There’s still time to help student debtors before loan repayment begins — but it means changing course.
When Chief Justice John Roberts vaporized Joe Biden’s half-trillion-dollar student loan forgiveness plan in June, he used some dramatically non-legal words to explain why. Writing for the Supreme Court’s six-member conservative majority in the case of Biden v. Nebraska, Roberts declared that the truly offensive and unacceptable thing about the Biden plan, which would have wiped out the loan balances of nearly 20 million people, was the sheer size of it.
The economic and political significance of the scheme was “staggering by any measure,” wrote Roberts, and thus ran afoul of the Court’s radical new doctrine of limiting presidential power.
Later that day, an angry Biden responded from the White House. His administration had been accused of being unprepared for other seismic court actions, like the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. This time was different. The president announced that the Department of Education would immediately begin re-implementing the loan forgiveness plan using a different legal rationale. Progressive lawmakers and grassroots activists, who had been pressing the administration to continue the fight, cheered in response.
But Biden’s so-called “Plan B” for mass loan cancellation comes at a perilous moment for student borrowers. For the last three and a half years, federal student loan payments and interest charges have been suspended because of the pandemic. Under the terms of the last-minute debt ceiling deal struck between the White House and congressional Republicans in June, the Department of Education is required to turn the loan repayment system back on in September. Monthly payments are due starting in October.
Meanwhile, some of the same scholars who laid the legal groundwork for the original mass cancellation plan are saying that the Supreme Court will likely kill the new plan, too.
The Biden administration is urging people to start paying their loans this fall. But it has also announced a year-long “on-ramp” to making payments that works much like the grace period borrowers face after leaving school, while simultaneously telling millions of borrowers their loans will be entirely forgiven by “Plan B.”
The resulting confusion, stoked by student loan advocates who demand mass loan forgiveness with no compromises, could wreck the administration’s efforts to successfully restart the student loan collection system. By pushing a politically potent but legally dubious mass forgiveness strategy, President Biden may well be setting a debt trap for the same vulnerable borrowers he is trying to help.
The new Biden student debt relief plan — and why it’s doomed to fail
While the White House has been short on details, all signs suggest that its next push for expansive forgiveness is essentially the same as the court-nullified Plan A, but based on statutory authority from a different law. The plan thrown out by the Supreme Court was based on the 2003 HEROES Act, which gives the Secretary of Education authority to waive or modify student loans during a national emergency, like a pandemic. The plan would have subtracted $10,000 from the balance of nearly every outstanding federal student loan. Women and people of color in particular would have benefited because they are more likely to borrow, and an additional $10,000 in relief would have gone to low-income students.
Plan B will be based on the Higher Education Act (HEA), which was first enacted in 1965 and is the main law governing federal college grants and loans. The HEA gives the Secretary of Education the authority to “compromise” or “modify, waive, or release” student debt obligations. These are collectively called “settlement authorities.”
To block Plan B, Biden’s opponents will need legal standing to sue. Biden v. Nebraska began with the court deciding that the state of Missouri had that standing. Missouri’s argument was weak, but the Court accepted it anyway, as courts do when they like a plaintiff’s case. Which means the same plaintiffs would very likely have standing to oppose the new Biden plan.
Biden’s lawyers will then have to grapple with the so-called “major questions doctrine,” a legal standard that has been brewing in conservative jurisprudence for several decades and was fully conjured into existence barely a year ago in the case of West Virginia v. EPA. The doctrine says it’s unconstitutional for federal agencies to do things of vast economic and political significance without clear congressional authorization — “vast” and “clear” meaning whatever the court wants them to mean. Critics have called this a “fake” doctrine with “no basis in any law or any provision of the Constitution,” and Justice Elena Kagan excoriated the majority’s reasoning in her dissent. But Roberts et al disagreed. That’s where the “staggering by any measure” part comes in. The Biden plan was too big to not fail.
Which means the outcome of the next lawsuit will hinge less on the exact meaning of the Higher Education Act and more on whether the plan once again offends Justice Roberts’s sense of inappropriate vastness. And the White House has given every indication that vast is exactly what it has in mind. Perhaps anticipating Plan B, Roberts even made a point of declaring that the HEA only authorizes loan forgiveness in “certain limited circumstances,” which is pretty much the opposite of “subtract $10,000 from every loan.”
Legal experts say the major questions doctrine is an enormous barrier for Biden to overcome. While studying for a PhD at Yale Law School, Luke Herrine wrote an influential 2020 law review article arguing that the Secretary of Education could use the settlement authority granted by the Higher Education Act for mass debt cancellation. Herrine also served as legal director of the Debt Collective, a student loan forgiveness advocacy group, before joining the law faculty at the University of Alabama.
In the wake of Biden v. Nebraska, he now says, “The Supreme Court has given every indication that it’s not inclined to look favorably on novel uses of the HEA’s settlement authorities” to cancel student debt.
In other words, Plan B will almost certainly meet the same fate as Plan A.
The debt forgiveness trap
For student loan advocates, a loss in the Supreme Court is no reason to give up the fight.
Mass student loan cancellation is a case study in how grassroots activism can move a social justice idea from the ideological fringe to the halls of power. With roots in the Occupy movement and a critical boost from Bernie Sanders’s insurgent 2016 presidential campaign, advocates used a combination of old-fashioned politicking and modern social media to shove debt cancellation into the center of the 2020 Democratic primary debate.
Biden was reluctant. His official position as a candidate was that he’d support a plan to forgive the first $10,000 of people’s loans if it came in the form of a bill passed by Congress. But when Democratic control of the Senate was still in doubt in the months after the election, advocates immediately began pressing for unilateral executive action on loans, and they never let up. Indebted college-educated millennial voters had been a key to victory, they argued, and the White House risked alienating them without bold action on loans. When Biden announced his mass cancellation plan in August 2022 and the midterms went relatively well for Democrats shortly thereafter, the strategy seemed vindicated.
But the plan itself had been doomed since at least September 18, 2020, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in time for Donald Trump to seat a sixth conservative on the Supreme Court. The lawsuits from Biden opponents were inevitable, and all hopes that the same court that willfully discarded decades of precedent in recent decisions on abortion and affirmative action would approach the loan question with mercy and restraint came to naught.
For student loan activists, the post-defeat course was clear: press onward with the same uncompromising tactics that had driven their success. Activists worked closely with the White House to push for the original mass forgiveness plan and to make sure that Plan B would be immediately launched in the wake of a Supreme Court defeat. The extent of their influence over Biden administration policy is well-represented in this recent Politico article, in which former Sanders campaign staffer and founder of the loan activist group We, the 45 Million Melissa Byrne says of former White House chief of staff Ron Klain, “We all loved Ron. He was personally invested.”
Now Byrne is telling her followers, “No one needs to make a payment until October 2024 thanks to the on-ramp. Literally no one pay.” The Debt Collective says, “Student debt strike begins Oct 1.” It’s a strategy that Astra Taylor, a filmmaker and co-founder of the Debt Collective, has described as “economic disobedience.”
When asked for comment, Byrne invited this author to “Go shill for student loan companies elsewhere.” (Under reforms implemented during the Obama administration, companies haven’t made federal student loans since 2010.)
The Biden administration is officially telling people to start making the payments that stopped in March 2020. But it is simultaneously telling those very same people that their loan payments are soon going to be reduced or, in the case of nearly 20 million people below the $10,000 and $20,000 thresholds, eliminated entirely. And thanks to the recently announced Department of Education “on-ramp” policy that Byrne cites, people who don’t make payments won’t be penalized or reported to credit agencies for at least another year.
For borrowers, this is enormously confusing. Payments are due, but there is no penalty for not paying, and you might be paying down a loan balance that is going to be forgiven under a Plan B whose terms have yet to be announced and might not happen — or might, depending on who you believe.
For loan advocates, the critical thing is to continue the struggle. Mike Pierce, a lawyer and the executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center, says no one can know for sure how the Supreme Court will treat Plan B and that the normal rules of crafting policies based on the likelihood of them being thrown out in court no longer apply.
“We’re at an inflection point with this administration’s relationship to a corrupt and unethical right-wing court,” he says, arguing that obstructionist Supreme Courts in the past have eventually bent to public pressure. To Pierce, Biden backing away from mass debt cancellation would amount to “unilateral disarmament.”
It’s time to get the loan system ready for repayment
The pandemic wasn’t the first time federal student loan payments have been paused. In 2017, payments were automatically suspended for borrowers living in areas affected by wildfires and hurricanes. When the pause ended the following year, federal officials who monitor the loan program began to notice a troubling pattern.
When people miss a student loan payment, they descend into a kind of limbo called “delinquency.” If they miss nine months’ worth of payments, they fall down another level into default, where their wages, tax refunds, and even Social Security checks can be garnished. When the disaster-area borrowers were required to start making payments again in 2018, the number of delinquencies began to rise. This continued for nine months and was immediately followed by an increase in the number of defaults. Some people may have fallen out of contact with the loan system and didn’t know they owed money again, or they couldn’t afford it or had lost the habit of making monthly payments.
The risk now is a similar default crisis on a massive scale. About two-thirds of undergraduates use debt to pay for their degrees. Over 5 million people have left college since 2020 who have never made a single payment on their loans. They may have changed addresses, switched phone numbers, or given loan servicers college email addresses that are now defunct. A recent study found that many borrowers used the payment pause to “increase borrowing on credit cards, mortgages, and auto loans.” If those debts are ongoing, borrowers may struggle to find room in their monthly budgets to make loan payments once again.
For the Biden administration, Plan B creates a potent issue for the 2024 election. For advocates, it provides another year or two to be part of a righteous cause. But the price of all that will be paid by debtors in the form of ballooning balances, ruined credit, and more.
Meanwhile, the agency within the Department of Education tasked with managing the federal government’s massive $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio has been rocked by an acute budget crisis. At odds over the Biden administration’s approach to loan forgiveness, Democrats and Republicans in Congress have been unable to agree on increasing the agency’s funding, hamstringing its ability to tackle the largest and most complex logistical challenge in the history of student loans.
The Biden administration should be relentlessly focused on helping 40 million student borrowers successfully resume payments and avoid the delinquency trap that has befallen past borrowers. It has a powerful tool at its disposal: a new, very generous program for reducing monthly loan bills and accelerating loan forgiveness, called SAVE. This plan is — confusingly! — entirely separate from the plan the Supreme Court just jettisoned. It is also built on much firmer legal ground and has not been challenged in court.
To ease the transition back to making loan payments, the Department of Education has announced an “on-ramp” policy, which functions much like the standard grace period that borrowers get after leaving college. For a year, starting in October, people can start making payments, but if they don’t, nonpayment won’t trigger reports to credit agencies or the ticking clock of delinquency and eventual default.
The on-ramp makes a lot of sense — if it’s accompanied by an all-out effort to get student debtors back on track to repay their loans. Instead, the Department of Education has simultaneously kicked off a complex, multi-step regulatory process to implement Plan B, requiring a morass of meetings, public notices, and comment periods. The inevitable lawsuit blocking the plan can’t be filed until after that process is complete.
That puts debt forgiveness opponents, including Biden’s rival in the presidential election, in the position of having to very publicly block tens of millions of people from getting their loans forgiven, again, just as the 2024 campaign reaches fever pitch. The inevitable defeat in court won’t come until 2025, after Biden has been reelected, or not.
The political calculus is obvious. But there are 20 million people out there who were told they would never have to make another student loan payment. Now they’re being told they don’t really have to start paying their loans back for another year, after which the we-promise-it-will-work-this-time Plan B will take effect. If they take President Biden’s word at face value, why would they start making payments in October?
Meanwhile, the same student loan advocates that the White House looks to for policy and political advice are actively discouraging their many followers from enrolling in repayment plans that reduce monthly payments and provide an accelerated, legally defensible path to loan forgiveness. The Debt Collective says, “Anyone who tries to sell you on IDR” (another acronym for the SAVE program) “is not your friend. The program does not work.”
For anyone who takes this advice or is just confounded by the Biden administration’s confusing and contradictory student loan messaging, interest charges will pile up. To its credit, the Department of Education has largely ended “interest capitalization,” which means most borrowers won’t pay interest on their interest. But interest will still accumulate, and loan balances will grow. And every month without a payment delays when people can have their loans forgiven under SAVE, which the department has the legal authority to implement.
Speaking on background, an education department spokesperson said, “The Department has already been directly in touch with borrowers and made clear that anyone who can make payments should do so when the payment pause ends later this year. The Department plans to do additional direct outreach with enhanced communications for borrowers who become delinquent after payments resume.”
The White House still has the option of not obstructing its own education department’s efforts to restart the student loan collection system. Legal expert Herrine believes a new forgiveness plan might survive Supreme Court scrutiny if it’s narrowly focused on certain distressed borrowers — “a more targeted form of cancellation might make it through,” he says.
That could also clear space and focus political energy on other initiatives to prevent students from being saddled with unrepayable debt, like long-gestating rules for reining in abusive for-profit colleges. And it would make it easier to strike a congressional budget deal to properly fund the education department professionals charged with the gargantuan task of turning on a loan system that wasn’t designed to be turned off.
Everyone could then turn to the challenge of redesigning the higher education financing system from the ground up so we don’t have so many loans that need forgiving. Debt scholars have proposed ideas like a new federal university system, affordable and open to all.
For now, though, President Biden has the unenviable responsibility of telling 40 million people they have to write him a monthly check starting in October. But that’s his job, and doing it successfully will require copious amounts of coordination, discipline, and expertise. Instead, he’s sabotaging his own education department for political purposes — and sowing doubt and chaos along the way.
Kevin Carey writes about education and other issues. He is a vice president at New America, a think tank in Washington, DC.
The biggest risk from advanced artificial intelligence is biological.
In the summer of 1990, three trucks sprayed a yellow liquid at different sites in and around Tokyo, including two US Naval bases, Narita Airport, and the imperial palace. The attackers belonged to a group called Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese cult that aimed to cause the collapse of civilization, making space for the rise of a new society ordered according to their religious ideals. Five years later, Aum would gain notoriety by carrying out sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway, killing 13 and injuring thousands.
Aum intended for the yellow liquid dispersed in the summer of 1990 to contain botulinum toxin, one of the most poisonous biological substances known to human beings. However, no one was killed in the attacks that summer. One possible factor in their failure is that Aum lacked a crucial bit of knowledge: the difference between disseminating the bacterium Clostridium botulinum and disseminating the highly deadly botulinum toxin it produces. It is unclear whether Aum even managed to acquire a toxin-producing form of the bacterium, and there are also other causes for why Aum’s attack failed.
But if it had access to contemporary artificial intelligence tools, Aum Shinrikyo, or a similarly malign group, might not have made this and other mistakes. ChatGPT is very good at answering questions and providing knowledge, including on the production of botulinum toxin. If Aum had had access to ChatGPT, would the attacks of the summer of 1990 be remembered as possibly the worst bioterrorism event in history?
Advances in artificial intelligence have tremendous potential to have positive impacts on science and health. Tools like ChatGPT are revolutionizing how society works and learns, and artificial intelligence applied to biology has led to solving the decade-old protein folding problem and is transforming drug discovery. However, as artificial intelligence raises the ceiling of biological engineering and helps distribute these powers to a tremendous number of individuals, there is a serious risk that it will enable ill-intentioned actors like Aum Shinrikyo, to potentially devastating effect. As I have discussed in a recent preprint paper, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, as well as novel AI-powered biological design tools, may significantly increase the risks from biological weapons and bioterrorism.
How AI language models are a threat multiplier for bioweapons
Large language models — which are very good at answering questions and teaching about dual-use knowledge — may in particular increase the accessibility of biological weapons. In a recent exercise at MIT, it took just one hour for ChatGPT to instruct non-scientist students about four potential pandemic pathogens, including options for how they could be acquired by anyone lacking the skills to create them in the lab, and how to avoid detection by obtaining genetic material from providers who do not screen orders.
At the same time, the story of Aum Shinrikyo’s lack of knowledge about the difference between Clostridium botulinum and botulinum toxin is not an isolated example. Past biological weapons programs have frequently been bottlenecked by not having the right staff, with the required knowledge and expertise, to create an effective bioweapon. Al-Qaeda’s exploration of bioterrorism was led by Rauf Ahmed, who had originally studied microbes related to food production, and thus tried to quickly learn about anthrax and other pathogens. Over the course of 2001, Rauf used his scientific credentials to make headway toward acquiring anthrax. It is not publicly known how far he got; he was arrested that December.
Despite having access to the relevant equipment, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq never turned its anthrax weapon from a less potent liquid form into a more dangerous powder form, which can be stored and released at much higher and more predictable concentration. That’s likely because its scientists lacked the knowledge of the relevant process for drying and milling anthrax. As chatbots become more sophisticated, however, they may inadvertently help individuals with malicious intent to upskill on topics that empower them to do harm.
But how much can you learn from an AI-powered lab assistant alone? After all, to make a pathogen or a bioweapon, you don’t just need instructional knowledge of the sort that can be dished out by an LLM, you need hands-on, tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge describes all knowledge that cannot be verbalized and can only be acquired through direct experience. Think of how to ride a bike, or for that matter, how to perform molecular biology procedures, which might require knowing how to hold a pipette, shake a flask, or treat your cells. It is difficult to define the extent of this tacit knowledge barrier and how much impact LLMs like ChatGPT may have on lowering it. However, one fact seems clear: If chatbots and AI-powered lab assistants make the creation and modification of biological agents seem more accessible, then it is likely that more individuals will try their hand. And the more who try, the more who will eventually succeed.
Additionally, ChatGPT is just the beginning of language models and related forms of artificial intelligence. Already now, language models are revolutionizing the way scientists can instruct lab robots on what work to perform. Soon, artificial intelligence systems will be able to perform ideation and design of experimental strategies. Thus, artificial intelligence will enable and accelerate the increasing automation of science, reducing the number of scientists required to advance large-scale projects. This will make it easier to develop biological weapons covertly.
Biological design tools could simplify bioweapons
While large language models may eventually push the ceiling of biological design capabilities, more specialized AI tools are already doing this now. Such biological design tools (BDTs) include protein folding models like AlphaFold2 and protein design tools like RFdiffusion. These artificial intelligence tools are usually trained on biological data, such as genetic sequences. They are developed by many different companies and academics to help with important biological design challenges, such as developing therapeutic antibodies. As biological design tools become more powerful, they will enable many beneficial advances like the creation of new medications based on novel proteins or designer viruses.
But such powerful design capabilities may also exacerbate biological risks. At the extreme, biological design tools could allow the design of biological agents with unprecedented properties. It has been hypothesized that natural pathogens feature a trade-off between how transmissible and how deadly they are; designed pathogens might not feature such evolutionary constraints. A group like Aum Shinrikyo could potentially create a pandemic virus much worse than anything nature could produce and thus, biological design tools could turn pandemics from the catastrophic risks they are now into true existential threats. Biological design tools could also enable the creation of biological agents targeted at specific geographies or populations.
In the short term, new design capabilities may challenge existing measures to control access to dangerous toxins and pathogens. Existing security measures tend to focus on proscribed lists of dangerous organisms or screening for known threatening genetic sequences. But design tools may simply generate other agents with similar dangerous properties that such measures wouldn’t catch.
The good news is that — at least initially — new cutting-edge possibilities enabled by biological design tools will likely remain only accessible to a manageable number of existing experts who will use these facilities for legitimate and beneficial purposes. However, this access barrier will fall as biological design tools become so proficient that their outputs require little additional laboratory testing; in particular, as AI language models learn to interface effectively with the tools. Language models are already being linked up to specialized science tools to help with specific tasks and then automatically apply the right tool for the task at hand. Thus, the heights of biological design could quickly become accessible to a very large number of individuals, including ill-intentioned actors.
Why we need mandatory gene synthesis rules
What can be done to mitigate risks emerging from the intersection of AI and biology? There are two important angles: strengthening general biosecurity measures and advancing risk mitigation approaches specific to new artificial intelligence systems.
In the face of increasingly powerful and accessible biological design capabilities, one crucial biosecurity measure is universal gene synthesis screening. The production of the genetic building blocks for a protein or organism is the crucial step in turning digital designs into physical agents. A range of companies specializes in producing such DNA or RNA building blocks. Since 2010, the US government has recommended that such gene synthesis companies screen orders and customers to ensure only legitimate researchers are accessing genetic material for controlled agents. Many cutting-edge gene synthesis companies perform such screening voluntarily and have formed the International Gene Synthesis Consortium to coordinate these activities. However, a significant number of gene synthesis providers still do not screen. Indeed, as the MIT exercise demonstrates, ChatGPT is very adept at pointing out this fact and giving instructions on how to exploit such weaknesses in supply chain security.
What is needed is a mandatory baseline for screening synthetic DNA products. Requiring such baseline screening does not go against the interests of companies: Industry leaders across the US and UK have been screening orders voluntarily and are actively calling for a regulatory baseline to prevent competitors from skimping on safety. Measures to make gene synthesis screening mandatory should capture increasingly common benchtop gene synthesis devices and need to be future-proof to include screening for functional equivalents of concerning agents. Similar customer screening baselines are also needed for other crucial service providers at the boundary of the digital-to-physical, such as contract research organizations providing services to synthesize organisms.
Advancing governance of artificial intelligence
In addition to general biosecurity measures, we also need artificial intelligence-specific interventions. The first focus should be mitigating risks from large language models because not only are these models likely already lowering barriers to biological misuse, but also because their capabilities may increase quickly and unpredictably. One crucial challenge that applies across the whole range of risks posed by large language models is that new and dangerous capabilities may only become clear after the release of the model.
A particularly crucial role in mitigating risks from LLMs may be played by pre-release evaluations of model capabilities. Such pre-evaluations are necessary to ensure that new models do not contain dangerous capabilities on public release — and if conducted by a third party, they could ensure that companies have taken appropriate steps during training and fine-tuning to reduce the chance that these models could enable biological misuse. Releasing models through structured access methods, such as the web ChatGPT interface, can ensure that safeguards can be continuously updated. In contrast, open-sourcing a powerful LLM has significant risks because fine-tuning and safeguards may be easily removed, and if new dangerous capabilities are discovered, it would be impossible to retract a model or update its safeguards.
Generally, the potential impact of artificial intelligence tools on the risk of biological misuse raises a profound question: Who should be able to access dual-use scientific capabilities? For policymakers trying to answer this question, it will be vital to consider diverse voices from across different disciplines, demographics, and geographies. This will require difficult trade-offs between the openness of scientific areas relating to pathogens, law enforcement and monitoring of data streams for illicit activities, and increasing risk of misuse.
One sensible position might be that language models like ChatGPT do not need to provide anyone with detailed step-by-step instructions to create a dangerous strain of pandemic flu. Therefore, it might on balance be preferable if public versions of such models do not give detailed answers to questions on this and other dual-use topics. Notably, Anthropic’s recently released cutting-edge language model Claude 2 features a notably higher barrier than GPT-4 for handing its users detailed instructions for dangerous experiments.
At the same time, it is important that these tools enable scientists with appropriate training and approval to develop new medications and vaccines. Thus, differentiated access methods are needed for AI-powered lab assistants and biological design tools. This might require advancing ways for legitimate scientists to authenticate themselves online. For instance, to access model capabilities for predicting immune evasion variants of influenza virus to inform vaccine design, a scientist might need to authenticate and provide appropriate documentation of biosafety and dual-use review.
Beyond exacerbating biosecurity risks, advances in artificial intelligence also present an opportunity. As progress in AI spurs more rigorous gene synthesis screening, this will strengthen biosecurity more broadly. And as biological risks drive AI governance measures like pre-release evaluations of large language models, this will mitigate a wider array of artificial intelligence risks. Swift action by policymakers will not only enhance safety but also pave the way for reaping the many benefits of artificial intelligence.
Jonas Sandbrink is a biosecurity researcher at the University of Oxford and a biological security adviser at the UK Cabinet Office. This article is based on his recently published preprint titled “Artificial intelligence and biological misuse: Differentiating risks of language models and biological design tools.” This article reflects only the opinion of the author and not of the organizations with which he is affiliated.
What’s the matter with men — and how do we fix it?
What’s going on with men?
It’s a strange question, but it’s one people are asking more and more, and for good reasons. Whether you look at education or the labor market or addiction rates or suicide attempts, it’s not a pretty picture for men — especially working-class men.
Normally, more attention on a problem is a precursor to solving it. But in this case, for whatever reason, the added awareness doesn’t seem all that helpful. The “masculinity” conversation feels stuck, rarely moving beyond banal observations or reflexive dismissals.
A recent essay by the Washington Post columnist Christine Emba on this topic was different. It was — apologies for the cliché — one of those pieces that “broke through.” Besides being well done, Emba’s treatment of the topic was uncommonly nuanced, which is increasingly hard to do when tackling “controversial” topics.
So I invited Emba onto The Gray Area to talk about the state of men and what she thinks the way forward might look like. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday.
Sean Illing
Worrying about the “state of men,” as you say in your piece, is an old American pastime, so what makes this moment different?
Christine Emba
I think that now we have actual data showing that men do seem to be in a real crisis, and we also have data on how the world has changed. We can all see this in our own lives. Our social structure, our work structure, our economy, has changed really significantly over the past 30 to 40 years. And that necessarily changes how people fit into the world.
A lot of the changes have had a direct effect on men specifically. So we can look at the stats that we have right now about how men are doing, and we see that for every 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, only 74 are awarded to men. We know that when you’re looking at deaths of despair, which is a more recent phenomenon, 3 out of 4 of those deaths are males.
And then there are social factors, too. There’s been a change in who the high earners in our society are. In 2020, nearly half of women reported in a survey that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husband or romantic partner. And in 1960, that was fewer than 4 percent of women.
So we’ve seen the economy change in ways that have moved away from the strength jobs, from traditional union jobs and factory and labor jobs that were mostly seen as male jobs and helped promote this idea of the man as the provider who can take care of a whole family on one income. Now it’s more about soft-skilled credentialism and that favors jobs that tend to skew toward women. Because of the feminist movement and women’s advances — which, to be clear, is a great thing — women have entered schools and the economy in force and they’re doing really well. And I think men are beginning to feel a little bit worried and lost in comparison.
Sean Illing
Why is this such a difficult problem to talk about, especially for people on the left?
Christine Emba
This was actually one of the major inspirations for writing this piece, because I was trying to get at that question, and I even felt as I was working on this piece my own reluctance to attend to it empathetically. I theorize that there are a couple reasons for this.
First of all, justifiably I think, progressives and people on the left want to preserve the gains that have been made for women over the past several decades. The feminist movement and movements for women’s equality are still pretty fragile. We saw during the COVID-19 pandemic that suddenly it was women dropping out of the workforce en masse. It’s really easy, on the left and just in politics generally, to think of things as being zero-sum. So there’s this fear that if we start helping men, then we’ll just have forgotten about women and there won’t be space or time for women anymore. I think that’s a mistake. We should be able to do two things at once. We can recognize that both women and men are members of our society and we should want to help everyone.
I think there’s also something really appealing to someone with a progressive mindset about the idea of gender neutrality, or gender neutrality as an ethos that we should aspire to and avoid making distinctions between men and women or masculine and feminine. We’ve moved in liberal society toward a real ideal of individualization; the idea that there could be one form of masculinity or manhood that’s good risks alienating people who don’t necessarily fit into that box. And then ascribing certain traits to men, especially if they’re positive traits, might create worries that we’re subtracting those traits from women. If we say that men are leaders, does that mean that women are always going to be followers? Or if men are strong, are we actually saying that women are weak? I think there’s a fear of doing that.
Finally, I think there’s a generalized resentment, especially after the Me Too moment — but also after a feminist movement in the 2010s that encouraged a pretty silly and uncritical form of man-hating and misandry where it was cool to be like, Men are trash, men suck. Wouldn’t the world be better without men? What are they even for? It was a feeling that you needed to do this sort of thing to prove your liberal bona fides that you love women enough.
There’s also the fact that because progressives in the mainstream have not really taken up the masculinity question, the people who have taken it up tend to be on the right and often they tend to be problematic figures. You see incels and men’s rights activists and Ben Shapiro burning Barbies, and there’s a fear that if you speak up for men, everyone’s going to be like, You seem too interested in this. Are you one of them? It’s a branding problem.
Sean Illing
It’s definitely true that the left, for all of these reasons, has ceded this space to the right and the right has happily filled the vacuum. So what do you see happening with people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate? These are very different people, I’m not equating them, but they inhabit this space in revealing ways.
Christine Emba
It’s a super interesting question. I do think that it’s important to try and draw distinctions here. There’s sort of a spectrum of what I call in the piece “the manfluencers” — a ridiculous word for a ridiculous phenomenon. But there is a range of people who are maybe slightly more benign. I think Jordan Peterson started out as more benign, although he’s gotten fringier since, to people like Andrew Tate, who I think are just straightforwardly bad people. And you have also people like Josh Hawley and Joe Rogan and Bronze Age Pervert and all of these people in between.
I think it’s just factually accurate that conservatives and the right have always been more invested in — and more clear about — gender roles. So it’s almost natural that they have a clearer vision of what manhood is and what men should do. But I think they realize that there was an opening here. Young men especially are looking for role models and realizing that they feel unsure and uncomfortable of their place in the world.
There’s a young man who I interviewed for the piece, who was like, I just want someone to tell me how to be. If the progressive left is like, We’re not going to tell you that, just be a good person, you don’t need rules. And then young men are like, No, I’m really asking you. I really want rules, actually, the right is happy to give them those rules.
If people have an identity as a man or masculine, the right is not going to say it’s toxic and only talk about toxic masculinity. They’re positive about it and they frame it as something that you want to aspire to, that’s actually transgressive and great and historically superior to whatever’s going on today, for better or worse. And being told that your identity is a positive thing, and here’s a road map to how to fulfill it, whether it’s actually good or bad, that something is going to beat out nothing anytime.
Sean Illing
I think there’s something earnest about Peterson’s project, or there certainly was, but the Tate phenomenon is different. To me, this is what happens when masculinity becomes steeped in fear and resentment. With Tate, unlike Peterson, there’s no pretension to anything virtuous. It’s just, Hey, the world hates you. The world wants to make you weak, wants to make you soft, so take what you can get, crush your enemies, abuse women, double down on everything they hate about you. It’s the weak person’s vision of a strong person. It’s the 19-year-old Nietzsche reader who didn’t make it past the preface.
But I still don’t think a lot of people quite understand Tate’s reach. Do you see him as a creature of a very particular moment or do you think he represents something bigger and more enduring?
Christine Emba
The Tate phenomenon, as you say, isn’t just about Tate. There’s a whole space with very online figures like Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, who wrote this book, Bronze Age Mindset, that’s become a very conservative phenomenon. I think you’re exactly right. This is a vision of masculinity that’s super basic and sort of tailored to a 15-year-old who doesn’t know any better. It’s all about just shouting and showing off your cars and your women and your money, and that’s what being a man is. It’s very clear: just work out and be mean. It’s simple and it’s superficially appealing because there are a lot of fast cars and pretty girls. And I guess that appeals especially to young men who haven’t thought about it very much.
But I do think, in the absence of better road maps, in the absence of other models, people like Tate present a very clear, visible model. He’s everywhere. You see him everywhere if you’re a kid online. I think that’s also part of what has let him be underestimated. His reach is enormous among younger men, like middle school through high school-aged kids. They’ve all heard of Andrew Tate, to the point that, actually, in Britain, where he’s from, there was a campaign last year where teachers in high schools and middle schools were talking amongst themselves about how to combat Tateism in the classroom because these middle schoolers who had watched Andrew Tate videos were getting up in class and telling their female teachers to shut up, because they don’t listen to women, and that’s what Tate taught them.
His videos spread on TikTok and YouTube and Facebook before he was banned from all of those sites. Fifty-five-year-old dads weren’t necessarily on TikTok, and I think didn’t realize how much reach he had and how much of a hold he had. And the same with all of these online figures who are sort of flying under the radar because they’re online. But I do think it’s important what you point out about their immorality.
Jordan Peterson, and even to some extent the Josh Hawley figures, are saying, Well, it’s good to be a man, but also being a man means being responsible in some way, contributing to society in some way. The Tateist version of masculinity is totally divorced from anything positive. It’s just about defining yourself in opposition to women and taking what you can get. But it’s a clear path and it feels almost transgressive, which I think is part of its appeal because he’s like, Call me toxic. I love being toxic. I am toxic masculinity. To a 15-year-old edgelord, that is aspirational, I guess. But it’s really ugly and it’s not good for society in any way.
Sean Illing
What do you think a truly healthy masculinity looks like? You identify three traits in the piece — protector, provider, and procreator — and I know a lot of people will hear that and, not without reason, immediately think of the patriarchy of yesterday. Do you think that’s a mistake?
Christine Emba
Another great question. Even when I was writing the piece, I was wrestling with my reluctance to try and define masculinity or cheer on masculinity too much and my belief that we actually need to do just that. One of the things about the piece that seemed to strike a lot of people was the fact that I admitted that I like men. I want them to be happy. And I also do think that there is something distinctive that one could call manhood or masculinity that is a different thing than womanhood or femininity.
So you pulled out the concepts of protector, provider, procreator, and I got those from the anthropologist, David Gilmore, who did this cross-country study a couple decades ago looking at what it meant to be a man in all of these different groups across several continents. He found out that almost every society did have a concept of masculinity that was distinctive from just being male. It was something that you earned and was also distinctive from being female. It had to do with being someone who protected the people around you in your community, who provided in some way for your family. That often looked like not just providing, but creating surplus in some ways and sharing that with others. And then there was the idea that procreating, having a family, was what being a successful male looked like.
In our modern moment, I think that can look like a lot of different things. In my essay, there’s a callout where I ask people to write in and tell me about their ideal of masculinity. When I think about masculinity myself, there are a couple of attributes that seem to come up a lot, and it’s stuff like strength used well and responsibility, performing your duties, looking out for people who are weaker than you.
The pushback that I get very often when I talk about this is what I was saying earlier, people are like, Why do you have to say that’s being a good man? Why is leadership or ambition or adventurousness a male trait? Aren’t women leaders? And of course, yes, but I do think that being a good person is not a clear enough road map. It’s not a strong enough, clear enough norm, and that’s what younger people especially are looking for.
I think what it means to be a good person is in some ways tied to your embodiment, to your human form as a male person or a female person. For instance, [younger] men tend to be — though not always — much stronger than the average woman or old person. So being a good person, if that is your embodiment, necessarily means thinking about what that says about your responsibilities. What do you do with that strength?
Richard Reeves, who wrote the book Of Boys and Men, talks about how masculinity and femininity, or male and female, overlap a lot. But on the far ends of the spectrum, there are very big differences, and that tends to be where our definitions of male and female come from.
Sean Illing
It’s true that you can’t talk about masculinity and femininity without acknowledging some differences between the sexes. And yet, that acknowledgment is utterly compatible with the reality that much of what we call gender is a performance, is a cultural construct. And I don’t know why we seem unable to avoid this zero-sum trap. You see this in lots of other cultures where there’s a respect for the masculine and feminine ideal. There’s no zero-sum relationship. These are poles at opposite ends of the continuum, and possessing virtues at both ends of the spectrum is seen as wise and healthy. I don’t know why we can’t do that.
Christine Emba
America really likes extremes. I think we like things that are very clear-cut and we’re used to seeing things that way and seeing them used to marginalize people or somehow denigrate people who don’t fit the exact norms. I think people who think of themselves as good progressives and liberals really don’t want to do that, and so shy away from espousing norms because they might leave someone out. And I understand that. But for the people who are asking for a road map, who want to be told who to be, just saying Be whoever you want to be, but be a good one is just not helpful.
There’s also an age factor here and I noticed this in the responses to the piece. There were older men who would write in and say, What’s the problem? I’m a man, I feel great about it. I don’t see the issue. That’s great for you, but for young people, who don’t have that much life experience, who are trying to figure out who to be, having some kind of norm or ideal, even if it’s loose, can be helpful. And then as you grow older and you get life experience and you figure out how you fit in the world, you make the norm up for yourself. But they’re looking for a starting point.
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