Women are more likely to register to vote and to actually vote than men. They are also more likely to boycott and sign petitions and volunteer. Yet, in poll after poll, question after question, month after month, and across ideology, race, and age, more women than men are telling us “I don’t know.”
Since August, of the 98 questions we’ve polled that offered “I don’t know” as a response, women consistently selected it at higher rates.
If you spent any time on the internet in 2025, you probably came across someone asking some version of the question: “Are Republicans really happier than Democrats?”
Whether in mainstream media, academia, or on Substack, it seemed like everyone wanted to know why conservatives appeared to report better mental health than liberals.
One potential answer, hypothesized by Derek Thompson, is that this is more a function of how emotions are expressed, rather than a true imbalance in happiness. In essence, both sides experience similar levels of negative emotions, but conservatives are more likely to “externalize,” bonding with others over conspiracy theories and anger, while liberals are more likely to “internalize,” retreating into their own shells. That’s why a Tufts study Thompson discussed found that conservatives had a slightly worse mood than liberals did, despite having much better mental health.
That seemed like a plausible explanation. But it’s not foolproof. After all, older surveys measuring “happiness,” rather than “mood” or “mental health,” have also found conservatives with an advantage.
But ultimately, despite the level of discourse on the subject, there just isn’t a ton of polling that looks at this question in detail. So, of course, we decided to conduct our own.
Last week, we looked at whether men are really lonelier than women. This week, we’re breaking down the supposed happiness gap between conservatives and liberals.
Men are lonely. Maybe it’s because they are marrying later and working harder. Maybe it’s because “women are outpacing them in school and at work.” Maybe it’s because they don’t know how to text or because they don’t have old boys’ clubs anymore.
We’ve read all sorts of takes on mental health over the last several years, but few of them are substantiated by hard data. That’s why we at The Argument decided to conduct a study over the last few months centered around mental health.
Over the course of three national surveys of registered voters conducted between August and December, we asked 15 questions — five per survey — centered around loneliness, mental health, anxiety, and socialization. Each response was mapped to a numerical value between -1 and 1, with -1 indicating the most antisocial and 1 indicating the most social response.
With nearly 23,000 responses to survey questions distributed over more than 4,500 individual survey respondents, our dataset is rich and lends itself well to subgroup analysis.
Here’s what we found.
A few months ago, a 2021 Pew Research Center study on Americans and their reading habits caught my eye. In particular, this survey said something astounding about the number of Americans who read: Seventy-seven percent of Americans said they read a book (in whole or in part) over the preceding year in some shape or form.1
That number seemed a bit high to me, especially given the other evidence we have. A 2022 survey from the National Endowment for the Arts found that just 49% of adults reported reading a book in the last year. And sure, the literacy rate is probably higher for registered voters, who tend to be more educated than nonvoters, but does that mean the reading rate is 28 percentage points higher?
The Pew result didn’t align with other trends I was familiar with either. We know that literacy rates have been declining for a while now, and a study based on the American Time Use Survey data found that just 16% of adults read for pleasure on a daily basis — down from 28% in 2004.
The Argument readers are invited to a conversation between Jerusalem Demsas and Brink Lindsey, senior vice president at the Niskanen Center, about his new book, The Permanent Problem, on Wednesday, Jan. 21, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center.
Event page
America’s abundance movement has focused on regulatory reform and housing policy — necessary fights, but perhaps insufficient ones. This conversation will explore the deeper diagnosis offered in The Permanent Problem: that our crisis isn’t just one of scarcity but of meaning.
Join us for a conversation about why the abundance movement may need to expand its ambitions: from making things affordable to rebuilding the communities and shared purposes that make abundance worth having.
Reserve your spot.
In a recent article in Bloomberg, David Zipper argued that “We Still Don’t Know if Robotaxis Are Safer Than Human Drivers.” Big if true! In fact, I’d been under the impression that Waymos are not only safer than humans, the evidence to date suggests that they are staggeringly safer, with somewhere between an 80% to 90% lower risk of serious crashes.
“We don’t know” sounds like a modest claim, but in this case, where it refers to something that we do in fact know about an effect size that is extremely large, it’s a really big claim.
It’s also completely wrong. The article drags its audience into the author’s preferred state of epistemic helplessness by dancing around the data rather than explaining it. And Zipper got many of the numbers wrong; in some cases, I suspect, as a consequence of a math error.
There are things we still don’t know about Waymo crashes. But we know far, far more than Zipper pretends. I want to go through his full argument and make it clear why that’s the case.
In many places, Zipper’s piece relied entirely on equivocation between “robotaxis” — that is, any self-driving car — and Waymos. Obviously, not all autonomous vehicle startups are doing a good job. Most of them have nowhere near the mileage on the road to say confidently how well they work.
But fortunately, no city official has to decide whether to allow “robotaxis” in full generality. Instead, the decision cities actually have to make is whether to allow or disallow Waymo, in particular.
Fortunately, there is a lot of data available about Waymo, in particular. If the thing you want to do is to help policymakers make good decisions, you would want to discuss the safety record of Waymos, the specific cars that the policymakers are considering allowing on their roads.1
Imagine someone writing “we don’t know if airplanes are safe — some people say that crashes are extremely rare, and others say that crashes happen every week.” And when you investigate this claim further, you learn that what’s going on is that commercial aviation crashes are extremely rare, while general aviation crashes — small personal planes, including ones you can build in your garage — are quite common.
It’s good to know that the plane that you built in your garage is quite dangerous. It would still be extremely irresponsible to present an issue with a one-engine Cessna as an issue with the Boeing 737 and write “we don’t know whether airplanes are safe — the aviation industry insists they are, but my cousin’s plane crashed just three months ago.”
The safety gap between, for example, Cruise2 and Waymo is not as large as the safety gap between commercial and general aviation, but collapsing them into a single category sows confusion and moves the conversation away from the decision policymakers actually face: Should they allow Waymo in their cities?
Zipper’s first specific argument against the safety of self-driving cars is that while they do make safer decisions than humans in many contexts, “self-driven cars make mistakes that humans would not, such as plowing into floodwater3 or driving through an active crime scene where police have their guns drawn.” The obvious next question is: Which of these happens more frequently? How does the rate of self-driving cars doing something dangerous a human wouldn’t compare to the rate of doing something safe a human wouldn’t?
This obvious question went unasked because the answer would make the rest of Bloomberg’s piece pointless. As I’ll explain below, Waymo’s self-driving cars put people in harm’s way something like 80% to 90% less often than humans for a wide range of possible ways of measuring “harm’s way.”
The “we don’t know” argument relies on indifference to the numbers: sometimes they’re better, sometimes they’re worse; therefore it is impossible to say whether, on the whole, they are better or worse.
They say that if you really want to know a person’s character, you should observe how she treats her servants. On Christmas vacation, I realized I didn’t like what this said about me.
I was at my parents’ house; my oldest daughter was playing board games with her grandparents, and my youngest was trying to befriend my sister’s cat. My wife was napping, my brother was cooking, and I was yelling at Claude.
I was, to be clear, incredibly impressed by Claude on the whole — specifically Claude Code running Opus 4.5, Anthropic’s command-line “agent,” a large language model that can build websites and do projects for you. I had absentmindedly pitched it an idea one day earlier, and now we had a functioning website and several hours of playable content. Working with Claude was like having an eager, responsive, literally indefatigable development team on tap — on Christmas Eve! I had never felt so powerful.
I wasn’t in love with what it was doing to me.
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In college, I was once told that the really hard part of programming was knowing, in sufficient detail, what you wanted the computer to do. This was not my experience of programming.
In my experience of programming, the really hard part was figuring out which packages weren’t installed or weren’t updated or were in the wrong folder, causing the test we’d done in class to completely fail to work in the same way on my own computer. The next really hard part was Googling everything the debugger spat out to find an explanation of how to make it go away.
I hated programming. I studied it because at my university, it seemed like everyone studied it; I studied it because it was where the good jobs were; I studied it because I was envious of what my friends who could program could do, the way they could sit down and tap at their keyboard for half an hour and make a website — a kludgy, messy website, but a website nevertheless — come to life.
If I worked 10 times as hard as in all my other classes combined, I could get good grades, but I never felt the magic. Programming was an unending drudgery of package installations, looking up how libraries worked, figuring out why the code still didn’t work, fixing it, and then finding that the code still didn’t work for new, frustrating reasons.
Claude Code solves all of that. Programming, now, really is just a matter of knowing in sufficient detail what you want the computer to do; no small matter, but a meaningful one, a fun one, an important one. Coding, a task that mostly tested my frustration tolerance, had been turned into writing, a task that I can barely be induced to stop doing when my drafts are already way too long.
Now, 99% of the time, it feels like magic. The remaining 1% is absolutely maddening.
This isn’t a totally new feeling: a feeling of frustration somewhere between hitting your printer when it isn’t working and yelling at a puppy for peeing on the couch. But I can tell, using Claude Code, that it is going to be a big part of my life going forward, and I don’t want “yelling at the printer” to be a big part of my personality.
I was inspired to try out Claude Code by the insistence of some people I respect that “This Is It. AGI — that is, general artificial intelligence, variously defined but often meaning artificial intelligence that can do everything humans can do on a computer — is Here.”
I knew that Claude Code wasn’t going to be AGI. But I will say this: A lot of the time, it feels like it is. That is, if you happen to run across the kind of problems that Claude Code is really good at solving, instead of a bunch of the kinds of problems it’s really bad at.
And precisely because it is so good most of the time, when it’s incredibly dumb, it is maddening in a way that I’ve never found in any previous AI system. When a toddler gets a multiplication problem wrong, it’s not maddening; it’s kind of cool they were attempting multiplication at all.
But Claude Code is good enough that it’s easy to start to relate to it as, well, an almost-human employee, with an element of how you relate to a critical household appliance. You send it specs, it builds them. You ask questions, it answers them.
Some part of your brain starts to rely on a new affordance. I can delegate tasks to Claude. I can whisper things and see them spring to life full-formed.
And then, sometimes, you can’t.
A good forecaster doesn’t start with the future; she starts with the past. I wanted to answer the question “What should we expect from AI in 2026?” and so I began to reflect on what had happened this last year. If you’re interested in doing some forecasting of your own, stop reading for a moment and jot down a few notes (or comment below) about how you think AI changed in the last year.
Most people can’t name a single thing that changed from the beginning to the end of the year, even while the technology improved massively.
The best widely available general purpose image model on Jan. 1, 2025 was Midjourney V 6.1. The best today, I’d argue, is Google’s Gemini 3 Pro Image Preview (which is branded as Nano Banana Pro, and available to test out for free). Here are some prompts that I think showcase the differences (copied these straight from my conversations with the chatbots so please excuse the typos):
“photorealistic image of four children sitting on a couch gathered around a laptop, watching something. some of them are sitting on the back of the couch so as to get a good view. their postures are varied and absurd but they’re all engrossed in what they’re watching”
Here’s a response from the version of Midjourney available Jan. 1, 2025:
The only thing emerging faster than the AI arms race in America is the debate over what to do about the workers who AI will displace.
Many of the loudest voices are also pitching some of the most ambitious ideas. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is interested in implementing a universal basic income (UBI) — an experimental idea that would require not only a gigantic budget but also massive new infrastructure to develop and implement. UBI sounds like a simple solution, but any new program — particularly one aimed at universality — would need to make decisions about eligibility, implementation, and oversight that are complex and politically contentious.
While politicians and tech optimists are out there pitching programs that are tough to build consensus around — or overly specific to the point of being unworkable — we already have a boring, scalable solution to the problem of mass job loss.
It’s called unemployment insurance (UI).
The best economic policy is flexible, automatic, and responsive to a range of shocks. UI already exists in all 50 states and has a strong track record of responding to technological disruption in the labor market.
We don’t yet have a clear sense of exactly how big AI’s labor-market disruptions will be — or who would be most immediately affected. By bolstering a long-running program that already serves as a social safety net for the unemployed, the economy can endure whatever shocks AI might deliver.
Why build UBI when we already have UI?
A note before today’s column.
Yesterday’s shooting in Minneapolis is another sign of this administration’s escalating authoritarianism. Not only did an ICE agent kill a woman at point-blank range, but senior officials immediately sprung into action to justify the killing of an American citizen.
Renee Nicole Good was 37 years old. She is survived by her 6-year-old child.
I wish I had something profound to say about this. Some advice or course of action that could make this right. But there really isn’t anything that can make this right. A woman is dead and her killer is free.
It can feel weird to talk about anything else other than the biggest story of the day, but the mission of The Argument is to engage in the most important debates that will define the policy and political direction of the alternative to Trump. And just a couple hours after Good was shot, Trump was posting online about his newest housing proposals.
How I imagine Trump will reveal his anti-Blackstone strategy at Davos. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
People forget, but J.D. Vance was a key architect of the populist myth that BlackRock is the primary villain in the housing crisis.
On June 9, 2021, the then-candidate for Ohio Senate approvingly retweeted a right-wing anonymous Twitter account that went viral for the claim that “Blackrock is buying every single family house they can find, paying 20-50% above asking price and outbidding normal home buyers.”
Vance’s addition was to blame “The Left” for ignoring this problem because BlackRock was pro-DEI: “Woke capitalism: culture war against your values with one hand, robbing you blind with the other,” he tweeted.
The BlackRock myth1 spread quickly, culminating in yesterday’s announcement by President Donald Trump that he will be “taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it.”2 Like Vance, Trump blamed corporate ownership of housing for undermining young people’s ability to own a home.
The MAGA right are not the only group interested in this story. Left-leaning commentators and Democratic leadership also exhibited a bizarre fixation on institutional investors as a root cause of housing unaffordability. Not only is this false, but recent research indicates that institutional investors entering the housing market actually increase rental options and affordability (more on this later).
If you’ve been enjoying The Argument and would like to share it with friends and family for the holidays, you’re in luck! You can save 15% now through Dec. 24 when you gift a subscription to The Argument using the link below.
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If I only watched movies where the character turns directly to the camera and says “I’m exactly the kind of liberal you are,” I would not watch very many movies. Still, it’s hard not to doom when every holiday season I’m accosted with anti-development, NIMBY-coded feel-good rom-coms.
Last year, I stumbled onto An Autumn Romance1, wherein a librarian loses her job and must, of course, move to a small Montana town to live with her brother. Her brother is working to “save” a historic hotel from developers who have bought it with plans to turn it into a resort and “bring more money into town.” One of those developers, played by Chad Michael Murray (!!), is a former townie who (you guessed it) is now a big-money-guy-who-has-lost-touch-with-what-really-matters.
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The librarian discovers that because the hotel is more than 100 years old, it’s eligible for landmark status2 — they just have to prove that a significant historical event took place on the property. You know where this is going, I know where this is going, and yet, I still can’t believe it.
Our main character discovers a photo of Teddy Roosevelt pictured in front of the hotel, saving the hotel and showing Chad Michael Murray that everything he’s been looking for is in this small Montana town.
The plot of An Autumn Romance was designed in a lab to give me an aneurysm, but it’s hardly the first. Two Weeks Notice even has my beloved Sandra Bullock lie in front of a bulldozer to prevent the erection of an apartment building.3
I’d been thinking for a long time about the prevalence of the anti-development holiday romcom when I saw a recent piece by comedian and writer Jeff Maurer who came up with his own, depressing, answer for why anti-development themes do better than pro-development ones in movies:
“YIMBY narratives aren’t compatible with screenwriting principles or with human psychology, generally,” Maurer argued, adding that “movies inevitably focus on the fear of loss, not the potential for gain.”
Maurer certainly has more expertise in the screenwriting business than I do, but I don’t think this is quite right. 4
First, because there is at least one very good YIMBY TV show: Show Me a Hero, starring Oscar Isaac. It’s the story of how NIMBYs in Yonkers, New York, stubbornly opposed the development of townhomes for low-income families. It’s a complicated (and tragic) TV show, but the villains are pretty obviously the NIMBYs. There are even subplots tracing the lives of low-income public housing residents who end up in the new development. 5
So it’s clearly possible to poignantly express the benefits of new housing through film, though I’d grant that it’s probably more difficult.
But why then has NIMBYism loomed so large in the genre?
Well, the holidays are a time when people tend to go back to their childhood homes, creating the perfect setting for reflecting on community, growing up, the poignancy of change, and tradition. In the same way that coming-of-age films augur change, dynamism, adventure, and striking out into the unknown, Christmas films set up the exact opposite dynamic.
Further, the very same forces that make YIMBYism politically hard — that losses from development prevention are concentrated and benefits are diffuse — are what make YIMBY narratives more complicated. It’s not that a complex film showing the knock-on benefits and harms of new housing is impossible, but it’s much easier to showcase conflict of a more direct sort: Developer bulldozes a family’s beloved Christmas treefarm.
For low-budget rom-coms, defaulting to a simpler, tried-and-true narrative is just safer than trying to subvert the genre.