Episodes
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When do fact-checks work? And when do they backfire and cause someone to dig in? Yamil Velez, a political scientist at Columbia University, set up an experiment using chatbots and found that people can change their mind, even on deeply held beliefs. Except under one condition: when the chatbot is rude.
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Police rarely move between jobs and departments. But according to a paper co-authored by the University of Chicago law professor John Rappaport, officers aren’t necessarily choosing to stay in the same place—a lot of policies have made it costly for them to switch. And that lack of mobility can have all kinds of ripple effects.
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Americans love local government. In a December 2023 Pew Research survey, 61 percent of respondents had a favorable view of their local government while 77 percent had an unfavorable view of the federal government. But behind this veneer of goodwill is a disturbing truth: Local government is driving a housing crisis that is raising rents, lowering economic mobility and productivity, and negatively impacting wages.
Host Jerusalem Demsas talks to Atlantic deputy executive editor Yoni Appelbaum and Yale Law professor David Schleicher about how local government is fueling the housing crisis.
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There’s a traditional line of thinking about the history of Black people and the law. It describes how slaves were entirely shut out of the legal system, disenfranchised and bereft of even a modicum of legal know-how or protection.
But research from the UC Berkeley professor Dylan C. Penningroth (in his book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights) upends that narrative by tracing the overlooked history of how Black people used the law in everyday life: through rights of contract, property, marriage, and more—even under slavery and Jim Crow.
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The 2010s saw attitudes—on issues such as race, immigration, and gender—shift to the left. Liberals became more liberal. And then a "wokeness" backlash began.
The backlash, though, didn’t just come from conservatives. It came from people all over the political spectrum. Host Jerusalem Demsas talks with the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg about the death of "wokeness"—and whether we might miss it when it’s gone.
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Is there such a thing as “balancing the ticket”? How much can a vice-presidential nominee influence the election? Host Jerusalem Demsas talks with political commentator and journalist Matt Yglesias about Kamala Harris’s recent pick of Tim Walz as her running mate and whether that choice could sway undecided voters.
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From 1999 and 2019, researchers found that the maternal-mortality rate in the U.S. more than doubled. Over the years, these findings filtered their way through academic journals and the news media to the general public.
But was there something more to this story? How had the U.S. become such a deadly place for pregnant women?
In this episode of Good on Paper, host Jerusalem Demsas talks to Saloni Dattani, a researcher at Our World in Data. Her work—built on the research of other skeptical scientists—found that the seeming rise in maternal deaths was actually the result of something very simple: a measurement change.
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If Democrats care more about climate change than Republicans, then why is Texas the nation’s leader in renewable energy?
Host Jerusalem Demsas talks to Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University, about how the Lone Star State emerged as America’s No. 1 renewable-energy producer, despite its politics—and about the broken bureaucracy that’s preventing more states from going green.
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America is in a “loneliness epidemic.” But is turning to religion the answer?
Host Jerusalem Demsas talks to Arthur Brooks, a professor at the Harvard Business School who teaches classes on leadership and happiness. He’s also a contributing writer for The Atlantic where he has written that happiness comes, in part, through faith.
Brooks argues that the “nones”—people who identify with no religion—are unhappier (at least, on average) than people who believe in a greater power.
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School choice is usually about providing parents an option outside the traditional public school system. Between 2010 and 2021, public charter school enrollment in the U.S. more than doubled.
But LAUSD did something different. It recognized the growing appetite for choice and wondered whether the normal public school system could help satisfy it. It set up a limited school choice program in 2012, the kind of experiment ripe for an economics paper, and thankfully economist Christopher Campos took notice. Host Jerusalem Demsas talks to Campos about his paper, revealing that when public high schools were forced to compete for enrollment, achievement gaps narrowed, and college enrollment took off.
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Does everyone really need therapy?
The destigmatization of mental health problems—and the normalization that many people do struggle with severe mental illnesses—has been one of the great cultural transformations of the 21st century. But has this shift carried unintended consequences?
After all, what if therapy is less like exercise—something everyone should do to be healthy—and more like prescription medication—something you should only really use if you need it? Host Jerusalem Demsas talks to Dr. Lucy Foulkes, a researcher at the University of Oxford who has become increasingly concerned that raising awareness is not unambiguously good.
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Does an aging workforce mean greater worker power?
One of the takeaways from pro-worker advocates during the pandemic financial crisis was that employees saw fantastic gain. As demand for workers skyrocketed, employees got to be choosy. What bosses called “The Great Resignation” was actually workers having the power to demand better wages and working conditions, as well as the willingness to quit jobs that wouldn’t offer those things.
But economist Adam Ozimek warns that people may be taking the wrong lesson about tight labor markets, and that the coming labor shortage isn’t cause for celebration—but concern.
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Are young men becoming radicalized? Could they be further to the right than even their fathers and grandfathers? These are big questions that have yet to be answered definitively, but in some countries, electoral results and polls suggest that a meaningful contingent of young men are frustrated and may be finding a home in radical spaces.
Host Jerusalem Demsas talks to Dr. Alice Evans, a researcher at Stanford University who has been traveling the world, diving into qualitative and quantitative research to uncover why some societies are more equal than others. Her insights help tease out why some young men may be turning against the tide of egalitarianism.
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In 2020, two major protest movements defined our political landscape: the racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd and the anti-lockdown protests pushing against COVID-19 restrictions. At the time, these movements were seen by many as near polar opposites and were often defined by their extremes.
But did the two actually have much in common?
Host Jerusalem Demsas talks to Nick Papageorge, an economist at Johns Hopkins University, who co-authored a paper called, “Who Protests, What Do They Protest, and Why?” His research calls into question our assumptions about the participants of mass protest. Are they really dominated by fringe elements? How can we tell? And what does it mean to misunderstand the people that make up social movements?
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In recent years, there's been an overarching narrative that immigration is seen as an obvious political loser for the left and a clear political winner for the right. But does that theory make sense?
Host Jerusalem Demsas talks to John Burn-Murdoch, columnist and chief data reporter for the Financial Times, about the factors that influence public opinion on immigration—and why it may not be as simple as political commentators would have you believe.
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Four years after the Great Remote-Work Experiment began, the public debate has boiled down to: Bosses hate it and workers love it. But is that all there is to it? Who really benefits from remote work—and who doesn’t? And why is it that women with more job experience suffer the most?
Host Jerusalem Demsas talks to Natalia Emanuel, a labor economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who co-authored a paper looking at the effects of remote work. Do people understand the tradeoffs they’re making when they choose to work from home? What’s the impact on the team if even one person is remote? And does remote work benefit older workers at the expense of younger ones?
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Have you ever heard a commonly held belief or a fast-developing worldview and asked: Is that idea right? Or just good on paper? Each week, host Jerusalem Demsas and a guest take a closer look at the facts and research that challenge the popular narratives of the day, to better understand why we believe what we believe. Good on Paper launches Tuesday, June 4.
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