Wednesday, May 31, 2023

Conservatives should embrace filibuster reform. By Matthew Yglesias


www.slowboring.com
Conservatives should embrace filibuster reform
Matthew Yglesias
12 - 15 minutes

I did a quick take on the debt ceiling deal over the weekend, but I think it’s worth revisiting exactly what’s so vexing and sort of perplexing about this outcome:

    It’s absolutely a solid win for conservatives that meaningfully reduces federal spending while leaving the door open to future GOP tax cutting and also giving military spending a somewhat privileged place in the firmament.

    It’s absolutely a solid piece of political bargaining by Joe Biden, who after appearing to have boxed himself into a corner, managed to get out while agreeing to what is essentially a normal appropriations deal with a GOP-held House.

    Given that, we’re left with the question of why Republicans put us through all this when there is a well-established and less potentially catastrophic process already in place for bargaining over appropriations.

Some of the answers to that question will have to come from those who are better-versed in reporting on the intra-caucus dynamics in the GOP. The Freedom Caucus, in particular, believes (apparently sincerely) that recent events — starting with Kevin McCarthy’s difficulty securing the votes to be installed as Speaker and playing through the debt ceiling crisis — represent a kind of step-change in their clout inside the Republican party. This doesn’t really seem true to me, objectively speaking, but factional politics is always a bit weird — and to an extent, perception is reality. Either way, inside dirt on House Republicans is not my metier.

What I do think is worth more consideration, though, is a topic that to the best of my knowledge isn’t on Republicans’ minds right now: the filibuster and its role in driving the party toward debt ceiling antics that ultimately do not succeed.

Republicans eventually settled for something they could have achieved through the normal appropriations process, but they started out asking for a lot more. Last fall, that was changes to Social Security and Medicare. This spring, it became — among other things — the REINS Act, a massive energy permitting overhaul, and structural changes to Medicaid. Why try to do this through debt ceiling hostage-taking? Well, because they’re trying to coerce Democrats into voting for Republican bills. But why do that? Why are Republicans asking themselves “how can we force our opponents to vote for stuff they disagree with?” rather than “how can we win elections so we can do our stuff?”

It all goes back to the filibuster.

There’s a bit of conventional wisdom that conservatives should love the filibuster because they can accomplish everything they want with 51 votes — judicial confirmations and tax cuts via budget reconciliation. We saw this spring that this isn’t true. Republicans don’t just want to do tax cuts and judicial confirmations. Their caucus includes a certain number of nutjobs and numbskulls and opportunists. But it also includes people who have ideas for substantive change in American public policy, and they are frustrated by a political system in which even if they win big, a rump minority of Democratic Party senators will be able to block their efforts at legislative change.

One of my most cringey and earnest beliefs is that even though electoral politics in the American system is inherently zero-sum — for John Fetterman to win, Dr. Oz must lose — policymaking is not like that. People come to the table with different sets of values and priorities and empirical beliefs and they form coalitions to try to advance those ideas. Smart policy changes can be win-win, and bad changes can be lose-lose.

And that’s what I find so frustrating about the state of the filibuster reform conversation.

This dialogue — one that I played a role in starting — began in 2009-2010 when Democrats held large majorities in Congress. Given the math at the time, the short-term implication of filibuster reform was clearly that Barack Obama would sign more progressive bills. Reform didn’t happen, but the push branded the cause as progressive. When Donald Trump became president and the GOP held a trifecta in 2017-2018, he started tweeting sporadically about the need for filibuster reform. I wish Democrats would have tried to engage with him a bit on finding a way to make a real bipartisan push, but this never became a serious thing. Filibuster reform re-emerged as a talking point in 2021, again as a purely progressive effort. I tried a couple of times to pitch this as an idea Joe Manchin should take seriously, but he didn’t agree.

So now, in 2023, I want to say that conservatives should look at embracing filibuster reform.

But how can reform be good for the left and for the right and for the center? Simple — this is a good idea, and because it is good, it would help advance multiple objectives simultaneously. People are unfortunately too locked into questions like “what is the immediate short-term implication of filibuster reform?” And the circumstances are always such that, as with the current Congress, it seems like it wouldn’t make a difference so nobody talks about it, or it would have some very predictable impact on short-term legislation so everyone views it through a narrow partisan or ideological lens.

My dream is to get people to take a more structural view. The filibuster makes it harder to pass legislation, and that’s good if you believe the status quo is close to perfect and any change is likely to be bad. But I don’t believe that, and I don’t think progressives or conservatives do either. I occasionally hear conservatives talk as if they believe this. But what we saw in the debt ceiling fight — and time and again before that — is that they don’t really. The American Republic has been around for almost 250 years, and there are lots of laws on the books. Left and right both favor policy change, and we would have healthier politics with more a spirit of “if you win you get a chance to do some policy change” and less a spirit of “to achieve policy change, we need to come up with crazy threats to blow up the world economy unless we can get our way.”

People have been asking me a lot lately about the immigration aspects of “One Billion Americans” in light of the ongoing backlash against asylum-seekers at the southern border.

A lot of people saw Trump as the apotheosis of anti-immigrant politics and hoped that his defeat would lead to a waning of those sentiments. The truth is more like the opposite. Trump’s presence in office generated thermostatic backlash against nativism that induced a lot of liberals to exaggerate their own welcoming attitudes toward a chaotic influx. I try to be a little more thoughtful than the thermostatic mass public, and I think if you pop open the book, you’ll find that I try really hard to not endorse open borders or a devil-may-care attitude toward chaos. To quote myself, “the high-level conservative contentions that entry to the United States should be controlled by law and that permission to live here should be dictated more by national interest and less by happenstance make perfect sense.”

What is true is that part of what follows from my own arguments about immigration is that illegal migration and border chaos aren’t really as bad as conservatives claim. They see immigration as bad in general and the asylum problem as a particularly bad form of a bad thing. That’s wrong; immigration is broadly beneficial and what we’re seeing now is an unusually bad form of a good thing.

Still, not only is “have lots of people show up and make semi-spurious asylum claims that take a long time to adjudicate which means in many cases they get to hang around the country for a while and maybe get a work permit and if not probably find some under-the-table work” an unpopular situation, it’s a very bad policy on the merits. So bad, in fact, that nobody would design it deliberately — and of course it was not the product of a deliberate design. Why don’t we replace the unsatisfactory status quo with something much better that would feature much stricter rules on asylum but a larger overall quantity of immigration via a well-organized, non-chaotic legal process? After all, countries like Australia and Canada do very well with immigration rules that are very strict but also allow a lot of immigration.

Well, the problem is that while it’s easy for a handful of writers or wonks or whomever else to draw up a win-win solution, it’s hard to actually do things in Congress. Mutual distrust gets in the way. So does partisan opportunism. So does a fundamental problem with win-win bargains — precisely because they are win-win, they generate a surplus that could be distributed in different ways, and everyone wants the maximally favorable bargain which means everyone needs to be willing to walk away from bargains that are superior to the status quo. In a sense, this all just goes to show that policy ideas are somewhat overrated, and what’s really in short supply is political work to generate the circumstances for compromise.

But this is also, I think, a clear example of a situation where the need to do things via bipartisan compromise is itself undesirable. You could imagine a world where instead of an immigration bargain, you have a GOP-led crackdown followed by a Democratic administration that expands legal immigration. If you look at foreign countries with fewer veto points in their political system, they don’t just see-saw back and forth. Similarly, if you look at budget reconciliation bills, it’s actually very unusual for a GOP Congress to literally reverse what the prior Democratic Congress did or vice versa. Directionally, Republicans cut taxes and Democrats raise them. But it’s more like an elaborate twirling dance than a simple ping-pong. And I think that kind of dance is mostly productive, with each coalition trying to attack the other side’s weak points while advancing its own strongest ideas.

One of the signature quips of the Trump era was Steve Bannon’s promise of a daily struggle for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

That in turn set the stage for a lot of wrangling about the existence of an alleged “deep state,” some late-in-the-game Trump efforts to gut the civil service, and a hazy sense on the right that if there are big problems with economic regulation in the United States, the solution is to wreck everything. But if you stop and think about it for five minutes, this is a crazy approach. There is a lot of international variation in public policy, but every country has some kind of regulatory apparatus. And even if Democrats and Republicans disagree about what the rules for air pollution and water pollution should be, I think that in their hearts, even most Republicans acknowledge that it would, in fact, be bad to allow unlimited dumping of toxic chemicals into drinking water. Tucker Carlson even got interested in the issue of excessive PFAS pollution via his interest in declining testosterone levels.

Well, guess who’s moving to limit PFAS pollution? Why, it’s the Environmental Protection Agency — the administrative state — because that’s the way the world works.

You need to have regulatory agencies, and ideally you’d like them to do their jobs well. People can disagree about what “doing the job well” should mean, but if there’s a problem, trying to smash them up and have them be ineffectual is a terribly ineffective alternative to actually solving the problems. I’ve written many times that I think the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is being unduly stringent in how it oversees nuclear power, neglecting the benefits (to human health, among other things) of creating abundant energy. At the same time, we clearly need a nuclear safety regulator. And having an understaffed, underfunded, or incompetent nuclear safety regulator could be the worst of all worlds. What nuclear policy needs is a better regulatory framework, not “deconstruction.”

If you think there are significant problems in American governance, which conservatives surely do, then you need to try to solve them. That means trying to pass laws, and that means trying to create a legislative system that is conducive to laws being passed. Obviously if you do that, more liberal laws will pass, too. But odds are that progressives’ top priorities aren’t the exact opposite of conservatives’ priorities. And if everyone got the chance to get their way when it’s their turn to govern, everyone might end up happier.

Kevin McCarthy releases the hostage — this time. By Noah Berlatsky


www.publicnotice.co
Kevin McCarthy releases the hostage — this time
Noah Berlatsky
11 - 14 minutes
McCarthy walks through the Capitol on Tuesday. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty)

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At least since Trump's election in 2016, it’s felt like we are careening towards crisis. The GOP has been rapidly radicalizing. The Christofascist Supreme Court gutted abortion rights and has been recklessly tossing out precedent in the name of imposing its own ideological hegemony. The far right attempted a coup on January 6. States are launching sweeping legal assaults on pregnant people and trans people while banning books about Black and LGBT life and history.

It’s felt like something has to give. Either fascism wins, or we have to defeat it.

The last week though has been a reminder that a third option is possible. Maybe fascism neither wins nor loses, or loses gradually. Maybe in the words of political scientist Jonathan Bernstein, we just muddle through.

America, arguably, has been muddling through fascism for a long time. The Civil War and possibly the civil rights movement were exceptions, but for the most part the US has responded to fascism and authoritarianism with half-measures and compromise. Typically, America when confronted with fascism changes just enough, and just quickly enough, so that daily life more or less stumbles on without any great moment of crisis or transformation.

Bernstein argues that "muddling through is a perfectly fine goal" — we can defeat Trumpism and fascism, he argues, even if we retain "an imperfect democracy with some absolutely unjustifiable features."  

That's true to some degree. But it's also true that muddling through without actually rooting out fascism means a real, brutal cost in ongoing human misery and injustice. We got a taste of what that might look like this week too.

One notable example of the country muddling through rising fascism can be seen in Texas, where a (relatively) moderate majority of the Republican-controlled state House of Representatives voted over the weekend to impeach far right Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton’s impeachment suggests there’s still some limit to the corruption and excesses Republicans will tolerate, even in red states. The New York Times framed it thusly:

    “It’s the battle between the version of the Republican Party under Trump and the version of the traditional Republican Party,” said Jeronimo Cortina, a professor of political science at the University of Houston. The fight is especially urgent in Texas, he added, because increasing urbanization and demographic changes threaten the party’s dominance over Democrats.

    “The question for Republicans is, do you want to stay in government for a couple of years” by catering to a shrinking pool of aging voters? Mr. Cortina said, describing the party’s most conservative members. “Or do you want to invest in having a Republican Party that’s going to have a future in Texas?”

Nationally, meanwhile, the specific crisis that it looks like we might be able to muddle through right now is averting a national default. For weeks, and really for months, the GOP has been threatening to refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats capitulate to sweeping spending cuts. Among the programs that Republicans suggested might be slashed were Social Security and Medicare.

The debt ceiling is an arbitrary and outmoded legislative construct. It limits the amount the federal government can borrow to pay debts it has already incurred. It's like if you put $300 on your credit card and then passed a law saying you were only allowed to pay off $200. And then loudly proclaimed that the law was necessary to prevent out of control spending.

RELATED FROM PN: The (many) perils of a debt default, explained by an economist

For most of the last century, raising the debt ceiling has been a routine, uncontroversial procedure. When the US incurred debts and needed to borrow more money to pay them, Congress just raised the ceiling. That's because failing to raise the debt ceiling would be catastrophic. The US would be unable to pay its obligations. Credit markets would seize up; the stock market would plummet. There would probably be a global economic recession at least on the scale of 2008, and possibly worse.

Congresspeople are elected by the public and are supposed to look out for their interests. Normally, that would mean that they would not cause a massive recession immiserating tens of millions of Americans for no reason. But thanks to gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the right-wing media bubble, Republicans have become less and less accountable, and less and less concerned with the real world consequences of their actions.

Since 2011, when a Democratic president is in office, Republicans have tried to use the debt ceiling as a kind of blackmail. Unless they're allowed to govern from the minority, they insist they'll destroy the country’s economy (and maybe the world’s too).

Supervillain hostage taking is not conducive to normal democratic processes. Democrats are faced with allowing Republicans to harm people by blowing up the world economy, or allowing them to harm people by shredding the social safety net.

Instead, many Democrats urged President Joe Biden to refuse to negotiate with the Joker. They've argued that the Constitution requires the US to honor its debts. The president could use that as a constitutional justification to order the treasury to mint a $1 trillion coin — or to simply continue to pay US obligations even if Congress can’t reach a deal.

The administration has been leery of these solutions, in part because Biden is an institutionalist, and in part because potential lawsuits could lead to a lot of market uncertainty. Biden preferred to try to negotiate as if he were facing a normal Republican Party.

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And, lo and behold, the Republican Party kinda sorta behaved as if it's a normal party. After much brinkmanship and back and forth, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to a deal that looks more or less like what you'd expect from a standard budget negotiation. There are no across the board cuts to entitlement programs. There are no draconian work requirements for those programs either. Government spending basically remains flat through 2025 — a major retreat from GOP demands to roll back Biden's legislative accomplishments of the last few years.

In a sign of the deal’s acceptability to Democrats, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries gave it his endorsement Tuesday, saying it protects the safety net and vulnerable communities.

It's still possible that the GOP rank and file legislators will reject the deal. Freedom Caucus members are running to any microphone they can find to talk about how much they hate it. But for now, the country appears to have muddled and shuffled its way away from a fiscal cliff.

Avoiding default is an unambiguous good. Immiserating millions and possibly billions of people globally would have been a horrific outcome.

There are downsides though. The deal suspends the debt ceiling till 2025. That’s good news for candidate Biden. But it means that he wins next year and has to again work with divided government in his second term, Republicans are likely to try to take the economy hostage in budget negotiations again.

(Tellingly, as the below clip illustrates, Freedom Caucus members like Dan Bishop are especially mad about the debt ceiling being suspended through next year, because it means Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis won’t be able to run against Biden on the wreckage of a smoldering economy.)

The provisions of the current deal also will harm many people. It calls for clawing back unspent covid funds. But covid funds remain vital; nearly 1,000 people are dying of it every week in the US, and long covid continues to affect millions, with less and less hope of a cure as funding dries up.

The GOP has also managed to expand work requirements for SNAP, or food stamps, to include those with no dependents between 50 and 54 years of age. There's barely a pretense that this will actually reduce spending or accomplish anything beyond ensuring that a number of poor older people will go hungry as they fail to get the benefits they need.

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More broadly, Biden turned down an opportunity for a full-throated defense of the Constitution. The 14th Amendment requires the US to pay its debts. Republican legislators — backed by the implicit threat of a far right Supreme Court — were recklessly attempting to violate the Constitution. Rather than fighting for the constitutional principle at stake, Biden sidestepped the issue.

Again, avoiding default is good. But ducking confrontation with the courts as a general principle leaves many vulnerable people in the lurch. The current horrifying assault on trans rights is just one example. Florida, for example, is putting in place a series of draconian laws that among other things ban gender-affirming care for minors and prevent trans people from using public restrooms.

RELATED FROM PN: A brief history of the right-wing scheme to corrupt SCOTUS

Part of the reason states feel empowered to pass these laws is because they feel confident that the far-right supermajority on the Supreme Court will uphold their bigotry. Democrats say that they have trans people's backs. But those promises ring hollow if the party isn't willing to aggressively challenge the court.

And so far, they haven't been. Biden has avoided even suggesting that expanding the number of Supreme Court justices might be a good idea. Following revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas's decades of egregious corruption, Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin has all but hidden under his desk to avoid doing anything about it.

Muddling through means avoiding the worst crisis, like coups and global economic collapse. It also means, though, avoiding aggressive steps to expand democracy, or to confront authoritarianism. It means acting as if GOP blackmail and a reckless, Christofascist, unaccountable court is normal. It means treating de facto fascist regimes in the states as legitimate, too, when they target the rights of LGBT people, or Black people, or women.

For students of US history, this is familiar. The country spent about a century, between Reconstruction and the civil rights movement, looking the other way as Jim Crow states (and not just Jim Crow states) subjugated Black people in flagrant violation of the Constitution. Was the US a fascist regime during those years? Sort of yes, sort of no; it muddled and bumbled through, with Democratic institutions that functioned, more or less, in some parts of the country for some people.

I think US commitment to democracy has expanded since the Jim Crow era. States like Minnesota, for example, have moved aggressively to increase voting rights, abortion rights, and LGBT rights. Where Democrats are in control, they push back against fascism. Where they're not, though, federal efforts have been vacillating.

Democracy is messy; you have to compromise. That's a truism, and an argument for the virtues of avoiding constitutional confrontation. But when one party has been taken over by reckless fascists, compromise tends to means abandoning marginalized people, and negotiating away the rights and safety of the most vulnerable. Muddling through may be better than some alternatives. But we should be clear about the cost.

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India Is Ill Positioned to Harness a Demographic Dividend. By Jack A. Goldstone


www.theunpopulist.net
India Is Ill Positioned to Harness a Demographic Dividend
Jack A. Goldstone
9 - 12 minutes
T. Nagar market in Chennai, India. 2008.

Wikipedia, Creative Commons. McKay Savage.

Last month, the United Nation’s Population Division projected that India will overtake China to become the world’s most-populous country by the middle of this year. That would mark the first time since 1950, when the U.N. began keeping global population records, that China was knocked out of the top spot. India is already the third-largest economy in the world by GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity, and it was among the 10 fastest-growing large economies last year.

The U.N. population estimate renewed discussion about India’s economic potential, including whether its swelling population could create a major “demographic dividend” that, in turbocharging its economy, would allow India to surpass China on that front as well. But India has a lot of ground to cover if it is to meet those expectations.

One reason for the optimism about India’s economic prospects is that its current economic outlook is virtually identical to what China’s looked like when it began its rapid economic rise more than 20 years ago, in 2000. At the time, China’s GDP stood at $2.77 trillion and its GDP per capita at $2,193 in constant 2015 dollars, while 36 percent of its population lived in urban areas. In 2021, India’s GDP was $2.73 trillion and its GDP per capita $1,937, and its urbanization rate was 35 percent. Over the next 20 years, China’s GDP soared to $14.6 trillion—overtaking Japan in 2010 as the world’s second-largest economy along the way—as its GDP per capita nearly quintupled to $10,358.

Another is that China now faces a rapidly aging population that registered its first decline last year, following decades of Beijing’s one-child policy. By contrast, India’s population is younger and still growing. As a result of India’s large and growing youth bulge, many now expect India’s economy to experience the same kind of dramatic growth over the next 20 years that China’s did in the last 20.

But a closer look at critical features of China’s historical growth and India’s recent economic trajectory suggests that those expectations might be too optimistic. By 2000, China had already laid the foundation for an economic takeoff by revamping its labor force. Its working-age population—namely, people aged 15-59—was 65 percent of the total population in 2000, and increased to nearly 70 percent of the total population a decade after. More importantly, China’s literacy rate stood at 91 percent, and its female labor force participation was 71 percent, putting it in pole position to take advantage of a “demographic dividend.”

India’s trajectory is quite different, and that makes it unlikely that it will be able to match—much less surpass—China’s demographic dividend. To begin with, India’s fertility rate has been steadily falling for decades, despite lacking a policy similar to China’s one-child policy—it currently stands at 2 children per woman, down from 4 in 1990. Although India’s current working-age population is approximately 64 percent of the total population, that figure will see only a modest increase to 65 percent by 2030 and is projected to dip to 61 percent by 2050. More importantly, India’s literacy rate today stands at 78 percent, and its female labor force participation is a lowly 24 percent. Labor force participation in both China and India has been falling since the 1990s, as more young people stay in school and more seniors head for retirement. But this development has been more drastic in India, where male labor force participation stood at 73 percent in 2021, compared to 83 percent in China in 2000.

The overall impact of these numbers is straightforward: India is seeking to jumpstart rapid economic growth with less favorable demographics and economic fundamentals. In 2000, 70 percent of China’s total population was made up of literate, working-age people who participated in the labor force. In India today, its proportion of literate, working-age people in the labor market—nearly 40 percent of its population—is so much smaller that it cannot realistically hope to match China’s economic miracle in the coming two decades.

To be sure, India can still reap the benefits of a demographic dividend if it steps up efforts to increase literacy rates and female labor-force participation. But it will likely face additional obstacles even if it begins those efforts immediately. Chinese policymakers were able to invest in the country’s labor force and infrastructure in part because the state faced only a modest fiscal burden with regard to care for the elderly. From 1990 to 2010, during China’s period of peak growth, the country’s working-age population increased by 200 million, while its retirement-age population—those 60 or older—increased by just 78.3 million. In other words, China added 255 new people of working age to the labor market for every 100 new retirees.

In India, 111 million new seniors aged 60 or older are projected to exit from the labor force between this year and 2040, but the country’s working-age population will grow by only 104 million—creating a labor force deficit of 7 million people. This trend will only get worse from 2040, as India’s working-age population is projected to begin to decline thereafter, while an additional 83 million Indians will reach age 60. By 2060, a quarter of India’s total population will be 60 years or older. The upshot is that while China is likely to grow old before it becomes rich, India may grow old before it ceases to be poor.

India must also start to move workers out of agriculture and into other economic sectors at a much more rapid pace than it has in the past decade. From 2002 to 2019, China reduced the share of its labor force that was employed in agriculture from half of all workers to a quarter. By 2012, India still had 47 percent of its workforce employed in agriculture, but the pace of decline since that time—to 43 percent by 2019—has been modest in comparison. At that rate, it would take until 2054 for India to match the 25 percent labor force employment in agriculture that China attained in 2019.

More broadly, the circumstances of China’s economic rise may have been unique, in that it was boosted by global dynamics that no longer exist today. When China’s takeoff began, it was gaining a near-monopoly on low-wage production for international markets, as the only developing country to combine a literate and disciplined labor force with the physical infrastructure needed to efficiently move goods to foreign markets. Today, the low-wage manufacturing market is far more competitive, with Bangladesh, Mauritius, Indonesia, Vietnam and other countries capable of meeting that demand for a skilled workforce and efficient logistics network.

Moreover, as China’s economy grew, global supply chains reached peak globalization. Going forward, however, they will likely be limited by local content rules and a growing preference among manufacturers for reliability over cost. Given those conditions, the sustained double-digit growth rates of “peak China” may not be attainable by India and other countries in the future.

Even some of India’s competitive advantages over China in 2000 might be less significant than many assume. For instance, the country produces thousands of new engineers every year, and it is possible that high technology will provide a major boost to the productivity of Indian workers. But it is also possible that generative AI tools will replace the call centers and software coding services that have been the bedrock of India’s services sector for several decades. While the long-term impact of technology on jobs in India is still uncertain, India will clearly need to rapidly boost the education and female-participation rate of its workforce if it is to make advances in the increasingly competitive space of low-income countries seeking to move up the middle- and higher-income ladder.

It is important for Indian policymakers not to get carried away by the mere fact that the country has overtaken China to become the world’s most-populous country. A large population counts for little unless it is educated, employed and productive. Today, even with its larger population, India’s GDP is less than a fifth of China’s. And despite the impending shrinking of China’s labor force, India’s economy will take decades to catch up to China.

But India does not necessarily have to replicate China’s remarkable growth over the past 20 years to improve the lives of its people and make an impact on the global economy. Countries can get rich by growing their economies by 5-7 percent per year for decades, if they consistently implement the right set of policies, much like South Korea did after the Korean War. Growth rates in that range could potentially make India the third-largest economy in the world, even if does not overtake China as the second-largest. As the country with the world’s largest population and its third-largest economy, India will rightfully command a place at the decision-making table in global affairs.

But even that kind of economic growth will depend on India making forward leaps in education and female labor force participation, if the country is to reap the “demographic dividend” of a large, youthful population. For all the international attention given to India’s population, the country’s future rests on three pillars: quality universal education, boosting women’s employment and moving large numbers of its labor force out of agriculture into more productive pursuits. If India is to move out of China’s economic shadow, those pillars must be solidified. Otherwise, the opportunity of a century may be lost.

This piece has been reprinted from the World Politics Review where it was originally published.

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Christian home-schoolers revolt by enrolling kids in public school. By Peter Jamison

Christian home-schoolers revolt by enrolling kids in public school. By Peter Jamison — Read time: 22 minutes


The revolt of the Christian home-schoolers

They were taught that public schools are evil. Then a Virginia couple defied their families and enrolled their kids.


Oliver Beall walks with his mother, Christina Beall, outside Round Hill Elementary School as Aimee Beall walks ahead. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Deep Reads features The Washington Post’s best immersive reporting and narrative writing.


ROUND HILL, Va. — They said goodbye to Aimee outside her elementary school, watching nervously as she joined the other children streaming into a low brick building framed by the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Christina and Aaron Beall stood among many families resuming an emotional but familiar routine: the first day of full-time, in-person classes since public schools closed at the beginning of the pandemic.


But for the Bealls, that morning in late August 2021 carried a weight incomprehensible to the parents around them. Their 6-year-old daughter, wearing a sequined blue dress and a pink backpack that almost obscured her small body, hesitated as she reached the doors. Although Aaron had told her again and again how brave she was, he knew it would be years before she understood how much he meant it — understood that for her mother and father, the decision to send her to school was nothing less than a revolt.



Aaron and Christina Beall pose with their daughter, Aimee, then 6, on her first day at Round Hill Elementary School on Aug. 26, 2021. (Christina Beall)

Aaron and Christina had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families.


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At a time when home education was still a fringe phenomenon, the Bealls had grown up in the most powerful and ideologically committed faction of the modern home-schooling movement. That movement, led by deeply conservative Christians, saw home schooling as a way of life — a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government.


Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.



Aimee Beall, 7, left, and her brothers finish getting ready for school while their father, Aaron, helps Oliver, 5, at their home in Northern Virginia. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post )


Ezra Beall, 9, climbs into the family car to head off to school earlier this year. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Like all rebellions, this one had come with consequences. Their decision to send Aimee to the neighborhood elementary school — a test run to see how it might work for their other kids — had contributed to a bitter rift with their own parents, who couldn’t understand their embrace of an education system they had been raised to abhor. And it had led Christina, who until that summer day had home-schooled all of their children, into an existential crisis.


“I never imagined sending you to the local elementary school instead of learning and growing together at home,” she wrote later that day in an Instagram post addressed to her daughter. “But life has a way of undoing our best laid plans and throwing us curveballs.”


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Christina did not describe on Instagram how perplexed she and Aaron had been by a ritual that the other parents seemed to understand; how she had tried, in unwitting defiance of school rules, to accompany Aimee inside, earning a gentle rebuke from the principal.


And she did not describe what happened after their daughter vanished into a building they had been taught no child should ever enter. On that first day of school — first not just for one girl but for two generations of a family — the Bealls walked back to their SUV, and as Aaron started the car, Christina began to cry.



(Matt McClain/The Washington Post)


The ‘Joshua Generation’

Across the country, interest in home schooling has never been greater. The Bealls could see the surge in Virginia, where nearly 57,000 children were being home-schooled in the fall of 2022 — a 28 percent jump from three years earlier. The rise of home education, initially unleashed by parents’ frustrations with pandemic-related campus closures and remote learning, has endured as one of the lasting social transformations wrought by covid-19.


But if the coronavirus was a catalyst for the explosion in home schooling, the stage was set through decades of painstaking work by true believers like those who had raised Aaron and Christina. Aided by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) — a Christian nonprofit that has been dubbed “the most influential homeschool organization in the world,” and is based less than five miles from the Bealls’ house in Northern Virginia — those activists had fought to establish the legality of home schooling in the 1980s and early 1990s, conquering the skepticism of public school administrators and state lawmakers across the country.


[Tell us about your home-schooling experiences]


Through their influence, a practice with roots in the countercultural left took on a very different character. Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view. Rightly educated, those children would grow into what HSLDA founder Michael Farris called a “Joshua Generation” that would seek the political power and cultural influence to reshape America according to biblical principles.



Christina (Comfort) Beall with Home School Legal Defense Association founder Michael Farris at her graduation from Patrick Henry College, which was founded by Farris to cater to Christian home-schoolers. (Family photo)

Home schooling today is more diverse, demographically and ideologically, than it was in the heyday of conservative Christian activism. Yet those activists remain extraordinarily influential.


Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”


But what should be a moment of triumph for conservative Christian home-schoolers has been undermined by an unmistakable backlash: the desertion and denunciations of the very children they said they were saving.


Former home-schoolers have been at the forefront of those arguing for greater oversight of home schooling, forming the nonprofit Coalition for Responsible Home Education to make their case.


“As an adult I can say, ‘No. What happened to me as a child was wrong,’” said Samantha Field, the coalition’s government relations director.



Arkansas state Rep. Jim Bob Duggar and his wife, Michelle, lead 12 of their 13 children to a polling place in Springdale, Ark., in 2002. (April L. Brown/AP)


Bill Gothard, founder of the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), an ultraconservative Christian organization. (Institute in Basic Life Principles)

Earlier this year, Jinger Duggar Vuolo — familiar to millions of TV viewers from the reality show “19 Kids and Counting” — published a memoir in which she harshly criticized Bill Gothard, a pivotal but now disgraced figure in conservative Christian home schooling whose teachings her parents followed. Beginning a decade ago, Gothard was accused of sexual abuse and harassment by dozens of women — allegations the minister vehemently denied.


Farris said it is not uncommon for children who grow up in oppressively patriarchal households to reject or at least moderate their parents’ beliefs. However, he said such families are a minority in the home-schooling movement and are often considered extreme even by other conservative Christians.


“I view this as the fringe of the fringe,” Farris said. “And every kid that I know that has lashed out at home schooling came out of this.”



Aaron and Christina Beall, pictured in the months before their wedding in 2012. (Family photo)

Christina, 34, and Aaron, 37, had joined no coalitions. They had published no memoirs. Their rebellion played out in angry text messages and emails with their parents, in tense conversations conducted at the edges of birthday parties and Easter gatherings. Their own children — four of them, including Aimee — knew little of their reasons for abandoning home schooling: the physical and emotional trauma of the “biblical discipline” to which they had been subjected, the regrets over what Aaron called “a life robbed” by strictures on what and how they learned.


Aaron had grown up believing Christians could out-populate atheists and Muslims by scorning birth control; Christina had been taught the Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old. Their education was one in which dinosaurs were herded aboard Noah’s ark — and in which the penalty for doubt or disobedience was swift. Sometimes they still flinched when they remembered their parents’ literal adherence to the words of the Old Testament: “Do not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.”


The Bealls knew that many home-schooling families didn’t share the religious doctrines that had so warped their own lives. But they also knew that the same laws that had failed to protect them would continue to fail other children.


“It’s specifically a system that is set up to hide the abuse, to make them invisible, to strip them of any capability of getting help. And not just in a physical way,” Christina said. “At some point, you become so mentally imprisoned you don’t even realize you need help.”



(Family photo)


‘Breaking the child’s will’

Christina had felt no urge to escape when, at the age of 15, she listed her “Requirements for my husband” in neat, looping script on a ruled sheet of notebook paper.


“Must want me to be a full-time homemaker & only have an outside job if required or instructed by my Potter,” she wrote, referring to biblical verses that liken humans to clay in the hands of God. “Must believe in ‘full & unconditional’ surrender of our # of children to God Almighty.” And: “Must desire to homeschool our children.”



Christina’s list of requirements for her husband, written when she was 15. (Peter Jamison/The Washington Post)

The list is a blueprint of what she had been taught about the proper ambitions of a woman: to bear and raise children while shielding them from what those around her called “government schools.” She felt both hopeful and nervous when, several years later, her father, Derrick Comfort, came home with news: He had just met with a young man who had been raised with those same ideals — and who wanted Christina to be his wife.


Aaron was shy and cerebral, a self-taught web developer who had grown up in Fairfax County, Va., had never attended college and, at age 26, still lived with his parents. He barely knew Christina Comfort, the oldest of eight children on her family’s 10-acre farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A graduate of Patrick Henry College — founded by Farris in Virginia to cater to Christian home-schoolers — she taught math and writing to her siblings and did chores around the farm. She prayed while riding a lawn mower for God to send her a husband.


The Comfort and Beall families were both active in a religious community led by Gary Cox, an evangelical pastor and pioneer of Maryland’s home-schooling movement. Christina was a graduate of Cox’s home education network, Walkersville Christian Family Schools, while Aaron began attending Cox’s church in rural northern Maryland as a teenager. The minister exerted a powerful influence over his congregation and students, teaching that children live in divinely ordained subjection to the rule of their parents.


[The Christian home-schooling world that shaped Dan Cox]


Cox — who still operates a home-schooling organization, now called Wellspring Christian Family Schools — declined repeated interview requests. Last year his son, Dan Cox, a home-schooled Maryland state delegate who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, won the Republican gubernatorial primary. He went on to lose in a landslide to Democrat Wes Moore.


During Aaron and Christina’s “courtship” — a period of chaperoned contact that served as a prelude to formal engagement — they seemed ready to fulfill their parents’ hopes. Eating calamari in Annapolis or touring Colonial Williamsburg, they talked about what their future would include (home schooling) and what it would not (music with a beat that can be danced to). But signs soon emerged of the unimaginable rupture that lay ahead.


On a spring afternoon in 2012, the couple sat in a small church in Queenstown, Md. In preparation for marriage, they were attending a three-day seminar on “Gospel-Driven Parenting” run by Chris Peeler, a minister whose family was part of Gary Cox’s home-schooling group. The workshop covered a range of topics, including the one they were now studying: “Chastisement.”


“The use of the rod is for the purpose of breaking the child’s will,” stated the handout that they bent over together in the church. “One way to tell if this has happened is to see if they can look you in the eyes after being disciplined and ask for forgiveness.”


Bible verses were cited in support of corporal punishment. But Christina had misgivings.


“I really don’t think I can be a parent,” she wrote to Aaron in the margins of the handout. “It just feels like you have to be, like, hardened.”


“YES! YOU! CAN!” Aaron wrote back.


The use of the “rod” — interpreted by different people as a wooden spoon, dowel, belt, rubber hose or other implement — was a common practice among the conservative Christian home-schoolers Aaron and Christina knew, and one they had both experienced regularly in their own families.


The elder Bealls and Comforts did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the discipline they used with their children and the decision by Aaron and Christina to embrace public education. Aaron’s older brother, Joshua — who Aaron said still home-schools his children — did not return calls. Aaron’s other siblings could not be reached for comment. Christina’s siblings, some of whom have also left her parents’ home, either declined to comment or could not be reached.


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Aaron actually shared Christina’s qualms. He knew that the term parents in the movement casually used for discipline, “spankings,” did not capture the childhood terror of being struck several times a week — sometimes more, sometimes less — with what he describes as a shortened broomstick for disobeying commands or failing to pay attention to his schoolwork.


The memory of waiting as a small child outside his parents’ bedroom for his mother to summon him in; the fear that his transgressions might be enough to incur what he called “killer bee” spankings, when the rod was used against his bare skin; his efforts to obey the order to remain immobile as he was hit — all these sensations and emotions seeped into his bones, creating a deep conviction that those who fail to obey authority pay an awful price.


“For a long time, I’ve wondered why I was so unable to think for myself in this environment,” he says today, attributing the shortcoming to “learning that even starting to think, or disagree with authorities, leads to pain — leads to physical and real pain that you cannot escape.”


Now, on the threshold of parenthood — Christina would become pregnant within two weeks of their wedding on Sept. 29, 2012 — the couple’s reservations about “chastisement” could no longer be ignored. As a wedding gift, they said, Aaron’s brother and sister-in-law had given them “To Train Up a Child,” by the popular Christian home-schooling authors Michael and Debi Pearl.


The Pearls advocate hitting children with tree branches, belts and other “instruments of love” to instill obedience, and recommend that toddlers who take slowly to potty training be washed outdoors with cold water from a garden hose. Their book advocates “training sessions” in which infants, as soon as they are old enough to crawl, are placed near a desired object and repeatedly struck with a switch if they disobey commands not to touch it.


The Pearls have defended their methods, saying they are not meant to encourage brutality and, when properly applied, reduce the frequency with which parents must later discipline their kids.


Aaron and Christina did not follow the Pearls’ advice when their first child, Ezra, was born. Nor did they take on authoritarian roles with their second, Aimee, or third, Oliver. All were home-schooled, albeit in less isolation than their parents: Christina joined co-ops with other Christian mothers in Northern Virginia.


But by the time the Bealls had Aurelia, their fourth child, Aaron — now a successful software engineer whose job had enabled the family to buy a four-bedroom house in Loudoun County — had begun to question far more than corporal punishment.


“When it came time for me to hit my kids, that was the first independent thought I remember having: ‘This can’t be right. I think I’ll just skip this part,’” he says.


But if that seemingly inviolable dogma was false, what else might be? Aaron gradually began to feel adrift and depressed.


“It’s like having the rug pulled out from under your feet,” he says. “All of reality is kind of up for grabs.”


He scoured Amazon for books about evolution and cosmology. Eventually, he found his way to blog posts and books by former Christian fundamentalists who had abandoned their religious beliefs. He watched an interview with Tara Westover, whose best-selling memoir, “Educated,” detailed the severe educational neglect and physical abuse she endured as a child of survivalist Mormon home-schoolers in Idaho.


And in the spring of 2021, as he and Christina were struggling to engage Aimee in her at-home lessons, he suggested a radical solution: Why not try sending their daughter to the reputable public elementary school less than a mile from their house?



(Matt McClain/The Washington Post)


‘So much pain’

Christina could think of many reasons. They were the same ones Aaron had learned as a child: Public schools were places where children are bullied, or raped in the bathroom, or taught to hate Jesus.


But she also suspected that Aimee could use the help of professional educators. Just as important, she had learned all her life that it was her duty to obey her husband. She was confounded and angry, at both Aaron and the seeming contradiction his suggestion had exposed.


“I guess I’m just honestly confused and wonder what you think,” she wrote in an email to her father in May 2021. “I’m supposed to submit to Aaron, he wants the kids to go to public school. … You think that’s a sin but it’s also a sin to not listen to your husband so which is it?”


At first, Christina’s and Aaron’s parents reacted to the news that they were considering public school for Aimee with dazed incomprehension. Did Christina feel overwhelmed, they asked? Did she need more help with work around the house? As long as Aimee was learning to read, she would be fine, Aaron’s mother assured them. Christina’s father sent a YouTube video of John Taylor Gatto, a famous critic of America’s public education system.


The dialogue took on a darker tone as Aimee, with Christina’s hesitant agreement, began school that fall. By then, Aaron had told his parents he no longer considered himself a believer.


“This is absolutely devastating,” his mother, Linda Beall, wrote in a long email to Christina. “I hurt so much for you Christina!!!”


“I don’t think Aaron is going to be wrestled into heaven with good arguments,” Linda added. “I think this is likely about his response to hard things in his life. I think he needs to come face to face with God himself, and bow before Him in recognition of his own sin, and need for a Savior.”


Despite the sympathy expressed in the email, Christina bristled at the suggestion that her husband’s crisis of faith stemmed from his reluctance to face “hard things” in his life. She knew that reexamining his religious convictions and traumatic memories had perhaps been the hardest thing Aaron had ever done.



Aimee Beall, then 6, poses on her first day of first grade in 2021. (Christina Beall)

Aimee, meanwhile, was thriving at Round Hill Elementary. By the third quarter, her report card said she was “a pleasure to teach,” was “slowly becoming more social and more willing to participate in class” and showed “tremendous growth” in her reading skills, which had lagged below grade level at the beginning of the year.


For several months after that first week of classes — when she had come home wearing a paper hat, colored with blue crayon and printed with the words “My First Day of First Grade” — Aimee had had a stock response when her parents asked her how she liked school: She would suppress a grin, say she “hated it,” and then start laughing at her own joke.


“You should have asked to go to school,” Aimee, who knew her mom had been educated at home, would eventually tell Christina. “It affects your whole life.”


Now it was Christina’s turn to question her belief — not in Christianity, but in the conservative Christian approach to home schooling. She began to research spiritual abuse and the history of Christian nationalism. Ideas she had never questioned — such as the statement, in a book given to her by her dad, that it “would be a waste of her time and her life” for a woman to work outside the house — no longer made sense.


Her loss of faith in the biblical literalism and patriarchal values of her childhood was coming in the way the movement’s adherents had always warned it would: through exposure to people with different experiences and points of view.


Those people just happened to be her daughter and her husband.


“This is the guy I’ve been married to for eight years,” she recalls thinking. “I know him. I know his heart. I know what kind of parent he wants to be to our kids. These easy answers of ‘Oh, you’re just not a Christian anymore, you just want to sin’ … didn’t work anymore.”



Christina, left, talks to Oliver while Aimee talks to Aaron as the family gets ready for the start of the day. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)


Christina prepares a snack for her daughter Aurelia, 2, at their home in Round Hill, Va. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

As Aimee’s first year at Round Hill Elementary came to an end, Aaron and Christina were more convinced than ever that they had made the right decision. But they were also at a loss for how to heal the tensions with their parents.


In a 2022 email intended for a pastor at her church but sent by accident to Christina, Linda Beall blamed her daughter-in-law for their deepening rift, saying she had taken undue offense at good-faith efforts to advise and support the family through Aaron’s loss of faith.


“So she is again flipping the script from the reality that we love them and her, want to support them, and have only tried to do that again and again, but have been assaulted every time we engage. And I have given up trying [because] it all gets flipped and used against us,” Linda wrote. “I really can not remember one conversations we have had since this unfolded that has not escalated things. So when she beats up ‘everything’ I say, never offers forgiveness, why would we want to engage again?”


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Around the same time, Christina sent Aaron’s parents a series of text messages lamenting what she said was their unwillingness to reconcile and explaining that she had changed her opinions about the way she and Aaron had been raised.


“There has been so much pain but I am so excited to now understand and see past the ways that people control and manipulate me,” she wrote. “And you may not believe it but I still love Jesus.”


Aaron and Christina had decided that, in the fall of 2022, all three of their school-age children — not just Aimee but 5-year-old Oliver and 9-year-old Ezra — would attend public school. Aurelia, then 2, would remain at home.


Despite Aimee’s positive experience, Aaron and Christina were anxious, both for their children and about how their parents would react. One afternoon in June, Christina sent a text message to her mother.


“I need to tell you that all three kids are going to school in the fall. I’m sorry, because I know this will be upsetting and disappointing to you and dad,” Christina wrote. “I figured you should hear it from me first.”


Three hours later, her mother texted back.


“Dearest Christina, it is not at all upsetting or disappointing to me,” Catherine Comfort wrote. “You and Aaron are outstanding parents and I’m sure you made the decision best for your family.”


Even Aaron’s parents finally signaled a grudging degree of acceptance. In February, Linda and Bernard Beall walked into the gym at Round Hill Elementary one cold Saturday afternoon to watch a school performance of “The Lion King.” Ezra had a part in the chorus as a wildebeest.


Sitting on plastic chairs in the dark and crowded room, the pair gave no outward sign of the remarkable nature of their visit. When the performance was over, they hugged their grandkids in front of the stage and exchanged halting small talk with Aaron and Christina. Then they drove off, with no discussion of a visit to their son’s house a few blocks away.



(Matt McClain/The Washington Post)


Family night

About 10 minutes remained before the Bealls would have to pile into their minivan, and the children needed to get dressed — in their pajamas.


It was Groundhog Day, a damp night in February, and a low fire glowed in the hearth of the Bealls’ living room. Aaron and Christina sat on the floor playing card and board games with their kids, while Ezra sat on the couch, wearing headphones and absorbed in a game on his laptop.


Soon they would be leaving to attend their elementary school’s “For the Love of Reading Family Night,” held in the school library, where students were encouraged to come dressed for bedtime.


As Oliver rose to change (Ezra, the oldest, would not deign to put on his jammies), Aimee told her parents how her second-grade class had learned that day about Punxsutawney Phil.


Aaron looked at her in bewilderment.


“Phil?” he asked. “Am I out of the loop?”


His daughter stared back at him in disbelief.


“He’s famous!” Aimee said. She explained Phil’s role in predicting the length of winter.


“I knew about groundhogs,” Aaron said. “I just didn’t know about Phil.”


“He’s really famous,” Aimee said.


Christina smiled at her husband.


“Home-schooler,” she said.



Aimee Beall works on homework beside Aurelia while their mother prepares a snack for them. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)


Christina packs lunches as her children get ready for school. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

These were the gaps Aaron and Christina had become accustomed to finding as they learned about a world whose boundaries extended far beyond the one in which they had been raised. There were so many things they had not learned, and perhaps would never learn.


Stacks of books on the living room’s end tables testified to their belated efforts at self-education: popular works by the biologists Neil Shubin and Robert Sapolsky, as well as “Raising Critical Thinkers” by Julie Bogart, a leading developer of home education materials who has criticized conservative Christian home-schooling groups. Aaron and Christina were still young, but they knew enough about the demands of life, work and family to understand that they could not recover or reconstruct the lost opportunities of their childhoods.


But they could provide new and different opportunities for their own kids. They were doing so in Loudoun County, one of the hotbeds of America’s culture wars over public instruction about race and gender. To the Bealls, who truly knew what it was like to learn through the lens of ideology, concerns about kids being brainwashed in public schools were laughable.


“People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated,” Aaron says. “It’s not even comparable.”


There were still moments when they were condemned by an inner voice telling them that they were doing the wrong thing, that both they and their children would go to hell for abandoning the rod and embracing public schools. But the voice was usually silenced by their wonder and gratitude at the breadth of their children’s education.



Aimee walks ahead of Christina, carrying Aurelia, while followed by Aaron during a reading event at Round Hill Elementary. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)


Kate Jeffers, 8, left, Aimee Beall, 7, Christina Beall and Alice Lyons, 7, take part in a reading group at Round Hill Elementary. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

That breadth was on display as the Bealls jostled into the school library with other families. It was the second day of Black History Month, and the shelves were set up with displays of books about the Underground Railroad, soprano Ella Sheppard and Vice President Harris. Where the walls reached the ceiling a mural was painted, with Mary Poppins and Winnie the Pooh.


Aaron and Christina stood shoulder-to-shoulder, surveying the room. This was the belly of the beast, the environment their parents had worked to save them from.


But they weren’t scared to be inside this school, and were now familiar with it. On Tuesday mornings, Christina volunteered here, helping Aimee’s class with reading lessons.


“Let’s go out this way, guys,” she said, leading the way through an exit when it was time to disperse from the library to listen to the teachers read stories aloud.


The hallways were long and wide, with plenty of room for small legs to gather speed. Soon Aaron and Christina were watching as their children, who knew the way to their classrooms, ran far in front of them.


correction

An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the source of Christina Beall’s post about her daughter’s first day of school. It was on Instagram, not Facebook. This story has been corrected.



70 years after first summit, Everest keeps giving

70 years after first summit, Everest keeps giving

A painting of late mountaineer Tenzing Norgay at the summit of Mount Everest at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute museum in Darjeeling, India. | AFP-JIJI

Khumjung, Nepal – When Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay first climbed Mount Everest 70 years ago, they paved the way for thousands of foreign climbers to try to follow in their footsteps.


The eight-day trek to the Everest base camp is among the most popular multiday hikes in Nepal, with tens of thousands of tourists making the journey every year.


What were small agrarian villages when the British expedition passed through in 1953 have since been transformed into tourist hubs with hotels, tea houses and equipment shops, boosting the livelihoods of local communities.


In many homes, three generations have found employment in mountaineering — a far more lucrative occupation than farming or yak-herding.


The work is hazardous by definition, but in a climbing season of about three months, an experienced guide can make up to $10,000 — several times the country’s average annual income.


And other Sherpas and Himalayan community members have opened restaurants and guesthouses that line Everest’s money trail.


Veteran mountain guide Sherpa Phurba Tashi was born and raised in Khumjung, a village about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from base camp.


He grew up watching his father and uncles go to the mountains for work, and soon joined them on expeditions, eventually climbing Everest 21 times before he retired.


“There would be just a few expeditions before but now there are so many every year,” he said.


“That means an increase in income. It has helped improve the lifestyle here. A lot has changed.”


Mount Everest, the world highest peak, and other peaks of the Himalayan range, in January 2020 | REUTERS

Mount Everest, the world highest peak, and other peaks of the Himalayan range, in January 2020 | REUTERS

Since the first British teams set their sights on making the summit of Everest in the 1920s, Nepali climbers — mostly from the Sherpa ethnic group — have been by their side.


The word “Sherpa” became synonymous with high-altitude guiding as they became the backbone of the multimillion-dollar industry, bearing huge risks to carry equipment and food, fix ropes and repair ladders.


Now local expedition groups — instead of playing second fiddle to foreign climbing agencies — bring the bulk of paying clients into Nepal.


And a younger generation of Nepali climbers is slowly being recognized in their own right.


Renowned Italian climber Reinhold Messner said in a 2021 interview that it was a well-deserved climb up the ladder.


“It is an evolution,” he said. “And this is also important for the future economy of the country.”


The first ascent of Everest brought Nepal to the world’s attention and its mountains have since captivated adventurers and tourists alike.


That has played a crucial role for Nepal’s branding as a destination, according to tourism writer Lisa Choegyal.


“Through COVID and earthquakes and all the other setbacks, the insurgency even, that Nepal has suffered over the decades, mountaineering has really endured,” she said.


The Himalayas from the summit of Mount Everest in Nepal | AFP-JIJI

The Himalayas from the summit of Mount Everest in Nepal | AFP-JIJI

The Khumbu region welcomes more than 50,000 trekkers a year.


“It is a gift of the mountains and we have to thank the first summit for opening this region to tourism,” said Sherpa Mingma Chhiri, chairman of the local municipality.


“Education and modern amenities have come here because of it.”


Driven to help the community he worked with, Hillary funded the region’s first school in Khumjung and is said to have hauled timber himself to help build it.


One of its first students, Sherpa Ang Tsering, now owns an expedition company.


“It is because of mountaineering that the young Sherpas today have higher education,” he said. “It has brought a wave of economic prosperity.”


More than 10% of Nepalis are employed in tourism and the government this year collected over $5 million in Everest permit fees alone as a record number of summit hopefuls arrived.


Sherpa Tenzing Chogyal, 30, whose grandfather Sherpa Kancha was part of the 1953 expedition, is a glaciologist and said that education had opened up options for Sherpa youths.


“A Sherpa can now be a doctor, engineer or a businessman, anything they want to be. That is very good,” he said.


“And if they want to be a mountaineer, they can.”


Tuesday, May 30, 2023

What can we really learn about housing from Vienna? By Matthew Yglesias

What can we really learn about housing from Vienna?


Mostly that it's good to build more housing


MATTHEW YGLESIAS

MAY 30, 2023


There’s a perennial fascination in certain circles with the success of Vienna’s large-scale social housing program, which really does seem nice (Vienna is a nice place in general) and which demonstrates that public ownership of a very large share of the housing stock is possible.


The city was recently described in the New York Times as a “renters’ utopia,” and the Financial Times profiled it in 2018 as a “renters’ paradise.” More pointedly, Daniel Denvir and Yonah Freemark wrote a piece in Slate last week calling for more investment in public housing as the real solution to America’s housing woes. I find Freemark to be a vexing figure. He was the lead author on a recent study that conclusively proved supply skepticism is wrong, but chose to frame the outcome as calling YIMBYism into question.


And his praise of Viennese social housing seems to suggest that there’s something missing in the argument between those of us who believe relaxing regulatory barriers to construction is good and those who believe relaxing regulatory barriers to construction is bad:


But this debate is often impoverished. As policymakers continue to confront this crisis, it is time for them to reconsider an obvious but long-taboo solution: building new public housing. Right now, it’s so disfavored that you rarely hear anyone argue about making more of it—but that’s beginning to change in a number of cities and states.


But this debate is not impoverished at all. The stakes around the regulatory issues are quite high, and battles are currently being waged over them in many different places. Land use reformers have won a lot of battles lately; we’ve also seen promising initiatives go up in smoke in New York. In Texas, we came really close to passing an ADU law but were narrowly defeated. The coalitions in each place are different, the organizing dynamics are different, the strategies pursued are different, but the goal is always the same: fewer constraints on housing supply.


Meanwhile, I don’t actually understand what problem it is that social housing, specifically, is supposed to solve. Normally, you look to the public sector to build things when the thing to be built is socially useful but so unremunerative that private capital isn’t willing to finance it. In that case, the government needs to either subsidize it (the way the Inflation Reduction Act subsidizes zero-carbon energy production) or build it (the way most of our infrastructure is built). But the whole point on housing is that private capital does want to expand the housing supply, and there are lots of rules in place to constrain that. Those same rules would also constrain the public sector, over and beyond other problems with publicly financed homebuilding, including the need to raise taxes to pay for it.


So what, exactly, are we talking about and why?


Viennese-style housing requires massive deregulation

Here’s a building in Vienna that has eight units per floor built around a central corridor with one staircase.



It’s built to the Passivhaus standard for ultra-low energy use. I’m not sure whether this particular building is part of Vienna's public housing program, but it seems pretty nice.


Meanwhile, in the United States, it’s illegal to build a mid-rise apartment building across the overwhelming majority of residentially zoned land. Not just in the NIMBY suburbs or on the west coast — on 48% of D.C.’s buildable land you can’t build apartment buildings, and even where you can, you often can’t build one that’s eight stories tall. And almost nowhere in the United States are you allowed to build a building this tall that’s served by a single staircase. The NYT article on housing in Vienna profiles the large Alt-Erlaa complex, which features apartment towers that are 70 meters tall, much taller than you’re allowed to build anywhere in D.C.


So if your point about Viennese housing is that America should reduce regulatory barriers to home-building, then I agree. Of course what makes the situation utopian is that not only are the apartments nice, they’re cheap to rent. How does Austria make housing cheap without creating huge shortages?


According to Statistics Austria, 16,000 new units were built in Vienna in 2021, not including additions to existing buildings. In all of Austria (population 9 million), 71,000 units were added.



The Los Angeles Metropolitan Statistical Area contains approximately 13 million people, roughly 50% more than the country of Austria, but it adds housing units at less than half the rate.



New York City builds about 50% more units per year than the city of Vienna, but it has about quadruple the base population — so it’s adding units at a dramatically slower rate.


Compared to the United States, a very large share of Austria’s new units are publicly financed and publicly owned. But as Michael Lewyn noted during an earlier iteration of this argument, Vienna also builds private housing at a much higher rate than America’s most constrained cities. Vienna and Manhattan have similar populations, but Vienna adds private housing units at 10 times the rate of Manhattan over and above its social housing. It’s also worth noting that Austria’s social housing units are awfully small by American standards.



And that’s fine. But it’s worth keeping in mind that this debate is always making a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. If you really wanted to attract middle-class Americans into social housing, the units would probably need to be significantly bigger than Austria’s co-ops and communal flats, which would end up raising costs.


What problem are we solving?

Vienna, of course, was the capital of the Habsburg Empire, which on the eve of World War I was a vast polyglot state of 52 million people.


Then four long years of war imposed economic difficulties on the residents of all the belligerent countries, especially the Central Powers, which were subject to Allied blockade. Things only got worse once they lost the war, and the post-war Austrian successor state was saddled with reparations and other problems. But from an economic point of view, Austria was in even worse shape than Germany because its whole economic structure was built around a country that no longer existed. Austria used to export manufactured goods to and import agricultural commodities from the eastern areas of the empire. It used to have a port city in Trieste. It used to provide administrative functions for a large empire rather than a small nation-state. Patterns of trade and employment were completely disrupted, and the various postwar successor states were run by cranky nationalists who didn’t cooperate with each other. Several parts of Austria tried to break off and reunite with Germany. The upshot was that the economy tanked and the central government tried to pay the bills by printing money, leading to ruinous hyperinflation. Amidst the chaos, national Austrian politics tilted to the right, but local politics in Vienna tilted left, setting the stage for “Red Vienna” and the social housing boom:


The macroeconomic turmoil of the late 1910s and early 1920s added fuel to conservative resentment, but it also presented an opportunity. The revenue raised from city taxes went further because the city government was able to buy out property owners buffeted by hyperinflation and economic crisis. This gave the public housing programme access to land all over the city that otherwise would have been prohibitively expensive (if it were for sale at all). The massive economic dislocations of the postwar years gave the Social Democrats’ housing plan an edge. By 1924, the municipal government was the biggest property owner in Vienna.


“The Social Democrats took advantage of a crisis,” says Janek Wasserman, associate professor of history at the University of Alabama. “They used that hyperinflationary moment to basically expropriate land and property from people going under – the people who owned a lot of the real estate stock in the city.”


You could imagine this turning out poorly — Austria had a lot of ups and downs between 1924 and the withdrawal of Soviet occupation forces in 1955. But as it happens, it worked out well.


The government bought land cheaply, employed what would have otherwise been idle labor building up the city’s housing stock, and following WWII, Austria became a peaceful and prosperous country with a rich capital city that benefitted from the existence of all this social housing. It’s good that the Viennese have kept up with it because a functional public sector institution is a valuable thing, and it’s absolutely a cool and noteworthy story of social policy development.


But this is nothing like the situation in any high-cost American city.


By the same token, Singapore’s housing and development board construction, another frequently cited social housing success story, also arose under conditions quite unlike those in the U.S. today. Lee Kuan Yew started out as the leader of a very poor country. One of his big ideas was that a poor country could develop economically by having a very high domestic savings rate, which would lead to a lot of capital accumulation. But he didn’t want Singaporeans to just accumulate financial capital in the form of foreign assets; he wanted to increase Singapore’s stock of domestic physical capital. So people were essentially forced into a government-run savings scheme that then plowed their savings into domestic apartment construction. It’s a different financing structure than the Viennese program, but it also seems to have worked well and mostly achieved its goals — another good public policy success story.


But, again, these are not the circumstances facing any high-cost American city today. Private capital is absolutely willing to finance the construction of apartment buildings in expensive jurisdictions. There are just lots of rules making it illegal. I don’t think those laws are a good idea, and an increasing number of people agree with me. Lots of other people, though, are on the other side of this and want it to continue to be illegal to build denser building types in various places. Publicly financed construction is a solution to a problem we don’t have, where some hypothetical high-cost city does want new housing and has created a regulatory framework that’s friendly to new housing but that the private market doesn’t want to finance. That’s something that can happen — but it’s not the thing that actually is happening.


It’s bad to waste money

Among single-minded housing supply enthusiasts, I think it’s become fashionable to play nice with the internet’s tiny cabal of self-proclaimed PHIMBYs who want public housing to play a big role in increasing supply.


And on some level, I agree with that. Texas was recently considering a big ADU bill that had the support of most, but not all, Republicans in the legislature. It narrowly failed because even though a few Democrats supported it, most were opposed. If throwing some money for public housing into the bill had gotten two Democrats to flip from “no” to “yes,” that would have been a deal worth making. And if that legislative math doesn’t work in Texas, maybe it does in Hawaii or Massachusetts. Anything is worth a shot in terms of coalition-building.


But I do want to say that in a world of limited budgetary resources, this really does not make a lot of sense as an expenditure category.


If you’re making market-rate housing more abundant but are still concerned about the fate of poor people, why not give them money? For state-provided housing to be a better deal than cash, you’d need to believe that either the government is going to be able to build more cost-effectively than private developers (which I think is wrong) or that the government has some kind of comparative advantage at landlording, which is definitely wrong. There are plenty of situations in which it absolutely does make sense to spend money on public sector construction projects. Only the government is going to build the infrastructure to prevent rainwater runoff from poisoning rivers. Only the government is going to build the transportation infrastructure that growing cities need.


At the same time, we can see that almost every level of government is struggling with contracting issues and cost control in its construction projects. There’s no need to take on ancillary, unnecessary construction projects. We need to be figuring out how to execute better on the public sector projects we really need. We need to be providing people with social services (schools, police, parks) that only the government can provide. And we need to be giving poor people money so they can be less poor.


Getting intellectually invested in public housing solves the very niche problem of “you understand that housing supply is important, but you’re uncomfortable sounding like a libertarian or someone who’s friendly to capitalism so you’ve decided to find a socialist way to do it.” But while this seems to be a problem that a decent number of journalists have in their lives, it doesn’t seem like a major problem facing Americans as a whole. What we need to be doing is working on solutions for people’s concerns about traffic and parking while continuing to build bipartisan coalitions for regulatory change.


Why Uganda’s LGBTQ Community is Under Renewed Fire. By David Malingha

Why Uganda’s LGBTQ Community is Under Renewed Fire. By David Malingha | Bloomberg — Read time: 3 minutes


Analysis by David Malingha | Bloomberg

May 29, 2023 at 8:35 a.m. EDT

Uganda is a tough place to be LGBTQ and the authorities are making it even harder. President Yoweri Museveni has signed off on the draconian “Anti-Homosexuality Act,” which extends colonial-era sodomy laws and envisions violators being sentenced to lengthy prison terms or even death. Civil rights groups have condemned the measure amid warnings that it may deter foreign aid and investment in one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies. 


Homosexuality is banned in more than half of the 55 African nations and frowned upon in many others. That includes Uganda, which inherited its original anti-gay laws from Britain, the former ruling power. Ugandan lawmakers and religious leaders — often encouraged by US evangelical groups — have said LGBTQ practices are contrary to their culture and have no place in Uganda. In February, the archbishop of the Church of Uganda, Stephen Kaziimba, condemned a decision by the Church of England to allow clergy to preside over a blessing for same-sex unions — an issue that has split the Anglican Communion, of which both are part. (Uganda was among those boycotting last year’s conference of the global grouping of Anglican churches.) Museveni signed a previous version of the law that was later struck down by the courts on a technicality. The president has described homosexuality as “degeneration” and a threat to procreation. 


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2. What does the new law propose? 


It states that the nation’s capacity to deal with “emerging internal and external threats to the traditional, heterosexual family” must be enhanced and that Ugandans need protection against activists who “promote” homosexuality. These are some of its main provisions: 


• The death sentence may be imposed on those who engage in so-called “aggravated homosexuality.” That categorization includes same-sex intercourse involving someone who is HIV positive or under the age of 18.


• Individuals can be sentenced to up to life imprisonment if they are convicted of other homosexual acts.


• Persons under the age of 18 who are judged to have engaged in homosexuality can be jailed for as long as three years.


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• Legal entities that are convicted of “promoting homosexuality” can be fined 1 billion shillings ($267,000).


An earlier version of the legislation approved by lawmakers in March sought to punish people for merely identifying as LGBTQ, but that provision was removed after Museveni requested changes. 


3. Is this constitutional?


The Constitutional Court struck down similar anti-gay legislation in 2014 that Museveni had signed. But that was on the grounds that lawmakers approved the law without the required quorum, and no determination was made on its constitutionality. Some legal experts have argued that discriminating against people based on their sexual identity or practices could constitute a violation of the constitutional right to freedom of expression, association and liberty. Sexual Minorities Uganda, a coalition that fights for LGBTQ rights, and other organizations have indicated that they will challenge the new law in court if the president approves it.


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4. How has the bill been received internationally?


United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk described the bill as devastating and discriminatory — “probably among the worst of its kind in the world.” The World Health Organization cautioned that the legislation risks stunting progress made in reducing the spread of HIV in Uganda. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other civil rights groups warn that homophobic attacks could increase. The US and other Western governments have condemned the measure, while the African Union has refrained from commenting. 


5. What’s the potential economic fallout?


The International Monetary Fund has said it expects Uganda’s economy to expand by an average of more than 6% annually over the next five years. However, the new law could make operating in the East African nation awkward and place billions of dollars of investments at risk at a time when companies such as TotalEnergies SE are looking to start producing oil there. The World Bank and other lenders that have helped to shore up Uganda’s finances may also face pressure from shareholders and rights groups to review their relationship with the country. Almost a fifth of the country’s latest budget was funded using external financing. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Museveni’s son, tweeted that Uganda could do without foreign investors. 


--With assistance from Fred Ojambo, Thomas Pfeiffer, Anna Kitanaka and Siraj Datoo.


More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

Don’t Dismiss the Fury Over Fukushima’s Water. By David Fickling

Don’t Dismiss the Fury Over Fukushima’s Water. By David Fickling | Bloomberg — Read time: 4 minutes


Analysis by David Fickling | Bloomberg

May 29, 2023 at 7:44 p.m. EDT

More than 12 years after the disaster that closed Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the country will soon dispose of one of the most enduring legacies of the disaster.


Some 1.3 million metric tons of water, most of it used to cool the radioactive material at the core of the plant, will be filtered and cleaned up before being pumped slowly to sea once a 1-kilometer (0.6 mile) pipe is completed in the coming weeks. It may take decades to trickle out the water at a pace slow enough to keep radioactive concentrations at sufficiently low levels — but that hasn’t prevented bitter opposition from some of Japan’s Pacific neighbors.


“Continuing with ocean discharge plans at this time is simply inconceivable,” Henry Puna, secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum intergovernmental group, wrote earlier this year. “I fear that, if left unchecked, the region will once again be headed towards a major nuclear contamination disaster at the hands of others.” China has also condemned the plan, while South Korean nuclear experts will be doing their own monitoring of radiation levels.

These widespread fears are spurious. There’s zero risk to human life from releasing Fukushima’s contaminated water at sea under the plan proposed by Tokyo Electric Power Co. Drinking a glass of it direct from the outflow pipe would expose you to about as much radiation (from trace quantities of the hydrogen isotope tritium) as you’d get from eating a dozen bananas. Once further diluted in the vast waters of the Pacific, the radioactivity decreases to homeopathic levels. The 1.3 million metric tons of water that Tepco needs to get rid of sounds like a lot — but the Pacific Ocean holds roughly 500 billion times that amount.


At the same time, Japan of all countries should be empathetic in dealing with the sometimes irrational opposition that nuclear energy can generate.


For decades, US nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers visiting local ports had to give authorities 24 hours’ notice so that geiger checks could be carried out — despite more than 1,000 dockings passing without incident. A 20-minute unapproved arrival in 2001 prompted the country’s foreign minister to temporarily call off such visits. In the 1960s, even agreed visits often prompted thousands of demonstrators to turn out.


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That unique political environment is inseparable from the fact that Japan is the only nation which has had atomic weapons used against it. You would have expected the nation that razed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be a little accommodating of local sentiments on this issue. Even so, the US’s observance of the radiological theater around ship visits was a potent example that, in diplomacy, listening and pragmatism are usually more important than being right.


Pacific nations have a similar history. Though no country has suffered the death toll that Japan endured from nuclear weapons, the dozens of bombs tested in the Marshall Islands released energy about 5,000-times greater than that of those dropped on Japan. It has been left with a grim legacy of cancers and birth defects.


Most Pacific nations became independent from their former colonial powers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when both the US and Japan were looking to the region’s vast spaces as a dump for radioactive waste. Fighting against those policies and establishing a nuclear-free zone south of the equator was a foundational event for many young nations, quite as much as pacifism was in post-war Japan.


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Some circumspection earlier in the process might have paid off. It took China’s aggressive diplomacy in the region before Japan, the US and Australia started to reverse decades of neglect and began making serious attempts to woo and listen to Pacific island governments. As recently as 2015, then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a delegation of island leaders meeting some 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the Fukushima plant “to support Japan’s effort without being misled by rumors.” That sort of scolding response was thankfully absent in his successor Fumio Kishida’s summit on the sidelines of the Group of Seven meeting earlier this month with Prime Minister Mark Brown of the Cook Islands. Pacific leaders, in turn, appear to have been mollified by the greater transparency and dialogue.


There’s a lesson here for nuclear advocates, too. It’s common now for supporters of an enhanced role for nuclear energy to dismiss the safety regulation around atomic plants as an unnecessary and costly imposition that must be swept away, sparking a renaissance of atomic power. That’s an unrealistic and ultimately counterproductive ambition.


Every form of major infrastructure has to deal with public opinion, and in a democracy you don’t get to rule whether your opponents’ arguments are valid enough. That’s a problem for renewables as much as nuclear. Europe closed nine factories for wind turbine parts between 2018 and 2022, according to BloombergNEF, as demand slumped in a region that has effectively outlawed onshore wind farms from swathes of its territory.


Still, the solution isn’t to gripe about the injustice of it, but to work with the regulation we have and seek changes where we can to build the clean energy the 21st century needs. If Japan’s problems with the Pacific serve to reinforce this lesson, that’s no bad thing.