Good on Paper
Have you ever heard a commonly held belief or a fast-developing worldview and asked: Is that idea right? Or just good on paper? Each week, host Jerusalem Demsas and a guest take a closer look at the facts and research that challenge the popular narratives of the day, to better understand why we believe what we believe.
Episodes
May 13, 2025 • 54 mins
In 1981, an estimated 44 percent of the global population lived in extreme poverty. In 2019, that number shrank to just 9 percent. We often think of poverty as a trap, but recent research shows it doesn’t have to be. The economist and co-founder of GiveDirectly, Paul Niehaus, explains how extreme poverty fell over the past 40 years and how it could be eliminated for good.
Further reading:
“How Poverty Fell,” by Vincent Arment...
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May 6, 2025 • 46 mins
The ’90s are sometimes described as the beginning of the postfeminist era. But if feminism died 30 years ago, who killed it? The Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert seeks to answer this question in her new book, Girl on Girl, and finds a likely suspect in the contemporaneous rise of internet pornography.
Further reading:
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, by Sophie Gilbert
...
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April 29, 2025 • 48 mins
Women now outnumber men on U.S. college campuses. There’s a common belief that the college gender gap has led to a decrease in marriage rates for college-educated women, but the economist Benny Goldman says the data just don’t support that narrative. Instead, shifts in educational attainment and marriage rates have had a much starker effect on non-college-educated women and low-earning men.
Further reading:
“Bachelors Without Ba...
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April 22, 2025 • 53 mins
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution designed a government that they hoped would be impervious to tyranny of the majority. What they didn’t spend much time worrying about was the reverse: a tyranny of the minority. The political scientist Steve Teles explains how very small minorities have come to dominate government and what should be done about it.
Further Reading:
“Minoritarianism Is Everywhere,” by Steve Teles
Tyranny of th...
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April 15, 2025 • 50 mins
States are cracking down on online porn—but is it working? The researcher Zeve Sanderson explains how age-verification laws backfire, why teens outsmart them, and what that means for the future of internet regulation.
Further reading:
“Do Age-Verification Bills Change Search Behavior? A Pre-Registered Synthetic Control Multiverse,” by David Lang, Zeve Sanderson, et al.
“The Online Porn Free-for-All Is Coming to an End,” by Ma...
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April 8, 2025 • 53 mins
In the summer of 1975, white schoolchildren at some Louisville, Kentucky, public schools were faced with a choice: stay in the school system and undergo busing to integrate the schools, or leave the system entirely. A remarkable new study by the economist Ethan Kaplan shows that for students who stayed, busing had lasting effects on their political identities, making them more likely to identify as Democrats, support unions, and sa...
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April 1, 2025 • 50 mins
Researchers have suggested that lifestyle choices explain the remarkably high number of very old people living healthy lives in regions of the world known as “blue zones.” That research has spawned cookbooks, docuseries, and diets and turned blue zones into a household name. Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Saul Newman, who has upended the field by questioning the underlying data and research methods that hold up the now-...
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March 25, 2025 • 59 mins
What do politicians really think of their voters? A new study looking at 11 different democracies finds that politicians hold an unflattering view of their constituents, while voters view themselves as thoughtful, policy-oriented decision makers. The political scientist Jack Lucas explains why politicians think voters are dumb and why they might be wrong.
Further reading:
“Politicians’ Theories of Voting Behavior,” by Jack Lucas...
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March 18, 2025 • 80 mins
Donald Trump won back the White House last year by stoking fears of scarcity. The zero-sum thinking of the right that says there aren’t enough houses or jobs to go around laid the groundwork for the forces of illiberalism currently at play in the federal government. In their new book, Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that to combat the politics of scarcity, liberals at every level of government must embrace abundance....
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March 11, 2025 • 50 mins
Shaken baby syndrome has been discredited, criticized, and even classified as “junk science” by a New Jersey judge, so why is it often being treated as settled fact in hospitals and courtrooms? The neuroscience researcher Cyrille Rossant was plunged headfirst into the controversy of shaken baby syndrome, now called “abusive head trauma,” when his child was believed to have been shaken by a nanny. After years of research, Rossant is...
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March 4, 2025 • 44 mins
As the second Trump administration dismantles federal DEI programs and removes trans Americans from the military, the crusade on “wokeness” seems to be a core focus of the president’s second term. In this encore episode, host Jerusalem Demsas speaks with the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg about the end of wokeness and why we might miss it when it’s gone.
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February 25, 2025 • 52 mins
If researchers could go back in time 100,000 years, they’d find at least three different types of humans walking the Earth. Today, only the dominant group, Homo sapiens, survives. The scientist Johannes Krause explains how new discoveries in paleontology and genetics help pinpoint the exact period in which human groups interbred. Understanding this timeline, he says, brings us closer to understanding what makes modern humans unique...
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February 18, 2025 • 63 mins
Why do governments educate their citizens? More than 200 years ago, Western regimes shifted the responsibility of education from the family to the state. The political scientist Agustina Paglayan argues that this transition happened not in pursuit of democratic ideals, but in the interest of social control.
Further reading:
Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education, by Agustina Paglayan
“How Reconstruction Created...
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February 11, 2025 • 56 mins
We’re often told that there’s “no room for politics at work,” and yet the workplace is one of the most politically segregated spaces in adult life. The Harvard economics researcher Sahil Chinoy explains the self-sorting happening at every stage of professional life and the trade-offs workers are willing to make in pursuit of ideological uniformity.
Further reading:
“Political Sorting in the U.S. Labor Market: Evidence and Explana...
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February 4, 2025 • 56 mins
Most gun deaths aren’t premeditated, so how can we stop gun violence before it happens? The University of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig makes the case for thinking differently about the source of America’s gun-violence problem.
Further reading:
Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, by Jens Ludwig
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, by S...
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January 28, 2025 • 53 mins
Seven years after the Supreme Court struck down a ban on state-sanctioned sports betting, a more complete picture of the downstream effects of legalization is starting to emerge. As some states see debt delinquency and problem gambling increase, the journalist Danny Funt explains why lawmakers took a gamble on sports betting in the first place.
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January 21, 2025 • 53 mins
Government reform isn’t an exclusively partisan issue, so why does it seem to fall under the purview of Republicans? The researcher Jennifer Pahlka says Democrats need to “get in the game” of government reform and consider working with, instead of against, the aims of DOGE.
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January 14, 2025 • 51 mins
Editor’s note: After this episode aired, MIT issued a statement raising concerns about the integrity of Aidan Toner-Rodgers's working paper “Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation,” and recommending that the paper be withdrawn. The open-access research repository arXiv, where the paper was originally posted, has removed it from its archive, citing “concerns about the validity of the data and incomplet...
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January 7, 2025 • 55 mins
What makes someone a NIMBY? The prevailing theory suggests that people support or reject new housing in their neighborhood based on what’s best for them personally. The political scientist David Broockman provides a different explanation—one based on people’s beliefs about important symbols such as cities or tall buildings, rather than self-interest.
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December 31, 2024 • 50 mins
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is poised to lead the Department of Health and Human Services under President-Elect Donald Trump. He has said “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” but Dr. Rachael Bedard, a pro-vaccine and left-leaning physician, says opponents should still seek common ground with him.
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