Filipino Sakalam (2024)

13/02/2024

New footage from cameras strapped to polar bears in Canada reveals what life is like in a warming world. | USGS/Washington State University

As the Arctic warms, these iconic bears are spending more time on land. New videos reveal why that’s a problem.

Global warming is famously bad for polar bears. The reason is simple: Sea ice provides a platform from which these hulking predators can hunt seals, their primary food source. And climate change is dramatically shrinking the number of weeks each year that the Arctic oceans are covered in ice. As a result, polar bears are spending more time on land, where calorie-dense food is far less accessible.

What that means for the survival of these iconic creatures, however, has been something of a mystery. Can they cope with life on land?

In search of answers, scientists strapped recording devices to 20 polar bears in Canada’s Hudson Bay, where the ice-free period has increased by roughly three weeks since 1979, as part of a study published today in the journal Nature. The cameras recorded 115 hours of footage over three recent years, providing a rare window into the land-bound lives of these animals.

The clips, some of which are stitched together in the video below, show bears feeding on bird carcasses (at the 2:30 mark), eating berries and grasses (at 3:15), and chewing on some marine mammals, including a beluga whale (at 5:00).

At times, these gargantuan creatures — which can weigh more than 1,500 pounds — seem to act like dogs, occasionally play-fighting in the water (2:42) and gnawing on antlers (3:06).

(You can find more timestamped descriptions about what’s going on in these clips here.)

The clips are not only cute and entertaining but highly revealing.

“We were amazed by the video footage,” Anthony Pagano, a wildlife biologist at the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Alaska who led the study, said in an email to Vox. “The video footage really highlighted how intelligent these animals are by using different behavior strategies to survive their time on land while without access to their primary prey.”

Before capturing these videos, scientists suspected that polar bears might cope with life on land by either resting to save energy (i.e., burning fewer calories) or filling up on other prey, like seabirds and plants. These bears ultimately used both approaches, according to the footage and other data the scientists collected, including measurements of movement, body mass, and energy burned. Some individuals laid down to conserve energy whereas others were actively foraging for food.

Neither approach, however, was especially successful. All but one of the 20 bears lost weight, suggesting they would eventually go hungry. One individual lost nearly 80 pounds.

USGS/Washington State University

The study revealed that some bears took long swims, which is “new and unexpected for this time of year,” Andrew Derocher, a polar bear expert at the University of Alberta, who was not involved in the study, said in an email. “These are possibly acts of desperation,” he said. “Hungry and skinny bears take more risks than fat bears.”

Feasting on berries and other foods also does little to stave off hunger, the research reveals. “This study really brings home the message that there’s no salvation from terrestrial feeding to help polar bears through the ice-free period,” Derocher said.

Researchers estimate that the polar bear population in this region has already fallen by 30 percent since 1987. This study provides yet more evidence that more warming — i.e., less ice — will only make this already bad situation worse. “With increased land use, the expectation is that we’ll likely see increases in starvation,” Pagano said in a statement.

USGS/Washington State University

Some polar bear populations elsewhere may be more resilient to warming, at least in the short term, as Vox previously reported. Scientists have observed a group of bears in southeast Greenland that hunt using ice that breaks off of glaciers, which is available year-round in some places. (While sea ice is frozen ocean water, glaciers are made of snow compressed over time into large sheets of ice that flow like a slow-moving river.)

In a warming world, regions with glacial ice, like Greenland and Svalbard, might be strongholds for the species, helping them hang on. It’s not exactly good news, scientists caution. Instead, it foreshadows the final act of a tragedy, revealing where the last remnants of a species could live.

For now, we’re lucky to be able to glimpse the lives of polar bears through their eyes. In the future, there will likely be a lot less to see.

New footage from cameras strapped to polar bears in Canada reveals what life is like in a warming world. | USGS/Washington State University...

11/02/2024

Marvin Recinos/AFP via Getty Images

The world’s “coolest dictator,” Nayib Bukele, wins reelection.

On February 4, as El Salvador held presidential elections, current president Nayib Bukele showed up at a polling place accompanied by speakers blasting “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” by R.E.M.

The song choice was deliberate — Bukele was once again trolling critics who claim he’s steering the country toward autocracy. For a while, his Twitter bio read “The World’s Coolest Dictator.”

Since being elected president in 2019, Bukele has made international headlines for what some have described as a millennial persona, eschewing ties and suits in favor of jeans and sunglasses and taking a selfie during his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly. He has famously sold El Salvador as a cryptocurrency paradise, making it the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender.

But Bukele’s detractors say he has used the presidency to push El Salvador away from democracy, packing the nation’s judiciary with judges sympathetic to his policies and reshaping electoral law to ensure his political party holds a majority in the legislature.

During his nearly five years in office, Bukele has declared an ongoing state of emergency, using the threat of gang violence to curtail civil liberties. He very publicly stormed the legislature with the aid of the military to demand funding for his policy priorities. And the fact that Bukele ran for reelection at all was unprecedented and probably illegal: El Salvador’s constitution explicitly bars reelection to consecutive presidential terms. Still, he has claimed victory in the vote and few are disputing that he won the presidency, though 60 seats in Congress are being disputed by El Salvador’s electoral body.

Silvia Viñas is the co-host of a new podcast about Bukele, Bukele: El señor de Los Sueños. She says that if you define a democracy only as the people being able to vote, El Salvador has that.

However, democracy is about much more. If Bukele controls everything without checks to his authority, Silvia asks, is the country’s government still a democracy? What follows is an adapted transcript of her conversation with Sean Rameswaram, co-host of Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, edited for length and clarity.

Sean Rameswaram

[Bukele is] the youngest president in the history of El Salvador when he’s elected in 2019. A millennial president. What’s he like when he gets into office? Is it all avocado toast and Instagram or what?

Silvia Viñas

He sells this image of the young, hip millennial president who is different from the other presidents in Latin America. He was 37 — as you say he looked very different from other presidents. He didn’t wear suits. He wore leather jackets, he used social media to conduct state business, to fire government employees or to ask them to take care of an issue. When he went to the UN, he took a selfie.

When he took office, the Congress did their job of being a counterweight and performing checks and balances, as they should in a democracy, because he doesn’t have a majority there. And so he started a fight with lawmakers because he wanted them to help finance his plan to reduce violent killings and to fight the gangs.

So Congress asked for more details about how he’s going to spend the money. And Bukele got tired of legislators delaying everything, so he called for an extraordinary session for Sunday, February 9th, 2020.

So some legislators go, but they don’t have enough people to actually carry out a session to vote on the loan. Meanwhile, Bukele advertised on social media for people to go march to Congress. They use government buses driven by military personnel to bring people to this gathering. And inside, while the legislators are waiting for the session to start, armed military personnel show up inside the building.

Legislators feared that this was a coup, with military entering the Congress.

Sean Rameswaram

It sounds like January 6th if it worked.

Silvia Viñas

Yes, and so Bukele asked the crowd, will you let me enter Congress? And of course, they say “Yes!”

So he entered the room where the legislators are waiting, with the military already inside. He sat in the chair where the president of the Congress would sit during a session. And he said, “Let’s say a prayer.”

He puts his hands on his head and he prayed in silence. And then he just got up and left. It was like a show of force, showing what he’s capable of doing. It was a fear tactic, showing that he could instigate a coup.

Sean Rameswaram

Does he find a way to consolidate power after that?

Silvia Viñas

Yeah, he consolidates power the following year when his party and allied parties win a majority in Congress. So within a few months after winning that election, he was able to gain legislative power and then judicial power. After that it’s like, okay, he can do anything he wants. He controls everything.

Sean Rameswaram

It’s my understanding that one of the reasons people back Bukele is because he’s taking a stand against the gangs and gang violence in El Salvador. How does he, as president, oppose the gangs?

Silvia Viñas

You might remember the images of prisoners in Salvadoran jails with shaved heads, without a shirt, with their hands behind their back, all sitting very close to one another in lines? Those images went around the world.

That was a reaction from President Bukele, because in April 2020 there was a surge in violence and 76 homicides in four days. His response was to crack down on gang members in jails, and he authorized security officers to use lethal force on inmates and suspects. He mixed members of rival gangs in the same cells. He was trying to show that he was treating the gang members terribly because they’ve done so much damage to our society. But then another big wave of violence happens, and there are 87 murders in three days.

So Bukele requested that Congress declare a state of emergency. And this state of emergency has been renewed 22 times, every 30 days. We’re almost at a two-year mark under a state of emergency in the name of fighting the gangs.

Sean Rameswaram

And what does the state of emergency get him in terms of power?

Silvia Viñas

It suspends basic rights, like right to defense or the presumption of innocence. More military on the streets and more military resources. The government so far has imprisoned over 75,000 people — that’s more than 1 percent of the population.

El Salvador is the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. There are thousands of reports of arbitrary arrests, of abuse, of torture. But again, this is possibly his most celebrated measure and the one that has ultimately made him one of the most popular politicians in the Americas.

Sean Rameswaram

Bukele seems to have consolidated so much power while in office. But he is still restricted by a constitutional term limit. How does he get past that?

Silvia Viñas

The Salvadoran constitution is very clear that reelection is prohibited. Basically, you can be president as many times as you win in El Salvador, but just not consecutively. So in September 2021, the Constitutional chamber, which is controlled by pro-Bukele magistrates, issued a resolution that says that only the people can decide whether the president should continue, ignoring the articles of the Constitution.

The chamber basically interprets one article of the constitution to say the only requirement is that he step down from the position of president six months before the beginning of the new presidential term. So he stepped down from office before December 1st of 2023, and the new period will begin in June.

Sean Rameswaram

What do people think he’s going to do now that he has this historic second term?

Silvia Viñas

When he announced that he was running, he said we have shown that this is the only correct path for El Salvador. We can expect the state of emergency to continue. There’s no indication that Bukele plans to dial back his policies.

There’s a concern that several experts mentioned concerning his popularity while so many people have been arrested. As his popularity decreases, there’s a concern that he will use the military even more, become more ironfisted, and implement more of these policies to maintain his power.

To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to follow Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Marvin Recinos/AFP via Getty Images The world’s “coolest dictator,” Nayib Bukele, wins reelection. On February 4, as El Salvador held pr...

11/02/2024

Getty Images

Forming a healthy relationship with regret means learning to look it in the face.

When Peter and Sjanna Leighton were in their early 20s, their marriage fell apart. Money was tight, and they each feared they were disappointing the other; neither one knew how to communicate their vulnerabilities and hurt.

So one day, almost a year after their vows, Peter packed his bags and moved out of their home in San Antonio, Texas. He got an apartment on his own and focused on building his career in the restaurant business.

“From the outside world, it may have looked like I’d recovered from our marriage failing,” says Peter, who became chronically depressed. “But the memories of how powerful our togetherness could have been, and what could have happened if we had continued developing — all of that churned in me.”

Peter and Sjanna both quietly carried their regret over giving up on their relationship through other marriages, children, and divorce. Then in 2007, 33 years later, Sjanna searched Peter’s name online and found his photography website. “The first photo that came up was a picture of him that he’d taken in our bathroom when we were married, and the second picture was me on our honeymoon, which he had titled ‘The Muse,’” says Sjanna. She realized that he lived in Austin, not far from her, and after a few weeks, she built up the courage to send him an email. They met up for coffee. When they met up a second time a few weeks later, she asked him, “What happened with us, Peter?” He replied, “I don’t know, but you were the love of my life.” Within a month of reconnecting, they were dating again.

Today, at 75 and 72 years old, Peter and Sjanna have been happily remarried for 16 years. “When we got back together, we did it with our regrets and our perceived mistakes,” says Peter. “Because of that, when there have been storms, we’ve been able to weather them.”

Few people have a second chance the way Peter and Sjanna did, but most of us live with regrets. We may not own up to them (maybe not even to ourselves), but we all have past actions we wish we could change — bullying a middle school classmate, not telling a loved one how much they meant to us, choosing a safe job rather than taking a creative risk — yet we rarely reckon with this universal feeling or recognize how it can benefit us. Since we can’t change the past, regret can seem useless and self-indulgent. But the emotion can clarify a disconnect between who we are and who we want to be. And it can show us how to change.

What causes regret

“There are three pieces to regret,” says Amy Summerville, a research scientist who has led studies on the emotion. “One, it feels bad; two, it’s based on a thought about how things could have been better; three, the thought is focused on your own actions.” In other words, if you feel bad after acing an interview and not getting the job, that’s not regret; if you feel bad because you stayed up late playing video games and slept through the interview, that could be.

According to Summerville, the most common regrets come from career and romance. As people age, entering their 60s and 70s, family and health start to come up as regrets, too, but romantic regret remains consistent through life stages.

She has also found that regrets of inaction are more common than regrets of action. In other words, we tend to regret the things we didn’t do rather than the things we did. “Human memory adaptively functions to remind us of open things on our to-do list, rather than things we’ve crossed off,” says Summerville, “which might mean that we have a better memory for unmet goals and they persist longer.”

Another factor: When we think about the path we didn’t take, we only imagine the dreamy positives, overlooking the mundane details and inevitable disappointments. It’s harder to regret choices we actually made since they led to so many other specifics. “With action regrets, you can find a silver lining, but with inaction regrets, you can’t do that,” says Daniel Pink, author of The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. It’s easy to regret not running away with that glamorous stranger at 22 since you don’t see the fights and heartbreak. It’s trickier to regret an unhappy marriage if it also led to wonderful kids.

Placing regret in context

If you’re reckoning with regret, first, be kind to yourself — and realistic. It’s easy to imagine acting differently if we could do it all over with what we know now, but we didn’t yet have that experience. “If you’re middle-aged, with kids and a mortgage, it’s easy to say, ‘Why didn’t I take a year off and go live in Europe after college?’” says Summerville. “But if you really think about yourself after graduation, with student loans and family pressure to get a career, you remember how you did have responsibilities and stressors then.”

It’s important to contextualize the emotion within your setting, too, especially if you live in a community that highly values personal choice and responsibility. “When we talk about how ‘people’ feel regret, we’re largely talking about how white Americans and Western Europeans experience it,” says Summerville. More collectivist cultures can turn down the inner spotlight on our personal choices: An arranged marriage or raising kids within the family compound can take away some of the pressure around finding your individual path. Some religions also provide established rituals for making sense of regret, like Catholic confession or Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. But in the US, people are taught that life is what we make it as individuals — so if something goes wrong, it’s a catastrophe and it’s our fault.

Come clean about regret

The first step toward coming to terms with your regrets is owning up to them, which can be tough. “In the US, we’ve over-indexed on positivity,” says Pink, who has led surveys that documented thousands of regrets within the US and across the world. “We tend to think that the path to a life well-lived is to be positive all the time and never negative, to look forward and never look back.” When he started talking to others about regret in midlife, Pink says he felt sheepish, expecting them to disengage from the conversation. He found the opposite: Everyone else had regrets, too, although they often felt like they weren’t supposed to voice them.

When Sjanna Leighton got back together with Peter in her 50s, it eased some of her sadness about the end of their marriage. But as they fell in love, rediscovering the joys of their relationship, she also felt acute regret: What if they had been vulnerable with each other in their 20s and stuck it out? What would their shared life have looked like through their 30s and 40s, as partners and parents?

“When we got back together, I felt safe and acknowledged, like he accepted me for who I was, which was an extraordinary feeling,” she says. “It also made me really sad. I wished we’d stayed together, that we had understood each other better.”

Let that regret inform your life

At first, Sjanna found that regret painful. But as she and Peter have sustained a happy second marriage to each other, she’s realized how the emotion informs her current relationship, which is full of gratitude, compassion, and wonder. “We’d both had difficult marriages and had kids, and know how precious it is to have someone that loves you for who you are,” she says. Sometimes she still thinks about the lifelong relationship that could have been, but when she sees couples her age bickering or bored with each other, she feels grateful that she and Peter never take each other for granted. “We’ve had some things happen that are difficult, but at the end of the day, there’s nowhere we’d rather be than beside each other,” says Sjanna.

If we let it, regret can clarify how to live: How is our life misaligned with our values? How do we want to act differently in the time we have left? “It can help us become clearer thinkers, better problem solvers, and better at finding meaning in life,” says Pink. “Some of us ignore regret; others wallow, but what we should be doing is confronting our regrets, using them as data and information.”

For example, say you’re 60 years old and regret that you stayed in a lackluster job rather than starting your own business. First, instead of feeling contempt for your younger self, treat yourself with kindness and curiosity. Place your choices in context: What were the reasons you stayed in this job? What were the pressures and unknowns you faced at the time? Remember, this choice is only one small part of who you are; think about some of the choices you made that make you feel proud.

Next, analyze. What can you learn about yourself from this regret? For the 60-year-old, a lesson might be that with the security and clarity of age, you value boldness and risk-taking more than you used to. You can work with that. Maybe you start a creative side hustle, or mentor young people, or take on a leadership role in a group at the library.

“You’re trying to look backward in order to move forward,” says Pink. “You can’t undo what you did, but you can use that piercing negative feeling as a signal about what you value, and a north star for guiding the rest of your life.”

Remember to give yourself grace

Reckoning with regret often feels painful and scary. If you admit to wishing you had acted differently, then you’re admitting your imperfections. You’re not someone who lives with “no regrets,” a glib success who never fails. But when you release yourself from the false binary of being a success or a failure, you’re free to live in a more thoughtful, informed way, one shaped by an understanding of your strengths and values. It’s never too late to learn from your regrets and use them to shape who you want to be today: If you wish you had taken English classes seriously in college, ask your friends about their favorite books and put together your own syllabus from their recommendations. If you regret the nights you spent working late while your kids were young, talk to them about how you’d like to build a closer relationship with them (and maybe their kids) now. Owning your regret is vulnerable, but it’s the best way to avoid accumulating more regrets in the future.

Sjanna and Peter still have arguments and tense periods in their marriage. But unlike in their 20s, they know how to work through it — and that their relationship is worth it. “Part of the regret we both carry with us is that we weren’t ready,” says Peter. “Now, we are.”

Getty Images Forming a healthy relationship with regret means learning to look it in the face. When Peter and Sjanna Leighton were in th...

11/02/2024

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The Protestant work ethic hijacked America. It’s time for a new pro-worker ethos.

When you hear the phrase “work ethic,” you might think of the perfect employee. The one who puts her job above everything else, who never complains, the type that lives to work.

That is certainly one version of the work ethic, and it’s a story that serves employers much more than it serves employees. But is that the only version of the work ethic? Or to put it more directly, is it the best version of the work ethic? A new book by the University of Michigan philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues that we should revisit the origins of the work ethic because the answer to both of those questions is no.

Anderson tells the history of the Protestant Work Ethic and how it gave rise to dueling interpretations. One of those interpretations was pro-worker and the other was not. And for various reasons, the anti-worker version is the one that ultimately prevailed — or at least it’s the one that dominates our society today.

So I invited her onto The Gray Area to talk about what happened and why she thinks we need to reclaim the work ethic for workers. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

Sean Illing

Where does the phrase “Protestant work ethic” come from?

Elizabeth Anderson

The phrase the Protestant work ethic comes from the great social theorist Max Weber, who wrote a book called The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; the English translation came out in 1920. He set the basic terms for our understanding of the work ethic. In his description, the Protestant work ethic was an ethic of nose to the grindstone for the workers for the maximum profit of the capitalist. So it’s a pretty dreary ethic, and he himself, despite his profession of value neutrality and social science, condemned the work ethic as consigning us to an iron cage, and he contrasted the Puritan attitude toward work as recalling the capitalist version of the work ethic that came to us where we are forced to work in our calling.

Sean Illing

How important is the Protestant part of the Protestant work ethic? Is the religious foundation essential?

Elizabeth Anderson

This is coming right out of the Puritans. The Puritans in England were basically Calvinist in theology and obsessed with getting certainty about their salvation. Theologically, the Calvinists think we’re all doomed from the start except for a tiny number of people who are saved. The critical issue, then, is you’re all desperate to know whether you’re saved, and the Puritan said the only way to tell is if you are working really, really hard because that shows that God has graced you and that you really have faith.

Sean Illing

There were contradictions built into the work ethic right from the start. You call them the “repressive” and “uplifting” dimensions, and these dimensions get teased apart during the Industrial Revolution, and out of that comes the conservative and progressive work ethics. Tell me about these competing work ethics and what happened here.

Elizabeth Anderson

Probably most of us know the Puritans as the biggest killjoys in European history. They banned the celebration of Christmas. You’re not supposed to have any fun. You’re supposed to be full of sobriety and self-denial and frugality, and they definitely thought that you should be working crazy hard. You needed your rest. You have the Sabbath, but then you have to go straight back to work. The purpose of rest is to restore yourself to that end.

But the important thing is they thought that workers would reap some rewards from all of this self-denial. You get to save up, you’ll be able to buy property, you’ll get wealthier. You can afford some conveniences, no luxury, but at least you’ll have a more comfortable life. And that was because the model workers in the 17th century, when the work ethic was perfected, both had capital and engaged in manual labor. The master craftsman who owned his own shop, even merchant sailors were entitled to a share of the profits of the commercial voyage.

We don’t have a sharp distinction between manual workers and capitalists in the 17th century. The critical issue in the Industrial Revolution is then you get a very sharp split between wage laborers whose only source of income is the wage they get from their employer on the one hand, and capitalists on the other hand, whose entire income comes from profit or interest or some kind of income flow from ownership of an asset.

Sean Illing

This is the hijacking of the term “Protestant work ethic” you’re talking about, right?

Elizabeth Anderson

Absolutely. The version that we received that ended up being neoliberalism as we know it today is the version that Max Weber described and condemned in 1920. That’s the version that I claim was hijacked by the capitalists and turned against the workers.

There’s another separate tradition of the work ethic, which is consistent because they kept to the class neutrality of the rights and duties of the work ethic. The whole idea was, yeah, you work really hard and then you’re entitled to reap the fruits of your labor, and that means you need decent pay, a living wage. You’re entitled to have improving prospects if you fulfill the demands of the work ethic.

Now, what was happening, especially in the first half of the Industrial Revolution, is that because now you have a sharp division between capitalists and workers, the workers are working harder than ever under more grueling and dangerous conditions, and their wages stagnate all the way through the mid-19th century. They’re basically flat. Meanwhile, the capitalists are reaping all the gains of the Industrial Revolution. So their income is growing by leaps and bounds, even though they’re actually not doing much, they’re just investing assets. There’s a lot of passive income there. So you see a betrayal of the idea that working hard is going to enable you to improve your life.

Sean Illing

The rich have always wanted the poor to work for them — that’s as old as civilization. So what is the real innovation with the conservative work ethic? Is it that we get an ideology that morally justifies exploitation?

Elizabeth Anderson

To an extent, but it’s a particular kind of exploitation that’s quite extreme. So by the late 18th century, we see conservative thinkers, notably Edmund Burke and Thomas Robert Malthus, who are in an absolute panic about the rising radicalism of propertyless workers. Many of them are inspired by the French Revolution in 1789. They’re out in the streets. They’re starting to protest and demand that their voices be heard. Also, the welfare rolls are growing, and conservatives are in a complete panic over this.

Malthus had this idea that it must be because of population increase: Those lazy workers are having too many kids that they can’t afford to feed because they will not restrain their sexual impulses. And many of us might recall similar ideas being promulgated in all the controversies about welfare reform in the United States, despite the fact that there’s never any empirical evidence for this.

Sean Illing

That’s sort of the point, isn’t it? These ideologies have a material impact on how we see the world, on who we see, and who we ignore, and they color our moral intuitions in all kinds of ways.

Elizabeth Anderson

A lot of what I’m writing about, and this is especially true in the US, is a culture deeply imbued with the hijacked version of the work ethic, the capitalist version. And so, there’s unbelievable contempt and suspicion of the poor. The overwhelming majority of Republicans think that poor people, who maybe are getting food stamps or some kind of public assistance, are lazy and life is easy for them. It’s like they’re just living in a hammock. Now, anyone who’s actually been poor knows that it’s in fact a lot of work to be poor, just getting the daily subsistence, and often they’re keeping down three part-time jobs. They can’t get full-time hours anywhere, and it’s enormously difficult just to pay for basic necessities.

But that’s not the image that many Americans have because we’re deeply imbued with the work ethic, suspicion of the poor, contempt for the poor, when in fact what social scientists have been telling us ever since the rise of social science is that a lot of poverty is structural. It has nothing to do with the virtues and vices of individuals. It’s already built into the system.

Sean Illing

You’ve mentioned the word neoliberalism, which is a boogeyman term at this point, but this is really what you’re contesting in this book.

Elizabeth Anderson

That is correct. Neoliberalism just is the late 20th century and early 21st century revival of the conservative work ethic. Really all the patterns of thinking were already set in the late 18th century, which became policies that redistribute income from workers to property owners and the holders of assets. That’s what neoliberalism amounts to: a whole bunch of policies that secure an increasing share of income for the holders of capital assets.

Sean Illing

I’m wondering why you think neoliberalism won when it did. I mean, we had this long period of post-war social democracy in America. And then in the late ’70s or early ’80s, depending on who you ask, that gives way to the era of neoliberalism, the era we’re still living in today. Why did it win at that particular moment in history?

Elizabeth Anderson

The late ’70s were a period of stagflation. We had the Vietnam War, rising distrust in institutions, and society was ripe for a critique of heavy-handed government. There was actually excessive regulation, I have to say. That’s a legacy of the New Deal. And so, society was ripe for a critique of many aspects of the New Deal regime that was still dominant in the 1970s, but it’s also the case that a lot of businesspeople themselves hated the New Deal from the start, never liked it, always resented it. Businesses, though, had won a great victory in 1948 with the Taft-Hartley Law, which undermined labor unions, and they had to spend a couple of decades steadily chipping away at the power of unions.

By the mid-70s, they had already undermined unions quite a lot. Reagan gets elected in 1980, and one of his most famous acts was to fire all of the striking air traffic controllers. That was a deliberate signal he was sending to corporations that they should be equally tough and break unions and employ very aggressive methods. And that, I think, got the ball rolling even faster.

Sean Illing

Zooming out a bit, do you think it would just be better if our livelihoods and our status and sense of self-worth and all that weren’t anchored to our jobs?

Elizabeth Anderson

I think that Americans probably excessively identify themselves with their jobs, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to do that. I think it depends on what the content of your job is.

Sean Illing

But that’s part of the problem though, right? To borrow a phrase from the late David Graeber, we have all these “bullsh*t jobs.” The nature of the work we do matters a ton. If we were all working jobs that we truly enjoyed, well, that would be different.

Elizabeth Anderson

Yes. And in fact, even the professional-managerial class has its difficulties. You might have come across this Washington Post article, which was discussing who are the happiest workers in America. It’s the lumberjacks, the farmers, and the fishers. Professionals are actually way down there.

Sean Illing

What do you think is the most immediate thing we could do to empower workers so that they have more genuine freedom in their lives?

Elizabeth Anderson

Well, I do think unions would definitely help. I think paid vacations would help. Workers having more say at work would help. Making basic necessities more available to people without having that be tied to work is critical. In all the social democracies, access to health care is not contingent on your having a job, and you don’t have to pay a lot for it. The prices are way more reasonable than they are in the United States. So I think we have to have some kind of public provision there. And also, in the social democracies, you don’t have to pay for college. You have a rich public university system and your tuition’s paid for. In places like Denmark and Germany, 18-year-olds even get a stipend for going to college. So they’re not even financially dependent on their parents while they’re not working, they’re just going to school.

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