A new project aims to tackle the “replication crisis” by shifting incentives among scientists.
For over a decade, scientists have been grappling with the alarming realization that many published findings — in fields ranging from psychology to cancer biology — may actually be wrong. Or at least, we don’t know if they’re right, because they just don’t hold up when other scientists repeat the same experiments, a process known as replication.
In a 2015 attempt to reproduce 100 psychology studies from high-ranking journals, only 39 of them replicated. And in 2018, one effort to repeat influential studies found that 14 out of 28 — just half — replicated. Another attempt found that only 13 out of 21 social science results picked from the journals Science and Nature could be reproduced.
This is known as the “replication crisis,” and it’s devastating. The ability to repeat an experiment and get consistent results is the bedrock of science. If important experiments didn’t really find what they claimed to, that could lead to iffy treatments and a loss of trust in science more broadly. So scientists have done a lot of tinkering to try to fix this crisis. They’ve come up with “open science” practices that help somewhat — like preregistration, where a scientist announces how she’ll conduct her study before actually doing the study — and journals have gotten better about retracting bad papers. Yet top journals still publish shoddy papers, and other researchers still cite and build on them.
This is where the Transparent Replications project comes in.
The project, launched last week by the nonprofit Clearer Thinking, has a simple goal: to replicate any psychology study published in Science or Nature (as long as it’s not way too expensive or technically hard). The idea is that, from now on, before researchers submit their papers to a prestigious journal, they’ll know that their work will be subjected to replication attempts, and they’ll have to worry about whether their findings hold up. Ideally, this will shift their incentives toward producing more robust research in the first place, as opposed to just racking up another publication in hopes of getting tenure.
Spencer Greenberg, Clearer Thinking’s founder, told me his team is tackling psychology papers to start with because that’s their specialty, though he hopes this same model will later be extended to other fields. I spoke to him about the replications that the project has run so far, whether the original researchers were helpful or defensive, and why he hopes this project will eventually become obsolete. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
Sigal Samuel
It’s been over a decade that scientists have been talking about the replication crisis. There’s been all this soul-searching and debate. Is your sense that all of that has led to better science being published? Is bad science still being published very often in top journals?
Spencer Greenberg
So there’s been this whole awakening to have better practices and open science. And I think there is way more awareness around how that seems to happen. It’s starting to trickle into people’s work. You definitely see more preregistration. But we’re talking about an entire field, so it takes time to get uptake. There’s still a lot better that could be done.
Sigal Samuel
Do you think these sorts of reforms — preregistration and more open science — are in principle enough to solve the issue, and it just hasn’t had time yet to trickle into the field fully? Or do you think the field needs something fundamentally different?
Spencer Greenberg
It’s definitely very helpful, but also not sufficient. The way I think about it is, when you’re doing research as a scientist, you’re making hundreds of little micro-decisions in the research process, right? So if you’re a psychologist, you’re thinking about what questions to ask participants and how to word them and what order to put them in and so on. And if you have a truth-seeking orientation during that process, where you’re constantly asking, “What is the way to do this that best arrives at the truth?” then I think you’ll tend to produce good research. Whereas if you have other motivations, like “What will make a cool-looking finding?” or “What will get published?” then I think you’ll make decisions suboptimally.
And so one of the things that these good practices like open science do is they help create greater alignment between truth-seeking and what the researcher is doing. But they’re not perfect. There’s so many ways in which you can be misaligned.
Sigal Samuel
Okay, so thinking about different efforts that have been put forth to address replication issues, like preregistration, what makes you hopeful that your effort will succeed where others might have fallen short?
Spencer Greenberg
Our project is really quite different. With previous projects, what they’ve done is go back and look at papers and go try to replicate them. This gave us a lot of insight — like, my best guess from looking at all those prior big replication studies is that in top journals, about 40 percent of papers don’t replicate.
But the thing about those studies is that they don’t shift incentives going forward. What really makes the Transparent Replications project different is that we’re trying to change forward-looking incentives by saying: Whenever a new psychology paper or behavior paper comes out in Nature and Science, as long as they are within our technical and monetary constraints, we will replicate them. So imagine you’re submitting your paper and you’re like, “Oh, wait a minute, I’m going to get replicated if this gets published!” That actually makes a really big difference. Right now the chance of being replicated is so low that you basically just ignore it.
Sigal Samuel
Talk to me about the timeline here. How soon after a paper gets published would you release your replication results? And is that quick enough to change the incentive structure?
Spencer Greenberg
Our goal would be to do everything in 8 to 10 weeks. We want it to be fast enough that we can avoid stuff getting into the research literature that may not turn out to be true. Think about how many ideas have now been shared in the literature that other people are citing and building on that are not correct!
We’ve seen examples of this, like with ego depletion [the theory that when a task requires a lot of mental energy, it depletes our store of willpower]. Hundreds of papers have been written on it, and yet now there’s doubts about whether it’s really legitimate at all. It’s just an incredible waste of time and energy and resources. So if we can say, “This new paper came out, but wait, it doesn’t replicate!” we can avoid building on it.
Sigal Samuel
Running replications in 8 to 10 weeks — that’s fast. It sounds like a lot of work. How big of a team do you have helping with this?
Spencer Greenberg
My colleague Amanda Metskas is the director of the project, and then we have a couple other people who are helping. It’s just four of us right now. But I should say we’ve spent years building the experience to run rapid studies. We actually build technology around studies, like this platform recruiting people for studies in 100 countries. So if you need depressed people in Germany or people with sleep problems in the US or whatever, the platform helps you find that. So this is sort of our bread and butter.
Another extremely important thing is, our replications have to be extremely accurate, so we always run them by the original research team. We really want to make sure it’s a fair replication of what they did. So we’ll say, “Hey, your paper is going to be replicated, here is the exact replication that’s going to be done, look at our materials.” I think all the teams have gotten back to us and they’ve given minor comments. And after we write the report, we send it to the research team and ask if they see any errors. We give them a chance to respond.
But if for some reason they don’t get back to us, we’re still going to run the replication!
Sigal Samuel
So far you’ve done three replications, which are scoring pretty well on transparency and clarity. Two of them scored okay on replicability, but one basically failed to replicate. I’m curious, especially for that one, have you gotten a negative reaction? Have the researchers been defensive? What’s the process been like on a human level?
Spencer Greenberg
We’re really grateful because all the research teams have communicated with us, which is awesome. That really helps us do a better job. But I do not know how that research team is going to react. We have not heard anything since we sent them the final version.
Sigal Samuel
Broadly, what do you think the consequences should be for bad research? Should there be consequences other than how frequently it’ll be cited by other scientists?
Spencer Greenberg
No. Failing to replicate really should not be seen as an indictment of the research team. Every single researcher will sometimes have their work fail to replicate. Like, even if you’re the perfect researcher. So I really think the way to interpret it is not, “This research team is bad,” but, “We should believe this result less.”
In an ideal world, it just wouldn’t get published! Because really what should happen is that the journals should be doing what we’re doing. The journals — like Nature and Science — should be saying, well, we’re going to replicate a certain percentage of the papers.
That would be incredible. It would change everything. And then we could stop doing this!
Sigal Samuel
You just put your finger on exactly what I wanted to ask you, which is … it seems a bit ridiculous to me that a group like yours has to go out, raise money, do all this work. Should it actually be the journals that are doing this? Should it be the NIH or NSF that are randomly selecting studies that they fund for replication follow-ups? I mean, just doing this as part of the cost of the basic process of science — whose job should it actually be?
Spencer Greenberg
I think it would be amazing if the journals did it. That would make a lot of sense because they’re already engaging at a deep level. It could be the funder as well, although they may be in not as good a position to do it, since it’s less in their wheelhouse.
But I would say being independent from academia puts us in a unique position to be able to do this. Because if you’re going to do a bunch of replications, if you’re an academic, what is the output of that? You have to get a paper out of it, because that’s how you advance your career — that’s the currency. But the top journals don’t tend to publish replications. Additionally, some of these papers are coming from top people in the field. If you fail to replicate them, well, you might worry: Is that going to make them think badly of you? Is it going to have career repercussions?
Sigal Samuel
Can you say a word about your funding model going forward? Where do you think the funding for this is going to come from in the long haul?
Spencer Greenberg
We set up a Patreon because some people might just want to support this scientific endeavor. We’re also very likely going to be going to foundations, especially ones that are interested in meta-science, and see if they might be interested in giving. We want this to be an indefinite project, until others who should be doing it take it over. And then we can stop doing our work, which would be awesome.
The election could say a lot about candidate quality and about whether Democrats can replicate their success in the state.
The results of the Georgia Senate runoff, taking place on December 6, could ultimately be pretty illuminating.
The election, a rematch between Baptist pastor Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) and former football star Herschel Walker (R) will tell us more about how much candidate quality really matters, whether Democrats are able to replicate the gains they saw in Georgia in 2021, and which party was able to keep more of its voters energized.
The outcome will also have big implications for power in the Senate. While Georgia’s election will no longer decide the majority, it could determine whether Democrats secure a 51st seat, which would give them more control over committees, judicial nominations, and the upper chamber’s legislative agenda.
Depending on how close the race is, we may not know the results for a day or two, though we’re likely to soon have a better read on several issues the runoff has raised. Here are five key questions we’re watching as results come in this week.
- Could Warnock maintain his lead from the general election and in the polls?
Although he did not get a majority of the votes in the general election, Warnock did beat Walker, securing 49.4 percent of the vote to Walker’s 48.5 percent. Because no candidate received 50 percent of the vote, the race went to a runoff, as required by Georgia law.
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Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Since the general election, Warnock has been leading consistently in polls, with most of the surveys conducted continuing to show him ahead by narrow margins. A late November poll from Emerson College and The Hill had Warnock up by 2 percentage points among likely voters, while another poll from SurveyUSA and WXIA-TV Atlanta had Warnock up by 3 percentage points. Warnock also benefits from incumbency — having served for nearly two years, he’s a name Georgians know — and has previously maintained solid approval ratings in the state.
The senator’s lead in the general and the latest polling suggest he’s in a strong position going into this runoff, but the main unknown is whether enough of the voters who supported him in November will be motivated to vote again.
- Are Walker’s scandals sufficient to deter Republican voters?
Another big outstanding question is whether Walker could still win in the face of his numerous scandals and campaign trail missteps.
During his campaign, Walker has been plagued with a series of issues, including allegations that, despite being staunchly anti-abortion himself, he paid for two women’s abortions (he has denied both allegations). Walker has also faced allegations of domestic violence, scrutiny over policy gaffes, and claims that he misrepresented his business record, charitable donations, and experience in law enforcement.
Most of these allegations and policy missteps were public ahead of the general election, suggesting that many Republicans remain willing to back him regardless, and could continue to do so.
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Alex Wong/Getty Images
For some voters, Walker’s celebrity in Georgia as a football player and the fact that he’d bolster Republicans’ numbers in the Senate could be sufficient reasons to overlook the other problems that have been raised. Republicans have also worked to tie Warnock with Biden, who has been blamed for inflation and has low approval ratings in the state.
- Which party can turn out more voters?
Turning voters back out for the second time is the real challenge of any runoff election. In this case, both campaigns face new obstacles.
Because of a 2021 Georgia election law, there were just four weeks between the general election and the runoff, which is a much shorter period for early voting and returning absentee ballots. That’s a lot less time than during the 2020 runoffs, when there were nine weeks between the two races.
Additionally, unlike last time, no new voters could register between the general election and the runoff, so the candidates had to target residents who were already registered. Both candidates also have to contend with different stakes than in 2020, when control of the Senate hinged on Georgia. This year, there is concern that because the state will no longer determine the majority, some could feel less motivated to vote.
The two candidates have had to navigate unique headwinds as well. Walker was likely helped in the general by the strong support that more popular GOP candidates, particularly Gov. Brian Kemp, had. Kemp, who 56 percent of Georgia residents approved of in a November Marist poll, is no longer on the ticket, and it’s possible some Republicans could stay home because of that. In the general election, 200,000 voters who backed Kemp did not vote for Walker, and some of those Georgians could opt out of the runoff entirely.
Democrats, meanwhile, are up against the state’s slight Republican lean and historic successes the GOP has had in Georgia runoffs, a trend they bucked last cycle. There’s also a chance that Walker could pick up votes from those who supported the libertarian candidate, Chase Oliver, in the general election.
So far, early voting suggests some positive signs for Democrats, though turnout could look very different on Election Day, since Republicans are more likely to vote then. This year, more than 1.8 million people cast votes early either in person or via absentee ballot, breaking records for the number of early votes submitted in a day. That’s likely because of the shortened early voting period people had to work with this time around; most voters had less than a week this cycle compared to multiple weeks for the 2021 race, and many reported waiting in long lines at their polling places.
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Cheney Orr/Bloomberg via Getty Images
As Politico reported, there have been strong early turnout numbers in Democratic-leaning counties and among Black voters, a majority of whom previously supported Warnock, both trends that could bode well for him.
- Were the 2021 elections in Georgia an anomaly?
Democrats saw strong gains in the 2021 elections, driven by aggressive organizing efforts that turned out voters of color in the state, many of whom supported the party’s candidates. Those races, which sent two Democrats to the Senate, as well as Joe Biden to the White House, marked the first time in years that Democrats had won Senate seats and the presidency in the state.
These wins spoke to how the state is becoming more purple, a shift that the runoff could further reaffirm. While there are certainly factors that make this race unique, including Walker’s specific candidate quality issues, another Democratic success this cycle would show that the party’s victories in the state can be replicated.
Many of the organizations that played a pivotal role in reaching voters in past races, such as the New Georgia Project Action Fund, have put in significant resources this cycle as well. Despite these efforts, the overall turnout rate in the state fell compared to 2018 in the general election, indicating that past gains could still fluctuate in the future.
- Which party had the stronger closing argument?
Both parties have invested heavily to mobilize voters in the last four weeks, although Democrats have outspent Republicans roughly two to one, according to NBC News. In the last month or so, Democrats have spent $52.5 million on political ads to Republicans’ $25 million, the publication reported.
The two parties have also boosted the two candidates with their respective surrogates, with former President Barack Obama visiting the state to stump for Warnock last week, and Sens. Tim Scott (R-SC) and John Kennedy (R-LA) among those doing the same for Walker. Walker’s campaign has also tapped Kemp for ads, while former President Donald Trump — someone who’s turned off moderate voters in the state — has kept a lower profile.
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Win McNamee/Getty Images
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Alex Wong/Getty Images
Although the Senate majority question is no longer being decided by the state, Republicans and Democrats have sought to underscore the importance of the seat.
Walker has emphasized that he would help the GOP counter the Biden administration, noting repeatedly that he would not be a “rubber stamp” for its policies, and argued that he’d help combat problems like inflation. Warnock, meanwhile, has said that this election is less about partisanship and more about “right and wrong,” jabbing at Walker over his scandals and fitness for office. Warnock has stressed, too, the policies he’s helped advance, including an insulin cap for Medicare recipients and a bipartisan proposal that bolsters highway funding in the state.
Tuesday’s outcome could speak to which candidate’s message wound up being more compelling, particularly for swing voters.
Layoffs are hitting tech and media. A recession may be looming. What happens to everyone who loses their job?
Hey, remember the pandemic economy? How could you not, right? In early 2020, millions of people lost their jobs in the blink of an eye, through no fault of their own. In the United States, their subsequent attempts to get help from the government overwhelmed unemployment offices across the country, revealing the system to be fundamentally broken. The infrastructure was bad, the benefits insufficient, and the entire scheme next to impossible to navigate.
And then, something remarkable happened: The federal government stepped in to shore things up. It added extra dollars to state unemployment benefits to make sure people could get by and pay their bills. It expanded the pool of people who were eligible for benefits, so workers such as freelancers and contractors could access them, too. While far from perfect, the extra efforts to help the unemployed made a real difference in people’s lives and played a part in the country averting a deeper and longer recession.
It felt, for a while, like maybe there would be momentum to finally address the issues in America’s unemployment system. So many people had experienced first-hand just what a disaster it was on a massive scale, from outdated administrative systems to inadequate benefits. It seemed obvious that this hybrid state-federal program that had left so much discretion up to individual states just didn’t work.
And then … America’s UI setup didn’t really get fixed, because it never does.
“This is literally what always happens every time there is an economic downturn,” said Michele Evermore, the former deputy director of policy at the Office of Unemployment Insurance Modernization at the Department of Labor who is now a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “At the very start of it, people are pretty sympathetic to people who suddenly became unemployed, so we temporarily add benefits and add temporary fixes, and then as the economic crisis rolls on, everybody gets sick of the unemployed people and starts blaming them. By the end of it, it’s all the unemployed people’s fault, they just don’t want to work, we’ve got to take away their unemployment benefits.”
As workers stare down the barrel of another potential recession — and the layoffs that would accompany it — the problems that dogged unemployment insurance before the pandemic, many of which have persisted for decades, remain. Most of the momentum to repair the system has dissipated.
Congress and the White House allocated $2 billion to the Department of Labor in 2021 to try to help states update their unemployment systems, combat fraud, and promote equitable access to benefits. But that funding and the accompanying efforts can only go so far, and they are aimed at administrative fixes, not policy fixes. The benefit amount a worker is entitled to, how long the benefits last, and the requirements to get them largely depend on which state that worker lives in. Many states are still digging themselves out from under the last crisis. Given the narrative that has taken hold around unemployment during this most recent economic recovery — that UI kept people out of the workforce, that too much government assistance contributed to inflation — it’s not clear what kind of appetite would exist in Congress to help workers if and when another recession hits.
“When the next crisis hits, we’re not at all ready for it, we’re worse off,” Evermore said.
State by state, not so great
The point of unemployment insurance is to replace income for people who have lost their jobs and keep them attached to the labor market. It’s meant to be a support for the broader economy in times of economic downturn, too, and keep consumer spending going. If I lose my job and can’t pay my rent, it is a problem for me and for my landlord and for the sandwich guy I no longer buy from down the street.
In the US, Wisconsin was the first state to put UI in place in 1932, and the federal program became law under the Social Security Act in 1935. It is a federal-state scheme that has never worked smoothly because each state does things its own way.
UI is financed through state and federal payroll taxes that are supposed to cover both administrative systems and the benefits themselves. Many states have kept those taxes quite low, leaving the system chronically underfunded and resulting in luck-of-the-draw situations for workers applying for UI, depending on where they live.
The average weekly benefit paid out in regular unemployment insurance nationwide was about $385 in the 12 months ending in September. But if you look at Mississippi, for example, the average benefit is in the low $200 range, while it’s now above $600 for Washington state.
These benefits do not move with inflation, either.
“Inflation is making it even harder for people to survive on these inadequate benefits,” said Rebecca Dixon, executive director of the National Employment Law Project (NELP). “Most benefits are not set to increase on any index, so there are a lot of states where they’ve just been stuck at the number that they’re at for a decade or more.”
Workers in many states are eligible to collect UI benefits for up to 26 weeks, but in some states, such as Florida, the maximum is about half of that. Different states also have all sorts of hoops workers have to jump through to certify they’re still unemployed and prove they’re looking for work. One week they’ll get benefits, the next week they’ll get denied.
Many UI offices are understaffed, are still dealing with pandemic-era backlogs, and are using outdated technologies to administer benefits. Or, they’ve updated their technologies and they’re intentionally designed to make the whole thing harder for workers to navigate, or the update was just bad.
Add it all up and it’s easy to see why so many unemployed people aren’t getting UI benefits at all. According to a recent analysis from the Century Foundation (TCF), about 27 percent of unemployed workers were getting state unemployment benefits in the year ending in August 2022. That’s worse than during the financial crisis in 2009, when 41 percent of the unemployed were collecting benefits. It’s much worse than in 2021, while many pandemic-era UI federal supports were still in place, which saw a 76 percent recipiency rate.
“It’s really the policy side that’s sticking out right now in that there are these huge holes in the safety net that got filled with a federal program, but when you took away these temporary federal programs, you just left these huge holes,” said Andrew Stettner in an interview while he was director of workforce policy and a senior fellow at TCF. In late November, after that interview, he took over Evermore’s old job at the Department of Labor.
After the pandemic, we tried to fix America’s unemployment system and then gave up
When the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020 and millions of people were laid off, America’s UI system was crushed. Millions of people were met with broken websites and endless call wait times as they tried desperately to access benefits to which they were entitled, and state offices were completely overwhelmed. Once people did get benefits, in many cases they weren’t adequate given the economic situation the country was facing.
So, the federal government stepped up in 2020 and through much of 2021. It added extra federal dollars to weekly benefits — first $600, then a lapse, then $300. It also extended the length of eligibility for benefits collection and expanded the pool of workers who could apply to include freelancers, gig workers, and the self-employed.
Those efforts certainly had their shortfalls; it’s estimated that billions of dollars in benefits were wrongly paid out and obtained by fraud. At the same time, they really helped people who needed them, and they demonstrated the need for a reformed system.
“There was such a crush that even some of the checks that were normally done were not done,” Stettner said. “I don’t think that would happen again because we’re never going to have that kind of crush again, god willing.”
The state-federal hybrid model across the country only made the overall system more vulnerable. “For hackers and people who are doing these waves of fraud, they’re looking at it like there’s 53 different opportunities for us to do this because there’s 53 different programs,” Dixon said. “It makes it harder to stop because it’s happening in multiple places.”
At the administrative level, there have been efforts to improve UI overall. The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) signed into law in 2021 provided $2 billion to the Department of Labor to put toward fraud detection, equity, and ensuring state UI programs worked better overall. The DOL dispatched what it dubbed “tiger teams” of experts six states at a time to work with their offices to improve their programs. They’ve thus far gone to 30 states, according to a DOL spokesperson. ARPA also put $260 million in equity grants to try to help with outreach to make sure everyone entitled to benefits has fair, equal access to them.
“In the beginning, it was like, make your website more disability accessible, of course, but by the second or third cohort, they were like, ‘Okay here’s how to redo your form, make it horizontal not vertical, this font not that.’ They were making very informed, specific recommendations,” Evermore said. “There are so many weird little bottlenecks that states never had time to address.”
Still, many of these initiatives are just scratching at the surface. “The big picture remains the same, which is that we’ve historically underinvested in the unemployment insurance programs,” Dixon said. “One infusion during the pandemic is not going to remedy years of disinvestment.”
Where the US would need an overhaul is on the policy end, many experts say. That could take a variety of forms. For example, the federal government could put in place a set of basic standards that states have to abide by that would set minimum benefit amounts and time frames, and it could overall push states to keep their systems updated. Or, it could put in place automatic stabilizers that would tie benefits to certain economic conditions, such as the unemployment rate. What that would look like is when the unemployment rate rises to X percent, an extra amount of dollars and/or weeks automatically kick in until the unemployment rate falls again. That way, workers aren’t dealing with the political will in Washington, DC, in the event of another recession.
The thing is, these types of changes would require action from Congress. There have been proposals from lawmakers on that front, including from Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Michael Bennet (D-CO), but they haven’t gained much traction.
“This is why unemployment hasn’t been fixed for decades. Whenever there’s an opportunity, there are more pressing things on the agenda that members want to get done,” one Democratic congressional aide, who asked for anonymity to speak freely about the matter, said in an interview. “If you gave those same members a choice of should we do climate or fix UI, should we do child care or fix unemployment, given that A or B choice, I don’t think anybody’s going to choose unemployment.”
Unemployment never feels like a problem until it is
Losing a job is an awful experience, financially and emotionally. In the current moment, the Federal Reserve is hiking interest rates in an effort to fight inflation, which could push the economy into a recession. It could put millions of people out of work, once again through no fault of their own. Part of what the Fed wants is for businesses to slow hiring, stop raising wages, and, ultimately, lay people off. If Fed Chair Jay Powell is the reason John in Minneapolis loses his job, does that mean John in Minneapolis, who also can’t access decent unemployment benefits while he looks for a new job, should also lose his home?
“You don’t want that Fed recession to have a lasting impact,” Stettner said. “The last time the Fed put the economy into a recession in the ’80s, there are entire communities that didn’t recover from that.”
Many experts, advocates, and policymakers worry that the opportunity to fix unemployment insurance has been squandered once again. On Capitol Hill and in many states, there doesn’t appear to be much appetite for addressing the system policy right now, when times are relatively good. It’s not clear what appetite there would be to put in place at least temporary supports if a recession hits, either. Pandemic unemployment insurance has taken some of the blame for bumping up inflation as part of government stimulus in the first place. There are also concerns about the potential for fraud and, more broadly, concerns that too-generous benefits keep people out of the workforce. (Evidence suggests more robust benefits during the pandemic did not keep people on the sidelines.)
“I’m actually worried that we won’t get any temporary improvement in unemployment insurance that we usually get,” Evermore said. “The political will is really, really bad.”
“There would be an appetite to do something more limited, maybe extend weeks or something like that, but I don’t see an appetite to do a boost like we did at the beginning of the pandemic, that’s for sure,” the Democratic aide said.
It’s a lesson the country has half-learned time and again and then forgotten. The last crisis — the pandemic-induced recession — is over, and the next crisis looms. Yet Congress has already moved onto other things, as has most of the public. “Unemployed worker” is a temporary status, and once people go back to work, they forget. “It doesn’t really have a constituency that you can rally to stand up for the program and support sustained advocacy to get changes,” Dixon said.
In the bad times, either personally or collectively, the shortcomings of the unemployment insurance system punch you in the face. It hurts in the moment, and it bruises. Then the pain subsides and the bruise fades, and life moves on, even though the risk of the next punch in the face remains.