Watch giddy Taylor Swift celebrate Travis Kelce’s surprising trick play during Chiefs game

Activist group Community Change Action displays a banner supporting child care funding near the Capitol, in December 2023 in Washington, DC. | Brian Stukes/Getty Images for Community Change Action Caregiving policies are having a moment in the 2024 election. Back in June, before President Joe Biden exited the race, the first presidential debate moderator asked both candidates how they’d help families better afford child care, noting that prices averaged over $11,000 per child in 2023. (Both Biden and former President Donald Trump dodged the question.) New care policy proposals then surfaced on the campaign trail over the summer, as vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance endorsed an expanded child tax credit (CTC), followed by Vice President Kamala Harris endorsing her own expanded credit on top of a new CTC for families with newborns. Both campaigns have said they’d fight for paid family leave and Harris recently said she’d cap child care costs at 7 percent of a family’s income.  If some of these ideas sound familiar, it’s because the push for “care economy” policies — ranging from paid family leave and an expanded CTC to affordable child care, universal preschool, elder care, and higher wages for care workers — was a central focus for advocates and Democrats during the 2021 Build Back Better Act negotiations. However, those talks fell apart after Democratic leadership failed to reach a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who had concerns over the size and scope of the package. The following year, care policies were ultimately excluded from the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act Democrats passed into law. Advocates are now pressing politicians to redouble their commitment to care legislation — citing polling that suggests such investments are not just good policy but smart politics. Care organizations are particularly pinning hopes on Harris winning in November, as a Democratic victory increases the chances for significant new federal spending. But should Harris actually win and advocates get another opportunity to push for federal policy, what, if anything, would they do? How, if at all, are they reflecting on their last failed push, and preparing for the future, especially given the strong chance that Republicans win the Senate? The odds of a Democratic trifecta are low.  Over the past several months Vox has been speaking with lawmakers, strategists, philanthropic funders, congressional aides, think tank experts, and leaders of care advocacy groups to gauge the future of federal care policy. The interviews revealed a simmering debate over whether advocates should narrow their focus to one or two agenda items in a future legislative push or whether compromise represents premature capitulation, a sign of adopting a limiting “scarcity mentality.” Beyond the tactical debate, deeper tensions have surfaced over whether future efforts should focus on the most vulnerable families or build out new programs for more people, and broader questions have emerged about who sets the agenda in Democratic policymaking, and whether there’s room in the party for real dissent. Should Democrats have prioritized more? In the summer and fall of 2021, as congressional negotiations for Build Back Better were heating up, activists saw a major opportunity to push new investments in paid family leave, child care, elder care, universal preschool and an expanded CTC. How exactly to describe this sweeping legislation wasn’t clear. “Cradle-to-grave” social welfare? A jobs and climate package? Human infrastructure? While Sen. Manchin had signaled he opposed spending as much as the White House and House Democrats were prepared to invest ($3.5 trillion over 10 years) and that he disapproved of budget tricks including temporary programs he suspected leaders would try to make permanent later on, advocates were optimistic that with enough pressure, Manchin would come around on most things. Manchin had also emphasized that he opposed expanding the CTC in a way that eliminated its connection to work, but activists believed he’d ultimately cave on that as well, given emerging research that showed how a CTC without work requirements successfully reduced child poverty by 30 percent during the pandemic. Both the White House and Senate Democrats were staking out political capital in declaring an extension of the pandemic CTC to be their top priority, too.  So when negotiations for Build Back Better ultimately collapsed in late December 2021, care advocates, White House officials, and Senate Democrats insisted there was ultimately nothing else they could have done, that Manchin had been disingenuous and never intended to strike a deal in the first place. (Manchin had expressed openness to policies like a permanent expansion of preschool and a larger CTC with a work requirement.) By the time January rolled around, care advocates were loath to adopt any new strategy, insisting they just needed to keep fighting and that eventually Manchin would come to his senses. Inflation was soaring by that point. Anyone who challenged this strategic consensus faced consequences. In February 2022, Patrick Gaspard, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, acknowledged in a memo that the House’s version of the Build Back Better Act had no path in the Senate, and urged lawmakers to focus on lowering health care costs, addressing the climate crisis, and reducing child care expenses through initiatives like universal pre-K. Shortly after, a coalition of care advocates voted to expel CAP from their group for throwing its weight behind a proposal that didn’t include an expanded CTC.  Also in February 2022, representatives from an umbrella group representing large, private child care providers spoke with Manchin about possibly moving forward on expanding the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) — a longstanding federal program aimed at reducing child care costs for low-income families. Other care economy advocates grew furious, and accused the group of sabotaging their larger, more progressive agenda. (While CCDBG has bipartisan support in Congress and is massively underfunded, many liberal child care advocates oppose its work requirement and want to see policymakers increase public subsidies to all or most families, not just poor households.) “That was probably one of the ugliest negotiations I’ve seen in terms of stifling folks,” said one child care advocate who requested anonymity to describe their private coalition calls. People who held very senior positions in the Obama administration on child care were saying the same things about moving forward on CCDBG, the advocate added, “and were being met as some sort of public enemy #1.” A Democratic Senate aide, speaking on anonymity to describe their own private conversations, recalled hearing through the congressional grapevine in the winter of 2022 that Manchin might be open to a deal on expanding CCDBG. This sounded encouraging to the aide, who had already accepted that the window for some sort of investment on the scale of the House’s version of Build Back Better had passed. But when this aide broached the idea of a new path forward with care advocacy groups, they too were met with backlash. “We had some really tough conversations with outside advocates when we tried to change course and got some very bad reactions,” the aide told Vox. “The idea to expand and pump out CCDBG, I think, fell really short of what they were trying to do.” The aide had hoped that, given their boss’s record on championing care policies, advocates would have been more understanding about a strategic pivot, and see it more as an effort to be nimble and respond to an evolving situation, and not about throwing groups under the bus. “Honestly those were very bad conversations and I look back at that time with a lot of sadness,” the aide said.”These things can get kind of intense and personal.”  Finally, after more than five months of resisting a new plan, and more than three months after Manchin expressed openness to reviewing a proposal on expanding CCDBG, Sens. Patty Murray and Tim Kaine released a proposal to expand CCDBG aid for more than a million new children. But most political observers felt it was too little, too late, and that the door for reaching a deal had closed.  “I mean, it was like a Hail Mary, you could see the window was closing and that’s finally when [advocates] came to try and find some compromise,” said one leader who supported pivoting much earlier. “There was this mentality that if you show your willingness to compromise early it’s going to kill your chances, and I think it was ultimately their unwillingness to compromise earlier that killed it.”  When does perfect become the enemy of good? The last few years seem to have revealed that within the Democratic Party, there’s not much space for debating competing care policy ideas. In the fall of 2021, as advocates began circling the wagon to get their policies through congressional negotiations, Matt Bruenig, the founder of the left-wing People’s Policy Project, came out with a number of critiques about the package — for instance, that the Senate’s paid leave bill would exclude at least 30 percent of new parents, that the House’s version was full of giveaways to insurance companies, that the proposed child care bill could lead to massive hikes in cost for middle-class families, and that pre-K and child care bills were crafted in ways that made adoption by Republican states unlikely. Democratic lawmakers and care advocates “mov[ed] quickly to dull a dagger,” as Politico put it at the time. Child care proponents publicly dismissed Bruenig, arguing he wasn’t closely reading the legislation and was spreading “a viral set of misinformation.” Paid leave advocates similarly declined to raise any concerns. “I trust the judgment of the Ways and Means Committee and of politicians who need to square the fact that there are lots of different interests at play,” one national paid leave advocate told the American Prospect when questioned about the insurance giveaways. Another said they were not “choosing fights” as negotiations progressed. Bruenig wasn’t the only person to notice weaknesses in the bills. When another think tank analyst raised issues, they were similarly told to keep quiet. Anyone raising concerns at this vulnerable negotiating stage was letting perfect be the enemy of good, or not grasping that this was the best possible version lawmakers could pass at this time, and that modifications could always be made later.Except a few weeks after Bruenig’s critique about rising child care costs for unsubsidized families, Senate Democrats quietly revised their bill, significantly raising the income threshold to address that concern. Similar dynamics emerged the next year when attempts to strike a new deal with Manchin were met with fierce outcry. The incentives to keep one’s head down and go along with the coalition were real. Bruenig has called this policymaking apparatus both dysfunctional and undemocratic. “If this nightmarish process actually generated good policy that was put into law, maybe you could forgive people for engaging in it,” he wrote in May of 2022. “But in reality, it keeps generating extremely broken policies that mostly don’t pass anyway and that fail to live up to expectations even when they do.”Even if some believe it’s unwise to debate legislative details during ongoing negotiations, since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, there’s been little space or energy to explore alternative ideas. “Now is allegedly supposed to be the time when people are to say, ‘Okay, let’s hash it out,’ but it still doesn’t happen,” Bruenig told Vox. Care advocates think they deserve more credit for coming close As it became even clearer over the summer of 2022 that child care investments were not going to be part of what ultimately became the Inflation Reduction Act, child care advocates began ramping up threats of economic calamity. A letter sent that July from 26 national organizations warned lawmakers that omitting child care aid from the reconciliation package would push the early childhood sector “closer to a catastrophic funding cliff that will affect America’s entire economy” and “preven[t] countless moms from pursuing economic security — let alone economic success.” These warnings continued to escalate over the next two years. The following summer, advocates warned that if Congress failed to renew expiring Covid-19 child care funding, then 70,000 child care programs would likely close, resulting in 3.2 million children losing access to care, and mothers in particular would be forced to quit their jobs or work part-time. This “child care cliff” idea originated with the left-wing Century Foundation and was echoed by Democratic and union leadership like Sen. Murray and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. It was repeated in more than a dozen national news outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Axios, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC. As I reported at the time, leading experts quietly disagreed with the scope of the projected closures, but were staying quiet so as to not upset others in their child care coalition. And indeed, industry-wide collapse never followed, while more moms with preschool and school-age children subsequently joined the labor force. Jobs in the child care sector continued to grow, too.  Looking back, White House aides maintain they did all they could have done to reach a deal with Manchin on care policies, as evidenced by the fact that they were ultimately able to negotiate successfully with him on climate change. Leading care advocates also deny any missteps. They say that, upon reflection, they are proud of all they have accomplished over the last four years, despite losing the bruising reconciliation fight. They point to wins like the new Biden administration rule to lower child care costs, a new law protecting nursing parents, and that care agenda policies have remained a top priority lawmakers regularly highlight.  “In the Build Back Better fight, the care community was able to get care policies out of the US House, even though that was not assured for quite a long time, and we lost by just one vote in the US Senate,” said Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, the executive director of MomsRising, a national advocacy group. “As a community we were punching above our weight. We did get care through the administrative level and through the House so what that means is we have to double down now.”  In a post-mortem of the Build Back Better fight published by the progressive think tank New America, care leaders interviewed similarly praised the coalition for being small and mighty. “While the outcome of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better (BBB) social agenda is widely known, much of the progress care advocates made given their minuscule financial resources is a big success story that deserves more attention,” the report said. Though some have argued advocates erred in refusing to pick one or two policies to focus on, activists publicly maintain that they are ultimately stronger if they push multiple programs all together.  In their own post-mortem of the American Rescue Plan, the Century Foundation pointed to historic levels of funding for child care and home care as evidence that “a holistic framework across care movements and strategies is impactful.” The liberal think tank argued that trying to silo aspects of the care agenda from one another “creates a scarcity myth and a fight for resources and helps maintain unfair power structures.” What care advocates see in the climate movement Elliot Haspel, the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, says part of the challenge of figuring out strategy is that child care advocacy does not have a single leader or single organization. “In some ways [this] means more voices can be heard, more small-d democratic, but it also can create challenges,” he told Vox, contrasting this with the 1990s, when the Children Defense Fund, and specifically its leaders Marian Wright Edelman and Helen Blank, “were basically the child care points of contact.” Past legislative battles may offer insight: following the defeat of universal health care under President Bill Clinton and cap-and-trade for carbon emissions under President Barack Obama, advocates for health care reform and climate went through years of painful reflection and recalibration of their tactics and goals. To get legislation through the legislative process, leaders agreed, they’d have to change course.  Health care proponents had to figure out how to bypass a strong suspicion of socialized medicine. So, with the past failed health care push top of mind, lawmakers drafted the Affordable Care Act to allow for a market-based approach with industry buy-in. Meanwhile, climate advocates realized that they had overestimated the power of businesses in the GOP coalition  An influential 2013 report by a Harvard scholar helped push the climate movement in its next decade to embrace grassroots activism, while practical experience led climate groups to negotiate more concertedly with Manchin in 2022 to get the IRA over the finish line. The care movement has had no comparable recalibration, at least yet. If anything, top care leaders point to the climate movement not as a coalition that had to make tough strategic compromises but as an example of the power of big political spending and a commitment to fighting over many years. “What’s the difference between the climate change movement and the care movement?” Rowe-Finkbeiner, of MomsRising, asked in the New America report. “Tens of million dollars and several decades [of concerted organizing].”  The report noted that the top three environmental lobbying groups outspent care lobbying groups in 2021 and 2022 about three to one. In addition to investing more political dollars, the New America review recommended building a bigger coalition including more faith leaders and businesses, working with Hollywood to feature more diverse characters and storylines about caregiving, and getting serious about publicly battling the opposition, such as large industry groups that fight corporate tax increases. An aide for Sen. Murray also pushed back on the idea that there’s not enough room to update ideas, noting their boss’s Child Care for Working Families Act, which has 42 co-sponsors, has evolved based on feedback, with newer changes including the expansion of eligibility and increased grants to providers.  “This was the product of countless discussions with other Senate offices, unions, policy experts, and other stakeholders,” the aide said. “Murray wanted to write a bill that could win the most possible support to actually get passed into law.” Where things might go after the election In interviews with advocates, aides and policy experts, I’ve tried to glean a clearer sense of what might happen with care policies should Harris win in November. Some activists declined to discuss hypothetical scenarios at all, saying they would not “negotiate against themselves” by publicly signaling what they might compromise on, but others were willing to get more specific.  Assuming Harris wins but lacks a Washington trifecta, the two most commonly cited ideas I heard were an expansion of the CCDBG program for low-income families — as that’s something Republicans generally support — and an expansion of the child tax credit, as that bipartisan program is also set to expire next December, so Congress will likely plan to reauthorize it in some form.  One area of tension will likely be over whether to expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), which helps parents offset the cost of child care. Supporters of expanding the credit say it will make any deeper investments in the CCDBG go further, by making child care both more affordable and more accessible. Rates for CDCTC were last set in 2001, so they have not kept up with inflation and other increases in care costs. “There is a monumental opportunity that should not be squandered,” said Radha Mohan, the executive director of the Early Care and Education Consortium, which is lobbying for the expansion of the CDCTC. Other progressive child care groups have opposed it, as they see it as further entrenching a child care financing system they want to ultimately move away from. The White House declined to endorse expanding the CDCTC in its latest budget, favoring a new child care entitlement instead, though Biden did support increasing the tax credit in the American Rescue Plan.Aides say there is a real sense within the Democratic caucuses that lawmakers need to do something on care, since it was so clearly left on the cutting room floor in 2022. Some child care advocates worry that lawmakers might try to frame existing proposals to expand the CTC as sufficient. The National Women’s Law Center put out a brief last week on this concern, arguing that the CTC and child care should not be seen as interchangeable.  (There’s no doubt that many of these policies and acronyms can be confusing. In the first presidential debate, Biden mistakenly referred to the CTC, which can be used for any costs associated with raising kids,  as a “child care tax credit” — causing stress among child care advocates that the two will continue to be conflated.) Other care advocates are looking at the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act next year as a fresh opportunity for advancing their own priorities, since Republicans likely will agree to new social spending in exchange for renewing their business tax breaks. The real question is how much money will exist to support care policies given other commitments. Harris, for her part, has already pledged to bring back the pandemic-era CTC and create a new CTC for newborns, two items that could cost up to $1.6 trillion over 10 years. Some experts say lawmakers should not be afraid to go back to the drawing board. There is a tendency for groups to become “path dependent” on old ideas, even if there are better, more effectively designed policies out there.  Bruenig, for example, advocates for universal free child care along with home care allowances for those who don’t want to send their kids to day care. He believes these policies would be easier and fairer to implement than  Democratic proposals aimed at capping costs at 7 percent of a family’s income. He also says there’s no reason all the Democratic paid leave bills have to exclude nearly a third of new parents. In the next session of the Maryland state legislature, Democratic Del. Vaughn Stewart, with Bruenig’s help, will be introducing a bill to close that loophole in Maryland’s paid leave law. A divided government may force advocates to embrace more bipartisan solutions, and there are some signs that such work has already started. A new bipartisan working group of 30 child care experts and analysts convened throughout 2023 to try and find common ground, and new bipartisan working groups in the House and Senate also launched last year to focus on paid leave. Whether advocates would push for some or all of their care priorities together remains an open question. Rowe-Finkbeiner stressed that it’s important “the policies move together,” saying it’ll take a combination of them to  help families the most. Sen. Murray is optimistic that if Democrats win the Senate, it will be a Democratic majority that’s “markedly different” from the last time, and one that’s ready to make serious, long-term investments in child care. But if they don’t win the Senate, Murray told me, Democrats will still act. “I will always talk to anyone and everyone to make progress on child care in every single way possible,” she said. This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

Martha Stewart's makeup artist applies it "every day," telling People it's "how she gets that dewy look."

At least one victim alleged Estefania Primera — a Venezuelan illegal migrant who goes by the street name "La Barbie" — drugged her and brought men in to gang rape her while she was unconscious, court documents said.

It's Apple-picking season.

After a whirlwind cancer scare during the offseason, longtime radio voice John Walton is back in the Capitals broadcast booth.

No membership required to save.

60 Minutes XKamala Harris responded to Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of a planned 60 Minutes interview by encouraging voters to watch his rallies instead.The vice president didn’t want viewers to miss out after Trump canceled the sit-down, unhappy with the CBS News show’s fact-checking requirements.While it was hardly the normal recommendation for a White House nominee caught up in a tight race to the finish, Harris apparently thought that the more voters listened to Trump, the more likely they were to vote for her on November 5.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Shop the best at Best Buy's competing Prime Day sale!

These deals sure didn't miss the target.

A conservative think tank's estimate of the effect of Trump's and Harris' policies shows that a single-minded concern with the federal deficit makes no sense

San Diego Padres fans have embraced the "Beat L.A." chant with great enthusiasm ahead of the team's NLDS showdowns with the Dodgers on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Despite Fuerza Regida's local roots, cross-border superstardom and gargantuan streaming figures, the band has yet to be nominated for a Grammy, Latin or otherwise. Could that change soon?

Galaxy assistant coach Nick Theslof's grandmother was Vivi-Anne Hulten, a famous Olympic figure skater whose courage taught him valuable life lessons.

With another hurricane set to hit Florida this week, Donald Trump has doubled down on his lies about FEMA diverting money to immigrants. Meanwhile, the realities of climate change are lost under the his propaganda dump.

Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 hurricane, threatens disastrous winds and storm surge to the Tampa Bay area and the west coast of Florida, officials said Monday.

If the election were held today, according to the survey from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times, 51% of the likely L.A. County voters would choose Hochman, and 21% would cast a ballot for Gascón. That leaves 28% undecided.

The success of her single 'Tennessee Orange' put Megan Moroney on the map. Says the country singer now: 'I don't want to limit myself in any way.'

It doesn't matter what gender a doctor is, says one reader. Others say they have experienced the differences between men and women in medicine.

The scale of suffering since Oct. 7, 2023 must force the world to not settle for half measures—and solve the conflict once and for all.

The Housing Rights Initiative filed civil rights complaints Monday, alleging California landlords routinely discriminate against Section 8 tenants. The filings, with the California Civil Rights Department, were based on an undercover investigation.

Ronald Anthony Jones admits he was one of the men who abducted, raped and killed Lois Anne Haro in 1988. But did he pull the trigger?

For the first time since the end of Jim Crow, substantial numbers of Americans are considering fleeing jurisdictions where legalized vigilantism imperils their lives.

Every time I think of my old idea of midlife — that dreary pasture full of drab linens — laughter bubbles out of me.

Everett Titterington, who died at Pearl Harbor, was interred at Riverside National Cemetery after his remains were identified.

Mayor Bass' selection of Jim McDonnell 'shows a level of integrity when it comes to concern for the safety of Angelenos,' says a reader.

We already know U.S. gunmakers are guilty. Will they face consequences?

Many of us would like to think we are capable of heroism. Liz Cheney showed us how to actually do it by campaigning for Kamala Harris.

The stiff sentence given disgraced Colorado elections official Tina Peters should serve as a deterrent to others promoting Donald Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen. The judge was having none of her nonsense.

A married couple who work at Boeing jobs in El Segundo have filed state whistleblower lawsuits alleging retaliation after the man lodged safety and other complaints.

The staggering scale and grandeur of the Sierra Nevada make for a breathtaking autumn spectacle when the trees explode in gold and amber. And it's not too late to see this glorious show.

A Porter Ranch family lost their huge terraced yard to the 2019 Saddleridge fire, but it gave them a blank slate to create a fire-resistant native habitat.

Enjoy exceptional deals on tech before the holiday season for October's Prime Big Deals Days!

"Even my mom said that she could feel him talking to her, saying 'This is insane, Mom, what are you doing?'" Riley Keough writes in the new memoir "From Here to the Great Unknown."

Happy shopping!

The Chargers have one of the best kick returners in Derius Davis, but so far they've not had many chances to take advantage of the new special teams rules.

Harris’s approach to affordable housing has inched closer and closer to what’s known as “YIMBYism,” shorthand for “Yes In My Backyard.”

“They’re cheering us now,” I said to the soldier next to me in the jeep, as we drove through Beirut to applause and showers of rice. “But soon they’ll be shooting.” It was June 9, 1982, four days after Israel had invaded Lebanon. The war followed years of Palestinian rocket fire on northern Israel, but the proximate trigger was a Palestinian gunman’s attempt to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London. The goal of Operation Peace for Galilee, as then–Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin called it, was to push the terrorists out of rocket range, but Defense Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the army to advance farther north and besiege Beirut. After evicting the terrorists and the Syrian troops occupying the country, Israel hoped to install a Christian, pro-Western government that was committed to peace.I was serving in a reserve reconnaissance unit of the Israel Defense Forces at the time, but in civilian life, I was studying Middle East history. I’d learned that the Lebanese had often cheered invading armies but later turned on them. Previous efforts to pacify the country had uniformly failed. Sharon’s plan, I thought, was reckless. “We’ll never get out of here,” I said to the soldier as we drove, rice-pelted, through Beirut’s suburbs. “We’re stuck.”Stuck we were, both militarily and diplomatically. President Ronald Reagan at first backed the operation, but then, appalled by the number of civilian casualties, forced Israel’s troops to fall back to southern Lebanon. The U.S. Marines who replaced us also abandoned Beirut after 243 of them were killed by a suicide bomber from a previously unknown Shiite group named Hezbollah. Those same Iranian-backed terrorists relentlessly attacked IDF positions in the south, until finally, a full 18 years after they’d invaded Lebanon, the last Israeli soldiers withdrew.[Gal Beckerman: A naked desperation to be seen]Though Israel succeeded in freeing Lebanon of Syrian troops and evicting many Palestinian terrorists, and a peaceful Christian government emerged, that progress proved fragile. The new president was soon assassinated, and the country gradually came to be dominated by Hezbollah. On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah terrorists ambushed an IDF patrol, killing eight soldiers and capturing two. Israel responded with the Second Lebanon War.The conflict raged for 34 days, during which Hezbollah rockets pummeled Israeli cities and towns and IDF jets bombed strategic targets in Lebanon. President George W. Bush initially supported Israel’s right to self-defense, before recoiling from the high civilian casualty rate and demanding a cease-fire. A last-minute thrust by Israeli ground forces succeeded only in further antagonizing the Americans. Their response was United Nations Resolution 1701, which ended the fighting and instructed Hezbollah to withdraw to north of the Litani River, creating a buffer zone in the south of Lebanon.In this second war, I served as an IDF spokesperson, rather than a combat soldier. But on its last night, I volunteered for battlefield duty. My assignment was to help transport the remains of fallen soldiers out of the combat zone and back over the border to Israel. Their comrades watched us as we worked, their faces grim with disappointment and fatigue. More than 100 soldiers had died, yet none of us could say exactly for what.Although Israel managed to inflict a toll on Hezbollah—its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly regretted ambushing that patrol—it gained little in the long term. In defiance of Resolution 1701, Hezbollah deployed along Israel’s northern border and burrowed multiple attack tunnels beneath it. Directly opposite the frontier fort where I served after 2006, Hezbollah erected a huge billboard on which a laughing terrorist hoisted an Israeli soldier’s severed head.Israelis deluded ourselves by thinking that the war had deterred Hezbollah when, in fact, the war had deterred us. We remained largely passive while, over the next 17 years, Hezbollah expanded its rocket arsenal tenfold and grew to become one of the region’s most formidable military forces.Israel’s indifference ended after October 7, 2023. We now know that 3,000 terrorists of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit had been planning to smash through the border and ravage Israel’s north much as Hamas had in the south. Timely bombing by the Israeli air force preempted that attack, but Hezbollah compensated by shelling the Galilee. Nearly 100,000 Israelis became refugees in their own country, their fields and houses scorched.Historically, Israel has never done well with wars of attrition, yet Hezbollah was waging one that steadily crept south, toward the Sea of Galilee in the east and toward Haifa in the west. Israel’s return fire failed to deter Hezbollah and, by its very ineffectiveness, may have egged it on. Throughout, Hezbollah declared its readiness to agree to a cease-fire if Hamas did, but Hamas wanted a war in the north that would relieve the pressure it faced in Gaza. It was only a matter of time before Israel, assured that Hamas was sufficiently degraded, would turn its attention to Hezbollah. On September 19 of this year, after the pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives simultaneously exploded, seriously wounding thousands of people and killing at least 37, the Third Lebanon War began.Though also launched in response to terrorist attacks from Lebanon, the Third Lebanon War differs from its predecessors in several crucial ways. For Israel, Lebanon is now just one front in a year-long, multifaceted struggle with Iranian proxies throughout the region, as well as with Iran itself. Unlike the previous two wars, both of which were perceived by many Israelis as wars of choice, the current conflict is seen by almost all Israelis as fully justified. We know that Israel cannot lose the north and survive.For that reason alone, Israelis need to consider how the Third Lebanon War can succeed where the first two failed.Success will depend principally on setting clear and realistic objectives. Israel cannot, as it did in 1982, seek to remake Lebanon into a Middle Eastern Belgium or, as in 2006, merely retaliate for Hezbollah’s aggression. Rather, Israel’s limited goals must be to drive Hezbollah beyond the Litani and to end the rocket fire on the north. Israel must deny any intention of permanently occupying southern Lebanon and declare its openness to any diplomatic means of implementing and reliably enforcing Resolution 1701.[Dara Horn: October 7 created a permission structure for anti-Semitism]The United States must also avoid its former mistakes, committing instead to supporting Israel and allowing it to complete its military mission. Israel began this war with a series of brilliant strikes against Hezbollah’s leaders and military infrastructure, but the fighting ahead is likely to remain brutal. The U.S. must desist from imposing premature cease-fires or sponsoring UN resolutions that the terrorists can handily violate. But the United States should also insist that Israel honor its pledge not to occupy Lebanon, and that it engage earnestly with diplomatic envoys.Although I recently volunteered for reserve duty guarding a Galilean kibbutz, I will not take part in this Lebanon war. For the young Israeli soldiers engaged in close combat, I can only offer one older veteran’s advice: You are fighting to restore security to your people, not to refashion Lebanon or to remain indefinitely on its soil. Your job is not to punish Hezbollah for any specific act of aggression, but to deter it and its Iranian sponsors from further attempts to destroy us. Your job is to fight with all the skills you’ve been taught, the superior gear you’ve been issued, and the values you learned at home, in order to complete your mission—and then to return to help lead Israel into the future.The third time—so the colloquialism goes—is always a charm. The Third Lebanon War can yield positive and perhaps transformative results. Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons can be defeated, Israel can reinforce its security and revive its deterrence, and the United States can reaffirm its superpower status. But all of that will require a consistent effort to study the mistakes of Israel’s first two wars in Lebanon, and to avoid repeating them.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsThe transformation of several East Asian countries from developing, agrarian economies to highly developed, industrialized economies is one of the great success stories of the 20th century. According to one World Bank report, almost a billion people were pulled out of poverty as a result of fast growth in the region. But the questions of why this happened and how it can be replicated by other countries remain essential to answer for the roughly 700 million people trying to survive on less than $2.15 a day.In today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Oliver Kim, an economist working at Open Philanthropy, whose recent paper co-authored with Jen-Kuan Wang, a Ph.D. student at Penn State, investigates one country that was part of the “East Asian miracle”: Taiwan. In the 1950s, Taiwan pursued a series of land reforms that were widely credited for transforming its economy. Other countries in the region had pursued similar reforms—including mainland China, Japan, and South Korea—adding to the sense that these specific changes were important for understanding the region’s development. In broad terms, the story went like this: Taiwan redistributed land to the peasantry, which significantly increased the nation’s agricultural productivity and helped finance the country’s industrialization.But Kim and Wang’s research casts doubt on this story. Diving into the data reveals a far more complicated picture of how land reforms spurred development in Taiwan, with implications for developing nations around the world.“It is definitely true that Taiwan got richer during this time period,” Kim explains. “But you also have to remember from a critical historical perspective that this is playing an important propaganda role. And so a lot of Taiwanese historians, though they didn’t have the data that we have, have been questioning this narrative.”He adds, “And actually, if you think about the experience of land reform more broadly in a global sense, I think our results actually bring the Taiwanese experience closer to the global experience, which is generally defined that land reform actually has been fairly disappointing in terms of its productivity impacts.”The following is a transcript of the episode:[Music]Jerusalem Demsas: How does a nation pull its residents out of poverty and into the developed world? I think this is the most important question in economics, and it’s one researchers have struggled to answer.To development economists, the rise of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, among others—what’s often called the East Asian miracle—has been a source of deep fascination. How did these countries so quickly enter the ranks of the global elite?On today’s episode, we’re going to focus on Taiwan. How did this country go from a Japanese colony to an advanced industrial economy? And what lessons does it hold for other developing nations?Over the course of the 1950s, Taiwan’s agricultural productivity took off, setting the stage for its transition to an industrial economy. Over essentially one decade, rice yields grew by more than 40 percent, unlocking a period of rapid economic growth. The traditional narrative is that land reforms are the key to development, particularly a set of reforms that redistributed land from wealthy landlords to the disaffected peasantry and thereby increased productivity.It’s a nice story, one that puts equity and efficiency on the same side. But a new study casts doubt on whether this story is actually true.[Music]This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My name is Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic, and today I’m joined by Oliver Kim. He recently co-authored a paper that is challenging deeply held beliefs about how development works.His white paper shows that while redistribution of the land might have been a great policy on its own terms, when you dig into the data, it doesn’t explain Taiwan’s sudden burst of productivity. Other explanations make a lot more sense. We’re going to dig into them today.All right. Oliver, welcome to the show.Oliver Kim: Thank you for having me.Demsas: So we’re here to talk about a very interesting new paper you wrote, but because it’s quite specific, I want us to step back a bit. There’s fundamentally one big question that development economics is trying to answer, and it’s: Why do some countries grow into developed nations where their residents are able to access high standards of living, and why do other nations fail to do so?And one of the most important debates is centered on the divergence of East Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, and places like Taiwan from places in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. I’m hoping you can just situate us for a second back in the early 1960s. What was the state of these countries that we now think of as highly developed nations, at par or ahead of many Western nations, relative to what we consider developing nations today?Kim: Sure. At the end of the Second World War—outside of basically Europe, North America, some other European offshoots—the basic condition in most of the world was poverty. And since then, in the present day, outside of basically if you’re lucky enough to find yourself sitting on a giant pool of oil, the only countries to really sustainably grow their economies to high-income status are really the East Asian tigers—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and then Singapore and Hong Kong.So I think one of the central questions in development is, Why did this miracle happen? And one of the primary reasons that’s been put forward by economists and economic historians is land reform, which is basically redistributing land from landlords to peasant farmers. Right around the end of the Second World War and the beginnings of decolonization, all these major East Asian economies had large, sweeping land reform. Japan had one around 1947 under American occupation. South Korea, similarly, had one in 1950. And Taiwan had perhaps the largest and most sweeping land reform, which occurred from 1950 to 1958.And the logic behind land reform is fairly simple. If you think about what most developing countries do—if you go and visit a developing country or area, what most people do to survive is: they farm, right? So I think in the present day—I think the latest stat’s from 2022—something like 40 percent of the world’s population are farmers. And this is where most of the extreme sort of poverty is.In Asia, immediately in the postwar period, agricultural productivity went up in the 1950s and early ’60s. The most famous example is that in Taiwan, rice yields went up by 40 percent over the course of the 1950s. And if you think about the rural poor, this is a huge increase to their incomes. And so a very influential sort of view in economics is to try and connect these two things and say that land reform had something to do with the growth in agricultural productivity.And so this was famously articulated by Joe Studwell in his book, How Asia Works. And the idea is that if you basically redistribute land—you take it away from landlords who happen to own a lot of it, and you give ownership to the peasants who actually work on it—you can improve productivity. And so you can get something that’s actually very rare in economics: You can get something that’s good for both equity and efficiency. And so the idea is that East Asia had these large, sweeping, major land reforms, and other developing areas in the world didn’t. And so this was a major contributor to the East Asian divergence.Demsas: Okay. This story then is about landlords, and by that we’re talking about landlords of agricultural land. And so essentially, at the base, it’s just redistribution, right? You’re talking about redistributing land from these large landholders to people who are farming small hectares of land.I’m hoping you could actually walk us through, more specifically, what this is, because I know land reform looks very different in different places, and we’re largely going to be talking about your research in Taiwan. So what was land reform there? What were the three phases? And which is the important one?Kim: Yeah. Land reform is this big, amorphous term in development, and it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But I think most people would agree that the most sort of meaningful form of land reform is what you described, which is redistribution.I guess the model you can have in your head is that in a lot of developing countries, there are these landlords who own a lot of the land, but they don’t necessarily work it themselves. And in the worst case, you have absentee landlords, who don’t even live on the land that they farm, and they have poor, oppressed peasants who are basically doing all the work and tilling the land. And the idea behind land reform—which I think is pretty compelling, at least on the face of it—is that you take that land, and you give the peasants who actually work it rights to that land. And in the most sweeping case, you give them ownership of that land.And so in Taiwan, as you mentioned, there were several different phases of this. Just to set the historical background, Taiwan has this very unique political history. The government that runs Taiwan, the Republic of China, is basically an exile regime. And so you had Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Party, the KMT regime, that basically lose the civil war to Mao Zedong on the mainland of China, and they fled to Taiwan with something like a million of their supporters. And so this was a very sort of foreign regime that is almost a neocolonial setup, where they actually had very little ties to the local Taiwanese population, and they’ve just been kicked out by what was essentially a peasant revolution on the mainland of China.And so you have this foreign regime coming into Taiwan, and they need to build their own domestic base of support. And they had this very recent experience where they were not very popular amongst the peasants. The KMT’s base on mainland China had been amongst landlords. It had been under urban elites. And so they needed to do something different, basically, to avoid getting thrown out a second time.The first thing that they did was that they capped rent. So this happened in 1949. This is almost like rent control in a modern sort of rental sense. They capped the amount that these tenant farmers had to pay to the landlords. This is actually a fairly limited form of land reform, and it didn’t really do that much.So the second thing that they did was: They just kicked out the Japanese, who had previously been the colonial overlords of Taiwan. And they took all the land that had previously been held by the Japanese, and they redistributed it to the peasant farmers. And that redistributed something around 20 percent of all arable land in Taiwan.This still didn’t go far enough from a political perspective. And so the last stage, which ran from 1953 to the ’60s, is that they took any privately held land that was over a certain cutoff—this varied a little bit in terms of the quality of the land, but the most common cutoff was around three hectares for rice-paddy land—and they basically said, Any holding that is over that is going to get split up. So the landlord can retain up to three hectares, and then anything above that gets redistributed to the tenants who farm it. And these three phases collectively basically redistributed about a quarter of all arable land in Taiwan. And this ended up being, I think in a global sense, one of the most sweeping land redistributions in terms of the share of land that was redistributed.Demsas: Yeah. You find that in all three stages—the three stages of land reform redistribute over 215,000 hectares of land. And for people like me who had to Google what a hectare was, that’s almost 2.5 acres per hectare. So that’s over 500,000 acres of land redistributed. So this is pretty massive. This is not some small amount of shift that’s happening here.I appreciate you brought the historical perspective here, because part of the question that I had when I was learning about this is: Why didn’t the landholders become a political problem for the government, as well? There’s a lot of power that’s held by landholders. What did they compensate them with?Kim: Yeah. So part of this has to do with the elite split that I was describing, where the KMT regime that comes over with a million followers—a lot of them who are soldiers with guns—they don’t feel a lot of connection to the local Taiwanese elites, the landlords there. And the KMT regime pretty quickly turns out to be very unpopular.And so the Taiwanese actually rise up in 1947. It’s this deeply traumatic event in Taiwanese history called the 228 Incident. Local Taiwanese rise up. There’s a huge uprising throughout the island. They take over major cities. And the KMT, which still controls part of the mainland at this time, has to rush troops over, and they basically end up killing tens of thousands of people. This basically massacres a lot of the traditional Taiwanese elite. So that’s an important feature here, where there was very strong political and military coercion that essentially crushes what would be the nascent elite in Taiwan.And so the split between the fact that you had this almost carpetbagger regime that came over, that had very little connection to the local Taiwanese—that enabled it. And there was some compensation that the KMT did. They did pay the landlords, in theory, for the land that they redistributed. But these payments actually, I guess, were not that economically significant in the final analysis.Demsas: And so politically, this helps pacify the population. But that’s not the main mechanism by which most people think of land reform as having helped lead to the East Asian miracle, right? And it’s not just in Taiwan. As you mentioned, in the late 1940s, Japan and South Korea have similar land reforms. And in the 1970s, mainland China also has land reform.And the mechanism is usually that land reform leads to greater agricultural productivity, right? So then you get a ton more productivity. That kind of output growth spurs the ability for people to move into manufacturing sectors. Is that the story? Can you break that down for us?Kim: Yeah. The traditional story, which was famously articulated by Joe Studwell, is that land reform boosts agricultural productivity. And there’s a number of different mechanisms by which this can be true. But the most common one is that as you shrink the sizes of farms, paradoxically, yields—which is agricultural productivity over a unit of area, so the amount of stuff that you can grow over a hectare of land—that tends to go up.And this is a deeply disputed sort of relationship in economics. There are a lot of advocates on one side. There are advocates on the other. But the historical view is—at least, in East Asia, in Taiwan and Japan—breaking up these land holdings that the landlords previously held and giving them to tenants had this effect of raising agricultural productivity.And what my research basically finds with Jen-Kuan Wang (we’ve recently released this working paper) is that if you actually digitize the data—and this hadn’t been done before—but if you actually go into the Taiwanese archives, and you look in a very straightforward way at what actually happened in townships where there was more land reform, do you see more agricultural productivity growth? Do you see rice yields go up more?We actually don’t really find a lot of strong evidence that was the case. So what we find, basically, is that in areas where there was more of phase two of the land reform—so remember, that’s where you redistribute the previously Japanese-held public land—in areas where there was more of that public land redistribution, you actually do find some small effect on rice yields. So rice yields go up by around 6 percent over 10 years as a result of this phase two of land reform.Demsas: Is that because they’re converting things from sugar to rice?Kim: Yeah. The idea there, basically, is that these are previously colonially held lands. The Japanese were previously mandating that you grow sugar. This was essentially feeding the Japanese empire, in a large sense. And once you lift that constraint, and you make farmers free to grow what they want, they choose to plant rice instead of sugar. And this is a classic economically liberal argument, but: You give people the freedom to choose, and they make more efficient decisions.But the reform that everyone tends to focus on more—because it’s very rare, actually, that you have a case where you have a colonial overlord that gets kicked out, and you can redistribute their property. That can only usually happen once. The case that people typically fixate on in the case of Taiwan is phase three of land reform—this redistribution. And this obviously has a lot of resonance in present-day debates whenever there’s a lot of inequality in the world.And the idea was that, basically, by taking land away from these landlords who own these larger estates, and you give them to these peasants, you boost agricultural productivity. But when we look in the data, when we go into the township-level data, and we run regressions on the stuff, we actually really can’t find this effect.Demsas: So much really good economics is just in the data, right? It is in finding and cleaning data, actually going and testing theories. And one of the things that you make clear in your white paper is that this theory had not been tested by looking at the actual records on the ground in Taiwan. So can you walk us through what you did there and how you found that? Did not have access to this before?Kim: Actually, it is a little surprising that this hadn’t been done before, because a lot of this was actually just sitting there. My co-author—I mentioned who I wrote this paper with, Jen-Kuan Wang—is Taiwanese, and he did a lot of digitization work, going into the government data archives. But the basic work, the initial regressions that we ran, actually it was just a book I pulled from the UC Berkeley library.Demsas: What was the book?Kim: The book was—they actually had, at the township level, the land-distribution statistics. So they had for each township in Taiwan, you know, How many people own plots that are between, like, zero and 0.5 hectares? Between 0.5 and 1 hectare? etc.And so this very sort of commonly held story that this phase three of redistribution, that land-to-the-tiller reforms boost agricultural productivity—it doesn’t actually seem to be the case. And one reason that we hypothesize is, basically, that the farms that this created were just too small, actually, to be economically viable.And so if you actually think about the context here—Taiwan is actually a pretty small place—the initial land holdings held by these landlords were just relatively small, and they just got broken down to an even smaller extent, to something like 0.2 hectares, which is, I think, less than an acre.And these are just too small to support a growing family. And this had the perverse effect, basically, of pushing labor out of agriculture and into industry because these farms are just too small to support the families that were living on them. So this is very different.Demsas: So people sold their land and moved to the city?Kim: They often kept it, basically. In a lot of developing societies, I think there’s a lot of attachment to the land as a form of security, but it was just not enough to provide enough income to support a whole family. And so you had people leaving agriculture and starting to pursue part-time or even full-time employment in manufacturing, and that’s maybe related to the broader sort of transformation of Taiwan that people typically think of when they think of the East Asian miracle.Demsas: And I want to ask you first: Were you surprised by the results of your study? Or did you expect to find productivity growth?Kim: Yeah, I did. I mean, people on Twitter and stuff have been like, Oh, there’s been a lot of fighting, over, like, Oh, what this means for the Joe Studwell book, but like, Oh, this was an attempt to take down How Asia Works.But I actually really like that book. And I was motivated to do this because I really did believe the story that land reform is good for productivity, and it had all these sort of positive effects on East Asian development. So yeah, I did go into this expecting to find a very strong result of land reform. So it was surprising to say the least.Demsas: Okay, cool. I also enjoyed the Studwell book, so I’m glad I don’t have to throw that one out.So there’s this question about whether small farms would be more productive than big farms, which is actually really, really important. In general, you would expect there to be economies of scale that come with bigger farms: You’re able to diversify your crops more in case of a problem. You’re able to invest in productivity-enhancing technology, whether that’s irrigation or whatever it is.At some level, do you feel like the original land-reform story felt suspicious on face?Kim: Yeah. So one thing that’s very interesting, particularly if you dive into the Taiwanese literature, is that local Taiwanese scholars are very skeptical of this story. And I brought up this political context, right? There’s a split—the KMT come in; they’re this foreign regime. This was a very brutal authoritarian regime. In a modern sense, this was an autocracy, right? And they need to build their local base of support, and so they play up this idea of land reform being this benevolent policy that was so good for the Taiwanese people, because it suits their interests, right?Part of that might be true. It is definitely true that Taiwan got richer during this time period. But you also have to remember, from a critical historical perspective, that this is playing an important propaganda role. And so a lot of Taiwanese historians, though they didn’t have the data that we have, have been questioning this narrative and have been pointing to examples of the fact that, Hey, a lot of these farms were actually really small. A lot of people were actually pushed off the farm. Maybe the sort of miracle doesn’t have actually that much to do with KMT policy.And so, yeah. I think adopting this critical historical perspective and saying, Hey, something about the story doesn’t seem quite right. And actually, if you think about the experience of land reform more broadly in a global sense, I think our results actually bring the Taiwanese experience closer to the global experience, which is generally defined that land reform actually has been fairly disappointing in terms of its productivity impacts.Demsas: And I think that brings me to this broader observation that I’m hoping you can expand on, which is that so many debates about development, especially development—these are obviously developing nations—are being shoehorned into debates that are happening in Western countries about what sorts of economic policies are better.And so in some ways it seems like there’s this larger debate about whether industrial policy, whether the government intervention in the market is an appropriate way to get to development. And then you have folks on the other side— the Washington Consensus, the more neoliberal economists—who are saying, No. We want free and open trade. We don’t want government intervention. And the industrial-policy people really, really like this land-reform story because it shows that there is a role for government to be intervening in the market. Is that how you see it, too?Kim: Yeah. I think there’s always a bit of a danger from trying to transpose lessons in developing contexts to developed contexts, right? They’re deeply different in very fundamental ways. On the industrial-policy stuff, the example that everyone likes to bring up is: South Korea did a ton of industrial policy and experienced this massive developmental miracle, right? So there was massive intervention. The state heavily subsidized certain sectors—like steelmaking, like auto production, like shipbuilding—and then created these very successful industries and very successful firms that were able to compete on the global marketplace.And I think there’s a real strong sort of temptation to try and take that logic and apply it to things like CHIPS [and Science Act] in the United States. I’m not saying, necessarily, that’s wrong. But you have to remember that the context in which Korea is implementing these policies is very different than what the United States is trying to do. Like, Korea when it was trying to build its domestic steel industry, or if you want to lump agricultural policy, so like Taiwan when it’s trying to develop its local agriculture—these are not new, frontier industries. These are not at the technological frontier.You broadly know that you should be growing more food. You broadly know that a developed country, at least in the ’60s or ’70s—the hallmark of being a rich country is that you make your own steel, right? It’s not a mystery. Especially in Korea and Taiwan, which were former Japanese colonies, you can look over the water, and you can see your former colonial overlord, Japan, that’s doing pretty well economically by developing its domestic industries, doing all this industrial-policy stuff. And so it’s fairly simple to mimic that policy recipe and try to develop an industrial mix that catches up to countries that have already reached the frontier.With things like CHIPS and modern industrial policy or things like electric cars, it’s much more difficult to have a guide in that sense. It’s unclear what the hallmarks of a highly rich society in the 21st or 22nd century is going to look like. So I think there’s a fundamental difference there. When you have the playbook and you have clear sort of historical examples—economists call these demonstration effects—when you have a demonstration effect that you can point to, the problem of what industrial sectors to prioritize becomes a lot easier.[Music]Demsas: All right. We’ll have more with Oliver after this break.[Break]Demsas: I want to step back broader and talk about why this really even matters. One mechanism that you guys are really undermining in your paper is the idea that land reform led to the East Asian miracle by increasing agriculture productivity.But you hinted at this already, but there are other ways in which land reform could have helped propel Taiwan, South Korea, all these other countries into becoming a developed nation, into these high-GDP-per-capita countries. I’m hoping we can talk through some of those, because the elimination of that one causal pathway doesn’t actually mean we can say land reform isn’t important for understanding Taiwan’s or other countries’ pathway to development.So I guess one pathway, which you hinted at, is a sort of political pathway, that you’re able to pacify the population of peasants who have already had this really, as you mentioned, traumatic uprising, have martial law now imposed, but you need to actually make sure that they’re not going to overthrow you. And so it staves off political demands for communism. Is that a pathway that you think is super valid for understanding what happened here?Kim: Yeah. I think that’s central. I think you can’t really understand the history of East Asian development without understanding the fact that this all is happening in the context of the Cold War, right?So I mentioned that Japan, South Korea, Taiwan all had these land reforms. These are all non-communist countries. But if you look at the map of East Asia, and you put the dates of land reforms across all countries—not just these three—on a map, you’ll notice there’s this kind of mirroring pattern. Japan has a land reform in ’47, but China also has one from ’45 to the ’50s, as Mao’s Communists take over. South Korea has one in 1950, but that’s because North Korea has one a couple years earlier.And so the motivations, I think, are fairly obvious, which is that these are poor societies where most of the people are farmers, and across the border, in a lot of cases, you have very viable military threats, which are doing actually fairly popular programs of land redistribution that build up the support among the peasantry.And so this is a very unique circumstance where the United States supports a lot of these very strong redistributionary measures in order to basically forestall the possibility of communist takeover. And this is not the kind of thing that’s very easy to do in a regression, like a formal statistical sense, but just knowing the historical context and the narrative of this history, it’s hard to see how these regimes could have survived without at least doing some form of land redistribution, at least building up some support amongst the farmers that made up the majority of their population. If these regimes had failed to survive, and they’d been swallowed up—let’s say Taiwan had been consumed by mainland China—you wouldn’t be talking about an East Asian miracle, probably.And the exception that proves the rule is South Vietnam. So people forget that there was this other kind of American proto-colony in Southeast Asia. Just like Korea, Vietnam gets divided into two. There’s a communist northern half. There’s a capitalist southern half. And for particular reasons, the South Vietnamese regime basically avoids doing systematic land reform. And the American government very famously spends a lot of effort, blood, and treasure in this horrific and tragic war, which is called the Vietnam War, basically, trying to solve through coercive means what ultimately, I think, is an agrarian and a peasant sort of revolt. And part of the problem is that the South Vietnamese regime is beholden to the landlords. It’s a landlord-led government. And they’re not particularly interested until very late in the war in doing large-scale redistribution, because that’s where their wealth is tied up.And what basically happens, of course, is that the South Vietnamese state gets hollowed out. It ultimately falls to a conventional invasion from the North, but it’s hard to argue, I think, that if they hadn’t done land reform earlier, they might have continued to exist. And failing to have done systematic land reform basically results in the regime failing to survive. And I think the East Asian states that did successfully do land reform avoided this fate.Demsas: Okay. It sounds like you place a lot of value in that story. But as you mentioned, Joe Studwell, who writes How Asia Works—he has a few other pathways that he also theorizes. One is that landlords are forced to go do more productive things than just rent seeking. Previously before land reforms, you’re a landlord, you have a bunch of money, you have peasants working the farm, you get to raise your rents really high, and you have no incentive to really invest in that land and to increase productivity, because you’re just making a lot of money by just collecting those rents and not having to do anything else. Once your land is forcibly redistributed, in order to—you want to still be rich? You want to make money? You have to go do something more productive. Do you find that to be a valuable way of thinking about this?Kim: Yeah. We’ve tried to find evidence for this. So the story in Taiwan is that, in compensation for the land reform, the landlords were compensated by the state, either in the form of land bonds, which basically is a claim on agricultural output. So I don’t know—you’re entitled to some number of kilograms of sweet potatoes in the next five years or something like that. My understanding is that those actually turned out to be fairly worthless.And then the second thing that landlords were compensated with were shares of industrial companies. So Taiwan had a little bit of industry that had been leftover by the Japanese. The KMT state claims it, and they give shares to the landlords. And I think this is a little bit of what Joe Studwell is gesturing at. I’m a little bit more skeptical that this is as developmentally important, because one of the things that happens in Taiwan is that a lot of the growth in manufacturing—there is growth on the state-led sector, but the really most dynamic kind of growth-leading sectors of the economy are small-scale manufacturing.And so these don’t really have much to do with the former—like, these lumbering, large-scale industrial enterprises that the government had redistributed these shares of. It’s more these new enterprises that sprout up in the countryside. And so that, I think, is maybe evidence against this view that it’s the landlords, in particular, who are the importance of entrepreneurs in development.Demsas: Okay. To recap land reform: Your belief is that it largely is operating positively for growth by staving off communism and, potentially also, the low yields lead people to work more manufacturing. But you don’t really believe that there is some large productivity increase that comes from redistributing the land to the peasantry.Kim: Yeah. That’s right. And I think this helps reconcile a little bit Taiwan with the global historical experience, right? It wasn’t unknown that South Korea and Taiwan did this. Throughout the ’70s, there were actually a lot of attempts at land reform in Latin America, elsewhere in Southeast Asia.Now, there are a host of different reasons that this didn’t work. Often, as I mentioned, as I alluded to, in the case of South Vietnam, for political reasons, a lot of these land reforms ended up getting co-opted. But even in the instances where there was genuine redistribution, there just never were sort of the claimed productivity effects that you saw, or at least you claim to see, in South Korea and Taiwan.And at least in the Taiwanese case, the study brings Taiwan back into line, I think, with the rest of historical experience. It’s not to say that agricultural productivity didn’t go up. Clearly, Taiwan got richer. Rice yields went up. But I think the balance of explanations and how much explanatory power you want to put on land reform versus more prosaic things—like the fact that there were, you know, improvements in fertilizer use, the fact that there were the development of higher-yield varieties sort of presaging the Green Revolution—these sort of more prosaic, technical developments probably are more important than this sort of very flashy, large-scale institutional change of land reform.Demsas: But I also want to take a step back from land reform in particular, because in general, if you are downgrading the importance of one explanation for East Asian development, then you should be upgrading other explanations for East Asian development, right?So I wanted to talk about some of the other reasons people often have for why nations develop or why nations fail, to quote Acemoglu, and see what you think of it now that you’ve done this study. Okay, let’s start with export discipline. Can you explain what that is and whether you feel more confident that it’s a reason for East Asian development?Kim: Yeah. The idea there, basically, is that when you think of the East Asian countries, you typically actually think of manufacturing development. There’s actually this Calvin and Hobbes comic, I think from 1980s, where Calvin asked Hobbes to check the tag of his shirt because it says where he comes from. And Hobbes checks the shirt, and it says made in taiwan. It’s like he came from Taiwan.I mean, the idea that Taiwan was making shirts back in the ’80s and now is doing things like TSMC and making microchips—that’s a tremendous transformation. But the common thread throughout this stuff is that it’s about making physical goods, industrial production that gets exported abroad. And the idea with export discipline is that there was a lot of industrial policy throughout the developing world throughout the ’60s and ’70s. And it was actually the policy consensus that the state has to do things to foster development.And Joe Studwell’s argument in How Asia Works is that the differentiating kind of factor for the East Asian economies was the fact that they actually forced their big sort of industrial champions to export. And this basically disciplines the firm when a firm can just stay in the domestic market. So imagine you’re surrounded by big, tall tariff barriers; there’s really no incentive to innovate or to try and become more efficient.Demsas: You have a captive audience.Kim: You have a captive market. You have a captive audience. And in the comparative sense, this is what a lot of scholars view happened, for instance, in South Asia and India, in a lot of Latin American countries, where you had initially very well-intentioned policies, where it’s like, Okay. We want to foster an infant industry. We want to get industrialization going. To support that industry, to prevent it from just being strangled in the cradle, we need to have all these supports. We need to put up tariff barriers. We need to subsidize credit, all this kind of stuff.Demsas: To make it easier for these industries not to have to compete with—Kim: Yeah, to make these industries grow and to get them to a sufficient size that economies of scale kick in.This is a very standard kind of economic argument, and it’s actually fairly sound. The problem is the political stuff, which is that once that firm is born and grows a little bit, it starts to create a constituency that actually really likes to have these barriers. It’s really nice to not have to compete with all these scary, big foreign firms that are potentially more efficient than you are.And so the view is that what happened in South Asia and Latin America is, like, a lot of these controls and these barriers stayed up, and the firms are never forced to export—unlike, for instance, the Hyundais and Kias of the South Korean experience. In other countries, they never developed the productivity enhancements to become globally competitive, and so you didn’t have the sort of miraculous growth. I think this view is basically still pretty sound.Demsas: So I think the more-popular ones that people generally tend to hear when they think about development and why it happens are these temperature and education explanations for development. So: Hotter places don’t develop well. And also, people should just invest in education. That’s why the East Asian tigers do so well, is because they have such well-educated populations. How do you think about those explanations?Kim: Yeah. The temperature one is interesting. I think that goes back to Montesquieu or whatever.Demsas: Yeah. It’s an old one.Kim: Yeah, like, tropical. There’s always a little bit of, That’s a little suspect, in there.Demsas: Oh, yeah.Kim: I mean, Taiwan is pretty hot. Singapore, which I grew up partly in, is really hot. I don’t think there are very many economists who would seriously defend it. In a more analytical sense, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, which is growing very quickly—they’re tropical climates, essentially. And so I don’t think that climate can necessarily be, like, the best explanatory sort of variable there.The second one that you mentioned is education, right? Which I think is still very live as a hypothesis, right? And so the idea is that maybe because of cultural factors, like the sort of legacy of Confucianism, this legacy of meritocratic exams in these Confucian regimes, East Asian cultures valued a lot of education. And so that carried over to the modern period, where the educational attainment was relatively high. I think that education is obviously really, really important. I think it’s important from a rights basis. As an individual, it improves your earnings.It’s a little bit more unclear to me how this works out at a societal level. So when you move from the specific, the micro, to the macro and the aggregate, this is a huge live debate in the development literature—how much, actually, educational attainment has gone up in the developing world.Clearly, actual growth experience has been kind of disappointing, especially over the past four or five years. At least on paper, there have been a lot of reforms—understanding the East Asian experience, trying to apply it—there have been a lot of reforms trying to promote free primary education, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. There’s at least a lot of rhetoric from governments that they should be prioritizing education. Whether that has actually translated into increases in learning—like the actual test scores, for instance—that is a huge open question. And I don’t think there’s very good sort of international data, particularly from these very poor, developing countries, to understand how much these test scores have gone up.There is also a lot of political incentives. I think Justin Sandefur from the Center for Global Development has an interesting paper showing that when Western donors attach a lot of conditions, basically, to—let’s say you want to hit certain targets in vaccination rates or something like that—the official government data goes up a lot, but when you actually do a survey, it doesn’t show that much of an increase.So there’s a lot of reporting incentives, also, to say that educational attainment goes up a lot. So that’s just a very long tangent to say that I think there’s a strong case to be made that this was an important component of success in East Asia. Whether it’s on its own enough to explain stuff, and whether it can explain growth in development more broadly, in a global sense, the jury is still out on that.Demsas: And then, the last one is sort of—I mean, the Why Nations Fail is the big developmental econ book that gets popular amongst noneconomists, too. And to oversimplify Acemoglu’s thesis here, there are these inclusive institutions that make development possible. Part of why I think that framework can be helpful here is that when you think about why a country is able to pursue or willing to pursue land reforms or is not able to or willing to pursue it—even if they have a lot of the information, there’s a level at which it’s almost like, Yeah. There are places where people can pursue good economic policy for kind of amorphous institutional reasons. And that’s very, very hard to isolate as a thing that you can tell countries to do.Kim: Yeah. This is sometimes phrased a little bit pejoratively as the “get a better history” kind of view. Which is that, Oh, there are these long-standing, almost fundamental historical differences that determine your economic destiny. And there’s very little that you can do about that. Obviously, history matters. Countries don’t just drop out of coconut trees. They exist in the context that came before them, right? But history is not everything.There was scholarly work, for instance, done about China and Confucian societies in the 1950s with the view that’s very different from today, which is that Confucian societies are actually not compatible with modern economic development.So if you’re taking the vantage point of somebody from the 1950s, you just see in Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime collapse on the mainland, it’s not even like Korea and Taiwan are doing particularly well in a global sense. Like, the miracle stuff is sort of very nascent. And so it’s a very rational kind of response, as a sociologist, to say, Hey. Maybe these Confucian regimes are just not very good at adapting to the modern world.Fast-forward 30 years, you have Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister of Singapore, making a very forceful case globally, going around to different countries and saying, Hey. The reason you’re not doing well is because you don’t have Confucian values. Confucian societies—we value education. We’re more respectful of the government. We’re more organized, all this kind of stuff.And so I think a lot of these more-ingrained cultural and institutional factors are actually not so ingrained when you take a broader view of history. They’re more malleable than people can make them out to be. And so there’s always this game that you can play about, Are institutions inclusive? Or are they exclusive?So a first approximation looking at Taiwan in the 1950s, this period, which we’ve been describing as the period where the miracle is laying down roots, this is an autocracy. This is an authoritarian, right-wing, military dictatorship. This is not like a democracy where—actually, the other famous example in How Asia Works and in the history of development is South Korea, which we know is the example of a miraculous country.One of the first things that happened under the dictator Park Chung Hee was that he took a lot of the prominent capitalists, and he threw them in prison. And he basically threatened to confiscate their property unless they started to dedicate their resources to the goal of national development. And throughout this period, there was a lot of state intervention in the economy. And so this just, prima facie, does not sound like inclusive institutions in the “democracy is good” kind of sense.This is not to condone dictatorship and autocracy as a route to development, but it’s just saying that history is complicated, and, like, our views of this stuff kind of change depending on our vantage point. And I think it’s, maybe, a little bit of a blind spot to think of these things as too fixed, and they can move around, and there are opportunities I think that exists for nations to reshape their economic destinies.Demsas: And so what’s really important about your paper—and I was reading through some of the other economists that have really focused on land reform in explaining East Asia’s divergence from Latin America or other countries or Southeast Asia—it’s almost like other countries have this template. They need to do land reform, and then they can develop. I wonder if you can talk to us a little bit about: Why wasn’t it possible for other countries to pursue this? And do you think that if they had, they would have gotten the benefits? Or is it kind of like, this is not the one-trick pony for development?Kim: Yeah. So I think the political factors are really important to foreground here. There’s a scholar, I believe at the University of Chicago, called Michael Albertus who has a great book called Autocracy and Redistribution, which I think of as the canonical theory of, Why does actual, large-sweeping instances of land reform happen? And the answer that he basically gives is that land reform occurs when there’s a split in the elites, right? So as I mentioned, this is a fact you should always bear in mind.What Albertus basically posits is that what you need to happen is that there’s a split in the elites. And so you have one group that advocates for reform and then separates from the landed class. And so this is what happened in East Asia, right? So I mentioned Japan and South Korea had these land reforms. Well, who actually implemented the land reforms? It was the American Army, in essence, occupying these countries in the aftermath of the collapse of Japan after World War II. In Taiwan, it was less an American military presence, but it was actually, again, this foreign KMT regime that didn’t have very close ties with the local elites that was free, basically, to impose a land reform through this essentially autocratic, authoritarian means.And so there’s this weird kind of thing where, actually, authoritarian regimes—Albertus points out—are actually, in a lot of cases, more likely to engage in land reform because they have the capacity and the willingness to disempower and remove property from the main political class, who in a democracy might actually have more of a voice.Demsas: Yeah. That reminds me of my favorite economist and philosopher, Amartya Sen, who has a book called Development as Freedom. There’s this larger debate where people talk about whether or not democracy or authoritarianism is going to lead to economic growth. And what Sen points out is that the ends of economic growth are freedom, whether it’s freedom from hunger or thirst or whatever it is, but those are just basic political freedoms.People are wanting to have access to these basic goods—whether you’re disrespected inside, or you’re not going to be murdered on the basis of immutable characteristics or treated differently by your government—and so not treating democracy as, Oh. Well, authoritarian government might get you closer to having a higher GDP. But people also care about basic freedoms. And so I always think that that’s an interesting—Kim: Yeah. That’s right. And also, Sen has this view of—it’s called the capabilities approach. What matters, basically, is, you know—it’s not necessarily just wealth or income; it’s what that wealth or income enables you to do and what sort of agency it gives you.And I think that’s also a framing with which to view the land-reform stuff, which is that even if it didn’t necessarily have the claimed productivity impacts—so both having this equity boost but also this efficiency boost, so having your cake and eating it too—it’s enough just to have the equity boost.Demsas: Yes. Exactly.Kim: You made society more equitable. You gave a lot of very, very poor peasant farmers a little bit more security. You gave them control over their land. This is something that, politically, they’d been advocating for and fighting for for a very long time.I think a lot of people on Twitter and elsewhere have been trying to read the paper as, Land reform is bad, or, Joe Studwell is wrong. I think that’s maybe too much of a simplification. Giving the poor more land is, I think, a pretty good thing in itself, and you didn’t actually lower productivity as a result. So I think the view is maybe a little bit more ambivalent than the triumphalist sort of narrative. But I think land reform should still be on the table.Demsas: Well, we have one final question for you, which is: What is an idea that you initially thought was a good one but ended up only being good on paper?Kim: Like a lot of people—maybe who are listening to this podcast—I got pretty involved in political-betting markets around 2016 or so. And I was peak econ brain at this point in time. One of the first things you learn if you’ve taken a little bit of intermediate micro[economics] theory is that conditional on the probabilities, you want to equalize your marginal utility across different states of the world. And that’s just a very nerdy, complicated way of saying that you want to hedge your bets, right?And so when it comes to political-betting markets, I imagine like a lot of people listening to this podcast, I have very strong preferences about the outcomes. And so in the 2016 election, I put it as a small bet—like $25 or whatever—and Donald Trump as, like, as an emotional hedge, basically.Demsas: So that if Hillary Clinton loses, at least you have some money.Kim: Yeah. Exactly. You feel a little bit better about yourself. And in Homo economicus logic, this makes a whole lot of sense on paper. And I fully expected Hillary Clinton to win, just like a lot of people did. And of course, she loses. And I get my little, dinky payout, and I don’t really feel a lot better about myself. In fact, I feel a little bit dirty in having—Demsas: How much money did you win?Kim: I don’t remember. It was on the order of $30 or $40. It was not a whole lot of money. But yeah, it just didn’t feel good relative to how horrible those months were. So I think, yeah, there’s a sense in which the Homo economicus model is missing something. So that’s something that’s maybe better on paper than it actually is in reality.Demsas: Well, we would need a randomized controlled trial here to see if you would have felt even worse if you hadn’t had the $30. So it seems unclear.Kim: Yeah. Maybe. Maybe.Demsas: Thank you so much for joining the show, Oliver.Kim: Yeah. Thanks. This was a lot of fun.[Music]Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

One year after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, both sides believe they are winning. The war in Gaza appears poised to continue indefinitely and probably expand, to the apparent delight of both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Each must be surveying the wreckage in the region and anticipating the dark days ahead with determination and confidence. Each must think he is playing a sophisticated long game that the other will lose.This is hardly the first time that the designs of right-wing Israeli leaders have coincided with those of Hamas. Netanyahu has long seen Hamas as a useful tool for weakening Fatah, the secular nationalist party that dominates the Palestinian Authority and rules parts of the West Bank. As he allegedly explained at a Likud strategy meeting in 2019: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” (Netanyahu denies having said this, but it certainly reflects his actions.)As an exercise in divide and rule, Netanyahu’s policy succeeded admirably. The Palestinian national movement was crippled by the disunion that Israel fostered like a hothouse orchid. But by foreclosing the possibility of Palestinian statehood or citizenship, the policy created the conditions for a violent backlash, as many Palestinians concluded that the only way to achieve their national aspirations was through armed struggle. In the months leading up to the October 7 attack, Hamas decided to prove that it, and not its rival on the West Bank, was worthy of leading such a movement.On the evening of October 7, Netanyahu vowed a “mighty vengeance” for Hamas’s killing of 1,139 Israelis and kidnapping of about 250 more. That much Israel has achieved: Israel has now killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-controlled ministry of health, which has published evidence suggesting that most of the dead were civilians, including thousands of children. Yet the war has failed to achieve much else. Netanyahu has vowed that Hamas would be “destroyed.” But this is quixotic; Hamas is more an idea among Palestinians than a collection of individuals or equipment. And Netanyahu’s call for the group’s destruction has allowed Hamas to declare victory simply by surviving.[Read: The choice America now faces in Iran]Israel has ravaged Gaza from north to south and wiped out almost everything of value to Hamas—nearly all of its known facilities, agents, associates, and aboveground assets. But the war is not over. In fact, Hamas has only just begun to get the war it really wants.Hamas is far from being destroyed; its fighters are popping up in areas across the Gaza Strip that months ago the Israeli military had declared pacified and abandoned. Israel is now playing whack-a-mole with militants who emerge for quick attacks before disappearing. When Israel strikes back, it usually leaves a pile of dead civilians behind. Hamas can likely keep this dynamic going for a decade or two—and in doing so, stake its claim to Palestinian leadership by waving the bloodied shirt of martyrdom and preaching the virtues of armed struggle against occupation.Netanyahu is doing his best to ensure that this happens. He has so far refused to discuss the next phase in Gaza, in which the Israeli military might withdraw and leave someone in charge other than Hamas. In the absence of any such plan, the Israeli military has been left to administer Gaza for the foreseeable future—a role it has begun to acknowledge by appointing one of its own to oversee humanitarian relief efforts. Through inaction, silence, and calculated inattention, Netanyahu has ensured the existence of only two possible candidates to run Gaza: Israel and Hamas.Everything Netanyahu has done since October 7 has guaranteed Israel’s continuing presence in Gaza, which is exactly what Hamas was counting on. Israel could have declared victory and left after battling the last organized Hamas battalions in Rafah—but it missed that opportunity. Now it is fighting an amorphous and pointless counterinsurgency campaign, from which it can’t withdraw without appearing to throw away a hard-fought victory and hand power back to the enemy.Hamas hoped for exactly this outcome when it attacked on October 7. It also wished to spark a region-wide, multifront war with Israel, in which other members of the Tehran-led “Axis of Resistance,” especially Hezbollah, would leap into action. The late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah essentially rejected Hamas’s plea, committing only to liberate two small towns still held by the Israelis, and to moderately step up rocket attacks over the border.But Netanyahu decided to call Nasrallah’s bluff with continuous escalations, which culminated in recent weeks with the killing of numerous Hezbollah leaders, including Nasrallah himself. Israel has killed or maimed nearly 3,000 Hezbollah operatives with booby traps; destroyed much of the group’s heavy equipment, including missiles and rocket launchers; and launched its third major invasion of Lebanon, where a potential Israeli occupation would surely face another open-ended insurgency.Iran responded to Nasrallah’s killing by sending a barrage of missiles into Israel on October 1. Most failed to cause damage, but the attack has buoyed Hamas’s hopes for a regional war nonetheless. Even the Biden administration, which has sought to restrain escalation in Lebanon, recognizes that Israel will retaliate against Iran. Washington is trying to persuade Israel not to strike Iran’s oil-production facilities or nuclear installations, but these warnings may be in vain, as Israel feels flush with victory and may imagine that it can reshape the region through force.And so both Israel and Hamas seem to believe that they are on the brink of unparalleled success. Hamas endured the battering in Gaza, and appears confident that it will ultimately assume the Palestinian national leadership. Looking at the same set of facts, the Israeli government apparently believes that it has struck back decisively against the architects of the October 7 attack and reduced Hamas to virtual irrelevancy, beyond being a ragtag nuisance in Gaza. Now Israel is fighting the war it wanted to fight—against Hezbollah in Lebanon—with dramatic early success.[Read: Lebanon is not a solution for Gaza]Some in Israel have begun talking about subduing not just Hamas but the whole Axis of Resistance, including Iran itself. Even if Israel doesn’t strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, it may seek to compel the United States to attack those installations in Israel’s defense, or to finish a job that Israel will have started. Netanyahu has long argued that an American military strike is necessary to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions. If he can’t bring that about today, additional opportunities will surely arise to steer the U.S. into an armed confrontation with Iran, no matter who is in the White House when the time comes.The Israeli leadership imagines a new Middle East—one where Iran’s nuclear program is eliminated and its regional influence greatly reduced; where Israel becomes part of an alliance of pro-American Arab states, including Saudi Arabia; and where, fantasy of fantasies, the Iranian regime is overthrown. Americans should find something familiar both in this vision of a pacified region and in Israel’s post–October 7 doctrine of “peace through strength” and “escalation to de-escalate.” Washington embraced similar ideas after 9/11, and they met a bitter end in Iraq.Both Israel and Hamas are probably kidding themselves. Sooner rather than later, Palestinians will come to resent Hamas’s brutal recklessness, which has led to more Palestinian bloodshed even than the catastrophe of 1948. The attack on October 7 did incalculable damage to the Palestinian national movement and prospects for statehood. And if Hamas dreams that it can ever take over the Palestine Liberation Organization and speak for its people at the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, the group has not comprehended how radioactive it has become internationally. Playing the long game of insurgency may win the sympathies of many Palestinians, but overcoming the stigma of October 7 will require renouncing terrorism—something that Hamas can’t do without completely transforming its ideology and leadership.Israel, too, may be facing a rude awakening. Its degradation of Hezbollah, which Iran sees as its forward defense force, may persuade Tehran to sprint toward nuclear weaponization. Attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities could set this process back a year or two, but Iran will surely succeed if that becomes the regime’s single-minded goal. Neither Israel, the United States, nor Arab countries can do much to force regime change in Iran if domestic conditions are not ripe for it—and there’s no sign that they are. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has made clear that it will not normalize relations with Israel, let alone enter into a partnership, unless the Palestinian issue is resolved. No amount of Israeli military success will change that.Netanyahu’s war of vengeance in Gaza has ensured that yet another generation of Arabs regards the Palestinian cause as a collective responsibility—one that may give rise to or strengthen extremist groups. Yet Israel appears more hostile to Palestinian statehood than ever, as it steadily annexes much of the West Bank with no plan for what to do with the Palestinians there.[Read: ’It’s an earthquake’]After October 7, Israel unleashed its military in search of greater security, and many Israelis appear to feel that the project could hardly be going better. But Israel now finds itself fighting one insurgency to its south, in Gaza, and marching briskly toward another such quagmire to its north, if it occupies Lebanon. Its hostility toward the Palestinian Authority and violent clashes with armed youth in Palestinian cities suggest a third insurgency developing to its east. If that’s a formula for security, it’s hard to imagine what insecurity would look like.One year on from October 7, Hamas and Israel both think events are moving in their direction. Any appreciation of the old adage about being careful what you wish for was, perhaps, one of the most significant victims of October 7.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on September 13. | Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images PENNSYLVANIA — Ahead of November, both political parties have made a similar bet: that they can boost their odds of winning key swing states by going on offense in places they don’t normally compete. For Republicans, that means building on the 2020 trends that saw their candidates, led by Donald Trump, make inroads among a swath of working-class voters of color, especially in urban centers. For Democrats, that looks like holding down GOP margins of victory in rural regions and accelerating changes in suburbs. With just a few weeks left until Election Day, the key to making these strategies work may be the ground operations each side has built up to make the case to new, undecided, or persuadable voters. To get a better picture of what this looks like, I teamed up with Today, Explained producer Miles Bryan to examine the ground game and the pitches Republicans are using to win over Black and Latino voters in Philadelphia, and that Democrats are using to turn out low-propensity or undecided Democratic and independent voters in rural and suburban areas like Lancaster County. The side best able to do this may end up reaping the biggest prize of 2024: Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes and the presidency. Republicans have a clear message, but a shambolic operation Early in September, Miles and I drove up to North Philadelphia. We had received word that a “Black Voters for Trump” bus tour would be making a few stops in the city as part of a five-state swing to motivate and mobilize Black Republican voters. The first stop of the day would be at a cheesesteak takeout in Nicetown, a predominantly Black neighborhood. Organized by the Black Conservative Federation, one of the main Republican-aligned groups campaigning with Black voters on Trump’s behalf, the tour was meant to drill down on the central kitchen-table pitches Republicans have been using to take advantage of trends in election polling and political surveys: namely, that Democrats’ hold on Black voters seems to be weakening. National polls still show Democrats winning the lion’s share of this segment of the electorate, but also find Trump increasing his level of support from 2020. Black Republican party identification has also been increasing among the youngest segment of this electorate, and though Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have reconsolidated support from Black voters compared to President Joe Biden’s now-defunct reelection campaign, she’s still not hitting his 2020 margins.  In Nicetown, Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, one of Trump’s key Black surrogates, told us he thinks this disaffection is being driven by economic nostalgia and frustration with immigration and crime. “Black people are sick and tired of being sick and tired, man,” Donalds said. “I’ve been in North Carolina, been in Wisconsin, been in California, here in Philadelphia, obviously in Florida, Texas — it doesn’t matter. The story remains the same.” Plenty of Black and Latino voters, he said, don’t trust Democrats to handle the nation’s economy, to lower prices, or to improve daily life — and when they compare their finances today to life before the pandemic, they can’t help but wish for a change. It’s a pitch I’ve explained previously for Vox, and it sounds like a compelling message — but it’s hard to persuade people if no one shows up. When the tour bus pulled up in front of Max’s Steaks, it arrived at a nearly empty scene. There were no crowds, a few local reporters, and just a solitary Trump sign, nestled on a chair near the shop’s entrance. Plenty of passersby heckled the BCF staffers and volunteers that began to talk to customers, but eventually Donalds and other surrogates did meet some receptive ears, like Sharita White, a Black woman living in Kensington — a rougher part of Philadelphia hit hard by heroin addiction and the fentanyl crisis. “I’m in a neighborhood that I don’t want to be in, but if Trump gets in his chair that can change. I might [be able to] move,” White told us. “I need to survive. And these streets of Philadelphia, it seems like they’re turning into New York now. Everything is high here. People can’t even afford a water. I don’t know too much about politics, but the only thing I know, my income’s changed. And if I need that man to get into the chair to fix my income, I’m all down.” White is the kind of voter Trump and Republicans are hoping will turn out in big cities like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Phoenix, Detroit, and Milwaukee, which net Democrats the big leads they need to win swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In Philadelphia, at least, there are signs that these more diverse working-class neighborhoods are becoming more competitive. But receptive voters don’t mean much if you don’t have a way of activating them on Election Day. We noticed that no one took down White’s information or checked her registration status, or logged her in any system to try to follow up with her and get her to vote. The same dynamic unfolded at the second stop of the tour, a soul food restaurant in the middle-class Germantown neighborhood.  This disconnect between potentially gettable voters and the organizing work needed to turn them out is a recurring problem with the GOP’s ground game. Grassroots and local work is primarily being run by outside groups and PACs like the Black Conservative Federation, not the Republican Party. These groups are hiring canvassers, doorknockers, and staffers who register people to vote at Trump rallies, but in many cases rally attendees are from out of state. This reliance on outside groups has raised flags among longtime Republican operatives, who warn that outreach and resource distribution by outside groups may be inefficient, and that local volunteers and longtime activists often know their neighborhoods and how to persuade voters better than paid staff do. Democrats’ renewed ground game aims to lose by less Democrats’ 2024 ground game stands in stark contrast to the GOP’s shortcomings, and could allow them to reverse a trend that has locked the party into close races in cycle after cycle. Specifically, Democratic support in rural communities has collapsed in recent decades, in some cases allowing Republicans to overcome the big leads Democrats rack up in cities and their surrounding suburbs. In 1996, for example, Bill Clinton won 1,100 rural counties. By 2008, Barack Obama won 455. And in 2020, Joe Biden won just 194, leading to a rural Republican romp that put Donald Trump within striking distance of victory yet again. So ahead of 2024, Democrats set out to stem this bleeding. Biden and his cabinet spent much of 2022, 2023, and early 2024 visiting rural communities to talk up the massive investments being made through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. While he was still the presumed Democratic nominee, Biden and his campaign began to set up field offices in, organize, and visit rural counties that Trump had won, and when the time came for Harris to take the reins in late July, the party had built up extensive ground operations in the kinds of rural places they need to lose by less. That dynamic holds true in North Carolina, where Harris’s campaign has invested heavily, and in Georgia, where Harris went on a rural bus tour shortly after becoming the Democratic nominee. And it’s true in rural Pennsylvania, parts of which Harris and Walz toured this week. The Biden and Harris campaigns have opened 50 coordinated Democratic campaign offices across the state and deployed 350 staffers — including 16 offices in rural counties that Trump won by double digits in 2020. Miles and I drove out to Lancaster County in southern Pennsylvania to visit the county Democratic headquarters in Lancaster City and see this operation in action. The county has historically been a Republican stronghold, but that’s quickly changing, Stella Sexton, the vice chair of the Lancaster County Democrats, told us.  “People move here for jobs for a bunch of reasons,” she said. “But the other piece of the story, and one that I think gets overlooked, is that our college-educated population is growing and it’s not just younger folks moving in with college degrees. It’s also retirees.” Trump won the county in 2020 by more than 44,000 votes, but in the 2022 midterms, Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat then running for his first term, got close to flipping the county, losing by just 4,000 votes. “The bottom line is the reason the Harris campaign — Biden and now Harris campaign — made this investment here is not necessarily because we’re going to flip it this cycle. It may take one more cycle to outright flip the county, but … the pickup in margin that they can get here is very important to winning the state,” Sexton said. And the key to this margin-narrowing strategy is the field operation Democrats have built, both to encourage rural Democrats that may feel alone or forgotten by past campaigns and to contact persuadable or undecided voters. “There were always Democrats around, but I don’t know that in our suburban or rural areas that the Democrats realized there were other Democrats as their neighbors,” Sexton said. “What I’m noticing is that folks aren’t embarrassed or hiding it. People are proud to be Democrats, and they’re proud to represent that to their neighbors.” That vibe was there earlier on, according to Sexton, even before Biden dropped out, but it’s only accelerated since Harris became the nominee. Since then, more volunteers have begun to get involved in canvassing. The switch created “excitement and urgency among people who might have sat back and waited until October to get involved,” Sexton said. We joined a canvasser going out to various suburban and working-class neighborhoods to see the Democratic pitch in action. Democrats we encountered were excited about Harris, anxious about Election Day, and happy to be reminded to vote. But undecided voters and independents were still not sure. One, a middle-aged union electrician named Ziggy, told us he didn’t have strong feelings about Harris, but was still upset that both parties had put up “somebody that’s over the retirement age” and showed “signs of slipping.” We watched as the Democratic canvasser, a nurse named Laura, cycled through a few policy issues and topics to see if she could find a way to persuade Ziggy. Talking about January 6, family-friendly policies like the Child Tax Credit, and climate change didn’t really land, but when they got to reproductive rights and abortion bans, Ziggy seemed ready to listen— particularly about how certain anti-abortion policies could impact care for other pregnancy-related medical issues. By the end of the conversation, he remained undecided about Harris, but did not seem like he’d back Trump, Laura told us. “And we will circle back to him,” she said, while marking him down in the party’s vote-canvassing app. The whole exchange demonstrated the newfound hope that Democrats feel about competing in places that usually go red, and the advantage of having a highly organized in-house operation for turning out your own voters and persuading undecided voters. Democratic organizing efforts are also boosted by Harris’s improving favorability ratings, a significant cash advantage, and improving economic vibes nationally. Despite that edge, Pennsylvania remains a dead heat in polling averages and election forecasts. The presidential election may end up coming down to a few thousand votes in the state. And if that happens, the difference may well be the strategies each campaign is now pursuing. Miles Bryan contributed reporting to this article.

If nothing else, the Mets are going to have to splice lots of stuff from the past week into their all-time highlight reel.

Who said you have to ease in a rookie quarterback?

Just call it a royally big deal.

Test your wits on the Slate Quiz for Oct. 8, 2024.

Who better to look to for shopping inspiration than the "Favorite Things" list-maker herself?

It’s time to stop arguing and start listening.

Everything feels as if it’s on the verge of collapse.

A Houston man shot and killed his autistic brother before turning the gun on himself in an apparent murder-suicide, the sheriff's office said.