanted to get down to the truth about the police and fatal shootings as it relates to race.

And so some publications say there's this huge epidemic that black people are being hunted. Some say the opposite, that, no, you know, there is no racial discrepancy. And so that's not my area of expertise. And I wanted to get down to what is the actual truth here. And I think you've done a good job of writing about that.

Before we get there, though, tell us about the work that you do and where you work, the Manhattan Institute. Sure. Well, the Manhattan Institute is a it's a think tank, sort of a center right think tank that focuses on urban issues, especially in domestic policy issues in general. My own background is in journalism. I went to journalism school.

I worked as an editor at a few different different publications and have done a lot of writing on a lot of different, different policy topics. And like most people, I think I really came to the issue of police shootings and the intersection with race in the aftermath of Ferguson when everybody was making all these all these kind of wild claims and we actually didn't have very good data at that time.

So in the years since, I've been paying attention to all the data that's been released and all the studies that have been done, and I kind of synthesize that report I did to the Manhattan Institute last year, called the fatal police shootings of race. Yeah. So and we're going to get into this, and I want to actually back up a second and ask you about what a think tank does and how that's different from a university or some other research body.

But I got to ask you, and we're sort of jumping ahead here, but I got to ask you, why is the conversation so messy? You said that like there was this narrative and there are plenty of people out there making claims with statistics. Why is it so hard? Why are there so many people making competing claims? It seems like on some topics there's this huge confusion and lots of people are saying lots of different things and some topics there's, you know, some consensus y on this topic.

So much so many opposing points of view and arguments. I mean, I think one one is that the emotion here runs extremely high. I mean, police shootings and the intersection with race have obviously been at the roots of riots, of protests. And of course, it's if people are being killed by the police unjustifiably, that's that's an enormous issue.

That's a that's an enormous violation of rights. I think the emotional emotions really run high with this topic. But the other is that, you know, first of all, we as I mentioned, we don't have a lot of great data at the beginning. So you could kind of drawn whatever numbers you wanted because nobody was actually paying attention to how many people the police were killing in America, which is really striking in and of itself.

But the other thing is, is that when you have a topic that involves race and crime, there's there's one question is whether there's a disproportion with regard to the general population. But the second question is whether there is a skew relative to crime rates. Unfortunately, in this country, we do have, you know, different crime rates on the basis of race for historical reasons that stretch back to you.

Of course, slavery and Jim Crow and years and years of really rough racial history in the U.S. But when you have different different crime rates on the basis of race, you're also going to have different policing outcomes on the basis of race. The left rate debate tends to boil down to folks in the left will tend to use population benchmarks.

They will say that you know, black people are shot disproportionately to their numbers in the general population, which is true. And but then the response from the right is that, no, this this reflects differences in crime rates and there's not really a problem here. And what I've tried to do is to dig underneath all of that and try to sort out what's really going on.

And so you would argue that at least early on it was a matter of low quality data and methodological disputes. Yeah, Yeah, definitely. At the beginning, there were basically two two major collections of data that you could look at. Police use three. One was from the CDC, the other was from the FBI. Neither one of them was even even collecting data on half of the police shootings.

The problem with the FBI data was that it was voluntarily reported by police departments. Some police departments don't even participate in the program. Some of them don't report the police shootings, even if they report other crime data. And the CDC, a lot of the the police homicides were just being classified as regular homicides. They were being classified as what's called a legal intervention, which is what they're supposed to be called.

So we actually didn't have data. And then you'd have, you know, journalistic outlets and in some academic studies trying to make use of what data we had. And that was just sort of sort of a messaging. And you'd led to all these kind of wild claims about about the percentages involved. Okay. So African-Americans, 13% of the population. All right.

And which so many people would say, okay, if it's much higher, if they're proportion of unarmed police shootings is much higher than that is racism. That's an example. That's a it's a clear demonstration of racism and bias and that kind of stuff. But you say a better benchmark is to look at crime rates. So why is that the case?

Why would that be a better benchmark than that, just like mechanically speaking, like for like how it actually plays out, why that would lead to more shootings? Why would crime rate be an important thing that we should actually get said to different to different levels of the issue? One and one is the crime benchmark, and the other is whether we're looking at all shootings or unarmed shootings.

One of the issues with using any sort of benchmark approach is that it's never exactly clear which benchmark is the right one. So so when police go into a neighborhood, they're they're often deployed on the basis of crime rates. There might be a stronger police presence in it in areas with more crime rates. And of course, they're often specifically looking for and responding to calls about crime.

So that's the whole job of the police, is to prevent crime. Crime, stop crime. They go where the crime is and where the crime is. And the individuals who are involved in crime are not represented, but of the general population, the people who police are interacting with and using force on are not going to be representative of the general population either.

So that's where you get this idea of using a benchmark. The second issue here is, you know, the unarmed versus armed question. Obviously, when somebody is not armed and they're killed by the police, that is sort of a red flag that indicates something might have gone wrong there. But being armed or unarmed is not proof of of a wrongful shooting.

If somebody is armed but was peacefully carrying a gun, that they had a permit to carry, The fact that they were armed is not a justification for shooting in the same things if somebody was unarmed, but they were saying that they had a gun and digging around in their waistband or if they were unarmed and, you know, very physically powerful and attacking the officer in these cases on the shooting of somebody who's unarmed can be justified.

So that that really digs into, first of all, why benchmarks are important, why it's important to understand that crime rates are different for different populations. And we need to consider why that's the case. But I think it also reveals some of the limits of just comparing the percentage of people who are shot by the police, whether that's in total or specifically those who are unarmed.

And just comparing that raw number to some other number that represent the crime rate. So I think I think crime is important. It's an important part of the dynamic here that we absolutely have to understand. But I also think that benchmark approaches we're just comparing two different percentages are very limited. So I use this metaphor in class and right on the air here for all of America to hear or, you know, the little slice of America that listens to me, you can tell us if this is a really stupid metaphor and if I could just stop using it or if this makes sense.

But I always tell my my students when thinking about race and crime and these types of issues, I tell them to think about our campus and imagine if there was only a couple of people on campus who were smoking weed, you know, and but the police knew that. And in one dorm, nobody was smoking weed in another dorm.

Two people were smoking weed. Everybody else wasn't. Right. But they pay their they they spend their energies and their resources there because that's where the crime was occurring. And by virtue of always being there and not being elsewhere, they're going to come and do a lot of contact with the other people in the dorm who aren't committing any crimes.

Right. So is that your argument that these benchmarks for crime show us that, yes, you should expect more interaction and therefore more more deaths based upon participation in crime, but also where police resources are targeted? Exactly. That's exactly the point that we expect cops to go where the crime is. These are people we hire and tell them, hey, you know, go where the crime is, stop crime, get involved.

When you see crimes happening. And that's not that's not an assignment to interact with a random sample of the population. You know, nobody is you. We talk a lot about race and crime, but nobody seems surprised at all that police shoot a overwhelming majority of people shot by the police are male as opposed to female, for example. This is not an assignment we give the police is not to interact with the random selection of the population.

It's a very specific assignment that involves subsets of the population. And unfortunately, those those are not representative along a lot of different, different demographic characteristics. And that's something that's going to affect, you know, who's shot by the police. And we need to account for that when we're thinking about your percentages of people who are shot by the police.

Because one issue, of course, is if you look at any maps of crime in the U.S., they tend to overwhelm in terms of gun homicides. They tend to be clustered in areas of intense disadvantage. And those areas tend to be much higher proportion of black. Right. But also another uncomfortable reality is on certain types of crimes where police are going to be likely to use lethal force like murder and sexual assault and those sorts of things.

You also see an overrepresentation in terms of African-Americans, in terms of perpetrate perpetrating exactly. Exactly. And this is not something I mean, I think some people on the right, you know, sometimes you almost come off as if they're gloating about it's like, you know, oh, no, this is nothing to worry about because it's just because there's such a high crime rate in this community.

And I think it's important not to come across like that. I think this is a national emergency that we have such disparate homicide rates, for example, by race. But but the bottom line is that when you're you're sending cops out to to interact with with crime and to try to stop crime, you can't then blame the cops, root for either the demographics of the of the offender population that that they're dealing with.

That's not something that's under their control, something that that we need to address as a society. Right. Unless they're shooting people in a unjustified manner. And what you found in your research is nationally, you find that no, it does not appear that cops just as a function of their duty and the bias that comes with, you know, being a cop, they're not shooting African-Americans at a disproportionate rate.

You say there are some areas where it looks like there may be an issue, but nationally, it's not just a function of if you have cops, they're going to, you know, disappointingly shoot African-Americans. There is a there was a different study by an economist called Mark Hoekstra, I think is the Dutch position. And Cali. Well. Sloan they did not identify the city that their data came from.

It was part of the condition of their agreement to get the data. But they actually found that when a white officer is sent into a black neighborhood, that officer is much more likely to discharge Scott. And then that a black officer is when sent in to the same neighborhood, working the same beat shift. So and also, I think there's just a lot of geographic variation in terms of overall police shooting rates and racial disparities in written and police shooting rates that deserve a lot more studying that we don't know a lot about.

But but if you look at the sort of the benchmark data you just get, if if all you're doing is comparing the percentage of police shooting victims who are black, which is in most years tends to be about 25 to 30%. And you just compare that to the percentage of offenders of various crimes that go through that that might reported that ranges as high as about 50% in some years for for for homicide offending and tends to be at least in that that kind of 20 to 40% range for for other serious crimes as well.

Basically even if you had completely unbiased cops who were just sort of doing their jobs as robots, if they were only shooting people who are committing serious violent crime and do something to justify a shooting, you would probably see a pretty similar racial skew to what we actually see. Now. That doesn't that doesn't prove that there's no bias anywhere.

It doesn't doesn't prove anything like that. But it doesn't show that that somewhere in the general ballpark of where you would expect the disparity to be is where, in fact, we see it. So so I think that in aggregate, it's fair to say that cops are not just running around shooting, shooting people at random on the basis of their race, which I think is some of where some of the more extreme versions of the narratives start to take.

You. Right. So you would say at the very least, you know, I always tell my students the when someone makes a claim, it is their responsibility to show evidence of that claim, not my responsibility to disprove it. Right. And so for people out there who are saying there's strong evidence that the police are hunting black people, you would say that's not actually true.

Now, there are some studies which suggests there's more bias than others, but you're saying the weight of the evidence suggests, no, that's not the case. Right. Right. I mean, I think if you look into the you know, for example, a lot of my my work has been based on The Washington Post data that's based on fatal police shootings, which I think is considered one of the better databases.

Yeah, that's I mean, I certainly consider it to have a lot of advantages. The big downside of it is that because it's only includes shootings, that's the vast majority of police, you know, sort of police cause fatalities. But it does leave out some of the really big cases, including George Floyd. George Floyd is not a shooting. But but yeah, if you start digging into that, you know, you you start to see that you a if you just go through the individual cases, it's the overwhelming majority of the cases.

It's either extremely clear, you know, justifiable shooting or something that would clearly be legally justifiable even if you could maybe come up with some explanation of how the officer could have avoided it. And you also see in the racial breakdowns that, you know, they're not as severe as is some some of the impression would have given you, you you get the narrative that your police are running around shooting black people.

They never shoot white people. I mean, it's just not true. Blacks are only 25 to 30% of the people shot by police. Plenty of white people are shot by police. And there are plenty of questionable shootings of white people as well. So it's a it's a much more nuanced picture. And the methodological questions of trying to answer it in a really rigorous way are way more complicated than I think a lot of people rise.

So let's just let's let's we spent a lot of time here talking about what you did say in your research. Let's spend a little bit of time because I think this is important. You can get wrapped up in a podcast and you can hear all this stuff and you can have your priors and those can clash and you can come away thinking people said things they didn't say.

So let's talk about some things you didn't say. You did not say. There aren't instances where police have clearly killed somebody in an unjustified. Oh, absolutely. I mean, there is a I would say there's a based on years of just paying attention to this. I think there are kind of a handful of cases each year, some some of them make the news in ways that others don't.

But there are at least a handful of cases each year where it is extremely blatant, bad use of force. You know, somebody just shot somebody who had no reason to be shot whatsoever. I think there's also a lot of cases that fall on a gray area where the officer could make a plausible case that he reasonably feared that he had a threat.

But, you know, a lot of other officers might not have not might not have shot in that same circumstance. And like I said, there's a whole lot of variation, you know, especially if you look out west, there's really high rates of police shootings relative to their homicide rates. And I have a chart in my report that that depicts your state by state, all of those numbers.

I mean, it's really striking how some some places have way more police shootings and others even with similar crime rates. So so I think that, you know, professionalizing law enforcement, you know, get training law enforcement better so that we have more consistent uses of force across the country, might be a really promising way of bringing down police shootings in general, regardless of the race.

QUESTION All right. Let's talk about some of the things you didn't You didn't say that there aren't areas of the criminal justice system where there is evidence of bias. So I'm fairly confident, but I'm not an expert in this area. I'm fairly confident there is some research out there which says that police are more likely to use excessive force, maybe not kill, but use excessive force when it comes to race.

Is that true? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a similar question with with all these other areas that when you start digging into it, certainly fatal police shootings is the area that I've dug into the most. But it Egypt, I've paid a lot of attention to researcher and police bias over the years. And with any of these areas you can kind of find conflicting studies that say different things.

But the rolling fire study that I mentioned earlier on looked at non-lethal force. In addition to lethal force, He found some evidence of bias in force by by by analyzing a survey that's conducted, asking people about their experiences with police. There's there's also evidence based on it's called the veil of darkness test, where basically it's easier for police to tell the race of somebody during the day than it is during the night.

So you can look to see if the composition of stops and searches and so on change when when darkness falls. And there's some evidence, too, of the of a modest but but but detectable shift when when darkness falls please stop stopped if you're black people presumably because they can't can't see the race so so yeah I mean there's there's a lot of research in a lot of different areas.

There's an entire process of criminal justice that goes all the way from, you know, police officers walking the streets all the way to, you know, criminal convictions and prison sentences. And each each part of that process has a whole area of research on it. And there's very complicated findings in each of them, as has been my experience. Yeah.

And in many of those areas, there's credible and, you know, compelling evidence of bias. So you're just you're just talking about fatal shootings here. Yeah. Not absolving the entire criminal justice system. Know, it was it was I found that it was more than enough to to write about to focus on. Yes. And hard enough I think to to get down to the bottom of it.

Definitely. Okay. So a decade ago, not great data when it came to this topic, you say the data is improved that perfect still problems, still some ambiguity, uncertainties, methodological issues, but the data is better. And you say you don't think it shows that cops are out there hunting black people. But that narrative took hold. Right? And so you mentioned the Ferguson narrative.

So that's Michael Brown. And of course, it all gets just ramped up to 11 with George Floyd. So talk about that, that Ferguson narrative after Ferguson was that the hands up don't shoot. Yeah, well, I mean, the Ferguson that was especially kind of gut wrenching to watch because that is a case where the shooting itself was justified in the know.

The Obama Justice Department more or less found that it was justified. They didn't find out till later. Yeah, and later. But but you had later in that case, you had a narrative about the shooting at the heart of the entire thing that was that was incorrect. That so and so you had you basically these cities on fire over a shooting, you know, in protest of a shooting that was justified and based on your false narrative that he had his hands in the air.

You know, of course, you have the George Floyd situations. You are extremely different. You you have somebody who is he had no time for it for for 8 minutes, 9 minutes, whatever. The the the official the count of that was. And your police continued to restrain him after he had he had he was down after he was had stopped moving after he was starting to lose his pulse.

That was a year obviously a murdered by by police officers. And so, yes, you do the narrative surrounding the the individual incidents, you know, vary across these things. But what we found found is that when one of these incidents goes viral, whatever actually happened, you can have you have, first of all, unrest in specific cities where you're having, you know, goings on fire, so on and so forth.

But another thing that that that a lot of different research has found at this point is that when you have one of these viral shootings, and especially when you have a lot of scrutiny on the police department, you also find that police back off of their jobs. And that's that's something that's extremely frustrating to me as somebody who is on the right but has some some libertarian tendencies, because you obviously you can't you can't stop people from talking about these incidents even when they're justified.

And some of these incidents are not justified. If the police kill somebody, as happened in the case of George Floyd, people have to be able to to correct that and talk about it and debate it and make reforms to fix it. That's really important. But but at the same time, there's this cost where police are backing out of their jobs and you're seeing crime go up in these places.

So one police murder can translate to multiple murders and property destruction and so on and so forth beyond the original incident. So I think this is something that we really need to get a grasp on as a society and fix, because every time you have one of these viral incidents, you can have a whole lot more bad things that happen after it.

Yeah, you know, I wrote a whole book on on inequality and Freedom, and one of the chapters we had was on violence. And it's really hard to conceptualize a free society when you're not secure, when there's chaos, you know, when there's attacks on your physical well-being, or at least the threat of that. So, you know, there was a push to defund the police.

There was a push to pull back. Is there a pattern in areas that were sort of de policed? Is there a pattern in terms of the positive or negative impact of that de policing? Yeah. I mean, there's been actually a fair amount of research on this on this now that I actually discuss a little bit in a different report.

There was another study by Birol and Fryer with Tonight Tonight, Debbie. And there is increasing in the authors names now but a different study that found essentially the same thing. And what they found is that when you have a viral police incident, and especially that's coupled with a lot of scrutiny on the department and your federal investigation, for example, of the department, what you see is violence goes up in that community writ large.

So it's not at that point you're no longer talking about the original violent incident. Now you have crime going up on a more general level. And what that seems to be connected to is just police backing off of their jobs. Basically, police feel that they can't enforce the law anymore. They're under a lot of scrutiny and they stop doing proactive work and there seems to be a connection between the de policing that happens after these incidents and then the subsequent rising crime.

And that's it. That's a extremely serious consequences that I think we need to be we need to look at better because it's very difficult, as I as I argued in that of the report, it's just very difficult to force a cop to do his job. If there's a911 call, you can certainly fire the coffee, refuse to go to a91 call.

But if he's just out policing, people do not like quotas. They don't like in this union pressure against it and also public pressure against having police do more proactive work, especially when they're under scrutiny like this. So so in somewhat at some level, you know, police are just doing what the public ask them to do. If there's a public outcry against the police and they kind of back off what they're back off it proactive work, responding to pressure in in a very straightforward way and that a serious consequences.

Yeah you know it's it is rare and like you say, the research does not support the claim that cops are hunting black people. In fact, it's about proportionate to what you would expect given the communities they're in and the number of offenders they would be likely encountering from each race. But it seems in the social media era, I find myself doing this all the time with any particular issue, any problem, write earthquakes or tornadoes or whatever it is that everything is local.

I'm seeing everything, right? I mean, I wouldn't have seen any of this stuff in the past. You know, maybe a few incidents, you know, would make national news. But I'm not seeing every bad thing that happens. I'm seeing it all. It all feels very, very close to me and local. Right. Because I'm seeing so much of it. I'm doomscrolling.

Right. It just seems like the world is as an awful place. And like in Ferguson, it seems like when this stuff happens and that's the kind of environment you're swimming in that all sudden we race ahead, right? Our feelings and our priors. And, you know, like you said, the Obama administration eventually says no. The narrative does not fit the facts on what happened.

But in the social media age, it seems like we're always going to race out in front of that stuff. I mean, is there any hope to not just be like beholden to our emotions on this stuff? Yeah, I feel like it's a central tension are we have a lot of freedom in this country, The First Amendment, we're allowed to say whatever we want.

And you know, that encompasses newer technologies like social media. But, you know, while these technologies do not work well with our sacred psychology, sometimes it's just like stuff can fly around to get where our of the narrative everybody kind of lines up on their sides. And then, you know, the next day it turns out that the the camera angle was misleading or what have you.

It's just it's a it's a very difficult dynamic to navigate in any way in a country that respects freedom. Yeah, that was my last episode. I talked about Covington Catholic, you know, and even myself. I'm not I'm not a crazy lefty, but, you know, I'm left of center and I'm an academic. And so I see this grinning kid in the MAGA hat, and there's an indigenous American in his face.

And I'm thinking, What an A-hole that kid is, right? I mean, he's just trying to provoke. And then you get a different camera angle and you're like, Oh, my God, the complete opposite. I thought it was all right. ROBERTS So we're going to wrap up here in a moment, But I was just going through the various things you've written for the Manhattan Institute, and there's a lot of great stuff in there about the gender wage gap and mass shootings and the falling incarceration gap between black and white Americans.

I mean, there's all sorts of great stuff, and they're all linked to some of that stuff in the show. Notes encourage everybody to go check out your work. It's great. I feel like you write with a really you mentioned your journalistic background. There's a really sort of dispassionate, objective way in which you treat this subject, which I really appreciate.

But I got to say, because I found one thing that you seem to be a fan of that I'm also a fan of because I'm a scholar of economic and racial inequality. You appear to be a Raj Chetty standard, You know, so so let's talk really briefly about that really cool study you wrote about the Facebook data. And it was millions of people and billions of friendships that they analyzed and they found that social capital ends up being really, really important for mobility.

So tell us what they do, what they find and what are the implications of all that? Yeah, I mean, essentially what they're what they're doing there is they have, you know, as you said, this data from Facebook, which some of your listeners and it may not be aware, Raj Shetty's superpower is getting data that nobody else has access to.

He's he's got massive millions. I mean, we would have I mean, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. But mean he's done work with the IRS data and college admissions data. Actually, the most recent study of his I wrote about was about college admissions. But. But, but for that study, what he did was he he took Facebook data. He basically was able to tell from the Facebook data how people are forming friendships in different kinds of communities and how sort of segregated by class and so on there.

And even what he basically finds that when you have stronger social connections between classes in a given place, that tends to be good for mobility, that if you have a more cross class friendships, the kids who start at the bottom of the income spectrum are then more able to work their way up. You know, presumably in part thanks to the connections they had with with people who are in the social capital and the manners and so on that you learn from interacting with people who are higher class.

So these a really, really fascinating and really interesting study. Yeah. And when you said people would hear you say that and your chair is famous for having found social capital and family structure, both being really, really important in the various you mentioned the IRA study and some people will hear that, especially when you hear the single Parenthood one and they'll say, Well, that's just a function of poverty, right?

So if you if you control for for poverty, single parenthood would disappear. And in fact, it's actually the opposite, right? So you control for all these different things and you find that family structure and social capital end up still being really, really powerful. In that study you mentioned there's two papers, two nature papers that came out of that.

They argue that there's two reasons, and they're both sort of equally responsible, sort of half and half, two reasons why people have different economic connectedness. One, you can't really change all that much and one you can one is friend friending bias. People just sort of naturally tend to make friends with people like themselves. But the other is exposure, right?

So that is one area where we could socially engineer more connections, right? Yeah, that's sort of an interesting concept how they how to go about that if it's not happening naturally because is they feel like a lot of a lot of times different communities just ended up being different for for totally random idiosyncratic reasons. And when you try to step in in social engineering in an existing unity that's already been built up, that's that's a it's a difficult question how to how to do that.

But it does seem to be a very promising area where if you could do it, you would get a lot more social mobility and a lot more social harmony, frankly. Yeah, And you mentioned that, you know, in that study, there's there's stuff for everybody. There's stuff for the right stuff for the left. But you mentioned one thing that that's going to sound good to my my right leaning listeners, which is religion, you know, being a part of a religious community, being a part of a church can actually enhance those types of connections.

Right? Yeah. I mean, I think there are there are a lot of good things about religious and I'm actually an agnostic myself, so I say that in a sort of dispassionate way. But but yeah, I think yeah, yeah. I mean, religious ties, religion serves the important social function of just bringing people together and saying everybody is welcome here, everybody can come in.

And I think we were losing a lot as people become less religious in that that isn't happening anymore. I think it was Ross Douthat who once said that if you didn't like the religious right, you wait till you see the past religious, religious right. So well, that's a topic for a whole nother show. So. ROBERTS So at a university, you know, I've I've got a Ph.D. in economic and racial inequality.

And so a university hires me to teach those kinds of classes. I'm expected then, as part of my agreement to get tenure, I should be then publishing in that area in journals that are known for that topic and those sorts of things. So a think tank is different from a university. So tell us, you know, what does a think tank do?

What does a person like you do there? Why are you hired there? You know, what's the difference between a think tank and other types of organizations that do research? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think there are a couple of things that distinguish a think tank for something like a university. One thing the phrase is that think tank is like a university without students.

I obviously don't have any teaching responsibilities beyond writing things and appearing on media once in a while to tell people about what? If you want some, I can give you some grading. No, thank, no thank you. But but yet another thing is that when we do do do research, yeah, we have some people who are academics as well and who do publish in those academic journals.

But when I write a paper or a research something, it's normally put out through the Manhattan Institute itself as opposed to being shopped around to academic publications and other things that think tanks tend to engage directly with policy and just to some limited extent, politics in a way that that universities generally we are who are nonprofit, we're not endorsing candidates, we're not getting involved with campaigns, but we are proposing policy ideas that that could be implemented through the political process.

And we do meet with politicians from time to time who are curious about our ideas to tell them about them. And too, there's a policy mission for a think tank or there's a lot of think tanks that I don't think a university or a university professor would have. Robert VerBruggen. He is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. I'll put a bunch of stuff in the show description.

You guys can go check out his work. I think it's really, really good. He does a really good job of, I think, trying to come to these topics, seeking truth, not trying to, you know, affirm his priors. So go check it out. Robert VerBruggen, thank you so much for joining the show today. Thanks for having me.

Happy trails to you until you need me again. Happy trails to you. Please smile. And until that, who cares about the clouds when we're together, just sing the song and bring the sunny When you betray too You tell me Oh, yeah. Call me Happy trails to you I know we need and happy trails Do you see? Smile down to the land Who cares about the clouds when we're together?

Just sing the song and bring the song When the happy trails to you tell me Oh, yeah. Goodbye. Good luck. And may the good Lord take a liking to you.

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On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are going to tackle a very sensitive topic, the debate and controversies surrounding gender affirming care for minors who display signs of distress at an incongruence between their gender identity and their biological sex.

In several countries, including places like Finland, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand, governments and clinics are either banning or placing new limits on the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender-affirming surgeries for children. We will discuss the reasons why they are reconsidering the medical approach to gender dysphoria.

Some links related to this episode:

• Lisa Selin Davis, “Trans Matters: An Overview of the Debate, Research, and Policies”
• Harper’s Magazine, “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”
• Amber Alt, It’s Not Transphobic to Say Your Daughter Is a Girl: The Wise Lesbian Guide for Progressives
• And don’t forget to subscribe to our free email newsletter in just one click

We know that many listeners will have strong feelings one way or another about this episode. We want to state at the outset that if you disagree with anything in our discussion, know that nothing we say here was said in bad faith or with ill intent. This is a good faith effort to explore the various controversies surrounding this very sensitive and important societal issue.

You may not agree with the podcast participants, and they may not agree with you, but know that everyone came to this discussion seeking truth while upholding the dignity of the human beings on all sides of this issue, whatever the truth may be.

We believe that we all must truly follow the facts on this issue, and we cannot shut down good faith and rigorous debate about a very unsettled issue that can have such major, life altering consequences for children.

In segment one we are joined by journalist Lisa Selin Davis, author of Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different.

In segment two (around the one hour mark in the episode) we are joined by Amber Alt, author of It’s Not Transphobic to Say Your Daughter Is a Girl: The Wise Lesbian Guide for Progressives.

If you would like to contact Ms. Alt, she can be reached at amberaltwrites@protonmail.me

The Connors Forum is an independent entity from the institutions that we partner with. The views expressed in our newsletters and podcasts are those of the individual contributors alone and not of our partner institutions.

Episode Audio:

• “Please Listen Carefully” by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Star Blessed Night” by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
• “Draw the Sky” by Paul Keane (licensed through TakeTones)
• "Reading by Lamplight" by Maarten Schellekens (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by good friend of the show Jim Swift from The Bulwark to discuss the mechanics of how a modern conspiracy theory like this goes viral.

Swift covered this story over at The Bulwark in a piece titled, “The Bogus Protest, the House Race, and the MAGA Grocer.” 

We talk about this viral conspiracy theory and more on this episode. Enjoy!

And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter! It’s INSTANT and FREE!

The Connors Forum is an independent entity from the institutions that we partner with. The views expressed in our newsletters and podcasts are those of the individual contributors alone and not of our partner institutions.

Episode Audio:

• “Please Listen Carefully” by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Star Blessed Night” by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
• “Draw the Sky” by Paul Keane (licensed through TakeTones)
• "Crazy Lazy" by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper.

If they had not ruled this way, it could have opened the door in presidential elections for state legislatures to ignore the votes of their residents and simply decide to give their state’s electoral votes to the legislature’s preferred candidate.

This would have been a nightmare, so the SCOTUS decision is a win for American democracy!

On this episode of Utterly Moderate we talk to The Bulwark’s Mona Charen about avoiding climate change “doomerism.”

Climate change is of course a very real problem. Humans are pumping too much carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases into the Earth’s atmosphere through a variety of means, most notably things like burning fossil fuels for energy production and transportation.

Climate scientists believe that it is necessary for us to keep the Earth from warming no more than 2° C above preindustrial levels to avoid a variety of problems like sea level rise, agricultural problems, water shortages, habitat destruction, and others. The global community has done an incredible amount of work to change this, and because of these efforts, the worst future climate catastrophes have likely been averted.

The problem is that projections have the Earth warming closer to 3° C, not 2° C, above preindustrial levels by the end of the century. This will not end human civilization, but it is going to create some serious societal strains and economic costs that we would be wise to prevent now.

Mona Charen joins us today to discuss why it is not only important to take this issue seriously, but also not to catastrophize the issue and make it seem worse than it is. She believes it is important to keep both of these things in mind.

Charen writes that:

“The unremitting catastrophism of much climate talk by major institutions (universities, foundations, entertainment companies, non-profits, and others) flies in the face of the scientific consensus. Even Professor Michael Mann (of the famous “hockey stick” graph) has cautioned that ‘doomism’ is more of a problem now than denial, and hysterical warnings about global collapse are wrong and unhelpful because they lead people to despair. Any amount of mitigation is good, he urges, adding that ‘Two degrees of warming would be far worse than 1.5 degrees of warming, but not the end of civilization’. . . Climate change is a big problem, but it is not an extinction-level event. No respected scientific body, including the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], says that climate threatens to end human civilization. Not even close. . . Adapt, improvise, and innovate. Switch to nuclear as fast as possible, and stop terrifying the kids. Climate change is a problem. It’s not the apocalypse.”

The Connors Forum is an independent entity from the institutions that we partner with. The views expressed in our newsletters and podcasts are those of the individual contributors alone and not of our partner institutions.

Episode Audio:

• “Please Listen Carefully” by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Star Blessed Night” by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
• “Draw the Sky” by Paul Keane (licensed through TakeTones)
• "Crazy Lazy" by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER!

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are going to discuss a topic that was back in the news recently with the debt ceiling negotiations: Social Security.

A number of politicians and elected representatives have recently suggested that we make major changes to the Social Security program, changes which could have a substantial (and I think likely negative) impact on American seniors.

We will all eventually age, so this means it will impact us.

A few quick notes on Social Security before you dive into this podcast episode:

• It is important to note that this is not a partisan issue (at least among voters). Surveys show that strong majorities of Americans—whether old or young, high-income or working class, Republican or Democrat—believe that it is crucial for the U.S. to preserve full Social Security benefits for future generations, even if it means increasing payroll taxes.
• Social Security is the biggest source of retirement income for most retirees.
• Social Security is arguably America’s most effective poverty-fighting program, bringing elderly poverty down from almost 38% to less than 10% (lower than the national poverty rate).
• Social Security is a social insurance program. This means it will continue to pay benefits regardless of whether or not you live long enough to use more benefits than you paid for—which a typical American retiree likely will.
• Some argue that you could personally invest money in the stock market, instead of putting it into Social Security, and get a better return on your money for retirement. While this is no doubt true for some, millions of Americans would not likely be able to save as much on their own as they would through the “forced retirement planning” of Social Security.
• Social Security will never “go broke.” It will always receive money from current workers, every two weeks, to pay for current retirees. Due to falling fertility rates, however, the program will only be able to afford to pay 77% of promised benefits beginning in the 2030s.
• According to Social Security expert Kathleen Romig, the guest on this episode, full benefits can continue beyond this point if we remove the taxable earnings cap (currently around $160,000) and increase payroll taxes on employees and employers from the current 6.2% to somewhere around 7% each.

On this episode, we play clips of a summer 2021 podcast conversation we had with Social Security expert Kathleen Romig from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Enjoy!

The Connors Forum is an independent entity from the institutions that we partner with. The views expressed in our newsletters and podcasts are those of the individual contributors alone and not of our partner institutions.

Episode Audio:

• “Please Listen Carefully” by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Star Blessed Night” by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
• “Draw the Sky” by Paul Keane (licensed through TakeTones)
• "Reading by Lamplight" by Maarten Schellekens (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)
• FDR on Social Security (publicly available on YouTube)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Lee Jussim, Rutgers University distinguished professor of psychology. He is here to discuss the questionable science behind microaggressions.

If you are unfamiliar with the term, microaggressions are claimed to be “acts, often facially innocuous, that convey subtle animus or bias against someone in a traditionally marginalized group.”

Our guest, Dr. Jussim, has written multiple excellent articles detailing the problems with microaggression research. According to Jussim, research on microaggressions is mixed, unsettled, and “in its infancy, and is most definitely not ready for applications in the real world.” Many of the claims made by progressives and academics about microaggressions have weak (and oftentimes nonexistent) empirical support.

As Jussim and his research collaborator Edward Cantu note:

“Many would assume that the social scientists who study and publish scholarship on [microaggressions] have already answered these questions to a degree that makes the current microaggression construct valid. But have they? The answer should inform the degree to which legal scholars and university administrators can responsibly incorporate the current microaggression construct into legal scholarship or diversity training materials.”

Cantu and Jussim, like many other scholars, argue that social scientists have not adequately answered these questions:

“After reviewing scholarship in which psychologists attempt to confirm the legitimacy of the [the prevailing microaggression perspective], and in which they debate the issue with dissenting psychologists, we conclude that the current operationalization of [microaggressions] in social justice discourse, legal scholarship, and education administration is significantly unwarranted.”

The authors add, quite scathingly, that it appears “to be ‘methodological activism’ that drives much of the debate over the legitimacy [of microaggressions]” and that the prevailing microaggression perspective “appears to be designed primarily to reinforce a critical race theory narrative about social reality.”

They go on to say that, based on their analysis, “[Researchers’] claims about microaggressions are without adequate scientific basis.”

If the research is this unsettled, it would be paramount that any credible news commentary or policies that flow from this research should be extremely careful in what they claim to be factual. Unfortunately, much of it fails to be:

“[E]ducators, scholars, and administrators have accepted [the prevailing microaggression perspective] as valid even though psychologists have not established its scientific legitimacy. The possible reasons for this are manifold. First, academics and administrators may have a willingness to accept a claim at face value because they deem the concept to be useful—ideologically, for example—such that confirmation bias cancels vigilance. More charitably, many people outside the field of psychology simply make the mistake of assuming that peer-reviewed publication of a social science idea means the idea has by definition been thoroughly vetted scientifically. This mistake is easy to make. But psychologists have a long and embarrassing history of canonizing claims that have turned out to be false, a situation that has come to be known in psychology as ‘the replication crisis.’ In short, it is a mistake to believe that, merely because an idea appears frequently in academic publications, it constitutes scientific fact. Often, it is only after withstanding decades of skeptical vetting that a new scientific claim can be established with a reasonable level of certainty.”

The authors go on to argue that:

“We are also concerned about how the current propagation of the [prevailing microaggression perspective], given its lack of adequate bases and therefore its limited utility, might have the primary effect of proving socially caustic—and therefore counterproductive in the quest for social justice—without countervailing benefits. Therefore, we recommend that scholars and administrators— and everyone else for that matter—generally refrain from relying on commonly propagated lists of microaggressions as reflecting anything meaningful, at least until psychologists perform the significant amount of empirical work left to be done to render the [prevailing microaggression perspective] scientifically valid and useful.”

Yet many on the left nonetheless treat the prevailing microaggression paradigm as settled fact: writing about them in news stories, teaching about them in classrooms, and creating university and workplace policies around them.

Here are some of the main problems that Jussim notes about microaggression research:

• Researchers state that several acts are microaggressions simply by claiming them to be so, without a proper scientific basis.
• No scientifically rigorous method exists for identifying whether many microaggressions have or have not occurred. Proof that a microaggression has occurred often largely depends on the subjective experience of the victim, leaving the researcher (a) no way to verify what took place and (b) no way to verify the intent of the perpetrator.
• Microaggression researchers argue that microaggressions cause harm, but in many instances this has not been empirically demonstrated.
• No evidence that most racial minorities consistently consider several microaggressions offensive.
• No demonstrated link exists between many microaggressions and racial bias on the part of the perpetrator.
• For some microaggressions identified by researchers, it is claimed that even though the person who committed the act did not intend harm, the microaggression itself was designed by somebody else with the intention of doing harm and/or upholding racial inequality. These researchers argue that microaggressions are a “manifestation of the aggressive goals of the dominant group, taught to unwitting actors through. . . social mechanisms.” Yet these same researchers have not provided empirical support for these claims.
• Many supposed microaggressions have multiple interpretations but are determined to be microaggressions by researchers because the researchers themselves privilege a particular interpretation.
• Some researchers claim that microaggressions occur with a frequency that they have not empirically demonstrated.
• Much of the microaggressions research depends on small or unrepresentative samples and/or has not been replicated—meaning the field itself is in its infancy and is nowhere near ready for real-world application.
• The term “microaggression” itself seems to be an example of concept creep. To the layperson, “aggression” suggests hostility and intentionality, but microaggression researchers maintain that hostility and intent are not required for something to be categorized as a microaggression.
• Priming people to look for microaggressions in every social interaction could plausibly (a) be more damaging to racial minorities and socially corrosive to society than the infrequent experience of microaggressions in the first place and/or (b) not achieve any meaningful reduction in racial inequality in America.
• Microaggression researchers frequently respond in intellectually dishonest ways to good faith critiques of their work.

Jussim will help us unpack a lot of these critiques in this episode. Enjoy!

The Connors Forum is an independent entity from the institutions that we partner with. The views expressed in our newsletters and podcasts are those of the individual contributors alone and not of our partner institutions.

Episode Music:

• “Please Listen Carefully” by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)
• “Star Blessed Night” by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
• “Draw the Sky” by Paul Keane (licensed through TakeTones)
• "Reading by Lamplight" by Maarten Schellekens (Free Music Archive)
• "Algorithms" by Chad Crouch (Free Music Archive)
• “Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.