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      Pro-Vaccine Views Are Winning. Don’t Fear the Skeptics.

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      With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, vaccine skepticism has been back in the headlines. Though Kennedy has said he isn’t anti-vaccine and that his children have had vaccines, and his campaign manager (the former Democratic congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich) says calling Kennedy “anti-vax” is a “left-handed smear,” Kennedy continues to suggest a link between vaccines and autism — a link that has leaned heavily on flawed and retracted science. He’s also been a vocal opponent of Covid vaccines.When a flurry of April polls indicated that Kennedy would enjoy double-digit support in a Democratic primary, I wondered if the respondents knew about his views on vaccines and agreed with them, if they were intrigued about the possibility of a contested primary or if they just had warm feelings about the Kennedy name. I worried that Covid vaccine skepticism had potentially sullied Americans’ feelings about all vaccines: If a meaningful slice of the Democratic electorate was either vaccine hesitant or indifferent to vaccine skepticism, I’d be concerned about dangerous diseases like polio, diphtheria, measles and mumps making a comeback.I was relieved, then, to see a survey from Pew Research in May that found that in 2023, 88 percent of American adults believe that the benefits of the M.M.R. (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine outweigh the risk — the same percentage that Pew found in 2016 and 2019. Per Pew, there’s been some softening in vaccine trust, particularly among Republicans and white evangelical Christians (who lean Republican), and this jibes with Republicans’ negative views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and several other government agencies. But overall, the picture isn’t dire.When you look at rates of vaccination among young children for potentially dangerous infectious diseases, the data is encouraging. According to a study published in January in the C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report:Vaccination coverage among young children has remained high and stable for most vaccines, although disparities persist. The National Immunization Survey-Child identified no decline overall in routine vaccination coverage associated with the Covid-19 pandemic among children born during 2018-2019, although declines were observed among children living below the federal poverty level and in rural areas.Per the C.D.C., for children born in 2018 and 2019, coverage was over 90 percent for the polio, M.M.R., hepatitis B and varicella (chickenpox) vaccines. A major barrier to receiving vaccines seems to be access to health care — according to the C.D.C., “The proportion of children who were unvaccinated by age 24 months was eight times higher for uninsured compared with privately insured children.”Even for children who missed routine visits and vaccine doses in the darkest days of 2020, the C.D.C. “did not identify any consistent or persistent decline in vaccination coverage associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.” When there were “transient declines” in coverage of some vaccines, children appeared to catch up with their doses at later dates.Acceptance of Covid vaccines is also one the rise in the United States. In a survey of Covid vaccine acceptance in 23 countries in 2022, published in January in the journal Nature, researchers found that 80.2 percent of Americans accepted the Covid vaccine, higher than the global average of 79.1 percent. (Vaccine acceptance was defined as “having received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and, if not, willingness to take the Covid-19 vaccine when it is available to them.”)Still, parents in the United States are more hesitant about getting the vaccines for their kids than for themselves. Though 33.1 percent of American parents were hesitant about the vaccine in 2022, that was a nearly 12.9 percent decrease in hesitancy from 2021 — with time, more parents are able to trust that the vaccines’ benefits matter. (Hesitancy for children among parents was defined as “having reported ‘no’ to the question of whether children received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and also ‘unsure/no opinion’, ‘somewhat disagree’ or ‘strongly disagree’ to the question of whether children will take a Covid-19 vaccine when available to them.”That it was going to take time for parents to get comfortable with Covid vaccines for their kids was predictable. As Dr. Aaron Carroll, a pediatrician and the chief health officer at Indiana University, wrote for The Atlantic in 2021: “Parents tend to be skeptical of new vaccines. Whenever one is introduced, many of them are initially hesitant to adopt it.” He went on to explain that though the highly effective varicella vaccine was approved in 1995, “uptake levels were initially low, with only 34 percent of eligible adolescents fully immunized by 2008,” despite recipients showing few side effects. But now, as noted above, the vaccination rate for varicella is over 90 percent.Two years ago, when I talked to parents who were skeptical about Covid vaccines for their children, they weren’t broadly anti-vaccine. They were worried about the newness of the vaccines, about allergies and about side effects. As one mom put it, “I’m not anti-vax but this all seems just too fast for me. I don’t want my children to be responding to those lawyer ads you see on TV 25 years from now. You know the ones: ‘If you were under the age of 16 in the years 2021-2022 and received the Covid-19 vaccination you could be entitled to compensation …’.”I know there’s some concern that amplifying Kennedy’s beliefs about vaccines will make the vaccine hesitant even more hesitant. But I wonder if all of the attention paid to vaccine skeptics in recent years could be having the opposite effect — that people are being exposed to skeptics’ unfettered theories on podcasts and social media and ultimately finding those views unconvincing. In June, my Opinion colleague Michelle Goldberg went to a Kennedy rally to talk to some of his supporters and she wrote: “As media coverage has made Democrats more aware of Kennedy’s conspiratorial views, his support has fallen; a recent St. Anselm poll had him at only 9 percent” among registered voters in the early and influential primary state of New Hampshire.Many scientific experts have worked to promote accurate and up-to-date information about vaccines, including Covid vaccines. In some cases, they’ve spent a lot of social capital in their efforts to debunk falsehoods. Many journalists have asked vaccine skeptics tough questions. Simply shaming those who don’t want to get their children vaccinated, for whatever reason, is not effective.What does work? As Dr. Katelyn Jetelina and Dr. Kristen Panthagani write for the newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist, some people have serious, good-faith questions about vaccines, and they shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand:Legitimate concerns exist. In fact, the vast majority of people who have questions or doubts about vaccines don’t outright deny vaccines as beneficial. They are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.Answering people with valid questions needs to be scientists’ priority. We need to meet them where they are, answer their questions from a place of empathy not condescension, equip trusted messengers, and anticipate concerns so we can prevent information voids that will otherwise be filled with false rumors.This is happening all the time. And looking at the data, I have confidence that it’s working. More

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      Can Biden Change the Economic Narrative?

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      Back in the 1970s, Arthur Okun, an economist who had been a policy adviser to Lyndon Johnson, suggested a quick-and-dirty way to assess the nation’s economic condition: the “misery index,” the sum of inflation and unemployment. It was and is a crude, easily criticized measure. The measurable economic harm from unemployment, for instance, is much higher than that from inflation. Yet the index has historically done a quite good job of predicting overall economic sentiment.So it seems worth noting that the misery index — which soared along with inflation during 2021 and the first half of 2022 — has plunged over the past year. It is now all the way back to its level when President Biden took office.This remarkable turnaround raises several questions. First, is it real? (Yes.) Second, will ordinary Americans notice? (They already have.) Third, will they give Biden credit? (That’s a lot less clear.)The plunge in the misery index reflects both what didn’t happen and what did. What didn’t happen, despite a drumbeat of dire warnings in the news media, was a recession. The U.S. economy added four million jobs over the past year, and the unemployment rate has remained near a 50-year low.What did happen was a rapid decline in inflation. But is this decline sustainable? You may have seen news reports pointing out that “core” inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, has been “sticky,” suggesting that improvement on the inflation front will be only a temporary phenomenon.But just about every economist paying attention to the data knows that the traditional measure of core inflation has gone rotten, because it’s being driven largely by the delayed effects of a surge in rents that ended in mid-2022. This surge, by the way, was probably caused by the rise in remote work triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic rather than by any Biden administration policy.Alternative measures of core inflation that exclude shelter by and large show a clear pattern of disinflation; inflation is still running higher than it was before the pandemic, but it has come down a lot. If you really work at it, it’s still possible to be pessimistic about the inflation outlook, but it’s getting harder and harder. The good news about inflation, and about the economy as a whole, does look real.But are people noticing this improvement? Traditional measures of economic sentiment have become problematic in recent years: Ask people how the economy is doing, and their response is strongly affected both by partisanship and, I believe, by the narratives conveyed by the news media. That is, what people say about the economy is, all too often, what they think they’re supposed to say.But if you ask Americans more specific questions, such as whether now is a good time to find a quality job, they typically say yes. At the same time, their expectations about future inflation have declined substantially.And if you look at a novel indicator — what information people are searching for on the internet — you’ll find that searches for both “inflation” and “recession” soared in 2021-22 along with the misery index but have plunged over the past year.Finally, as always, it’s important to look at what people do as well as what they say. Strong consumer spending, record levels of air travel and many other indicators suggest that Americans are feeling pretty good about their economic circumstances.But will Biden get credit? Polls suggest that voters are still giving him very poor marks for his handling of the economy, despite the decline in the misery index.Some analysts have argued that this jaundiced view reflects a failure of wages to keep up with inflation. But this was true for most of the Reagan years too, and in any case real wages have been rising lately.So will voters’ views of the Biden economy eventually reflect the good news? Or did the inflation shock of 2021-22 establish a narrative of Biden as a poor economic manager that has become too deeply entrenched — both in the public consciousness and in the news media — to be dislodged even as the economy rapidly improves?Biden himself is trying hard to change that narrative, by pointing both to the improving data and to an impressive surge in manufacturing investment. But I have no idea whether he’ll succeed. One encouraging precedent for Biden: Ronald Reagan still had fairly low approval in mid-1983, then went on to win a landslide in 1984 on the strength of the economy’s recovery. Biden might yet turn the narrative on his economic policy around.And even if he can’t, it might not matter. High inflation was supposed to guarantee a huge red wave in the midterm elections. Instead, Democrats did surprisingly well, probably because abortion and other social issues played a bigger role than economics. Those social issues aren’t going away, while high inflation is. Arguably, Biden doesn’t need to convince Americans that his economic policies have been highly successful; he just needs to make the case that the economy isn’t doing too badly.And it isn’t. In fact, by most measures the economy is doing quite well.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Biden Is Trying to Co-opt Trump’s Biggest Strength

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      Joe Biden just offered a window into what a Biden-Trump rematch might look like. Well, part of it, at least.The wildness of Donald Trump’s political style often obscures — at least to his critics — the more banal dimensions of his appeal. The strongest of Trump’s arguments, and the one Biden has the most to fear from in 2024, is economic. In 2016, Trump ran as a businessman savant who would wield his mastery of the deal in service of the American people. “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy,” Trump said. “I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. But now I want to be greedy for the United States.”Trump said that elites had sold you out. They traded your job to China. They let your bridges and roads and buildings crumble. They respected the work they did — work that happens behind a computer screen, work that needs fancy degrees, work that happens in offices rather than factories and cities rather than towns — and dismissed the work you did. They got rich and you got nothing. Exit polls found that Trump won large majorities among those who thought the economy was “fair” or “poor.”Trump did not, during his presidency, turn that critique into an agenda. There were islands of action — trade policy foremost among them — but the order of the day was incoherence. Infrastructure weeks came and went. Tax cuts were tilted toward the rich. There was no strategy to restore America’s manufacturing prowess or rebuild bargaining power for workers without college degrees.But Trump had the good fortune to take office during an economic boom. And he kept that boom going. He worked with congressional Republicans to tax less and spend more, budget deficits be damned. He appointed Jay Powell to the Federal Reserve, and Powell kept money cheap and the labor market hot. Unemployment, in February 2020, was 3.5 percent. Wages were rising and inflation was low.Then Covid hit, and Trump worked with Speaker Nancy Pelosi to flood the economy with trillions of dollars in support payments. Joblessness spiked, but workers overall didn’t suffer. This is Trump’s deepest well of strength in a 2024 rematch. Only about a third of voters approve of the job Biden has done on the economy. Polls show Trump is the more trusted economic manager, by far.On Wednesday, in Chicago, Biden previewed the counterargument he’ll make in a much-hyped speech defining “Bidenomics.” Biden’s case is this: What Trump only promised, I delivered.Biden set his economic policies in contrast to “40 years of trickle-down.” Trickle-down economics usually describes the theory that tax cuts at the top will lead to prosperity at the bottom. Biden is using it to describe a more expansive economic order — what sometimes gets called “neoliberalism.” Trickle-down, in his telling, was the philosophy that “it didn’t matter where you made things.” It “meant slashing public investment” and looking the other way as “three-quarters of U.S. industries grew more concentrated.” Forty years, as alert readers will note, encompasses not just the administrations of Donald Trump and George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, but Bill Clinton and, yes, Barack Obama.This is a point worth dwelling on. The Biden administration is thickly populated with veterans of the Obama and Clinton White Houses. But it doesn’t see itself in comfortable continuity with those legacies. It sees itself, in key ways, as a break with them.Back in May, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser (and a key aide, before that, to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), made this explicit during a speech to the Brookings Institution. Sullivan slammed the belief that “the type of growth did not matter.” That had led, he said, to administrations that let Wall Street thrive while “essential sectors, like semiconductors and infrastructure, atrophied.” He dismissed the “assumption at the heart of all of this policy: that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently.”And he tendered a modest mea culpa for his own party. “Frankly, our domestic economic policies also failed to fully account for the consequences of our international economic policies,” he said. In letting globalization and automation hollow out domestic manufacturing, Democrats had been part of a Washington consensus that “had frayed the socioeconomic foundations on which any strong and resilient democracy rests.”Biden’s speech in Chicago tried to show he was a Democrat who had learned these lessons. First, there was his emphasis on place. “I believe every American willing to work hard should be able to say where they grew up and stay where they grew up,” he said. “That’s Bidenomics.” Later, he said it again. “I believe that every American willing to work hard should be able to get a job no matter where they are — in the heartland, in small towns, in every part of this country — to raise their kids on a good paycheck and keep their roots where they grew up.”I talked to Jared Bernstein, the chairman of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, about the thinking here. “One of the pretty bereft assumptions of traditional economics is that you don’t need to worry about place because, as long as there are good jobs somewhere, people will go there and get them,” Bernstein told me. “It doesn’t really work that way.” One reason it doesn’t work that way is housing costs. “The idea that you can relocate from rural America, where housing is cheap, to expensive-housing America, even with the pay differentials, is a bit of a fantasy,” he said.Biden’s answer is built around the investments being made by the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill. You don’t install wind and solar farms in Manhattan and San Francisco. You don’t even necessarily do it in blue states, much to the chagrin of Democratic governors. Biden pointed to Weirton, W.Va., “where a steel mill closed in the beginning of the century” and, because of him, an iron-air battery plant is “being built on the same exact site, bringing back 750 good-paying jobs, bringing back a sense of pride and hope for the future.” The Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy research firm, estimates that Biden’s red states will get $623 billion in clean energy investments by 2030, compared with $354 billion for blue states.All these factories and battery plants and electric-vehicle charging stations and auto manufacturing facilities give Biden his strongest line against Trump. After comparing the infrastructure weeks Trump never delivered and “the infrastructure decade” he did, Biden noted: “Construction of manufacturing facilities here on U.S. soil grew only 2 percent on my predecessor’s watch in four years. Two percent. On my watch, it’s grown nearly 100 percent in two years.”Biden made a point of saying that in the economy he’s building, “we don’t need everyone to have a four-year degree. It’s great if you can get one; we’re trying to make it easier for you to get one. But you don’t need it to get a good-paying job anymore.”Bernstein didn’t pull his punch on this one. “I’ve been part of Democratic administrations where, basically, the solution to labor market woes was to go to college. The president has seen through that.” Biden, he continued, “realizes something everybody should know. About two-thirds of the work force isn’t college-educated. And there’s no version of Bidenomics that leaves two-thirds of the labor force out.”But here, Biden’s policy argument was a little thinner. He talked up his support for unions and apprenticeship programs, but he named more proposals to help people go to college than to help them get good jobs without a degree.The best thing Biden has done for less-educated workers is preside over a tight labor market. Unemployment has been below 4 percent since February 2022, and workers who are often on the margin are making gains. The Black-white employment gap has nearly closed, and wage gains have been particularly strong for workers without a college education. But the Biden administration’s pride in those numbers only underscores the real problem it faces: Americans felt good about the economy under Trump. They don’t feel good about it under Biden.The reason is simple: Real wages have been falling because inflation has been rising. Biden’s long-term investments, his efforts to rebuild American manufacturing and create millions of news jobs decarbonizing the American economy, will take time to pay off. People have to live in the economy now, not a decade from now.The good news — for both Biden and America — is that real wages have risen over the past few months. Inflation is down by more than half since its peak. Forecasters who were confidently predicting a recession in 2023 are now hedging. Mark Zandi, of Moody’s Analytics, thinks we’ll escape the downturn altogether. Whether the good economic news continues may well decide the 2024 election. Biden has co-opted the best of Trump’s ideas and pursued them with a diligence and focus that Trump never did. But that won’t mean much if voters still find themselves yearning for Trump’s economy.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      This Is Why Trump Lies Like There’s No Tomorrow

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      Donald Trump can lay claim to the title of most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency. This challenges commonplace beliefs about the American political system. How could such a deceitful and duplicitous figure win the White House in the first place and then retain the loyalty of so many voters after his endless lies were exposed?George Edwards, a political scientist at Texas A&M and a retired editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly, states the case bluntly: “Donald Trump tells more untruths than any previous president.” What’s more, “There is no one that is a close second.”Trump’s deceptions have been explored from several vantage points. Let’s take a look at one line of analysis.In 2008, Kang Lee, a developmental psychologist at the University of Toronto, published “Lying in the Name of the Collective Good” along with three colleagues:Lying in the name of the collective good occurs commonly. Such lies are frequently told in business, politics, sports, and many other areas of human life. These lies are so common that they have acquired a specific name, the “blue lie” — purportedly originating from cases where police officers made false statements to protect the police force or to ensure the success of the government’s legal case against an accused.How does that relate to the willingness of Republican and conservative voters to tolerate Trump’s lies — not just to tolerate them, but to cast votes for him again and again?In a 2017, a Scientific American article building on Lee’s research, “How the Science of ‘Blue Lies’ May Explain Trump’s Support,” by Jeremy Adam Smith, argues that Lee’s workhighlights a difficult truth about our species: we are intensely social creatures, but we are prone to divide ourselves into competitive groups, largely for the purpose of allocating resources. People can be prosocial — compassionate, empathetic, generous, honest — in their group and aggressively antisocial toward out-groups. When we divide people into groups, we open the door to competition, dehumanization, violence — and socially sanctioned deceit.If we see Trump’s lies, Smith continued, “not as failures of character but rather as weapons of war, then we can come to see why his supporters might view him as an effective leader. From this perspective, lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s campaign and presidency.”Lee’s insights provide a partial explanation for the loyalty-to-Trump phenomenon, but gaining an understanding of Trump’s intractable mendacity requires several approaches.The deference, or obeisance, of so many seemingly well-informed Republican leaders and millions of Republican voters to Donald Trump’s palpably false claims — the most egregious and damaging of which is the claim the 2020 election was stolen from him — raises an intriguing question: How can this immense delusion persist when survival pressures would seem to foster growing percentages of men and women capable of making discerning, accurate judgments?In their March 10 paper, “The Cognitive Foundations of Ideological Orthodoxy: Threat Avoidance, Ingroup Mobilization and Signaling,” Antoine Marie and Michael Bang Petersen, political scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark, pose the question this way:Navigating the world and solving problems would seem, by default, to be best done with beliefs that fulfill the epistemic goal of faithfully portraying how things are. Prima facie, one would thus expect selection to favor belief formation systems that prioritize accuracy and motivations to flexibly correct those beliefs in the face of compelling evidence and arguments, including in the domain of ideological beliefs.How, in this context, do powerful “orthodox mind-sets” emerge, the authors ask, mind-sets that restrict free thinking, armed with a “disproportionate righteousness with which they try to protect cherished narratives.”Marie and Petersen argue that these “orthodox mind-sets” may derive from three main cognitive foundations:First, oversensitive dispositions to detect threat, from human outgroups in particular. Second, motivations to try to mobilize in-group members for cooperative benefits and against rival groups, by using moral talk emphasizing collective benefits. Third, (unconscious) attempts to signal personal devotion to accrue prestige within the in-group.The prevalence of orthodox mind-sets in some realms of our political system is difficult to comprehend for those who are not caught up in it.In his June 23 article, “Far Right Pushes a Through-the-Looking-Glass Narrative on Jan. 6,” my Times colleague Robert Draper captures how deeply entrenched conspiracy thinking has become in some quarters.“A far-right ecosystem of true believers has embraced ‘J6’ as the animating force of their lives,” Draper writes. For these true believers, along with a faction of House Republicans, “Jan. 6 was an elaborate setup to entrap peaceful Trump supporters, followed by a continuing Biden administration campaign to imprison and torment innocent conservatives.”Trump, over the past two years, has become “even more extreme, his tone more confrontational, his accounts less tethered to reality,” according to The Washington Post:Now, as Trump seeks to return to the White House, he speaks of Jan. 6 as “a beautiful day.” He says there was no reason for police to shoot the rioter attempting to break into the House chamber, and he denies there was any danger to his vice-president, Mike Pence, who was hiding from a pro-Trump mob that was chanting for him to be hanged.Another way to look at the issue of Trump’s deceptions is through his eyes.In the chapter “Truth” in “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning,” Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern, has his own explanation of “why Donald Trump lies more than any other public official in the United States today, and why his supporters, nonetheless, put up with his lies.”For Trump, McAdams writes,Truth is effectively whatever it takes to win the moment, moment by moment, battle by battle — as the episodic man, shorn of any long-term story to make sense of his life, struggles to win the moment.Among the many reasons that Trump’s supporters excuse his lying is that they, like Trump himself, do not really hold him to the standards that human persons are held to. And that is because many of his supporters, like Trump himself, do not consider him to be a person — he is more like a primal force or superhero, more than a person, but less than a person, too.Part of Trump’s skill at persuading millions of voters to go along with his prevarications is his ability to tap into the deep-seated anger and resentment among his supporters. Anger, it turns out, encourages deception.In “Mad and Misleading: Incidental Anger Promotes Deception,” Jeremy A. Yip and Maurice E. Schweitzer of Georgetown and the University of Pennsylvania demonstrate through a series of experiments thatAnger promotes the use of self-serving deception. The decision to engage in self-serving deception balances concern for oneself (i.e. self-interest) and concern for others (i.e. empathy). The greater concern individuals exhibit for themselves and the lower concern for others, the more deceitful they are likely to be.When individuals feel angry, Yip and Schweitzer continue,they are more likely to deceive others. We find that angry individuals are less concerned about the welfare of others, and consequently more likely to exhibit self-interested unethical behavior. Across our studies, we link incidental anger to self-serving deception.“Many people are angry about how they have been left behind in the current economic climate,” Schweitzer told the magazine The Greater Good in 2017. “Trump has tapped into that anger, and he is trusted because he professes to feel angry about the same things.”Trump, Schweitzer said, “has created a siege-like mentality. Foreign countries are out to get us; the media is out to get him. This is a rallying cry that bonds people together.”In some cases, lying by autocratic political leaders can be an attempt to weaken norms and institutions that restrict the scope of their actions.In their 2022 paper, “Authoritarian Leaders Share Conspiracy Theories to Attack Opponents, Promote In-Group Unity, Shift Blame, and Undermine Democratic Institutions,” Zhiying (Bella) Ren, Andrew M. Carton, Eugen Dimant and Schweitzer argue that such leaders use conspiracy theories “to undermine institutions that threaten their power” and “in some cases are even motivated to promote chaos.”More recent work suggests that the focus on anger as a driving force in supporting populist and authoritarian leaders in the mold of Donald Trump masks a more complex interpretation.In their paper “Does Anger Drive Populism?” published this month, Omer Ali of Duke, Klaus Desmet of Southern Methodist University and Romain Wacziarg of U.C.L.A. find that “a more complex sense of malaise and gloom, rather than anger per se, drives the rise in populism.”“The incidence of anger,” they write,is positively related with the vote share of populist candidates, but it ceases to predict the populist vote share once we consider other dimensions of well-being and negative emotions.Hence, low subjective well-being and negative emotions in general drive populism, rather than anger in particular. This comes as a surprise in light of the growing discourse linking “American rage” and populism.While levels of anger, gloom and pessimism correlate with receptivity to populist appeals and to authoritarian candidates, another key factor is what scholars describe as the “social identity” of both leaders and followers.In a provocative recent paper, “Examining the Role of Donald Trump and His Supporters in the 2021 Assault on the U.S. Capitol: a Dual-agency Model of Identity Leadership and Engaged Followership,” S. Alexander Haslam, a professor of social and organizational psychology at the University of Queensland, and 11 colleagues from the United States, Australia and England analyze the Jan. 6, 2001, mob assault and dispute the argument that “Leaders are akin to puppet masters who either influence their followers directly or not at all. Equally, followers are seen either as passive and entirely dependent on leaders or as entirely independent of them.”Instead, the 12 authors contend, a more nuanced analysis “recognizes the agency of both leaders and followers and stresses their mutual influence.” They call this approach “a dual-agency model of identity leadership and engaged followership in which both leaders and followers are understood to have influence over each other without being totally constrained by the other.”The authors describe a phenomenon in which Trump and his most ardent followers engage:Identity leadership refers to leaders’ capacity to influence and mobilize others by virtue of leaders’ abilities to represent, advance, create and embed a sense of social identity that is shared with potential followers.In the process, Trump’s supporters lose their connection to real-world rules and morality:Regardless of how others see them, followers themselves will rarely understand their actions in destructive terms. Instead, they typically perceive both the guidance of their leader and the objectives they are pursuing as virtuous and are willing to undertake extreme actions.This willingness to take extreme action grows out of a duality in the way people experience their identities:Humans have the capacity to define themselves not simply as individuals (i.e., in terms of personal identity as “me” and “I,” with unique traits, tastes and qualities) but also as members of social groups (i.e., in terms of social identity as “we” and “us,” e.g., “us conservatives,” “us Trump supporters,” “we Americans”).Social identities, they write, “are every bit as real and important to people as personal identities,” butthe psychological understandings of self that result from internalizing social identity are qualitatively distinct from those which flow from personal identities. This is primarily because social identities restructure social relations in ways that give rise to, and allow for the possibility of, collective behavior.Social identities become increasingly salient, and potentially more destructive, in times of intense partisan hostility and affective polarization, accentuating a climate of “us against them” and the demonization of the opposition.“In order for identity leadership to be effective,” the authors write,it is important that leaders construe the goals toward which a group is working as both vital and virtuous. In precisely this vein, another central feature of Trump’s address (on Jan. 6) to those who went on to attack the Capitol was his insistence on the righteousness of their cause.The authors then quote Trump speaking at his Jan. 6 rally on the ellipse near the White House shortly before the assault on the Capitol:As this enormous crowd shows, we have truth and justice on our side. We have a deep and enduring love for America in our hearts. We love our country. We have overwhelming pride in this great country and we have it deep in our souls. Together, we are determined to defend and preserve government of the people, by the people and for the people.At the same time, Trump portrayed his adversaries as the epitome of evil: “Trump reminded them not only of the good work they were doing to fight ‘bad’ actors and forces, but also of the challenges that this ‘dirty business’ presented.”Again, Haslam and his co-authors quote Trump speaking at his Jan. 6 rally:Together, we will drain the Washington swamp and we will clean up the corruption in our nation’s capital. We have done a big job on it, but you think it’s easy. It’s a dirty business. It’s a dirty business. You have a lot of bad people out there.Critically, the 12 scholars write, Trump “did not provide them with explicit instructions as to what to do,” noting that “he didn’t tell anyone to storm the barricades, to invade the speaker’s office, or to assault police and security guards.” Instead, Trump “invoked values of strength, determination and a willingness to fight for justice (using the word “fight” 20 times) without indicating who they should fight or how,” setting a goal for his followers “to ensure that the election results were not certified and thereby to ‘stop the steal’ without specifying how that goal should be achieved.”For Trump supporters, they continue,Far from being a day of shame and infamy, this was a day of vindication, empowerment and glory. The reason for this was that they had been able to play a meaningful role in enacting a shared social identity and to do so in ways that allowed them to translate their leader’s stirring analysis and vision into material reality.Leaders gain influence, Haslam and his collaborators argue,by defining parameters of action in ways that frame the agency of their followers but leave space for creativity in how collective goals are accomplished. Followers in turn exhibit their loyalty and attachment to the leader by striving to be effective in advancing these goals, thereby empowering and giving agency to the leader.In the case of Jan. 6, 2021, they write:Donald Trump’s exhortations to his supporters that they should “fight” to “stop the steal” of the 2020 election was followed by an attack on the United States Capitol. We argue that it is Trump’s willing participation in this mutual process of identity enactment, rather than any instructions contained in his speech, that should be the basis for assessing his influence on, and responsibility for, the assault.In conclusion, they argue:It is important to recognize that Trump was no puppet master and that his followers were far more than puppets. Instead, he was the unifier, activator, and enabler of his followers during the dark events of Jan. 6, 2021. As such, rather than eclipsing or sublimating their agency, he framed and unleashed it.The power of Trump’s speech, they contend,lay in its provision of a “moral” framework that impelled his audience to do work creatively to “stop the steal” — fueling a dynamic which ultimately led to insurrection. The absence of a point at which Trump instructed his supporters to assault Capitol Hill makes the assault on Capitol Hill no less his responsibility. The crimes that followers commit in the name of the group are necessarily crimes of leadership too.On Jan. 7, 2021, a full 30 hours after the assault on the Capitol began, Trump condemned the assault in videotaped remarks: “I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack on the United States Capitol. Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem,” he said, adding, “To those who engage in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”During a CNN town hall in May, however, Trump called Jan. 6 “a beautiful day” and declared that he was “inclined to pardon” many of the rioters.In a January paper, “Public Opinion Roots of Election Denialism,” Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at M.I.T., argues that Trump has unleashed profoundly anti-democratic forces within not only Republican ranks but also among a segment of independent voters:The most confirmed Republican denialists believe that large malevolent forces are at work in world events, racial minorities are given too much deference in society and America’s destiny is a Christian one. Among independents, the most confirmed denialists are Christian nationalists who resent what they view as the favored position of racial minorities.Stewart continues:The belief that Donald Trump was denied the White House in 2020 because of Democratic Party fraud is arguably the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of the federal government since the Civil War, if not in American history. It is hard to think of a time when nearly two-fifths of Americans seemed honestly to believe that the man in the White House is there because of theft.It remains unknown whether Trump will be charged in connection with his refusal to abide by all of the legal requirements of democratic electoral competition. Even so, no indictment could capture the enormity of the damage Trump has inflicted on the American body politic with his bad faith, grifting and fundamentally amoral character.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Are Democrats Actually Winning Older Voters?

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      Some intriguing signs that the party may be doing better among seniors than is commonly thought.Some polling suggests President Biden gained among seniors.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesIn the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, the polls showed something strange: Joe Biden was faring far better than expected among voters over age 65. Some polls showed him ahead by 10 points or more.It was a little hard to explain — and believe. Yes, the pandemic hit seniors hardest. Yes, Mr. Biden was old himself. Yes, the baby boomer generation was aging into the 65-and-older group, replacing somewhat more conservative voters. But could Mr. Biden really be winning older voters? When the final overall results came in far better for Donald J. Trump than the polls suggested, it appeared to offer an obvious answer: no.Three years later, I’m wondering whether there was more to Mr. Biden’s strength among older voters than it seemed. Maybe he didn’t win older voters by 10 points, but maybe he actually did come close to winning older voters or outright did so.My renewed interest boils down to this: The polling, which was accurate last year for the midterms, still shows Mr. Biden and Democrats doing quite well among older voters.Our own Times/Siena polls, for instance, were highly accurate. They did not overestimate Democrats. And yet the Times/Siena polls found the generic congressional ballot tied among seniors, at 45 percent support for each party. In a question asking how they voted in the 2020 presidential election, the polls still found Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump, 53 percent to 47 percent, among older voters.Could Mr. Biden really have done so well? Unfortunately, it’s very hard to be sure. The various post-election studies — like the exit polls or the data from the Democratic firm Catalist — still show Republicans winning the group in 2022. Worse, the hard election results don’t offer much additional evidence to help clarify the matter. Voters aren’t nearly as segregated by age as they are by race or education, making it difficult to find additional evidence in voting results to confirm whether the trends evident in the polls are ultimately borne out on Election Day.But there is one additional data point worth considering: our high-incentive mail study of Wisconsin. As you may recall, we promised Wisconsin voters up to $25 dollars in an effort to reach the kinds of people who don’t usually take political surveys. In the end, it achieved a response rate surpassing 20 percent (by contrast, only about 1 percent of our attempted phone calls yield a completed interview in a typical poll). The response rate among older Wisconsinites appeared to be much, much higher.Democrats fared better among older voters in the Wisconsin mail survey than in any other major election study. The mail survey found the Democrat Mandela Barnes beating the Republican incumbent senator, Ron Johnson, by 52-40 among older registered voters. In comparison, the concurrent Times/Siena poll — using our traditional live-interview methods — found Mr. Barnes up by 46-43 among that group, while the other election studies were even farther to the right. The exit polls found Mr. Johnson ahead by seven points with that group while AP/VoteCast found Mr. Johnson up by four points.The findings were just as extreme when voters were asked to recall how they voted in the 2020 presidential election. In the high-incentive mail survey, voters over 67 in 2022 (meaning over 65 in 2020) said they backed Mr. Biden by 55-38 over Mr. Trump. In contrast, the Times/Siena poll found Mr. Biden ahead, 48-43, among the same group. The exit polls and VoteCast data both found Mr. Trump winning seniors by a comfortable margin in 2020.To reiterate: There’s not much additional evidence to help corroborate these very different versions of what happened among older voters. But the mail survey in Wisconsin is intriguing evidence. It’s renewed my curiosity in the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Democrats are doing better among older voters than is commonly thought.If they are, it would help make sense of the party’s new strength in special elections — which tend to have very old electorates — and perhaps in last November’s midterm elections as well. More

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      Biden to Deliver Major Address on the Economy in Chicago

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      President Biden hopes to claim credit for what the White House describes as a record-breaking economic revival in America.President Biden’s attempt to earn a second term in the White House begins with a concerted campaign to claim credit for what he describes as a record-breaking economic revival in America.Mr. Biden will make that case in what his aides say is a “cornerstone” speech on Wednesday, using the backdrop of the Old Chicago Main Post Office to reassert the lasting benefits of “Bidenomics” as the 2024 campaign cycle heats up.He will argue that his willingness to plunge the American government more directly into supporting key industries like silicon chips has revitalized manufacturing. He will say investments in rebuilding crumbling infrastructure will pave the way for future growth. And he will insist that spending hundreds of millions of dollars on programs like student debt relief will let more people find their way to a comfortable, middle class life.“Since the president has taken office, 13 million jobs have been created,” Lael Brainard, Mr. Biden’s top economic adviser, said Tuesday. “The unemployment rate is near historic lows, below 4 percent for the longest stretch in nearly 50 years. And we’ve received record low unemployment for groups that too frequently have been left behind.”The boasting about Mr. Biden’s economic achievements is a calculated shift from the more cautious approach of his first two years, when millions of Americans were still struggling to recover from the devastating impact of the pandemic on their financial well-being.And the positive spin from the president and his advisers largely ignores the frustrations of many Americans who are still suffering from the effects of high inflation, interest rates that make borrowing more expensive, and the expense of everyday spending on necessities like health care, child care, groceries, gas and more.“While families suffer, the Biden administration is in a fantasy world, insisting their ‘policy has indeed worked,’” Tommy Pigott, a spokesman for the National Republican Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday. “Americans don’t want Biden to ‘finish the job.’”Mr. Pigott cited figures showing that the price of a gallon of gas remains about a dollar higher than it was when Mr. Biden took office, despite declines since the price shocks when Russia invaded Ukraine. He said numbers from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association show about 20 million Americans are behind on their utility bills.But administration officials are betting that with the pandemic largely in the rear view mirror, people will soon begin to appreciate the positive effect they say the president’s policies are having on their own lives.“I think people all across the United States of America are starting to see shovels in grounds in their communities,” said Olivia Dalton, the deputy White House press secretary. “As we get further into implementation, people are going to continue to feel that. They’re going to continue to see that and they’re going to continue to hear from this president about how we’re going to continue to make progress for them.”For now, most Americans have refused to give Mr. Biden the kind of credit that he and his advisers say he deserves. Polls show that about three-fourths of those surveyed believe the country under Mr. Biden’s leadership is on the wrong track. Only about a third say they approve of his handling of the economy.The president’s advisers say they believe it will take time for two things to happen: First, Americans must shake off the economic hangover from the pandemic. And second, they must begin feel the benefits of Mr. Biden’s policies in action.“People are just starting to see the impact of all of the successes of the last couple of years under this president’s economic agenda,” said Olivia Dalton, the deputy White House press secretary.Eventually, Mr. Biden will have to shift his focus to the future, and make specific promises to Americans about what kinds of new economic policies he would pursue in a second term.That could include making progress on the economic pledges he had to abandon as he made legislative compromises since taking office. He failed to win sufficient support for his proposals to roll back tax cuts implemented by former President Donald J. Trump. He also dropped proposals for universal preschool, free community college and heavily subsidized child care. More

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      Can DeSantis Break Trump’s Hold on New Hampshire?

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      Donald Trump is looking to the state as an early chance to clear a crowded field, while Ron DeSantis’s camp is banking on winnowing the Republican race to two.Former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are holding dueling events on Tuesday in New Hampshire, but from vastly different political positions: one as the dominant front-runner in the state, the other still seeking his footing.Strategists for both campaigns agree that the state will play a starring role in deciding who leads the Republican Party into the 2024 election against President Biden.Mr. Trump sees the first primary contest in New Hampshire as an early chance to clear the crowded field of rivals. And members of Team DeSantis — some of whom watched from losing sidelines, as Mr. Trump romped through the Granite State in 2016 on his way to the nomination — hope New Hampshire will be the primary that winnows the Republican field to two.“Iowa’s cornfields used to be where campaigns were killed off, and now New Hampshire is where campaigns go to die,” said Jeff Roe, who runs Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down. Mr. Roe retains agonizing memories from 2016, when he ran the presidential campaign of the last man standing against Mr. Trump: Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.New Hampshire’s voters are known for being fickle and choosy, sometimes infuriatingly so. The joke is that when you ask a Granite Stater whom they’re voting for, they say, “I don’t know, I’ve only met the candidate three times.”Mr. DeSantis is campaigning in Iowa, another early-voting state.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesYet midway through 2023, the state — more secular than Iowa and with a libertarian streak — appears frozen in place. Mr. Trump, now twice indicted and twice impeached, is nowhere near as dominant with Republicans as he was in 2020, but he is stronger than he was in 2016, and his closest challenger is well behind him.In 2016, Mr. Trump won New Hampshire with a blunt and incendiary message, fanning flames about terrorist threats and without doing any of the retail politicking that’s traditionally required. But local operatives and officials believe that Mr. Trump, with his decades-long celebrity status, is the only politician who could get away with this.“It’s definitely not going to be something that someone like Ron DeSantis can pull off,” said Jason Osborne, the New Hampshire House majority leader who endorsed the Florida governor for president. “He’s got to do the drill just like everybody else.”Polls suggest there is an opening for a Trump alternative. But to be that person, Mr. DeSantis has miles of ground to make up.As recently as January, Mr. DeSantis was leading Mr. Trump in the state by a healthy margin, according to a poll by the University of New Hampshire. But Mr. DeSantis has slipped considerably, with recent polling that suggests his support is in the teens and more than 25 percentage points behind Mr. Trump.In a move that some saw as ominous, Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC, went off the airwaves in New Hampshire in mid-May and has not included the state in its latest bookings, which cover only Iowa and South Carolina.DeSantis allies insist the move was intended to husband resources in the Boston market, which they said was an expensive and inefficient way to reach primary voters. And they said Mr. DeSantis would maintain an aggressive schedule in the state.“We are confident that the governor’s message will resonate with voters in New Hampshire as he continues to visit the Granite State and detail his solutions to Joe Biden’s failures,” Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for Mr. DeSantis, said in a statement.Still, so much of Mr. DeSantis’s early moves seem aimed at Iowa and its caucuses that are dominated by the most conservative activists, many of whom are evangelical. In contrast, New Hampshire has an open primary that will allow independents, who tend to skew more moderate, to cast ballots. And without a competitive Democratic primary in 2024 they could be a particularly sizable share of the G.O.P. primary vote.Iowa is where Mr. DeSantis held his first event and where his super PAC has based its $100 million door-knocking operation.Mr. DeSantis’s signing of a six-week abortion ban is unlikely to prove popular in New Hampshire, where even the state’s Republican governor has described himself as “pro-choice.” Trump supporters at a DeSantis event in Manchester, N.H., this month. David Degner for The New York TimesThe clashing Trump and DeSantis events this week have jangled the nerves of local officials. Mr. DeSantis’s decision to schedule a town hall in Hollis on Tuesday at the same time that the influential New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women is hosting Mr. Trump at its Lilac Luncheon has prompted a backlash. The group’s events director, Christine Peters, said that to “have a candidate come in and distract” from the group’s event was “unprecedented.”Mr. DeSantis’s town hall will mark his fourth visit to New Hampshire this year and his second since announcing his campaign in May.Mr. DeSantis did collect chits in April when he helped the New Hampshire Republican Party raise a record sum at a fund-raising dinner. And he has gathered more than 50 endorsements from state representatives. But before the town hall on Tuesday, he had not taken questions from New Hampshire voters in a traditional setting.During his last trip to the state — a four-stop tour on June 1 — Mr. DeSantis snapped at a reporter who pressed him on why he hadn’t taken questions from voters.“What are you talking about?” Mr. DeSantis said. “Are you blind?”New Hampshire’s governor, Chris Sununu, said in an interview that there was “a lot of interest” in Mr. DeSantis from voters who had seen him on television but wanted to vet him up close.“Can he hold up under our scrutiny?” Mr. Sununu said. “I think he’s personally going to do pretty well here,” he added, but “the biggest thing” on voters’ minds is “what’s he going to be like when he knocks on my door.”New Hampshire’s voters will indeed be subjected to thousands of DeSantis door-knocks — but not from the man himself. He has outsourced his ground game to Never Back Down, which is expected to have more than $200 million at its disposal. The group has already knocked on more than 75,000 doors in New Hampshire, according to a super PAC official, an extraordinary figure this early in the race.But Mr. DeSantis still faces daunting challenges.Mr. Trump remains popular among Republicans, and even more so after his indictments. And he is not taking the state for granted. Unlike in 2016, his operation has been hard at work in the state for months, with influential figures like the former Republican state party chairman Stephen Stepanek working on Mr. Trump’s behalf.Mr. Trump’s super PAC has hammered Mr. DeSantis with television ads that cite his past support for a sales tax to replace the federal income tax — a message tailored to provoke residents of the proudly anti-tax state. The large field in the Republican race is a key challenge for Mr. DeSantis, as he seeks Republican voters looking for a Trump alternative.Sophie Park for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis’s biggest problem is the size of the field. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, camped out in the state in 2016 and appeared to be making headway in consolidating some of the anti-Trump vote in recent polls.The entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has already spent around 20 days campaigning in the state, according to his adviser Tricia McLaughlin. Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina is another frequent visitor. Both have events in the state on Tuesday. Additionally, the campaign of Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has already spent around $2 million in New Hampshire.If these candidates stay in the race through early next year, a repeat of 2016 may be inevitable. In a crowded field, Mr. Trump won the state with over 35 percent of the vote. In the meantime, Mr. DeSantis needs “a defining message that gets beyond the small base he has,” said Tom Rath, a veteran of New Hampshire politics who has advised the presidential campaigns of Republican nominees including Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. “He needs to do real retail, and so far there is no indication that he can do that.”Ruth Igielnik More

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      Can Bidenomics Revive Biden’s 2024 Presidential Bid?

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      The president plans to extol his economic achievements in a big campaign-style speech. But inflation and recession fears could overshadow the message.President Biden heads to Chicago tomorrow to hail his economic record.John Minchillo/Associated PressBidenomics gets a reboot President Biden plans to double down on his economic record in a big campaign-style speech on Wednesday. He will hail the country’s record job growth, along with the administration’s signature policy wins aimed at expanding manufacturing, reinvesting in aging infrastructure and reorienting the economy for a clean-energy future.Yet despite the good news, Mr. Biden hasn’t seen a big jump in his popularity, and he trails his Republican rivals, according to some polls. High inflation and recession fears are dragging down his approval ratings, and the Biden administration is rethinking its messaging to try to convince Americans they should vote for him next November.“Bidenomics” will be at the heart of the president’s message. In a memo shared with journalists this week, two top Biden advisers, Anita Dunn and Mike Donilon, use the term repeatedly to frame the president’s accomplishments. They credit Bidenomics with helping the country bounce back from the pandemic “more quickly than most experts thought possible.” But as The Times’ Michael D. Shear reports, voters appear skeptical.What is Bidenomics? The president himself joked that the messaging is a work in progress. “I don’t know what the hell that is,” he told a rally this month. “But it’s working.” The Donilon-Dunn memo tries to give the messaging around Bidenomics a reboot. They point to how, for example, the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure law are creating jobs in the high-tech, manufacturing and green sectors.The numbers behind Bidenomics look impressive. Employers have added 13 million jobs during his presidency. And the unemployment rates of Black and Hispanic Americans are at or near a historic low. The White House also averted a potentially disastrous debt-default standoff with the Republican-controlled House, a victory that largely registered as a nonevent with voters.Those successes aren’t translating into an uptick in support. According to a Pew Research Center survey, Biden’s approval ratings fell to the lowest level of his presidency this month.Mr. Biden’s reboot will compete with a contrasting message from the Fed. Hours before the president steps to the microphone in Chicago, the Fed chair Jay Powell will engage with other central bankers in a panel discussion in Portugal on a topic that’s been weighing on the markets: how further interest rate increases are probably needed to bring down stubbornly high inflation.At the same gathering in Portugal yesterday, Gita Gopinath, the International Monetary Fund’s deputy managing director, warned central banks not to ease up in their inflation fight. “Monetary policy should continue to tighten and then remain in restrictive territory until core inflation is on a clear downward path,” she said.For now, the boosterism of Bidenomics may get overshadowed a by a hawkish Fed.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Goldman Sachs plans to add an ally of David Solomon to the board. Tom Montag, who led trading at the firm before joining Bank of America as a senior executive, is set to return as a director. DealBook hears that the move is seen by some internally as a message from the board that Mr. Solomon, Goldman’s embattled C.E.O., isn’t going anywhere soon.KPMG plans to lay off 5 percent of its U.S. employees. The accounting giant, which had 39,000 workers in the United States last year, cited “economic headwinds” in announcing the move. It’s the latest sign of how a slowing economy is battering a wider array of businesses, including white-collar industries.Janet Yellen reportedly plans to travel to China next month. The Treasury secretary is arranging a meeting with her new Chinese counterpart, according to Bloomberg, in another effort to lower tensions between Washington and Beijing. But China’s premier, Li Qiang, chastised Western countries today for trying to limit ties to Chinese businesses.Could Saudi money disrupt tennis’s pay-equity goals?The WTA, the women’s pro tennis tour, will commit on Tuesday to bringing prize money for its tournaments in line with that of men’s competitions, in what’s meant to be a major step toward pay equity in the sport.But the question looms: How will Saudi Arabia greet the effort? The kingdom has poured billions into pro sports as part of a global campaign to expand its soft power, and is keen to bring its deep pockets to the ATP men’s tour, potentially aggravating the sport’s already sizable pay divide.The WTA’s effort is set to ramp up over the course of a decade, to allow the tour to raise the revenue necessary to bring its payouts in line with those of men’s competitions. (While men and women receive equal prize money for Grand Slam tournaments, the campaign is focused on the two tiers of competitions below that.)Saudi Arabia’s plans for tennis complicate the matter. As the kingdom has dug into sports like soccer and golf, its playbook has involved flooding competitions with cash to attract top-flight players. It may now do so for tennis, where it already hosts a lucrative men’s exhibition event, is bidding to host the ATP Next Gen Finals and has plans to launch a similar women’s event.But the WTA hasn’t committed to that plan — or to holding any competitions in Saudi Arabia, which only recently gave women the right to drive, and which faces criticism over its human rights record. The WTA has taken stances on human rights before, notably by suspending operations in China for 18 months over the country’s treatment of the former player Peng Shuai.Things could change, given that the WTA has held talks with Saudi officials. But it’s unclear how the kingdom’s plans for tennis will affect the effort by the women’s tour to more tightly integrate with the ATP.In other Saudi sports news, a five-page pact between the PGA Tour and Saudi-sponsored LIV Golf shows the two sides have agreed on ending their litigation — but it lacks details of their planned alliance.A new shield for pregnant workersA new federal law will go into effect on Tuesday that provides protections for pregnant workers. More than a decade in the making and passed in December with bipartisan support, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is meant to help close loopholes in existing rules that left millions of women subject to discrimination, The Times’s Alisha Gupta writes for DealBook.What the act requires: Companies with more than 15 employees, including hourly workers, must provide “reasonable accommodations” for pregnancy, childbirth and related medical events like fertility treatments, abortion and pregnancy loss.Left intentionally undefined, reasonable accommodations can include a stool to sit on during long shifts, a flexible schedule to accommodate morning sickness or time off to recover from childbirth complications. But companies aren’t expected to suffer “undue hardship” in their business.It’s an effort to stop pregnancy discrimination. Advocates say that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 was riddled with ambiguity. That has had disastrous consequences for many women:Twenty-three percent of mothers have considered leaving their jobs because of a lack of accommodations or fear of discrimination, according to a poll last year by the Bipartisan Policy Center.At least a third of the more than 2,000 pregnancy discrimination complaints that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received last year were about companies that failed to accommodate pregnant workers.The law signals growing recognition of pregnancy discrimination’s economic toll. The Fairness Act helps ensure that women no longer have to choose between “maintaining a healthy pregnancy or a safe recovery from childbirth and a paycheck,” said Dina Bakst, the co-president of the advocacy group A Better Balance, which helped Congress draft the new law.$377 million — The medical costs associated with pickleball injuries in the United States this year, according to a new research report by UBS analysts.Remembering Jim CrownJames Crown, the billionaire financier who was a longtime board member of JPMorgan Chase and General Dynamics, died on Sunday, The Times’s Emily Flitter writes for DealBook. He was 70.The scion of a Chicago industrialist family, Mr. Crown became a major figure in business, philanthropy and political giving. He died on his birthday in Aspen, Colo., when a vehicle he was driving crashed into a barrier on a racetrack, according to the Pitkin County coroner’s office.Mr. Crown was C.E.O. of Henry Crown and Company, which managed the fortune built up by his grandfather Henry by investing in an array of real estate and corporate investments. He joined the firm after working for Salomon Brothers.Mr. Crown was also a prominent corporate director. He had served on the board of what became JPMorgan Chase since 1991: His family had owned a major stake in Chicago’s Bank One, where he was a director and helped recruit Jamie Dimon as C.E.O. In 2004, Bank One merged with J.P. Morgan.“He has been a trusted adviser to me for nearly 20 years, playing a key role in helping our company navigate numerous business and economic challenges,” Mr. Dimon wrote to employees on Monday.Mr. Crown was also the lead director of General Dynamics, the aerospace giant that bought his grandfather’s Material Service Corporation in 1959.He also played a role beyond corporate America. Mr. Crown split his time between Chicago and Aspen, where he once served as chair of the Aspen Institute, which is holding its annual Ideas Festival now. As managing director of the Aspen Skiing Company, he played a big role in the American skiing industry.Mr. Crown was also a major Democratic donor, and he attended last week’s state dinner for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. “Jim represented America at its best — industrious, big-hearted and always looking out for each other,” President Biden said in a statement.THE SPEED READ DealsLordstown Motors, the embattled electric truck maker, filed for bankruptcy protection and sued the electronics giant Foxconn over its failure to invest in the company. (Reuters)Group Black, a Black-owned media investment firm, is reportedly in talks to buy control of the publisher of Sports Illustrated. (WSJ)Despite companies’ concerns about universal proxy, which makes it easier for investors to vote for board candidates from different slates, the policy had a muted impact in proxy fights this year. (Kirkland & Ellis)PolicyPresident Biden announced a $42 billion initiative to expand access to high-speed internet to all American households by 2030. (CNBC)Federal efforts to help develop next-generation vaccines are running into bureaucratic hurdles that may hamper efforts to fight future pandemics. (NYT)The wife of Justice Samuel Alito leased a 160-acre plot of land in Oklahoma to an oil company, as the Supreme Court justice weighed in on cases involving the E.P.A. (The Intercept)Best of the restHow the North Sea, long one of Europe’s biggest hubs for oil and gas production, may pivot to wind power. (NYT)“Will Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ Become the First $1 Billion Tour?” (WSJ)Richard Ravitch, the developer and public servant who helped rescue New York City from financial collapse in the 1970s, died on Sunday. He was 89. (NYT)The New York Mets may have the biggest payroll in the major leagues and a deep-pocketed owner in Steve Cohen — but that hasn’t translated into success on the field. (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More