R.P. Aditya

Article URL: https://github.com/timqian/chart.xkcd

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20734956

Points: 424

# Comments: 40

Article URL: https://guzey.com/productivity/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20737304

Points: 596

# Comments: 155

Mevan Babakar was a 5-year-old refugee in the Netherlands when she received a present that changed her life. Social media helped her find the man who gave it.

Researchers identified nearly 400 common medical practices and theories that were contradicted by rigorous studies. Here are some of the most notable findings.

Parents should monitor spending and explain how to pay the bill on time. A financial planner says teenagers should get a card. “We live in a credit-driven society.”

Weakened by court battles with major tobacco companies, the F.D.A. has softened its depictions of smoking-related illnesses required for cigarette packs.

Whether tigers or tortoises, field mice or feathered peacocks, artisanal creatures are a celebration of life itself.

Cafe Ohlone, a small restaurant behind a bookstore in Berkeley, serves the updated native foods of the Bay Area, along with some history.

Article URL: https://www.routefifty.com/tech-data/2019/08/boston-school-bus-routes/159113/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20680050

Points: 347

# Comments: 152

Barring tourists from the giant lizards’ island lair may save them, but the moratorium could doom residents, who will have to leave, too. If they refuse? “It’s their own fault if the Komodo eat them.”

Europeans speaking perfect English sounds like good news for native speakers, but it may also be a threat.

Alex Citrin / Vox

I was born into the 1%. I think having this much money is wrong.

*Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s policy adviser makes the case for abolishing billionaires.

*My Path to “Making Money Make Change”

Adam Roberts is a writer and community organizer living in Boston. He currently works for Resource Generation, which helps young people (ages 18-35) with wealth and class privilege to become transformative leaders working toward the equitable distribution of wealth, land, and power. You can learn more about Resource Generation’s Giving Pledge here.

Alex Citrin is an illustrator and art director based in New York City.

Article URL: https://medium.com/@bellmar/all-the-best-engineering-advice-i-stole-from-non-technical-people-eb7f90ca2f5f

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610839

Points: 1148

# Comments: 258

To improve access to safe birth at home, nationwide standards are necessary.

Just-add-water cleaning products from Blueland. | Blueland

From mouthwash to kitchen cleaner, environmentally friendly dehydrated products are coming to your home.

My first lesson in savvy consumerism came in elementary school from my best friend’s mother, who sat us down and handed us a bottle of fancy grown-up shampoo. “Let’s read the ingredients,” she said.

We started: “Aqua …”

She cut us off there. “What do you think aqua is?”

“Water?”

“Yes! It’s just a fancy name for water!”

I now know that brands who call water “aqua” are simply abiding by the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients (and by “now know,” I mean I just looked it up), but at the time, the fancy vocabulary struck me as a mild consumer scam designed to hide how much of our fanciest consumer products are simply water. It also spawned in me a lifelong interest in reading ingredient labels.

So 25 years later, when brands started shipping normally waterlogged products to consumers with all or most of the water removed, I was intrigued.

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, more than 90 percent of a typical bottle of cleaning product is simply water. Drying out these cleaning and personal care products does several environmentally friendly things: It reduces their volume, thus reducing the number of boats and trucks needed to transport them. It reduces their weight, thus further reducing fuel and carbon emissions associated with shipping them. And it reduces the plastic packaging by requiring a smaller container to hold the refillable concentrate, or by precluding the need for any disposable plastic at all. An estimated 20 percent or more of global disposable plastic packaging by weight could be replaced by reusable packaging if we only shipped active ingredients.

The time is ripe for a low-plastic, just-add-water revolution. Only 5 percent of plastic produced globally is ever recycled, a number that has likely dropped since China stopped accepting our recyclables in 2017. You’ve probably heard this, but there’s a lot of plastic swirling around in our oceans, and in developing countries, single-serve product sachets are a scourge on the rivers and beaches.

Almost all at once, waterless products have arrived to save the day. By Humankind (emphasis theirs) launched in February. The startup makes a “forever” refillable container for its mouthwash tablets, packages its shampoo bars in paper boxes, and provides refills for its deodorant. It’s all in the design scheme du jour: gender-neutral, with minimalist font swimming in pastel color schemes.

Truman’s, which also launched in February, says shopping for cleaning products is too confusing and onerous, offering as an alternative four concentrated cleaning products for glass, floors, bathrooms, and all-purpose, shipped in small recyclable plastic refill cartridges that fit in the neck of its reusable plastic spray bottles.

In 2018, Seventh Generation introduced an “ultra-concentrated” laundry detergent, which the company says uses 50 percent less water and 60 percent less plastic and is 75 percent lighter than the standard detergent bottle. The bottle automatically doses the right amount of detergent with one squeeze. For some reason, it’s not sold in any stores near me, or else I would absolutely get that to carry home instead of the standard 100-ounce detergent bottle.

By Humankind

In March, Amazon launched an in-house product line called Clean Revolution. You screw a bottle of concentrate with the equivalent of six refills to the bottom of the spray bottle or soap dispenser, and pour water into the top. The product has 3.9 stars online; the complaints that the refill pod can sometimes leak are far outweighed by praise for how eco-friendly it is.

The system is by a packaging company called Replenish, which has its own line, CleanPath. It’s a subscription refill service for five cleaning products that lets you choose your scent, your bottle and baseplate color, and — for an additional $7.95 fee that strikes me as patently ridiculous — a customizable label. Buying a six-time-use refill is certainly less wasteful than the alternative, but the drawback is that, like a fancy Gillette razor, you’re now wedded to that particular refill and at the mercy of CleanPath’s redesign process. “We regret that previous versions of CleanPath reusable bottles and refill pods have been discontinued and are not compatible with the all new CleanPath,” it says in tiny font on the website.

All of the above products promise to be nontoxic, of course. We’re talking about a target market of eco-minded consumers here. The European brand Cif doesn’t make that promise. (It might not have to, as Europe has banned a much longer list of potentially toxic ingredients, so Europeans tend to be a little more relaxed than we are.) That hasn’t stopped Unilever from launching the Cif ecorefill in July, a 10-times-concentrated liquid refill for the normal Cif spray bottle, which Unilever now markets as a lifetime piece. If the spray trigger breaks, it will even deliver a new one for free. And once you remove the plastic sleeves, the ecorefill tube can be thrown the recycling bin. According to Unilever, asking consumers to dilute the product at home means 97 percent less water being transported, 87 percent fewer trucks on the road, and less greenhouse gas emissions.

That all sounds great, but in actuality, distribution of Unilever’s products, which range from Dove to Axe, Hellmann’s to Bertolli, Suave to Tresemmé, only accounts for 3 percent of Unilever’s greenhouse gas emissions. (The company says 25 percent is in raw materials and blames 65 percent on how consumers use the products. Our bad?)

But this isn’t about carbon emissions. Unilever, cognizant of the growing resentment against single-use plastic, has vowed to reduce the weight of its packaging by one-third, halve the waste associated with the disposal of its products by 2020, and use only reusable, recyclable, or compostable packing by 2025.

Its efforts in this direction have been tentative. In 2018, it launched a 3-liter bottle of a Brazilian laundry detergent brand with a formula six times the concentration of the original. Unilever says it’s reduced the volume of plastic used for the detergent by 75 percent.

Unilever is one of the consumer product behemoths in Loop, an ambitious cross-brand pilot project that ships reusable containers of everything from Degree deodorant to Häagen-Dazs ice cream to your door and then picks up the empties when you’re done. For that, Unilever redesigned Signal toothpaste to come in tablet form in a recyclable and refillable jar. You just chew one, brush your teeth, then rinse.

I can’t tell you how Signal tabs work — I signed up for Loop’s pilot in New York City the day it was announced in January and haven’t yet gotten off the waitlist. But I have tried out ChewTab by Weldental, which was relaunched this year in a glass bottle with a metal lid to appeal to the zero-waste market. The sickly sweet minty xylitol is an acquired taste ... but the bottle sure looks good on my medicine cabinet shelf.

If I’m honest, aesthetics are also why I selected Blueland, launched on Earth Day in April 2019, to test out this whole just-add-water fad for myself. That, and out of all the cleaners described above, it had no one-use plastic in its refill system and the most certifications, including the reputable Cradle to Cradle certification, which covers not only how the product is made and disposed of but also its toxicity — or lack thereof.

I asked Blueland to send me a kit, and a few days later, a simple cardboard box arrived at my apartment. Inside, I found three shatterproof acrylic spray bottles accented in pink, yellow, and Caribbean blue and labeled in tiny font: Bathroom, Multi-Surface, Glass + Mirror. I filled the bottles with aqua de tap, unwrapped three tablets in corresponding colors, put the postmodernist wrappers in the compost bin, and dropped the tablets in the bottles, where they fizzed just like antacids. An hour later, I used the resulting lightly scented cleaners to wipe down my countertop and mirror and, with the help of a scrubby brush, break apart the soap scum in my bathtub.

Before I put them away, I Instagrammed my zero-waste, nontoxic cleaning supplies and received a barrage of questions from my friends eager to try for themselves what might be the most attractive cleaning system ever made.

If I sound like I’m in the Blueland cult, I apologize. I really did try to find something wrong with the products, and I couldn’t. While a lot of these supposedly more sustainable consumer products are rightly criticized for feeding our ever-expanding appetite for more stuff, you can’t quibble with making cleaning products — a necessary component of doing life — more sustainable. Blueland could only steal market share, not create a whole new purchasing category. I’ve DIYed my cleaners before, and found myself with shards of glass in my foot after my cat shoved the pretty brown glass spray bottle off the counter. And you can call it the placebo effect or clever marketing, but I honestly don’t believe plain white vinegar works as well as formulated cleaning products. Also, jugs of vinegar are mostly water.

I guess my only quibble with this wave of just-add-water products is this: Shipping dry ingredients in compostable packaging and adding water to them ourselves is not a new concept. In fact, we’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Hello, tea, coffee, and soap. It’s only in the past few decades that we’ve taken these formerly eco-friendly items, added in water pumped out of water-scarce areas; thrown in aspartame, flavoring, parfum, and various other synthetic ingredients; put them in plastic bottles with cool logos and ridiculous health promises; and shipped them around the world.

The fact is, even if every glass and multi-surface cleaner on the market came in tabs and refill cartridges, it would be BB shot compared to the warships of “functional” beverages that exist for no other reason than getting us to buy more stuff. According to Blueland’s research, the average American home will go through 30 single-use plastic bottles of cleaner in a year. Reducing this to zero is a good thing, sure. But in 2017, America’s per capita consumption of bottled water rose yet again to 42 gallons. That’s equivalent to more than 300 bottles of water. In Europe, plastic drink bottles are the most prevalent form of plastic found in waterways, now that plastic bags have been tackled.

Yes, I’m definitely signing up for a Blueland subscription because I’m a sucker for pretty stuff that makes me feel less personally guilty about being an American consumption monster. But I’m under no illusion that this will save the world. It will merely save me a few trips downstairs to the recycling bin.

Sign up for The Goods’ newsletter. Twice a week, we’ll send you the best Goods stories exploring what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters.

For the world’s cities, the advantages of size have only grown. Big, superstar cities attract more talent and have higher rates of productivity and innovation than smaller cities. And the people who work in these cities tend to make more money. But does simply being born in a big city confer a lifelong advantage?

That’s the question at the heart of a new study published in the Journal of Urban Economics. In the study, economists Clément Bosquet of the University of Cergy-Pontoise in France and Henry G. Overman of the London School of Economics use detailed data from the British Household Panel Survey to track the connection between the size of an individual’s birth city in Britain and their earnings as a working adult. The minimum sample (after cleaning) is 7,500 individuals aged 16 and older, interviewed multiple times from 1991 to 2009.

What they find: The size of one’s birth city does have a sizable effect on later-life earnings. Technically speaking, the elasticity of wages with respect to the size of birthplace is 4.2 percent—two-thirds of the elasticity with respect to current city size (6.8 percent). That’s a pretty big effect. For example, controlling only for demographic characteristics like age and gender, a person born London in 1971 will make, on average, 6.6 percent more than someone born in Manchester and 9.3 percent more than someone born in Liverpool.

There are several ways in which the size of the city where we’re born can affect our future earnings. For one, bigger cities may boost life chances because they have more amenities, a greater choice of schools, more neighborhood options, larger social networks, and access to more role models and mentors. There is an ever-larger body of research (such as that by Raj Chetty) on how the places where we grow up shape our economic mobility. Sociologists including William Julius Wilson and Patrick Sharkey have documented how less advantaged neighborhoods perpetuate chronic concentrated poverty.

Or it could be that bigger cities attract more advantaged families. We know that the sorting of people by income and education has become more and more pronounced in recent years. If people tend to stay in their hometowns, then those from big cities are born with an advantage that those from small towns have a hard time gaining access to.

Indeed, a raft of recent studies document the substantial decline in geographic mobility in the United States and other advanced nations. Around 44 percent of people in Bosquet and Overman’s study had only ever worked in the city where they were born. For people with no more education than a General Certificate of Secondary Education (a set of exams taken at age 15 or 16), the share was higher, 48 percent.

The effect of birthplace-city size is larger for stayers than for movers, according to the study. And children from big cities, when they do move, tend to move to other relatively big cities. In either case, they continue to benefit from a higher urban wage premium.

Children from big cities are also more likely to be born to professional parents. In the British data, Bosquet and Overman find that 79 percent of children born to parents in professional occupations are born in a city, compared to 72 percent of those with parents in other occupations. On average, children with parents in professional occupations are born in cities 50 percent larger than kids with other-occupied parents.

Education plays an even larger role than occupation in determining life outcomes. Kids born in big British cities are more likely to have more educated parents and to access better education—but that connection basically disappears when the study controls for the socioeconomic backgrounds of parents. The key mechanism at work is that more educated parents already tend to sort themselves into big cities. As the authors put it, “birthplace size is linked to parental social class, so that some of the link between wages and birthplace size is explained by the sorting of parents.”

All in all, the study documents the considerable and lifelong economic advantages that come from being born in a big city. The divide between superstar cities and the rest goes far deeper than the here and now: It helps determine the life course of future generations.

CityLab editorial fellow Claire Tran contributed research and editorial assistance to this article.

For more than a century, one school of political science dominated the education of Turkey’s governing class — until the Erdogan regime set about destroying it.

They are our apex predator, the deadliest hunters of human beings on the planet.

Art workers around the country are sharing their salaries and in some cases forming unions to put pressure on their institutions.

It may sound extreme, but it’s normal in the Netherlands.

Mr. Mathrubootham has 100% total hatred of all GK quiz programmes since childhood itself  The Hindu

'Appa, at least jackfruit you can eat, what you will do with information about first man on moon, first elephant on Uranus, first adai-avial on Neptune'

As a child, she “was desperate to understand money.” Now, as one of the most senior black women in finance, she oversees billions.

After President Trump attacked four congresswomen of color on Twitter, suggesting they "go back" to the places they came from, readers shared experiences of being told the same thing.

Ireland, the country of my ancestors, has become what America used to be.

This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Though wrestling is widely regarded as the world’s oldest sport, women have only recently gained a foothold.

And even then, they’ve done so while facing tremendous discrimination and resistance from organizers, other wrestlers, and fans.

This is certainly true in competitive Olympic forms of wrestling. But it’s also been the case for more spectacular forms of wrestling entertainment, where women have long been relegated to the roles of managers or girlfriends. When they do actually wrestle, they’re often sexualized.

Yet these women are nonetheless making advances. World Wrestling Entertainment’s most recent WrestleMania featured the first ever women’s main event. And in the world of Bolivian wrestling, women have also made big strides. In fact, many Bolivian female wrestlers now have achieved far more popularity than their male counterparts.

As an anthropologist of gender in Latin America, I actually trained and performed alongside these wrestlers while conducting ethnographic research.

These women have not gained respect easily: They have met resistance and sexism at every turn. However, their stories not only pay tribute to Bolivia’s past but may foretell a more egalitarian future in the world of wrestling.

Wrestling’s masculine past

Bolivian wrestling traces its roots to Mexican professional wrestling, called lucha libre, and professional wrestling in the U.S. before that.

The scale and production level of Bolivian lucha libre are certainly not on par with World Wrestling Entertainment, but the conventions are the same. This form of wrestling is less about the competition and more about the theater.

Just like in the U.S., promoters, wrestlers, and others with a stake in the business at times decide beforehand who will win the match in order to further developing storylines. To this end, referees don’t always enforce the rules. The wrestlers aren’t just grappling. They’re performing as characters.

In the 1960s, Mexican wrestlers toured South America and, while there, trained a number of Bolivian men. Early wrestlers like Médico Loco, Mr. Atlas, and Diablo Rojo helped build the tradition in Bolivia, which waxed and waned in popularity for four decades.

But beginning in 2001, Bolivian women started appearing in the ring.

The fighting cholitas

These female wrestlers began calling themselves cholitas luchadoras, or fighting cholitas. They take their name from the chola of the Andes, women who have historically worked in markets—though not all of them do—and have earned reputations for being aggressive negotiators and strong advocates for workers’ and women’s rights. At the same time, they’re romantically evoked as national icons.

The luchadoras use their popularity to highlight the roles that Indigenous women may play in society.

The combination of this character type with the spectacular physicality of lucha libre has made them popular with both local and foreign audiences.

Some represent morally corrupt characters: rudas, or the equivalent of heels in English. They’ll sometimes shake a 2-liter soda bottle and spray its contents into the audience. Others will simply sneer and hurl insults at the crowd.

On the other hand, the good ones—called técnicas—will stand with a microphone in the ring and declare their loyalty to “the people” and promise to fight for their honor.

Once the match begins, the luchadoras often incorporate humor, pulling each other’s braids or even ripping off the spandex pants of a male opponent to reveal hot pink boxer briefs. At times, they pull audience members up to dance with them or lean in to kiss the cheek of a young man in the crowd.

Costumes and cumbia music

But perhaps their most eye-catching quality is the pollera skirt, a knee-length garment made by extensive pleating of sparkling fabric and further puffed by multiple petticoats beneath.

As they enter the ring to local cumbia music, they’ll swirl these layered skirts. As they flip from the ropes or throw an opponent to the ground, the polleras will billow in the air.

After a few years of wrestling, international journalists began to take notice. Outlets like National Geographic, the BBC, and The New York Times have published articles about the luchadoras. They even appeared as a “challenge” for competitors on The Amazing Race.

Each of the stories plays up the novelty of women wrestling in these “traditional” skirts. And it doesn’t hurt that the colorful pollera makes for a good cover photo.

But much of the media coverage fails to acknowledge the continued struggles the women face. They often find themselves demeaned by other Bolivian wrestlers and spectators, who sneer at their gender, race, and performance styles.

“All show, no ability”

As I wrestled alongside both men and women in La Paz, I heard trainers, current wrestlers, and even the retired luchadores of the country disparage the women for relying too heavily on the chola character—which they derided as a “gimmick”—rather than on their craft as wrestlers.

Many of the men involved in wrestling have said that the women have degraded the skill level of the sport. Others called them payasas—clowns—or said that they were “all show, no ability,” even as they urged male wrestlers to incorporate more elements of spectacle into their performance.

The cholitas luchadoras have also been criticized by a number of Bolivians as a kind of racist performance. They suggest the characters are offensive to the image of the chola, Bolivia’s Indigenous women, and Bolivians as a whole.

While some of these critiques may be valid, at times they are leveled by the same promoters who fill their events with male luchadores whose gimmicky personas often involve little technical ability. These men perform as stiff mummies who simply bulldoze their way across the ring or clowns who spend more time popping balloons than grappling with opponents.

The luchadoras, many of whom identify as Indigenous, counter that they are using their popularity as a springboard for highlighting the roles that Indigenous women may play in society. They say they are attempting to act as role models, providing young Indigenous women with positive representations in the public sphere.

So while the luchadoras are bringing progress, critiques of them show that the more popular they become, the more backlash they have to contend with. But women’s acceptance in sports is not only an issue in Bolivia.

Even in the United States, women fight to be taken seriously in areas related to sports and entertainment. By understanding how these stories are linked, observers can understand the widespread difficulties women face when navigating power structures in sports that continue to be largely made up of men.

The post How Skirts Are Changing Bolivian Wrestling appeared first on SAPIENS.

They — along with a great many other high-achieving women — were all once Girl Scouts. So was Sylvia Acevedo. Raised in a poor, immigrant family, she was told that “girls like her” didn’t go to college. But she did, and then became a rocket scientist and tech executive. Now she’s C.E.O. of the very organization she credits with shaping her life. Acevedo tells us how the Girl Scouts are trying to stay relevant, why they’re suing the Boy Scouts, and how they sell so many cookies.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*     *     *

I’ve been speaking with Sylvia Acevedo, who’s telling me about a rule she learned when she was a kid. This rule, she says, has been a big force in her life, and helped shape her impressive career. It is called the “rule of three ‘no’s.” I ask her to demonstrate, with some role-play. I’m playing a grumpy old man who’s just answered his doorbell. And she’s playing — well, it’ll be obvious who she’s playing.

Sylvia ACEVEDO: So first I would ask you if you would like to buy some wonderful, delicious Girl Scout cookies.

Stephen J. DUBNER: And I would say, “Do I look like I need to eat more cookies, little girl? Get off my doorstep. No.”

ACEVEDO: And I’d say, “You know, buying cookies, you can eat them for yourself or you can give them— they’re really very delicious. People at your work, or your family would really enjoy having these cookies. So I would really encourage that.”

DUBNER: I’m retired and my wife died, and I have no family. I don’t want your cookies. Get off my porch, little girl.

ACEVEDO: All right. Well, sir, it sounds like you don’t— you would need some more friends, and I would really encourage you to buy a box of and take it to your neighbor. And you can meet your neighbors and they would really enjoy getting this box of cookies from you, sir.

Who, exactly, is this clever and determined woman?

ACEVEDO: I’m Sylvia Acevedo and I’m C.E.O., Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.

And what, exactly, is the Girl Scouts’ mission?

ACEVEDO: Creating girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.

But I’m guessing there’s a lot you don’t know about the Girl Scouts. Including the fact that cookie sales, which generate more than $700 million a year, are an economic necessity dating back to the organization’s founder.

ACEVEDO: Yes. Because she faced the same dilemma that many girls and women’s organizations face, which is: girls and women’s organizations get less than 10 percent of every philanthropic dollar.

And there’s a lot you don’t know about Sylvia Acevedo too. How her low-income, Latinx background did not exactly pave the way for future success.

ACEVEDO: She said, “Girls like you don’t go to college.”

How she became a rocket scientist and then a tech executive — again, swimming against the tide.

ACEVEDO: I’ve got all these great qualifications and experience. And he said, “Well, you’re a woman.”

And the problems the Girl Scouts are dealing with today. Like: how to stay relevant in an increasingly digital world. And: what to do about the Boy Scouts.

ACEVEDO: So you cannot call females in that organization “girl scouts.” We are the owners — intellectual-property owners, trademark owners — of the phrase “Girl Scouts.”

It’s rare for the C.E.O. of an organization to have been a member of said organization when they were a child. But that’s the case with Sylvia Acevedo. Today on Freakonomics Radio: Girl Scout power then, now, and forever?

*     *     *

Here’s a question: what do Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have in common? Sure, they’re all female members of the United States Congress, and they’re all Democrats. But it goes beyond that. All three female Secretaries of State — Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, and Madeleine Albright — they all have this same thing in common too. But also Taylor Swift, Meghan Markle, and Queen Latifah. Melinda Gates, Venus and Serena Williams, and nearly every female astronaut who’s ever been in space. Yes, all these women were once Girl Scouts. As was Sylvia Acevedo.

DUBNER: So what I want to know is: which came first? Sylvia Acevedo, the smart, disciplined self-starter, or Sylvia Acevedo the Girl Scout? And what I mean by that is you’ve got this remarkable record of accomplishment and discipline and intellect. Much of it accomplished with not very much advantage, and often active disadvantage. You also, though, joined the Girl Scouts when you were young, and you’ve said that that gave you a big boost. But you were someone who, it seems, had so much drive that I wonder if you really needed the Girl Scouts. I wonder which direction the arrow is traveling in.

ACEVEDO: So, about 14 years ago, somebody was doing research at Stanford, and they called me. They said, “You’re one of the first Hispanic male or females to have ever gotten your graduate engineering degree from Stanford. And unfortunately you’re still one of the few.” So they said, “So how did all this happen? Were your parents college professors?” “No.” And so they kept saying, “Well, how were you prepared with the math and the science?” And the more they kept asking, it did go back to that pivotal Girl Scout experience.

Acevedo recently published a book, for middle-school readers, called Path to the Stars: My Journey from Girl Scout to Rocket Scientist.

ACEVEDO: I did this book tour and I went across the country — urban, rural, suburban areas. And what I was struck with — I saw that as the girls got older, so when they’re in the early ages in elementary school, there’s just this exuberance and enthusiasm, and raising their hands. By the time they get to middle school, they don’t raise their hands. So much so that I started to institute a rule that I would only take questions if they were alternating boy-girl-boy-girl. And we do know that in classrooms, boys get called on more than girls.

And I think about — in our girl-only space, I think that’s why Girl Scouts tend to over-index in so many nontraditional fields. Half of all female elected officials in America were Girl Scouts. So I think that girl-only environment allows you to try things safely. And also if you don’t succeed the first time, it’s not, “Okay, you tried it. You’re not going to be good at it. You’re not good at a computers. So get away from it.” You get to try, try, and try again until you either decide you like it, or you see success in it. And I know that’s what happened to me.

Acevedo is 61 years old. She was born in South Dakota:

ACEVEDO: I was born in South Dakota but I grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico. All my grandparents were born in Mexico. My mom was born in Mexico. My dad was born in El Paso, Texas. And we lived in a Spanish-speaking household. We lived paycheck to paycheck. Sometimes we ran out of money, we had to go live with other family members. You know, this was my reality.

Because of where we lived, unfortunately, there was a health epidemic of meningitis, and my sister got really sick. And we moved because my mother realized the only part of town where people got sick was in this dirt-street neighborhood that we lived in and we moved to another part of town. But I didn’t like it because I had all my friends, everything that I knew, there. But at that point a girl followed me and pestered me to come to see Girl Scouts. And then I just fell in love with Girl Scouts.

The Girl Scouts were founded in 1912 by a Georgia woman named Juliette Gordon Low. She’d been inspired by the Boy Scout model. Low wanted girls to have the space to learn self-reliance in everything from camping and cooking to citizenship and career training. It was on a Girl Scout camping trip that Sylvia Acevedo first got interested in science.

ACEVEDO: My troop leader saw me just looking at the night sky. She helped me understand that there were constellations and there was planets, and I had no idea. I just knew there were twinkly lights. But she remembered that. And later on encouraged me to earn my science badge. And I wasn’t successful at first. I mean, it took me quite a few times before I was successful.

Acevedo was trying to get her science badge by launching an Estes model rocket. She had a really hard time getting it off the ground.

ACEVEDO: I was like, “What is this that won’t let my rocket go up?” And so I learned about this invisible force called gravity that keeps things down. In fact, I really did get really inspired of trying to figure out, how do you break gravity’s grip?

How do you break gravity’s grip? This is something Acevedo learned to do, again and again. She started playing basketball even though her parents thought that wasn’t something a girl should be doing, and she got really good. She started playing music and, of course, chose the drums — and, again, she got really good. Acevedo was so frustrated after the family car broke down on a trip that she set about learning auto repair even though she wasn’t old enough to drive. She also started thinking big about her academic future.

ACEVEDO: When I was in fourth grade, my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Baldwin, showed different pictures of colleges across America. And I’m in the Chihuahuan Desert, one of the driest and most arid deserts.

One of the pictures Mrs. Baldwin showed was of Stanford University.

ACEVEDO: So you see these green, verdant hills and the limestone buildings with the red tile roof, and I did blurt out, “I want to go there.”

She would go on to Stanford, for graduate school, but first there were some other hurdles. Like the high-school college counselor:

ACEVEDO: When she walked out and she looked at me, she said, “What are you doing here?” And I said, “I signed up to go to college counseling.” And she said, “Girls like you don’t go to college.” And to be fair, statistically, she was probably right. But that didn’t mean she was right in saying what she said. But by that time, that was just my first no. I just stood up and walked into her office and she followed me, and then she said, “What do you want to study?” And I said, “I want to be an engineer.” And she laughed.

At the time, around one percent of undergraduate engineering degrees were earned by women.

ACEVEDO: So I went to New Mexico State University and I became an industrial engineer, a systems engineer, and my first job out of college was as a rocket scientist at NASA’s J.P.L.

DUBNER: I think when a lot of people would hear a story like that, about your counselor telling you that girls like you don’t go to college, it’s so insulting. And I think that most people when they hear that story, if they put themselves in that position, they would imagine themselves responding with anger or hurt or resentment. And you sound and appear to be the kind of person who was able to let that kind of thing roll off you. And then get to the next level, keep pushing for your goal. I’m really curious whether you think that ability is your natural characteristic, whether you learned that, if it was hard to learn, and really if you have any advice for people who, when they face a no, a failure, how to not let the weight of that failure keep them from moving forward?

ACEVEDO: Yeah, that’s a great question and I think that has to do a lot with problem-solving. How do you solve the problem? And when you think of it that way, you’re not just trying to solve the problem for yourself, you’re also trying to meet their need and the problem they’re also trying to solve. I know in my career, I faced this quite a bit. There was one company that I was working for, and I wanted to move from domestic sales to international sales. And I saw that there were some openings for people who could speak Spanish and had this technical background. And I could not break in. It took months and there was just always some excuse why it wasn’t a fit.

I kept trying to figure out so, how do I get this so that they can’t say no? And I love numbers. Numbers are sort of my superpower. So I did a lot of data analysis and I showed that if their penetration of some major multinational accounts was the same as my accounts, that region would have hundreds of millions of dollars more in sales. And I created this presentation.

I got that five minutes with that really busy sales V.P. And I flipped through the presentation, and he looked at that. He’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is really great.” He went to grab it. And he said, “Well, can’t I have it?” And I said— put my hand on it and I said, “Yeah, you can, but it comes with me.” And I finally got the job.

Considering her early fascination with the night sky, and with rockets, and with science generally, you might be surprised that Acevedo didn’t stay at J.P.L., NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, or return there after she got her graduate degree. I asked her why not.

ACEVEDO: The thing was, when you’re working with NASA, and especially when you’re working with missions that are going to different planets, payday or “Christmas” is when that actual spacecraft is passing that planet. And I was able to work right when Voyager 2 was doing its flyby of Jupiter and its moons Io and Europa, and I got to do a lot of data analysis and actually create algorithms around that, of all the data that was coming back from the telemetry devices. Then the other project was Solar Polar Solar Probe, where we were planning to send a spacecraft to the sun.

The “Solar Polar” project had been conceived in the late 1950s. Acevedo worked at JPL in 1979 — but the mission still had a long way to go. The science itself fascinated her.

ACEVEDO: You had to think about all these different things that were going to happen. And even some of the material to handle the radiation — obviously the heat, the temperature fluctuations, asteroids hitting — some of the material or the ceramics hadn’t even been created yet.

But the timetable of the project was a problem.

ACEVEDO: And I realized it was going to be not just months, not just years, it could be decades before the next great event happened.

Indeed: Solar Polar, later renamed the Parker Solar Probe, was finally launched last year, in 2018. Acevedo had not been interested in waiting it out. So she got that graduate degree in engineering from Stanford.

ACEVEDO: And then I saw everything happening around Silicon Valley, and I really liked the pace. I was fortunate to graduate from Stanford right at sort of ground zero of the Internet explosion.

Over the next few decades, Acevedo worked for Apple, Dell, Autodesk — and, in her first job, I.B.M.

ACEVEDO: When I worked at I.B.M., we were creating the state-of-the-art storage devices. And I brought an innovation lens to it. Instead of just doing it the way everybody did it, I took a step back, and I thought, what could we do to make this an improved experience for the workers as well as improve our manufacturing output?

Well, I did that with a few projects and manufacturing outcomes went up. So the results were so good that I was given this amazing plum assignment to help design their brand-new, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility.

Working at I.B.M., I noticed that men would have this way of coaching each other and networking with each other. And I saw that the few women that were there, we weren’t doing that. And no one was doing that for us. So I went to my boss and I said, what will it take to get promoted, to get to these other levels? And he looked at me like, “What?” You know, “What are you thinking, of doing that?’ And he couldn’t even imagine that.

And I said, “Well, let’s just make it a hypothetical. If you were wanting to be that, what would you have to do?” And he said, “You’d have to have sales experience, product, all this experience.” And that was the ticket. And I thought, “Okay, I want to do that.” And so at that point I applied and got accepted into the I.B.M. sales program. And then I just went checking the box. And kept working on getting myself into these other types of jobs, product marketing, into having profit-and-loss responsibility as an executive.

Later, at Autodesk, Acevedo worked under Carol Bartz, one of the few female C.E.O.’s in tech.

ACEVEDO: Well, it was really a different dynamic to have a female C.E.O. And there were— I counted 36 people that had revenue responsibilities across the organization. And I was the only female, obviously in addition to Carol. But the moment I got hired, everyone kept saying “Oh gosh, do we have to start wearing skirts now? Is this the only way you can get promoted?” And I remember thinking, “Holy cow, there’s 35 of you. And there’s me and Carol.”

DUBNER: Were there more females hired over time in senior positions there?

ACEVEDO: Yes. Absolutely, she did. Carol was really good about making sure that we looked high and low for the right talent and not just saying, you’ve just looked within your networks. But really going to different areas.

DUBNER: There’s research — I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, what’s called the “queen-bee syndrome” in which, in corporate settings and institutional settings, powerful women tend to be harder on female subordinates than on male subordinates. And I’m curious to know, whether from your personal experience or observation — if you’ve seen that, if you believe that research, and, if so, maybe what to do about it?

ACEVEDO: I’d always heard about that anecdotally, and I know that — I mean, myself in my career, I always tried to treat others the way I wanted to be treated. So I always made sure that we created opportunities for others. And that’s that Girl Scout maxim, “Always leave your campground better than you found it.” When you look at Girl Scouts and we’re a girl-only environment, we really try to make sure that girls learn about collaboration, teamwork, ethics, working well with others.

DUBNER: I am curious to know your views on the gender pay gap generally. There is a lot of argument over the degree of the gap, the causes of the gap, the consequences, and what should be done about it. As we speak, the U.S. Women’s National Team soccer players are suing their own federation over gender bias and pay discrepancy. So what’s your position?

ACEVEDO: In technology, one of the things I would do when I took over a department is I would do that gender analysis. And I would find huge disparities. And in one case there was a woman that was being paid $35,000 a year, and they analyzed her work she was doing — we were paying men $105,000 for that job. And she didn’t know. She didn’t know the difference. She was happy that she had that job. She was one of many examples. That was probably the most extreme.

But I realized that not a lot of women had that courage and confidence to ask for the additional stock options, to ask, “Is this the best salary?” Asking all those questions to make sure I was getting treated fairly and getting adequately compensated — a lot of women aren’t raised that way, don’t think that way. Or there are practices and policies that don’t reinforce that.

But at Girl Scouts, one of the things we’re working on is thinking about how do we work to use the power of our purse to help out on that gender pay gap. And making sure we’re working with partners who are committed to same job, same pay. And committed to having at least 30 percent female leadership.

DUBNER: So you were on the board of Girl Scouts of the United States of America for several years and then you became interim C.E.O. and then C.E.O. a couple of years ago. When you took over, the organization was having some difficulty in terms of membership and leadership. Can you describe what it was like coming in? What were the fixes or challenges you immediately turned to?

ACEVEDO: One of the things about being on the board is you’re strategy and governance, you’re not in operational execution. And me being a technology executive, I was always in my head playing all these scenarios, “What would I do?” So when that opportunity came, it was really focused on really three things. It’s about membership. It’s about the movement. And it’s about money. And to get people very focused, that that’s what we’re about.

We’re about the girl. We have to provide a fun, relevant, and safe experience for the girl. Many girls across America now have a digital device in their hands, as does their mom or their parents. So let’s get programming that helps them not just be users of technology but the creators and the inventors and the designers. We have this amazing ability to reach girls across America. So we have a scale that’s unmatched. And right now we’re using that to create the workforce of the future.

*     *     *

With her engineering background, and a long career in tech firms (and a little bit of rocket science thrown in), you can see why Sylvia Acevedo was an appealing choice to run the Girl Scouts. Its mission is essentially to empower girls to succeed in life. In an increasingly digital world, success often means an intense engagement with technology. In that regard, girls and women are trailing. They are severely underrepresented at tech firms, especially in senior leadership, where women hold about one in 10 positions. There are of course many possible factors behind this underrepresentation. But Acevedo is determined to at least turn some no’s into yes’s.

ACEVEDO: So you just have to keep taking away the objections.

To that end, the Girl Scouts have been adding a lot of badges and programs that promote STEM learning: science, technology, engineering, and math.

ACEVEDO: There’s things like design thinking, there’s robotics, there’s data analytics, there’s NASA badges about space science, there’s citizen science, there’s coding, programming, engineering, cybersecurity badges, it’s just really great.

We’ll always focus on the outdoors and leadership. But it’s so important right now to make sure that we can give girls the skills they need to lead in the 21st century. And our cybersecurity in particular has been massively successful. In our first eight months, over 75,000 badges have been earned. And that’s just girls five to 10 — our older girls’ cyber badges are coming out. And that’s because we really have a team. We have psychologists on staff, we have Ph.D.’s, academics, as well as practitioners in the field, but then we put it in a way that girls learn and lead really well.

So people say, how do you in cybersecurity teach girls about malware and networking? If you looked at the standard ways, people are saying, “Well, networking, the physical layer, it’s a 7-stack protocol, and the first layer is the physical.” I can tell you, seven- and eight-year-old girls are checked out.

DUBNER: In their defense, I checked out as well.

ACEVEDO: Okay. But now what we do, you’re a seven- or eight-year-old girl, so we ask you to sit in a circle and talk with your friends. Do you think they’re going to do that? Absolutely. And then we give them a ball of yarn and they pass the yarn to one another as they’re speaking. And in a few minutes they’re able to see a physical network. And they’re able to see how maybe Sally didn’t talk to Sara, but they both talked to Elizabeth, who had a virus, and that’s how the virus got spread. And you see that in a way that is incredibly relevant to them.

DUBNER: Let’s talk about the economics of Girl Scout cookies. So from what I see on the most recent Form 990 tax return the Girl Scouts filed, total revenues for the organization was just over $130 million. But Girl Scout cookie revenues, I understand, do not flow to the central organization, is that true?

ACEVEDO: That is true. When you’re buying Girl Scout cookies, you are supporting that local girl and that local council. All your money stays local.

DUBNER: Okay, so I’ve read reports that annual cookie revenues are in the neighborhood of $700 to $800 million? Is that roughly accurate?

ACEVEDO: That is correct. We are the second-largest cookie business in America. Second only to Oreo.

DUBNER: Who makes your cookies?

ACEVEDO: We have two different bakers. One is called the A.B.C. and the other one is Little Brownie Baker. One of them is more of a contract maker, A.B.C., but Little Brownie Baker used to be owned by Kellogg’s but it’s in the process of being sold.

DUBNER: It sounds as though the cookie program is really a very, very key component of Girl Scouts. Both for entrepreneurial and goal-setting and financial purposes within the Girl Scouts.

ACEVEDO: Yes. So one of the reasons that we have been able to thrive for over 100 years is, Julia Gordon Low, when she learned about an enterprising Girl Scout Council in Oklahoma that was doing a cookie sale, she immediately saw that that was how we could fund the movement.

I’m so grateful for that because that has allowed us to continue to be inclusive and diverse from the very beginning. Because the cookie program did fund our growth and funds and supports the organization. Now in terms of the money staying local — a percentage, and that varies per council, of dollars stay within the troops so that the girls can use their cookie cash for different programs.

DUBNER: Let’s say I really wanted to rain on your parade and say I’m all in favor of female accomplishment, of female entrepreneurship, etc. But I’m a little uncomfortable in this day of poor health and obesity, that the foundation of the Girl Scouts’ financial mountain is built on cookies, which are both very sugary and fattening. And again I admit I’m raining on a parade, I’m being as devilish an advocate as I could possibly be. But let’s say I say that. What do you say to that?

ACEVEDO: The thing is, it’s once a year. It’s an indulgence. Our cookie portions have remained small. We don’t have these gigantic cookies. And what you’re doing, your dollar is going to really create a female entrepreneur. You’re teaching girls money skills, business skills, management skills, customer, business, ethics skills. And this is a girl’s first business. And we only offer that once a year, three months a year.

DUBNER: I wondered about the once-a-year factor as well. You know, scarcity is a powerful force, and it tends to drive demand, but it also may leave opportunity or money on the table. I’m really curious about the organization’s attitude toward either lengthening the selling time or maybe there would be two or three seasons a year? Because it’s hard for me to imagine that an organization could oversee an operation that is so successful and so profitable and not want to say, “Hey, if we did it twice a year, we could bring in maybe 2x or 1.8x the money.” What’s your position on that?

ACEVEDO: You are really thinking like a for-profit business. We’re really focused on the girl. And the cookie program is really to teach her these really great business skills and also to provide the funding for the organization.

The Girl Scouts are often held up as an example of a successful “social enterprise nonprofit,” or what you might call a nonprofit with a for-profit arm. This does not, of course, entirely shield it from competition. In 2003, the Girls Scouts had nearly 3 million youth members, along with just under a million adult volunteers. They’ve since fallen to below 2 million youth members. Some competition, lately, has come from the Boy Scouts.

DUBNER: Okay. The Girl Scouts’ relationship with the Boy Scouts of America. How would you describe that relationship? One word for starters.

ACEVEDO: Separate.

DUBNER: Okay. I understand that the Girl Scouts are presently suing the Boy Scouts, yes? Can you give us the background on that?

ACEVEDO: Sure. They made a change in their policy and decided to accept girls. But we are the owners, intellectual-property owners, trademark owners of Girl Scouts. The phrase “Girl Scouts.” So you cannot call people in that organization, females in that organization, “girl scouts.” We are the Girl Scouts.

DUBNER: So let’s just back up. The Boy Scouts began to admit female scouts, correct? Is that essentially what triggered this contentious moment?

ACEVEDO: Yeah. They decided to open up their membership to girls.

DUBNER: Did your organization approach them and try to have amicable discussions about how to work this out? Or did it quickly get to the lawyers?

ACEVEDO: They told us that they were making that decision. So it wasn’t bringing us in. They just said, “Here’s what we’re going to do.” And then we would share with them that there were all these instances of people calling females in their organization “girl scouts,” and that is our organization.

DUBNER: So I know your membership has declined somewhat, but the Boy Scouts membership has fallen much faster than yours. Do you have any thoughts as to why that is? Do you think the Girl Scouts are more valuable to the modern American girl than the Boy Scouts are to the modern American boy?

ACEVEDO: I really can’t make judgments on their organization. But what I can say about Girl Scouts is we really are focused on that girl-only experience. And to create a program that works for them, that is designed around the way girls learn and lead. And that’s really what we’re experts in.

DUBNER: I’m really curious, your thoughts on same-sex education generally. A lot of great women’s-only colleges have, over the past 40 or 50 years, become coed. I know the research on same-sex education is mixed or in progress right now; it’s really hard to find a definitive answer. But do you think that is a loss for society?

ACEVEDO: I know that historically what you’re talking about at the college level is certainly true, there’s fewer of them. But I used to live in Texas. In Austin, Texas. And across the state there is just a huge growth in the number of all-girls public schools. So I really saw that big increase.

We live in a coed world, but we are talking about girls, we work with girls five to 18 and want to give them that confidence and those skills so that they can be successful in life and navigate the world. And clearly our outcomes show that they can.

DUBNER: So I’m guessing that the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. will not ever accept boys.

ACEVEDO: Just like any good business, you focus on what you do well and what we are are experts in how girls learn and lead.

DUBNER: I’m curious to know about the Girl Scouts’ policy, I guess, on policy. I can think of a number of issues that are in the news today, that a female organization would have a particular take on, whether it’s immigration, whether it’s abortion, and so on. What is the official position on politics and policy, and the endorsement of candidates and things like that?

ACEVEDO: We’re a nonpartisan organization. We exist for the girls. So we don’t tell girls what to value, what to think. So a couple of years ago, when there were a lot of parades, and a lot of different things, people said, “Hey, Girl Scouts, you need to be in the middle of that.” And we were like, “No.”

What we did do is we realized what people want is change, especially change in policies and in politics and we said, “Well, let’s make sure that girls understand how you do that in a democracy, regardless of what it is.” So we’re teaching girls how to create the change they want to see in the world, the positive change they want to see, but we’re not telling them what that is.

DUBNER: So let’s say I’m a Girl Scout troop, and I decide that, for instance, Elizabeth Warren, I think is a great presidential candidate. And I want to participate and help in campaign events for Elizabeth Warren and I want all of our girls to go in their Scout uniforms. Allowed or no?

ACEVEDO: So what we encourage people is to— we really encourage you to get out the vote. We encourage you to encourage people to go out and vote. But as a Girl Scout, endorsed as a Girl Scout, that’s not what our organization is about.

DUBNER: It seems as though the line between what’s political and what’s not political is much, much blurrier these days than it used to be. And I’m just curious whether that line is a little bit harder to navigate for the Girl Scouts than it might have been 20, 30, 50 years ago.

ACEVEDO: You know, there are always people trying to push us one way or the other. It’s interesting. I can be in one part of the country and say our message, exactly, and people will say “Oh my God, you are from New York. You are so liberal.” I can then take that exact same message, go to another part of country, and, “Oh my God. You guys are just so conservative. Get with the times, Girl Scouts.”

DUBNER: Okay. Thank you so much, it was great to speak with you.

ACEVEDO: It was wonderful. I really enjoyed it. And keep buying Girl Scout cookies.

*     *     *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Daphne Chen. Our staff includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, Matt Hickey, and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The post What Do Nancy Pelosi, Taylor Swift, and Serena Williams Have in Common? (Ep. 385) appeared first on Freakonomics.

George Will, author of The Conservative Sensibility, pictured in 2004. | George Bridges/MCT/MCT via Getty Images

Where George Will thinks America went wrong.

It’s a good time to be a Republican. But it’s a bad time, George Will argues, to be a conservative. Hence his new, 700-page manifesto, The Conservative Sensibility, which tries to rescue conservatism from the perversions of the Trumpist GOP.

Will’s conservatism is rooted in a deep mistrust of majority rule, and an almost religious veneration of the Founding Fathers, or at least a certain understanding of them. Remember, he writes, “the Constitution of the first consciously modern nation, the United States, protects the sovereignty of private individuals, not the sovereignty of a public collective, ’the majority.’”

Will is articulating a tendency that’s always been present on the right, but is becoming more central today: the belief that majority rule will be the death of the American experiment, and that the conservative project is at odds with democracy. Will is more forthright than most on this point: He chides conservatives for blasting activist judges, for instance, arguing that the right needs a judiciary willing to make sweeping rulings to curb the power of the state and the whims of the crowd.

There’s a lot to discuss here. And discuss we do. You can listen to our full conversation by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts, or streaming it below. A transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Ezra Klein

You write about a “braided relationship” between a person’s political philosophy and his or her sensibility. Can you tell me a bit about that?

George Will

By sensibility, I mean something more than an attitude but less than an agenda. I didn’t want to write another book telling people 10 things to fix America, or what to think, I’m more interested in how to think. How we think is a result somewhat of our sensibility of how we respond to the flux and flow of things in a complex society. That’s as close as I can come to defining it.

Ezra Klein

In political psychology, there’s this concept that Jon Jost, at New York University, calls elective affinities. That depending on where you start with your psychological makeup — whether you like change, or you prefer tradition — that some ideologies will be of more appeal to you. And it feels like you’re getting at that concept here.

George Will

Right. I can put it in a less recondite way by quoting Virginia Postrel, who said that the story of the Bible reduced to one sentence is “God created man and woman and promptly lost control of events.”

The conservative sensibility, as I understand it, says, “That’s terrific.” The conservative sensibility finds the lack of design and lack of control of a spontaneous-order, free-market society to be exhilarating. Some people find it frightening, others find it offensive that things are going on without people organizing it and bossing people around. The conservative sensibility says lack of control is a good thing.

Is conservatism about accepting change or preventing it?

Ezra Klein

That’s surprising, because when I think of conservatives and the conservative movement, I think of a preference for order. That’s often assumed to be within both the conservative agenda and the psychological makeup. And yet you’re defining it as a group of people who are actually quite comfortable with a sort of disorder.

George Will

Yes, the people who say conservatism wants to defend order have a good point, but the wrong country. European conservatism evolved in defense of established institutions, orders and hierarchies, often nobility, often monarchy, often established churches. And it became self-conscious and articulate under Edmund Burke, who was of course in strong recoil against the French Revolution, and its turmoils, and wound up celebrating the British public as the stolid cud-chewing cow in the meadow, with grasshoppers making lots of noise but having no consequence.

American conservatism is something the reverse, which is to say it celebrates and wants to reconcile people to the hazards and frictions granted, and the creative destruction, the exhilaration of a free society.

Ezra Klein

There’s a tension here between the conservatism that is comfortable with the creative destruction of the market and conservatism’s defense of the preexisting social hierarchies, which has given the conservative movement much of its power in the US.

Your book is dedicated to Barry Goldwater, but in 1964, the only region he won was the South, and that was based not on a preference for a free-market approach to affairs, but a frustration about the way civil rights was changing their states. So how do those two things reconcile?

George Will

They don’t always reconcile. There are tensions within conservatism: There’s the localism that took a particularly unseemly and nasty turn with Jim Crow laws, which reflected local majorities. But there is a social conservatism that says if you’re going to have the free-market, lightly governed society, then you’re presupposing a moral capital that institutions, religious and otherwise, have to nurture. Therefore the civil society becomes a principal concern of those who are less concerned about a strong regulatory administrative state.

Ezra Klein

Your book is built on the idea that there’s a fundamental conflict between conservatives and progressives on the idea of human nature. What do you see as the conservative view of human nature, and where does it differ from that of progressives?

George Will

Human nature is not plastic. People are not as malleable as some people thought they were. John Dewey, for example, and some of the early political scientists at the turn of the 20th century, said that people were reflections of an ever-evolving culture, and it’s a political project to take charge of the evolution of the culture to make sure that it progresses. Hence, the label “progressives.”

Ezra Klein

It seems to me there are two ideas built into that, and I agree with one and probably disagree with the other. It does seem to me that human beings are remarkably plastic — what they’re not is predictable. We were hunter-gatherers living in big kinship communities. We have adapted to extraordinarily different circumstances over time. On the other hand, the idea that we can organize that plasticity and direct it in a clear rationalistic way is, I think, proven wrong again and again throughout history. It seems to me that you can take half of that without taking the other half.

George Will

You probably can. I think the conservative sensibility wants both halves. I’ll tell you what John Locke and James Madison had in mind. Locke said that individuals are self-conscious creatures who define themselves through action. They are largely self-interested, and will behave in more or less predictable ways. Which is to say, politics can take its bearings from the steady constant in human behavior. Conservatives say ‘what’s the worst in life, and let’s try to avoid it.’ And the worst result in politics is tyranny. And you work from there. How to limit government and make tyranny, including tyrannical majorities, less likely.

Ezra Klein

That’s a very broad definition of human nature, but the way that you apply it in the book is more narrow. The argument you’re making, as I understand it, is that this idea of human nature flows into the idea of limited government, and this idea of limited government flows into certain political structures. And as I understand the structures, they would take things like a big national health care system, among other policies, off the table. It’s a big jump to go from a Lockean idea of human nature to a narrow vision of what government can do.

George Will

It is a big jump, but the question of the proper scope and actual competence of government are not severable questions, and they are largely informed by human experience. Short term experience in the United States from the New Deal on, in the larger context, the last 600 years of North Atlantic community history, again informs us about the proper scope and actual competence. And as I say, those are not quite severable questions.

On “the empirical case for limited government”

Ezra Klein

In the book, you write, “The empirical case for limited government is that although human beings have something in common—human nature—they are different in capacities and aspirations. From this it follows, not logically but practically, that government cannot hope to provide happiness to all. The most it can reasonably expect to provide are the conditions under which happiness, as each defines it, can be pursued.”

If this is to be defined as an empirical question, then it seems we could look at places that have done different things, like Canada and Western Europe, and see if people are happier and go from there. I take it that that probably would not be amenable to you.

George Will

To come back to the subject to raise, national health insurance. That’s largely a utilitarian call. There are people who say that the human experience in what we call more advanced societies has shown that ... certain protections and rights, alongside restrictions on or duties for government, make people have a worthy happiness. In that sense, as I say, we’re all rule utilitarians learning as we go along.

Ezra Klein

You frame that reasonably positively. It seems to me you’re saying that you can hold those opinions and even potentially be a conservative?

George Will

Sure.

Ezra Klein

That’s interesting, because you argue for a version of judicial review in the book, that I think would take a lot of this off the table. And as I understand it, it flows from these fundamental assumptions of human nature and limited government. But does it not? Am I misunderstanding that chain?

George Will

Well, I’m not ... I do have a very expansive role for the judiciary, to produce what Madison called “mitigated democracy.” I’m not saying that Social Security or Medicare or what have you should be considered unconstitutional. I am saying that there are certain rights necessary to human flourishing that enumerated or not, and the ninth amendment of course provides for unenumerated rights, that cause me to think, for example, the Lochner decision was quite right, because the freedom to contract is fundamental to the flourishing of autonomous individuals either as individuals or cooperating voluntarily in groups.

Ezra Klein

Help me draw out the distinctions here. The book seems to me to be constructing an argument from philosophic first principles for a very different world than the one that someone like me would prefer. I’m having a lot of trouble in this conversation drawing out the distinctions. In the book, you’re clear you want something quite different than what we see. That you think we’ve gone quite far off the rails. Tell me about how America should look differently?

George Will

The book is dedicated to the memory of Barry Goldwater, for whom I cast my first presidential vote in 1964, when 77 percent of the American people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all the time, or almost all the time. Today, it’s 17 percent. Now I would think my progressive friends would be interested in the fact that the 60 point collapse has occurred, because everything progressives want to do depends on strong government, and that strong government depends at the end of the day on public confidence in the government.

You ask how would America be different? We’d be much more lightly regulated. The states would be less administrative appendages of the federal government. We would have congressional supremacy reestablished. We would not have a presidency untethered from any restraints imposed by the separation of powers. We would have a president not empowered to declare emergencies and wield powers given to him by Congress. The complaints that modern presidents usurp powers is unfortunately not true. They’re wielding powers that were all too willingly given them.

The one thing my hero James Madison got wrong was he said that under popular government all power is sucked into the impetuous vortex of the legislature. In fact, legislature has been spinning off the powers. Congresses under both parties have been spinning off powers to presidents of both parties.

Ezra Klein

It is hard for me to believe that the government were doing less to solve the problems people felt they had, that they would like it better.

George Will

Well, it’s curious though, that as governments pretensions and solicitousness have grown, its prestige has plummeted. This began in the 1960s, when the landslide against Goldwater produced the first liberal legislative majority in Congress since 1938. What government does that it knows how to do is something like Social Security. You identify an eligible cohort and mail the cohort checks. It’s good at that.

What it’s not good at is creating, for example, model cities, or nation building abroad. That’s far more ambitious than what the New Deal had in mind, and far more subject to disappointment. And disappointment produces the curdled American attitude toward the national government that exists today.

Ezra Klein

Let me go back to the story about trust, because I think it’s interesting. One problem with all this of course, is the lack of survey data going back much further than the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s. But let’s grant that the New Deal era, which follows a large expansion of governmental power, is a high watermark for trust in government, and then in the Nixon era and what follows it, you begin to see a large and consistent fall. It seems to me there’s a consistent story here that says something like, you had ideologically mixed political parties with low polarization and a not-very nationalized media and this led to reasonably high trust in government.

Then as the parties polarized, and a conservative movement with its own oppositional media developed that was about attacking government and bringing attention to its failures, trust in government falls. Put another way, trust in government is less about what government is doing and more about what is being said about it and reported on about it.

George Will

I think that’s right. I am frankly bewildered by the intensity of our political argument today because I don’t know what we’re arguing about. I’m much more alarmed not by the discord in America, but by the consensus, which extends from Elizabeth Warren on the left to Ted Cruz on the right, and it is this: We should have a large and generous welfare state and not pay for it. Everyone’s agreed on that, as far as I can tell, and the public loves it — they get a dollar’s worth of government and are charged 80 cents for it. And the differences fobbed off on the unconsenting, unborn future generations.

We used to borrow money for the future — we fought wars for the future, built roads, harbors, airports for the future — now we’re borrowing from the future to finance our own consumption of government goods and services, and everyone’s agreed on this. It seems to me the political class is more united by self-class interest than it is divided by ideology in this regard.

Political scientists have been saying for years that Americans are ideologically or rhetorically conservative, but operationally liberals. Absolutely true. They talk like Jeffersonians and insist on being governed by Hamiltonians.

What did the founders believe?

Ezra Klein

I think this is a nice bridge to the chapter on judicial review and the Constitution more broadly, which seems to me to be the heart of the book. You argue that the conservative experiment is fundamentally about the founding experiment, that it’s about the views of the founders as embedded in the Constitution, which you argue operationalizes the Declaration of Independence. Can you talk a bit about that view?

George Will

Yes. I should say that among those who sternly rejected that view of mine that you just accurately describe was for example, Justice Scalia. Scalia said the Constitution contains no philosophizing. The Declaration was a revolutionary document useful in its time in place, but has nothing to do with the Constitution.

My view of the Constitution is that it should be read in the light cast by the Declaration of Independence. The most important verb in the Declaration is in the second paragraph, which says, “All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights and governments are instituted to secure those rights.” And when you start from that, you were put on the path to limited government, and therefore the respect for the, what Hayek called the spontaneous order of a market society,

Ezra Klein

In your book, you write about the importance of what the founders intended, but you also write about the fact that the founders split into the political parties in part over their differing views of what the Constitution permits, and was intended to create. Given the diversity of views among the founders, how can we talk clearly about what “the founders” as a group intended?

George Will

By understanding that while we had these robust, wonderfully interesting arguments they were arguing about what kind of people we were going to be. [To Jefferson] we needed a vast extensive republic, in which there would be lots of land for steady, rural, self-reliant yeomen, rather like Thomas Jefferson. And Hamilton said, No, actually, we want public credit system of finance, and a debt to help with economic growth to allow for a restless, entrepreneurial striving, urban manufacturing commercial class of people rather like Alexander Hamilton.

They were really arguing about the soul of the country, what kind of people we were going to be. I once wrote a book, read by dozens, called Statecraft As Soulcraft, in which I argued that when you organize a society, and particularly when you pick an economic system, you are, of necessity, picking the kind of people you’re going to deal with. Your statecraft becomes soulcraft.

And I think America made a wise choice to have a robust, constantly turning market society with the consequent individualism celebrated. What worries me more than anything about the American future is that will now have a great flinch. People will say, “this kind of freedom is stressful, and there are casualties and frictions and uncertainties, and it’s just not worth it anymore.”

Ezra Klein

I want to hold here on the question of founder interpretation, because as you go through the book, you’re arguing for the judiciary at this point to take on a much more active role than even most conservatives support. But given what you’re allowing here about disagreements between the founders, there are obviously fundamentally different ways to interpret the Constitution.

George Will

Let me be slightly autobiographical here if I may. I wrote my doctoral dissertation at Princeton and the title was “Beyond the Reach of Majorities.” It’s a phrase from the second of the flag salute cases. The one in which they overturned a decision just three years earlier, when they had held that it is okay as an exercise of the police power of the state to require Jehovah’s Witnesses children to salute the flag, even though it violated their fundamental beliefs, because the government was saying national unity is a public good.

In his opinion overturning that in West Virginia v. Barnett, Justice Jackson said, “The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to play certain things beyond the reach of majority’s and above the vicissitudes of politics.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, a great progressive pin-up, said, “If the American people want to go to hell, I will help them, it’s my job.” That is to get out of the way of majorities, of the dominant forces in the community, as he kept saying. Well, I do not believe that, and I think the conservative sensibility rejects the idea that America is about majority rule.

[America is] not about a process majority rule; it’s about liberty. Obviously, majorities should rule where government is going to rule, but the fact is that majorities can be tyrannical, and they can be self-interested. Furthermore, as I argue at length most of what governments do have nothing to do with majorities — they have to do with government responding to compact, articulate, confident, and well lawyered minorities who understand the levers and pulleys of the modern state and manipulate them for their advantage.

This is why I think Elizabeth Warren has a firm grip on half a point. She says, “Look, there is a reason why five of the 10 richest counties in America by per capita income are in the Washington area, Washington doesn’t make anything save laws and regulations and trouble, and has no natural resources. But there are trillions of dollars sloshing through the system here and deflected and controlled by this. And the government often is the captive of these factions.” Then she inexplicably says, “Well, the answer is to make the government very much bigger and very much more involved in allocating wealth and opportunity.” It seems to me that this is just going to make matters very much worse.

Ezra Klein

Let me put a pin in Warren’s answer, because I want to come back to it. But one question your point raises is this: the president of the United States was the runner-up in the popular vote, the Senate is controlled by the party that got fewer votes than the minority party, the Supreme Court is controlled by Republicans, which it wouldn’t be if these things had gone the other way. In a country where the majority controls so little, are we really in danger of tyrannical majority rule?

George Will

You are in danger of tyrannical minority rule inflicted by supposedly majoritarian institutions. It’s particularly evident that at the state level, where you have all kinds of rent seeking, domestic protectionism of various interests, passed by majoritarian institutions, but in no conceivable way responsive to majorities.

The good and bad of gridlock

Ezra Klein

This seems to be then where you do have a deep divergence. One view is to say that in a country where you have this much government and this poor level of responsiveness, you just can’t have this much government without endless corruption. The other view, which tends to be the view of progressives like Elizabeth Warren, is that the government needs to do these things, so we should work really hard on things like anti-corruption and campaign finance reform, which other countries, like the Nordics and Canadians, have done.

The true dividing line is: Do you want to try to manage the problems of capture as you go along, or simply not create all that much to capture? But then in a system built for gridlock, we end up doing neither.

George Will

My view is a gridlock often is not an American problem, it’s an American achievement. That a great many people in the world live under governments they wish were capable of being gridlocked. When the founders went to Philadelphia in 1787, they did not go out to devise an efficient government, the idea would have appalled them. What they wanted was a safe government, to which end they produced three branches of government, two branches of legislative branch, each with its own electoral rhythm and constituencies, judicial review, veto, veto override, supermajority — all kinds of ways to slow the creature down. And yet, I can think of nothing that the American people have wanted intensely and protractedly they did not eventually get.

The idea that we are really hopelessly gridlocked is absurd. People say, “Well, nothing gets done under the Obama administration.” Well, nothing except the largest, most sweeping financial regulation since the 1930s, and the Affordable Care Act, the largest domestic welfare legislation since 1965.

Ezra Klein

We were talking when we started the podcast about how I live in California now. And as a Californian, I have a lot of experience of gridlock. And I always think it’s actually a better metaphor for government than people give it credit for. Because when you have gridlock, what happens is not that nothing moves, it’s that people begin taking weird city streets, and they get places slowly, and they’re angry when they get there. But gridlock does not, as Californians will attest, stop people from going places; it changes how they end up getting there, and makes the experience miserable.

And that seems to me to be true for how American gridlock functions. So, it is true that things do ultimately get done, they’re just worse than they would otherwise be. That said, I disagree that there’s nothing the American people have wanted in an intense and protracted way that they have not gotten. I think truly universal health care is something they’ve wanted and have not gotten.

George Will

Why haven’t they gotten it?

Ezra Klein

Because in America, the institutions through which you would have to push something like that are extremely difficult, whereas in other countries under parliamentary systems, when a political majority is elected based on a promise to create universal health care, they more or less have the power to pass that law. And so in every country, in Western Europe, and Canada, and Japan, where people gave the majority that power, the majority used it. Here, we’ve many, many, many times elected the majority, that promise universal health care, and it is never polled poorly to create universal health care. And it has failed over and over and over again.

Another example of this is immigration reform. George W. Bush tried it, Barack Obama tried it. A majority of the country polled in a million different ways has said they would like a comprehensive immigration reform compromise in which you get more border security and some kind of path to legalization. Yet, under Bush it died in the Senate, and under Obama, it passed out of the Senate and was never brought to a vote in the House because of the fear that it would pass. Now we have Donald Trump, who has only increased the popularity of that idea.

George Will

I think your example of immigration is much stronger than your example of health care. Immigration is such an interesting issue, because a majority of Republicans favor a path to citizenship, not just legalization, but a path to citizenship for the 11 million who are here illegally. The fact that we can’t move on this, does indicate the veto-ocracy we live in. I think that may be [Francis] Fukuyama’s description of us: that we have these extraordinarily efficient blocking mechanisms and institutions.

Should judges have even more power?

Ezra Klein

I want to return to the topic of judicial supervision before we run out of time. You argue for much more expansive version of judicial review. If judges were indeed these supra-political figures, who existed with no allegiance to anything but the Constitution, it would be one thing. But as it is, judges are increasingly highly politicized figures, who come up through a long association with whatever political party ends up appointing them. The fundamental problem of the constitutional structure stems from having two parties competing across branches, as opposed to branches competing with each other. Giving judges much more power seems to only magnify the problem.

George Will

You’re quite right to worry about judges. I worry about everyone who exercises political power and judicial power, all of this. But I’m less afraid of judges than I am of what the administrative state does and what Congress does to enable the administrative state to do what it does. There’s no safety in politics. I just think that at this point in our history, that the court really is for reasons not the ones Hamilton was referring to when he coined the phrase, it is the least dangerous branch.

Ezra Klein

But why? I’d say it’s safer to at least rely on Congress and legislators and others as representing some kind of will. If it’s just the judges making their own arguments, then you end up in this place where the judiciary begins to lose credibility quite quickly, because people disagree with the arguments. And so if you have this kind of judicial review, how do you prevent that from happening?

George Will

What makes the judicial review so much fun, is that uniquely in judicial review, the court has to say why it is doing what it’s doing. It has to reason from precedent and it has to reason from political philosophy. People will often say, “Well isn’t it interesting that Americans don’t do political philosophy? They have the Federalist Papers and nothing much after that.” So absolutely wrong. The Supreme Court reports are where we do political philosophy. Where we reason about the meaning of equality and freedom and justice and all the rest.

So, you have to take the risk, you have to bear the heat, because you are defending a super permanent majority. That is the majority that launched the country, wrote the Constitution and made it possible but difficult to amend.

Ezra Klein

Let me ask you about that. You have a very interesting paragraph on constitutional interpretation. You write that “the threshold question when evaluating any particular mode of construing the Constitution is whether the mode would dictate declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. No acceptable theory for construing the Constitution can invalidate the court’s conclusion in Brown; the conclusion invalidates any theory that rejects it.”

But you also believe we should go back to the founders’ intent, and the founders clearly thought segregation and much worse was constitutional. And the Brown decision itself held that segregation violated the 14th Amendment, which was not added by the founders. It’s hard for me to reconcile the faith you place in arguing from founders’ intent with a threshold test like that one.

George Will

Well, here’s where you and I would differ only on what I’m referring to when I refer to the founders’ intent. What were they trying to produce? They were trying to produce a society, a free society respectful of a vast scope of individual autonomy, exercising natural rights. My doctrine is sort of Living Originalism, in that it’s the original intent, which is broadly libertarian for our society, applied to today’s circumstances.

I love all the recondite hairsplitting on this kind of originalist and that kind of originalist, but I keep coming back to one of the reasons why Scalia described himself as a “faint-hearted originalist.” The Eighth Amendment forbids cruel and unusual punishments. Now we know what was being done to punish people at the time the founders wrote that.

If you simply take the original public meaning of the word cruelty, we would not be able to strike down a law today that allowed branding, cropping ears, flogging, pillorying, etc. But instead we say, “Look what the founders intended, their original intent was to get rid of cruelty.” And we’ve changed our minds about cruelty, and that’s perfectly permissible. But the original intent was still there, that cruelty shall not be practiced in the United States.

Ezra Klein

This is why I find myself so skeptical of your approach. One thing we very much do know about human nature is we all find arguments that appeal to our ends more convincing than those that don’t. There are wrong interpretations of the Constitution that clearly violate the document’s text. But there isn’t a right answer to a lot of hard constitutional problems, there are a range of them. And you end up in a space where what you have is answers that are generated by power and ideology that people are calling constitutional truth.

I think one reason people like me prefer more majority rule is that at least it’s clear what the form of accountability is and how people can change it as opposed to running this dance where the two sides are fighting to death over the Supreme Court, so they can appoint people who agree with them politically, but are good at dressing that agreement up in constitutional language.

George Will

Well, I think you’re a Holmesian, much more presentable than the original, but a Holmesian nonetheless.

Ezra Klein

I often think of myself as a presentable Holmesian.

George Will

Well, good. No, I understand your point, and it comes down often to what do you fear most? And you and I fear different things.

You fear the atrophying of democratic muscles. I fear much more the inevitable capture of sprawling administrative state by determined muscular, skillful, articulate compliment, well-lawyered factions.

My view is very much informed by public choice theory, which reduced to its essence is that people in the private sector try to maximize their interest, often profit, people in the public sector do exactly the same thing. They try to maximize their power. And that if you de-sentimentalize your view of government, you will come to a conclusion that there is more to fear than an attenuation of majority rule.

Article URL: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/operating-a-high-scale-distributed-system/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20462349

Points: 372

# Comments: 60

My college class asks what it means to be white in America — but interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much harder to do.