The Doomed Youth Edition

Summary

Slate Money Podcast: "The Doomed Youth Edition"

Date: December 24, 2016
Host: Felix Salmon
Co-hosts: Kathy O’Neill, Jordan Weissmann

Episode Overview

This episode of Slate Money tackles some of the bleakest—yet crucial—public policy and business stories of the week. The panel explores America's ongoing lead poisoning crisis, the realities lurking behind China’s much-lauded education system, and whether giant internet platforms like Facebook and Google have any responsibility for hate speech and terrorism. The tone is witty and candid, weaving statistics and policy debate with personal anecdotes and sharp commentary.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. America's Ongoing Lead Poisoning Crisis

[03:00–15:39]

• Reuters Investigation Findings:

  • Reuters revealed alarming rates of lead poisoning among children in certain US neighborhoods.
  • National incidence: 2.5%. Flint, MI (water crisis): 5%, with pockets over 11%.
  • Some areas—such as census tracts in St. Joseph, MO (up to 20%), Baltimore (25–40%), and Pennsylvania (49 tracts over 40%)—have rates far surpassing Flint.

• Historical Context & Progress:

  • Both the proportion of children with high lead and the level considered "elevated" have dropped over decades.
  • “One of the reasons why the world is a better place now is precisely because we have much less lead in our blood.” – Jordan Weissmann [06:33]

• Impact on Health and Behavior:

  • Lead exposure linked to lower IQ, difficulty focusing, mood swings, antisocial behavior, and violence.
  • Reference to studies: adolescent violence plummets 16–20 years after unleaded gasoline is adopted.
    • "One of my favorite pieces of science is...what happens to rates of adolescent violence...after they move to unleaded gasoline. And it just plunges every single time." – Jordan Weissmann [08:53]

• Source & Policy Challenges:

  • Problems arise not just from water, but from old paint, soil, and lingering industrial contamination.
  • Causality is hard to pinpoint; some governments underplay lead in water via skewed testing.
  • Legal efforts to hold paint companies liable have largely failed; few successful state lawsuits.
  • Problems are concentrated in poorer areas; wealthier people can afford remediation.

• Statistical Analysis & Policy Implications:

  • Felix describes using statistical models (with help from Rebecca Golden) to show that the pockets found by Reuters are not random—implying a real, actionable problem.
  • The panel argues that concentration of cases makes remediation more feasible than if the problem was uniform nationwide.

---

2. The Truth Behind China’s "Amazing" Education System

[15:40–25:19]

• PISA Test Results & Myth Busting:

  • Past international comparisons (PISA exams) cited only Shanghai, painting an unrealistically rosy picture.
  • When four provinces are included, China’s results fall: 10th in science, 6th in math, 27th in reading.

• Educational Inequality in China:

  • Sharp division between urban and rural education; "rural education is both inferior and expensive." – Kathy O’Neill [19:45]
  • Strict rules often keep children of migrants from getting city education.

• Rise of Online Education Startups:

  • Chinese startup VIP Kid connects American teachers to Chinese students for $21/class (72-class package: $1,500).
  • Demand comes from parents dissatisfied with local schools and who can afford outside help.
  • Discussion covers the boom in for-profit education/online tutoring—a sector mistrusted in the U.S., but sometimes filling gaps in countries lacking public infrastructure.

• Pedagogical Takeaways:

  • VIP Kid experiments suggest allowing students to pick their own teachers may lead to better outcomes—a lesson not yet adopted at the elementary level in the U.S.
  • “They seem to be finding that when kids can pick their own teachers, they do better.” – Felix Salmon [24:46]
  • The importance of parental involvement: Chinese parents invest money and oversight, in contrast to many online learners in America.
  • Scalability of this model is questioned: physical space, culture, and economic ability are limiting factors.

---

3. Are Platforms Like Facebook Complicit in Hate and Terror?

[25:24–37:24]

• Lawsuits Against Tech Giants:

  • Families of Orlando Pulse nightclub victims are suing Google, Facebook, and Twitter, alleging their platforms “aided and abetted” radicalization because of terrorist content.

• The Section 230 Debate:

  • Platforms are generally shielded from liability for user content by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA).
  • The lawsuit argues that pairing ISIS content with ads makes platforms “co-creators” of illegal content.

• Panel’s View:

  • Hosts express skepticism, noting platforms actively take down terrorist content.
  • Clear distinction is drawn:
    • Stormfront is legal but odious; ISIS is illegal and quickly removed [31:12–32:09].
  • Kathy and Felix argue there are unresolved, gray areas—regarding algorithms amplifying libel or hate and the evolving role of editorial discretion.

• Algorithmic Editorializing & Social Harm:

  • Algorithms now decide what millions see, which blurs the line between platform and publisher.
  • The panel debates whether platforms should bear more responsibility if their algorithms amplify direct harm (e.g., “straight up libel”).
  • “Things like Section 230 were premised on the idea of platforms not making editorial decisions. And now we have algorithms making editorial decisions.” – Felix Salmon [35:55]
  • No consensus on what new legal frameworks should look like; all agree it’s complex and that careless changes could stifle free speech.

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Lead Poisoning:

  • “We are much more aware of how weird behavior among our children can be caused by a disease. We used to just say, oh, that's just a kid being a kid.” – Kathy O’Neill [07:44]
  • “The good news is that we now know how to do that. We know where to go to do that.” – Jordan Weissmann [15:39]

• On Chinese Education:

  • “The irony...is when we talk about the money here...if we in America aren’t going to teach, pay for good teachers, then the Chinese people will pick up the tab.” – Kathy O’Neill [19:45]
  • [On online education] “If you set a price of zero for these courses, then 99% of people taking the courses are going to drop out.” – Felix Salmon [22:46]

• On Platform Responsibility:

  • “You have algorithms making editorial decisions. And it's not as if algorithms are neutral. It's just automated editorializing.” – Felix Salmon [35:55]
  • “We have to figure out a way to hold them responsible without ruining everything.” – Kathy O’Neill [37:08]

---

Numbers Round

[37:24–41:28]

• Kathy’s number: "112" – Uber’s self-driving cars spent 112 total ‘car-days’ in San Francisco before being ordered off roads.
• Jordan’s number: "17" – In Uganda, providing free sanitary pads reduced girls’ absenteeism by 17%.
• Felix’s number: "40" – Oprah reportedly lost 40 pounds on Weight Watchers, temporarily boosting the company’s stock 14%.

---

Closing Banter & Memorable Moments

• On New Year's Resolutions:
  • "My New Year's resolution is to gain 10 pounds and start smoking." – Kathy O’Neill [42:42]
  • The hosts joke about the futility of diet companies and “blaming Trump” for post-election weight gain.

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Lead Poisoning Crisis: 03:00–15:39
• Chinese Education Realities & VIP Kid: 15:40–25:19
• Tech Platforms & Legal Liability: 25:24–37:24
• Numbers Round: 37:24–41:28
• Closing Banter: 41:28–end

---

Summary

This episode traverses urgent, thorny questions about environment, education, and technology—offering sobering facts, debunking popular narratives, and debating the unresolved legal/ethical issues emerging in a digital world. Balancing sharp humor and rigorous analysis, the hosts leave listeners with a clearer—if not always more optimistic—view of what’s shaping the lives and prospects of modern youth.

Transcript

[Felix Hammond]

The following podcast contains explicit language.

[Jordan Weissman]

Hello, and welcome to the Doomed Youth edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I am Felix Hammond of Fusion. I'm here to wish you a very merry Christmas because it's Christmas time with Cathy o', Neill, the author of Weapons.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Of Math December and Happy Hanukkah.

[Jordan Weissman]

Hello, everyone, and Hanukkah Time. And Jordan Weissman, the Money Box columnist at Slate.

[Felix Hammond]

And it's festivus for the rest of us.

[Jordan Weissman]

And we are going to do a very un holiday. There's nothing holiday themed about this episode of Slate Money. It's a perfectly normal episode of Slate Money. For the festivities, you're going to have to wait until next week. And the craft beer edition. This week we're going to be talking about the Chinese educational system, what we know about it and what they were up to. We're going to be talking about whether Google and Facebook and Twitter have any role to play in in mass shootings. I'm going to be talking about lead poisoning. You know, it's going to be one of those kind of episodes.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Far from uplifting.

[Jordan Weissman]

If you have things that you want us to talk about or if you have questions that you want us to answer. We have been getting qu questions at our email address, which is slatemoneylate.com and we sometimes answer them by email and we sometimes don't answer them. But we're thinking about maybe doing a little Q and A segment, adding a little Q and A segment to this show. So if you have a question that you want us to answer, send it in and we'll see if we can add a Q and A segment. We might call you back. We might ask you to record it on a voice memo or something. We haven't entirely worked this thing out, but it's gonna be fun.

[Kathy O'Neill]

It could be like questions like. So we could give advice to people.

[Felix Hammond]

Yeah.

[Jordan Weissman]

So Kathy O' Neill has an advice [e-mail] I used to.

[Kathy O'Neill]

I used to. I kind of miss it.

[Jordan Weissman]

It's called Aunt Pythia.

[Felix Hammond]

Yeah.

[Jordan Weissman]

And maybe. Maybe Aunt Pythia can make an appearance on Slate Money.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Aunt Pithy would love to.

[Jordan Weissman]

So we might have some. We might, yeah. If you want advice, send in your questions, which require advice. And also the other thing is, now that we have recorded a wine episode and we have recorded a craft beer episode, we are thinking about should we record a cocktail episode?

[Kathy O'Neill]

And that would only happen once our hangovers are done.

[Felix Hammond]

It might be a couple more months.

[Jordan Weissman]

But again, because we are suffering from a seriously hungover failure of imagination here. We need your ideas for what we would actually talk about on a cocktail episode.

[Felix Hammond]

Frankly, I think every episode should be a cocktail episode of Slate Money. But that's, that's another story.

[Jordan Weissman]

So send us your questions, send us your cocktail questions, send us your feedback, send us, you know, funny jokes. Because it's that time of year. Dad jokes are always welcome. The email address is slate [e-mail] but let's get into this whole thing of lead poisoning, because I feel like if we can't just have a depressing story to kick off the show, then when can we have a depressing story?

[Kathy O'Neill]

I don't think it's that depressing.

[Felix Hammond]

It's pretty depressing.

[Jordan Weissman]

So, okay, so here's the story. The story is a Reuters report which came out last week. And this was everything that you love about journalism, where they went out and they literally asked every single census tract in the country. And there are 74,000 of these things, like what their incidence of lead poisoning was in children. So that's, this is, it turns out children under the age of six. And the answers were quite scary, that if you use Flint. Let's give a couple of baselines here. Number one, the nationwide incidence of lead poisoning in children is 2.5%. In the Flint, Michigan water poisoning scandal, the incidence of lead poisoning in Flint was 5%, double the national average. And there were areas of Flint where it got up to as high as 11%. If you look at the nation as a whole. Reuters didn't manage to look at the entire nation, but it managed to find about 61% of the nation in 21 different states. There were areas of America which had much, much higher lead poisoning into the.

[Felix Hammond]

30S in some places.

[Jordan Weissman]

So let me give you some numbers here because they're really scary. If you go to St. Joseph, Missouri, there were seven different census tracts where it was over 15%. In one of them, it was 20%. In Baltimore, there was a whole group of census tracts where you found between 25 and 40% of children with elevated lead in their blood. And in Pennsylvania, there were 49 different census tracts. 49 just in Pennsylvania, where more than 40% of children had elevated levels of lead.

[Felix Hammond]

And we should be clear when we're talking about census tract, that's, that's almost the neighborhood. Essentially, it's about 4,000 people. So you're talking about a very small area. But I mean, that, that is almost more or it is more important information than a whole state because it Gives you that micro sense of where, if you live in Pennsylvania, where you're actually in danger from. From lead.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Okay, I'm gonna be a little bit positive about this. Number one, it's always good when something that's truly bad that's happening is uncovered. So, like, that's already good because, I mean, it's. In other words, it's progress on the problem of lead poisoning, which is. But the other thing I want to mention is that historically, I think lead poisoning was a much harder, much bigger deal. We had much more like, I would like to see this compared to 20 years ago.

[Jordan Weissman]

So this is an incredibly good point, and it's one of the. I wrote about this and one of the more interesting bits of feedback I got is that there are two different things that you look at when you're looking at lead poisoning. And Reuters only mentioned one, which is the incidence of children with elevated lead levels. The other thing which you look at is how high are the lead levels. And broadly speaking, over the past few decades, both of them have been coming down a lot. The incidence has been. I mean, it's still far too high, but it's been coming down. And the level of lead which is considered to be elevated has also been coming down.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Right. That's the next thing I was going to say.

[Jordan Weissman]

And so. And so the levels of lead in children's blood that we are getting really worried about today would have been quite normal when I was a child and I probably had them myself.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Yeah. Do we have that data from 20 years ago?

[Jordan Weissman]

We do. And the levels of lead were high. And the incidence of lead in children at the levels that people get worried about now, which people weren't actually worried about, levels that low 20 or 30 years ago were probably over 80 or 90% back in the 70s. And there is a sense, there is a feeling among some people of like, well, I grew up in the 70s and I'm. Okay, so I don't know why we're worried about this, but I think that's very wrong. And I think that one of the reasons why the world is a better place now is precisely because we have much less lead in our blood. And that we can lose sight of the amount of. We can lose sight of the degree that violence has decreased and antisocial behavior has decreased over the past 20 or 30 years. And most of that, I think, is actually attributable to lead. And it. The fact is that we weren't okay in 70s.

[Kathy O'Neill]

I can't completely agree. And by the way, like my brother My brother was diagnosed with autism in the 70s and probably more like Asperger's syndrome. But one of the reasons it took them forever to diagnose them with anything is cause so many kids around us were poisoned with lead. And the symptoms aren't that different. I mean, in other words, like, we are much more aware of how weird behavior among our children can be caused by a disease. We used to just say, oh, that's just a kid being a kid.

[Jordan Weissman]

So let's just back up a bit. Kathy, what does lead poisoning do?

[Kathy O'Neill]

I mean, I don't. I'm not an expert on lead poisoning, but I know it has a lot to do with a lack of focus, lots of mood swings, and just basically decreased mental capacity.

[Jordan Weissman]

It reduces iq, it reduces. Yeah. Mental development, and it also increases antisocial behavior and violence. And one of the things. One of my favorite pieces of science is the studies which look at what happens to rates of adolescent violence in states and countries around the world. And 16 to 20 years after they move to unleaded gasoline.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Jordan Weissman]

And it just plunges every single time.

[Felix Hammond]

So I kind of. I kind of want to talk about the money aspect of this. And this is slight money or at least kind of the policy aspect of this because it really. It's. It's a tricky problem to solve. Right. Because this isn't. Most. These places aren't necessarily suffering from the same problems as Flint. It's not necessarily lead in the water. A lot of it is, you know, lead left over in the soil, maybe from old industrial plants in the area. A lot of that's probably in Pennsylvania. A lot of it is just lead from homes. From. Yeah, I mean, that's not necessarily the majority of the problem.

[Kathy O'Neill]

But it's paint. Yeah.

[Felix Hammond]

It's old houses that still have lead paint that's flaking and dusting and kids are breathing.

[Jordan Weissman]

Although it's hard to tell. Like if you read the Reuters report, it's filled, as journalism is these days, with lots of anecdotes. They went out to these places and they found kids, and these kids invariably were growing up in homes with lead paint. But one of the problems is that it's impossible to really be sure about the causality. And the thing which terrifies me is that in a lot of states, in a lot of cities, they're deliberately underplaying the amount of lead in the water by requiring, for instance, when they test the water, that people run their taps for five minutes before testing the water and that kind of stuff, they're basically flushing the Lead down the drain before testing the water.

[Felix Hammond]

Well, so that comes back to what you bring up though. It's hard to tell exactly where the lead comes from all the time. And so that brings up this question of responsibility, right? These, you know, these, these small communities can't necessarily afford to do a big lead cleanup. These census tracts certainly can't do it. A lot of these people can't even afford to redo their, repaint their own homes. You know. And then when you've had attempts to maybe for instance sue the paint companies that provide that were hawking lead paint for 50 years even though they it seems knew the dangers of it kind of Big tobacco style, a lot of those lawsuits have up until recently failed because they haven't been able to prove that maybe it was Sherman Dutch Boy's actual paint in that house that caused the problem. There's one lawsuit ongoing right now against Sherman Williams, a few other companies that actually the some cities in California won a big billion dollar verdict to kind of help clean up the lead situation in California. But that's being appealed. It's not clear how that's going to, how that's going to play out. So you have this kind of diffusion of responsibility and the only thing you can really think of to deal with it is maybe have like a state level action. But then this isn't necessarily a priority for most states because it's basically spending money on the very, very poor. Those are the people most affected by it all.

[Jordan Weissman]

And I mean the Reuters investigation found elevated lead levels in all types of census tracts. It wasn't only the poor, but this is, you're absolutely right, more, much more of a problem of poverty than, than it is for rich people because rich people can pay to alleviate lead. They can replace their lead pipes, they can, you know, do sophisticated lead remediation on their old homes and the problem is more likely to be solved.

[Felix Hammond]

Well, also I think you can, you know, just say they're less likely to live in old industrial areas where there was lead settling into the soil from whatever emissions were floating around in the air. I mean that's just, it's most old.

[Jordan Weissman]

Industrial areas are now relatively poor, some are now relatively rich. And so as I say, it happens, it's not just poor people. The one thing I want to mention because this is slate money and we have Kathy, here is my little bit of stats nerdery that I did on this story which is that if you're looking for patterns without having a hypothesis at the beginning of where these pockets are going to be. You can wind up being what Nessem Taleb would call fooled by randomness, that if you just take the 600,000 children in America who have elevated lead levels and distribute them randomly across America, there are going to be pockets of higher density areas and lower density areas. And so I actually did the math with the help of this lovely woman from George Mason University, Rebecca Golden.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Rebecca golden, who's a friend of mine. Hi Rebecca.

[Jordan Weissman]

Hi Rebecca. And she did the math for me, which was amazing. And she basically said that if there's 2.5% lead poisoning in America, then you would expect about 484 census tracts to have 5% lead poisoning and basically zero to have 10% or higher. And of course the numbers which Reuters found are way higher than that. And I just wish those numbers had been the report because I'm a stats nerd.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Yeah, I like that analysis. And I'm going to ask a philosophical question about it. I mean, I definitely think that Reuters should have thought about that, should have said, hey, if this were, if these kids were randomly distributed, what would it look like? And what does it actually look like? So compare it to that baseline. But I do question, and it's a philosophical question, do we expect lead poisoning to be randomly distributed? Because I actually, it's like, it's. That analysis that you just mentioned is perfect with cancer because you do think cancer is random. Right. But with lead poisoning, I kind of feel like it's not random. There's always a cause. And as Jordan points out, very importantly, when we don't know exactly the cause, there's lots of different causes. We don't exactly know the causality.

[Jordan Weissman]

Okay, so for instance, in the days when lead poisoning was coming from pencils and gasoline, you would expect it to be much more evenly distributed.

[Kathy O'Neill]

That's true, that's true. But nowadays when we're being much more hypersensitive to it, my point is if we find a pocket of kids with lead, we expect there to be a cause for that.

[Felix Hammond]

Right?

[Kathy O'Neill]

We expect to find it because like, let me put it this way, kids aren't born with lead poisoning, right? There's always a reason they have lead poisoning. Any given child, you would expect there to be a sort of narrative about why they have lead poisoning. So it's not a random event.

[Felix Hammond]

That is a good point and I think is probably over time, as it's become less evenly distributed and class has become more of a role, you would expect more of the more of it to be occurring in concentrated pockets. I mean, that's that's.

[Jordan Weissman]

And in fact, that's, I mean, in a weird way, that's the good news. The fact that it's in concentrated pockets is the good news because it's much easier, it's much more tractable if it's in concentrated pockets. If you can take 3,000 census tracts and just attack those and deal with 75% of the problem, that's much better than having a nationwide problem, which you have to do some huge federal thing about. And the bad news is the big headline bad news is there's 600,000 kids out there with elevated lead levels. We need to bring that number down. And, you know, we didn't need a Reuters investigation to find that. That's public knowledge. That's the standard incidence of lead poisoning nationwide. The good news is that we now know how to do that. We know where to go to do that.

[Kathy O'Neill]

It is good news.

[Jordan Weissman]

So it's not such a depressing story after all. Talking of children, Jordan, Yes. If I am a kid in China, how likely is it that I'm going to get an amazing education?

[Felix Hammond]

Well, I think if you had been talking to a lot of American politicians or even some education wonks a few years ago, you'd have been hearing a lot about China's, like, dominant education system and just how they're outclassing the United States left and right.

[Kathy O'Neill]

We're worried about their test scores always being higher than the Americans, much higher.

[Felix Hammond]

And a lot of that is based on this thing called the PISA exam. It's an international test done by the oecd. Not going to get too much into the acronyms, but there's one big international test where essentially they were just taking in 2009, they were just taking scores from kids in Shanghai. And those scores were just, like, astronomical. And so President Obama even got freaked out and said, this is our Sputnik moment. Right. But recently we had the 2015 results come out for Pisa and they didn't just test kids in Shanghai this time. They actually looked at four different provinces. And all of a sudden, China's results are starting to drop a bit. You're starting to see all of a sudden they're 10th in science, 6th in math, 27th in reading. I think they actually did worse in.

[Jordan Weissman]

Reading, but that's still better than the.

[Felix Hammond]

United States, not on reading, but still better. And again, now one of the interesting thing is, okay, they've expanded to four provinces in China, but, and they're big provinces. Like, it's like Guangdong, which is like, on the coast, and I think it's almost like 100 million people or something like that, but it's still not the majority of the country. And so what we're beginning to see in China is this vast amount of educational inequality. And we, I think we're kind of starting to scratch the surface of it. And one of the outgrowths of that is this startup in China, which I sent you an article from Bloomberg about this week. Where it is, it is providing online elementary and high school education to Chinese students and connecting them with teachers in the United States who will teach them American style, they'll teach them math, they'll teach them English, they'll teach them reading, et cetera, all of that. The startup is called VIP Kid. And it's fascinating because we've had all this envy about Chinese education for years now. And learning is that parents in China are desperate for American style education to some degree, or at least what is marketed as high end American education.

[Jordan Weissman]

And is this the parents in Shanghai whose kids are getting amazing test scores? This is the parents in, you know, rural areas who have very bad education.

[Felix Hammond]

I think to some extent it looks like it's, well, okay, so it has to be a parent that can afford to pay for it. Right? So it's not going to be the most desperate, you know, parents in far out western China.

[Jordan Weissman]

But that said, there is this problem in China that if you move to a city and start making lots of money, there are rules preventing you from bringing your kids with you and enrolling your kids in the local school in the rich city where you're at. So there's, I can easily imagine that there are parents in rich cities in China whose kids are getting a bad rural education.

[Felix Hammond]

That's very possible. And I mean, to give you a sense of the price, it's, you know, about $21 per class, you can get a package of 72 class for 1,500 bucks.

[Jordan Weissman]

And that's like a semester a year.

[Kathy O'Neill]

72 classes meets about twice a week. So it's about half a year. So let me just back up a bit. From what I understand, there's a basically two class system of education for children in China. It's the city education and the rural education. As Felix pointed out, many, many parents who've moved to the city do not have access to the good city education. And, and the, and the rural education is both inferior and expensive like this, this, the teachers, there was basically high fees to pay for this, for the teachers, for that. And so the irony for me is when we talk about the money here. So the Bloomberg article about Americans teaching these Chinese kids. The Bloomberg article said, well, if we in America aren't going to teach, pay for good teachers, then the Chinese people will pick up the tab. In other words, the Chinese people are paying for our teachers.

[Jordan Weissman]

We should totally be exporting our teaching prowess to China. That's a little great, little American export to China. God knows we don't have very many of them.

[Kathy O'Neill]

It's.

[Felix Hammond]

I mean, it's funny but, you know, we are, I mean it's so this, this startup VIP kid, it's about. It went from 200 to 5,000 teachers in a year. Yeah, yeah. I mean like that's. Which is, I mean that's huge growth really quickly. They've raised about $125 million. And they're not the only one. It's fascinating also just, you know, the, I think the role that like kind of for profit education is playing here. I think in the US we have this totally justified and rational aversion to for profit education. A lot of people are very. Because it's been sort of an awful, awful industry here. But abroad, in countries that don't really have such a great infrastructure for public education, it's been a little bit more of a force for good.

[Jordan Weissman]

And people, I've been spending a little bit of time with people who run private schools in the Middle east. And some of these schools are just amazing and they cater to expats and there are tiers of these schools and so you get the lowest tier schools for like the Pakistani workers and then the middle tier schools for the middle tier workers. And then you get these incredibly grand sort of. Norman Foster designed high schools for the oil industry, Americans and Brits who are earning millions of dollars a year. And what's fascinating is that the difference in price between these schools is really quite enormous. But the difference in outcomes is basically zero. The kids all graduate from all of these schools with amazing grades and you can get a fantastic education even at a very low price school.

[Kathy O'Neill]

So I mean, here's what's going on from my perspective. Yeah, we are just conflating too many things when we say online education. Yeah, right. The thing about, there's a lot of things that make this Chinese system potentially work. And the first, the most important two things are that it's not really online classes, it's online tutoring. Like it's one on one as far as I heard. Is that not true?

[Felix Hammond]

No, I believe those are classes. They are classes. Yeah. So it's not too. There are In China they do have tutoring, there are tutoring programs too, which, you know, those are blowing up as well. So the VIP kids, these are classes.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Oh, okay, I misunderstood. Well, in any case, it seems like the teachers are well respected, well paid and they seem to really interact with those kids. I think the other really important thing that doesn't happen for the students at what we consider like the shitty for profit online colleges in this country is that you have those parents who are, who are putting really hard earned money into this and are hovering over their kids and making sure those kids really learn their English and their lessons. And we don't have that same kind of support system for the typical online learner in this country.

[Jordan Weissman]

I remember the time I first heard about Udacity when like no one had heard of MOOCs. And I went to this speech in Munich of all places where Sebastian Thrun announced that he, you know, that he was starting Udacity and everyone was going to do these amazing things with online learning and it was full of hope and, you know, vision. And what happened very, very quickly was that it became obvious that if you set a price of zero for these courses, then 99% of people taking the courses are going to drop out. And the, one of the reasons why people go to university, one of the reasons why people go to school, one of the reasons why it's so important, for that matter, one of the reasons why people go to offices, because it's important to just have a physical space where you can be in the mindset of doing a certain work. And if you just kind of say, well, I can do this at home, you probably won't. And so I think you're right that the Chinese parents are probably saying, okay, here's your room, go do your lessons. And they really create a space for that. But I do wonder how scalable that is.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Yeah, I mean, and here's another question, like the, and this is just a question about the future of China. It's not answerable but like, you know, it's clear that the Chinese people who are currently are fluent in English and have a relatively good education have a huge step up in China. But if you have an enormous number of kids who can speak English, that doesn't mean they're all going to do very, very well. And that's what we're headed for if we, if we, if we keep seeing this kind of growth.

[Felix Hammond]

I, I should say I just double checked apparently. So language classes at least are one on one. So it is more. There are, yeah, there are like full immersion classes at. So you're right on there. Yeah. I do think also though, it's interesting just about what China might show us about the future of online education and can it work? There are, yeah, there are things about this company that it seems to be discovering that could be brought over here. Like they're seem to be finding that when kids can pick their own teachers, they do better.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Interesting.

[Felix Hammond]

Which is like a fat, like, which is fascinating because it's not about, like, it's not about rating a teacher necessarily like we do here, like you know, based on test scores or something or it's not necessarily the, the parent picking a teacher, but it's really the kid just saying, I like this one. I like.

[Kathy O'Neill]

You know, Mrs. Jones, that does happen in college.

[Felix Hammond]

Right?

[Kathy O'Neill]

People, kids, students choose their teachers.

[Felix Hammond]

Yeah. But we don't think about that way in elementary education so much. And so that's kind of a really cool lesson. Like maybe these experiments will lead to bigger pedagogical discoveries that, you know, could be scaled internationally. Who knows?

[Kathy O'Neill]

It'll definitely run into this woman getting very, very rich. Right.

[Felix Hammond]

Maybe the founder, I think. Well that and like Kobe Bryant and Jack Ma, who are investors right now.

[Jordan Weissman]

Yeah. Slate Money does not give investment advice. Yeah. The one thing I've learned is that when you get a big hyped billion dollar company, the chances that the founder of that company will actually turn out to be very rich in the end are far from certain.

[Felix Hammond]

What's our definition of very rich? How about like normal rich?

[Jordan Weissman]

There's a lot of, there's a lot of things which can go wrong. Elizabeth Sebastian. So I put out a little snarky tweet about ambulance chasers earlier this week because I saw some unspeakable lawyer from 1, 800ambulance chasers deciding to sue like Google and Twitter and Facebook over, you know, a tragedy in Orlando. And Kathy. Yeah, we at least said that I was maybe a little bit too cynical about this.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Well, let the listenership decide. The lawsuit was filed by these lawyers. You're right, they were ambulance chasers, I'll give you that. On behalf of the families of the victims of the Orlando shooter at the Pulse nightclub. If you guys remember, the gay nightclub that was that this radicalized self proclaimed ISIS follower shot. And the idea that the lawsuit is suggesting is that Google, Facebook and Twitter aided and abetted the radicalization of the shooter and are responsible for that radicalization and therefore responsible to some extent for their family members death.

[Jordan Weissman]

And in fact the lawsuit claims, without any evidence as far As I can see that Google and Facebook and Twitter were paying Isis, that somehow there was some kind of weird revenue share and that ISIS would do posts on these platforms, and then there would be ads against the post, and then Google would pay. And I'm like, that's a pretty good argument.

[Felix Hammond]

Don't be so dismissive. Yeah, so I read the lawsuit. So, Felix, did you read it? No.

[Jordan Weissman]

Wait, don't just throw this show together.

[Felix Hammond]

Felix just gave me the I didn't do the homework look. Anyway, so this lawsuit is operating on one big, slightly tenuous, but interesting theory. And to understand, you have to start by realizing that companies like Facebook and Google and Twitter are all protected under federal law by this thing called the Communications decency act of 1996, or the. The telecommunications act of 1996. And it's this provision called section 230, which basically says you will. These companies will not be held responsible for things that third parties post on them. So if someone writes something libelous on Facebook, or you cannot sue Facebook for as part of your libel case. Right.

[Kathy O'Neill]

And the idea is that they're just platforms. They're not. They're not creating that context.

[Felix Hammond]

Exactly. They're just platforms. And in 1996, this seemed like a essential thing to protect an open Internet. You couldn't be sued for something that Slate couldn't be sued for something that somebody wrote in the comments section. Exactly right. Like, that's the idea.

[Kathy O'Neill]

And it protects bloggers, it protects comments, it protects a lot of things that are posted on YouTube. Yeah, things like that.

[Felix Hammond]

And so. Well, it doesn't protect the person who posts the content, but it protects the platform, like you're saying. So how are you going to sue Facebook and Twitter over this strategy? Well, what they're saying is that these lawyers are saying is that by pairing this ISIS content, these ISIS posts with ads, they are essentially creating new content. And that because they are participating in this new. In the creation of this new content and making a profit off it, they are no longer protected by section 230. Now, I don't necessarily think that's a great argument as far as how Google is supposedly paying isis. The issue here is that Google has allowing. Is allowing them to run ads before their videos, sometimes which requires some sort of approval process. And when you put up your video with AdSense and you get. You put an ad before it, you share the revenues between Google and I.

[Jordan Weissman]

Can I just, like, jump in here and ask. When you say Google is allowing them to run ads before their videos, you're kind of implying here that Google is okay with ISIS videos and does not take them down.

[Felix Hammond]

And in fact, I'm saying what they are. I am saying what the. I'm presenting the lawsuits theory here.

[Jordan Weissman]

Okay, but in reality, yes, this is not true. In reality, when ISIS videos are found, they are not just shown without ads. They are not shown at all. They are taken down. Twitter is taking down tens of thousands of ISIS accounts. You know, every week. Both Twitter and Facebook and Google all have active attempts to try and just remove this content. They are explicitly censoring this content. I don't see where the idea comes from that they are not just allowing it, but that they're encouraging it because they make ad revenue from it.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Let me give you another example which is not. Isis crisis is an extreme. There was a pretty well known example recently of if you asked Google about the Holocaust, the number one hit and the number one ad was a holocaust denying website.

[Felix Hammond]

Yeah. Called Stormfront. We discussed this. Yes, right.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Okay. They made a lot of money on that ad. They made a lot of money on that Stormfront ad, which, by the way, they're protected by ads as well as content. Google's protected by ads by the same section 230. But the question is to. At what point do you hold Google somewhat responsible for it when they're actually directly profiting off of it?

[Felix Hammond]

So I think what we're. Yeah, I mean, that is a good question. Where do you, you know, where do you draw the line so that you still have a free and open Internet and these companies do not have a incentive to take advantage of speech as destructive? And that also gets a really core question of just like, what kind of speech do we as Americans think is so beyond the pale that it shouldn't be allowed on these platforms? These are all hard questions.

[Jordan Weissman]

And I think we have answers to them, though. I mean, I think the answer is that, you know, Stormfront is an odious organization, but it is legal and they can run ads and that's entirely legal, if deplorable. Whereas ISIS is a terrorist organization which is illegal and they cannot run ads and we don't make money off them. And I think the line is drawn very clearly between Stormfront and isis. And I think that trying to analogize from ISIS back to Stormfront doesn't work because Google and Twitter and Facebook really do draw the line in between those two groups.

[Felix Hammond]

I do think there are other questions also just about how forcefully they're going after. I mean, how much of an effort are they making to take down even These extreme cases that the terrorism adds, they're still relying heavily on, you know, flagging from their communities and things like that. And there are questions about whether or not they're doing enough to prevent. Whether Twitter is doing enough to prevent these, these jihadi groups from creating new accounts once they've been pushed out, once they've, they've had their old account blocked. So I don't think we should necessarily assume perfectly, you know, perfectly good effort on the part of these companies. I think it does raise the question is, are they doing enough? We should think about that. Let me give you a case. I think what I think really is a hard case in terms of Section 230 these days, which is straight up libel. Right. It's one of the oldest speech issues. You know, there was an article in New York Mag recently about how a favorite tactic of some alt writers these days is just accuse people of pedophilia. Right. Which is libelous. You don't get much more straight up libel than that. Now let's say you do that on Facebook, and Facebook then starts promoting that post to people through its algorithm because it's clicked on something, because it's clicked on, because of whatever. So at what point does Facebook's algorithm really become complicit in spreading. Yes, libel.

[Kathy O'Neill]

That's exactly what I mean.

[Felix Hammond]

So a straight up libel case. Now, Section 230 was created at a time when it was thought of as like a free and open Internet where you go and search things and you kind of have to go look hard for this kind of content, where you really had to go look for that libelous post. Now, you know, you're, you are on the World Wide Web. You know, you were surfing. Now you are being fed something that is potentially, you know, not a legal speech, but you're being fed speech that is damaging and is legally actionable. So I think there are hard cases now that we may have to rethink in terms of the new way we get information, the way these platforms interact with. And I don't know what the answers are. I don't know how you write.

[Kathy O'Neill]

I don't either. I'm not a legal scholar.

[Felix Hammond]

I do think there are fair questions here.

[Jordan Weissman]

Okay, so I mean, let's. To ask the obvious question, let's say that the Facebook algorithm inadvertently does end up amplifying libelous accusations of pedophilia. You're the expert on this, Kathy. You wrote this book about algorithms. You would want to weaken section 230 so as to allow the people damaged by those Accusations to sue not only the people who made the accusations, but also Facebook.

[Felix Hammond]

I would.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Yes. I mean, I don't know exactly. I'm not. As I said, I'm not a legal scholar. I would want to somehow hold Facebook legally responsible for dealing with this in a sort of. In a comprehensive way. Right now, what we're having is, you know, they're like, oh, it's the algorithm. Sorry, we can't.

[Jordan Weissman]

In order to do that, they would need to make determinations as to what was libelous.

[Kathy O'Neill]

That's right.

[Jordan Weissman]

Yeah.

[Kathy O'Neill]

No, I definitely think they should do that.

[Jordan Weissman]

I think that. You see, and that's where I disagree. I don't think that it is Facebook's position. I don't think they're qualified to do that.

[Kathy O'Neill]

They're not right now, but they could pay some of that profit to become qualified to do that.

[Jordan Weissman]

No, I don't think that's right at all. I think libel cases are things which stretch on for years and are extremely expensive. And it's not something where you can just find an expert who will say, yes, that's label.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Okay, let me. Let me say it this way. People think. And tell me if I'm wrong. People think that you either have some kind of messy human policy of gatekeeping, or you have a perfect algorithmic policy of gatekeeping. My point is that the algorithm is not up to the task, so we have to go to the messy thing, which is not. It's not like the shitty alternative. It turns out it's probably the best alternative.

[Felix Hammond]

I mean, again, and this is a thing we've talked about on the show many times now, which is just that things like section 230 were premised on the idea of platforms not making editorial decisions. And now we have algorithms making editorial decisions. And it's not as if algorithms are neutral. It's just automated editorializing. And so the problem, though, is when you want to deal with, you know, how do you police this stuff is. Okay, let's say, is how do you prevent that from freezing out necessary speech? Like, let's say, okay, so when you have. You have a rule that if someone says, I'm being libeled, that post gets taken down. Well, you can obviously see how that would be abused because someone who is not being libeled but just wants something unflattering taken down could alert Facebook and say, you're not.

[Jordan Weissman]

And you can't just say, you know, accuse. I should be allowed to accuse Jimmy Savile of being a pedophile because Jimmy Savile was a Pedophile. You can't just say that accusations of pedophilia are things that in and of themselves.

[Kathy O'Neill]

I'm not saying this. I'm not saying there's an easy answer. I'm saying there's no easy answer.

[Jordan Weissman]

Well, if there's no easy answer, then I don't think you should make this something which Facebook can be sued for. Like, I don't think there should be some kind of weird civil or criminal liability on Facebook's part for doing some. For not doing something which can't be done.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Well, I disagree. I think that what we're. What I'm saying is that right now, Facebook, Google, they're getting a ton of profit off of doing something that's kind of damaging, possibly very damaging to society. And we have to figure out a way to hold them responsible without ruining everything.

[Jordan Weissman]

Okay, numbers round. Who has a number?

[Kathy O'Neill]

I've got a number.

[Jordan Weissman]

You've got a number. What's your number?

[Kathy O'Neill]

112. There were 16 cars in seven days, so that's 16 times seven, which is 112 car days in which Uber was allowed or was using self driving cars in San Francisco before they got pulled.

[Felix Hammond]

Yeah. Didn't get permission.

[Kathy O'Neill]

They did not get permission. They were just like in total Uber style gonna do it anyway.

[Felix Hammond]

Yeah. Apparently they, the biker, the like, the bicyclists were infuriated because they discovered that Uber was just making turns that were. Uber cars were making turns that were very likely to injure poor cyclists.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Not only that, but they went through a bunch of red lights. So anyway, we'll see what happens with that. But as a kind of like Uber hater, I love seeing this kind of thing happen.

[Jordan Weissman]

My number is 17. This is a number which comes from Uganda where you have 91% of Ugandan girls are enrolled in primary school, which is a good number, but you only have 22% of Ugandan girls enrolled in secondary school. There's this massive drop off and they're trying to work out why this massive drop off. And it turns out that if you just tell these girls about puberty and you give them some sanitary towels, absenteeism reduces by 17%.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Wow. So let's do that. Let's give them free pads.

[Jordan Weissman]

Free pads basically means you're 17% more likely to stay in school.

[Felix Hammond]

All right. My number is sort of holiday ish themed a little bit. It's 40. My number is 40. That's how many pounds Oprah Winfrey has apparently lost on Weight Watchers. We have discussed the demise of Weight Watchers on this show and I believe actually Oprah's investment in it previously. And so they are now using her really as a spokeswoman, saying her, you know, experience losing weight on this is, is going to be featured in her ads. And apparently after losing like half its value over the course of the year, the news that Oprah had lost 40 pounds drove up the stock like 14%.

[Jordan Weissman]

So yeah, that, that was in pre market. That was in thin premarket trading. They went straight back down again. And it has to be quite a good pun and it has to, it has to be put in the context of Weight Watchers shares being basically worthless compared to where they were just a.

[Felix Hammond]

Couple of years ago.

[Kathy O'Neill]

However, given, given how much of a stake she has in that, I would like you to work out how much profit per pound lost that figures out for her, because I would probably, given those stakes, I'd probably lose £20. Not really.

[Jordan Weissman]

But no, I think this is true. And one of the things we know about all weight loss programs is that losing the weight is not easy, but it's not the hardest bit. And the problem, as we found with previous Weight Watch spokespeople like Jessica Simpson, is that after you lose the weight, you then put it back on and that the more weight you lose, the easier it is to regain weight. And the faster you lose weight, the easier it is to regain weight. And if you look at the people who won the Biggest Loser competition on the television, which who lost vast amounts of weight, they are now, they have these crazy metabolisms where they can eat like half a banana and suddenly put on the pounds. It's completely insane.

[Kathy O'Neill]

I like that there was your, like 1, 1, 1 answer summary for why Weight Watchers doesn't work. It had like 15 facts in it. But yes, Weight Watchers does not work. It save your money.

[Jordan Weissman]

It's not, it's not worth.

[Felix Hammond]

For Oprah in her fluctuating.

[Jordan Weissman]

It's actually.

[Kathy O'Neill]

No, I love her.

[Jordan Weissman]

I, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say that Weight Watchers doesn't work. I think that Weight Watchers does help people be more conscious about what they're eating. They. It does help people be more conscious about their general health and wellness. And that at the margin, it's a good thing. I, I'm not anti Weight Watchers, but I do think that there's no easy way of keeping the pounds off, as.

[Felix Hammond]

I've learned this year, as, as my genes are telling me right now.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Wait a second. Question, Jordan. Didn't you have a New Year's resolution last January, it was like lifting weights.

[Felix Hammond]

Yeah.

[Jordan Weissman]

So I Jordan getting swole.

[Felix Hammond]

So that was one of my New Year's resolutions, was to get swole. I even, like, bought books on it and read them and I. Did you lift weights a few times? I, I, you know, I did get swolen. Perhaps it's not swole, as my pants size will tell you.

[Jordan Weissman]

So. But isn't, isn't your pant size meant to go up when you get swole?

[Felix Hammond]

No, no, no. Maybe your shirt size is.

[Kathy O'Neill]

I think everybody for this January, given who's being inau, should like their New Year's resolution should be to gain 10 pounds.

[Felix Hammond]

See how much emotional eating you can.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Do in jail will finally be able to fulfill our nearest solution.

[Felix Hammond]

We're so gonna have a wet January.

[Jordan Weissman]

I gained a bunch of weight after Trump was elected. And of course I blame Trump and I'm like, yeah, as long as he's president, I can blame Trump for everything, including whatever, you know, extra pudge, pudge I might gain.

[Kathy O'Neill]

I'm gonna go on record. My New Year's resolution is to gain 10 pounds and start smoking.

[Felix Hammond]

I think, I think we'll check back next year.

[Jordan Weissman]

We'll check back this time next year.

[Felix Hammond]

I think you can do it, Kathy. I've got confidence in you.

[Jordan Weissman]

You want to eat some lead while you're at it?

[Felix Hammond]

Jesus. Let's not.

[Kathy O'Neill]

Doesn't work for grownups very well.

[Felix Hammond]

Joke about that. Come on, guys. Okay, Some standards on this show.

[Jordan Weissman]

Enough of this. Send us some ideas and questions because obviously we're just flailing here. Slate moneylate.com subscribe to the show. Listen to our craft beer show next week. We'll be back in the new year. Many thanks to Zach Dynastine, Andy Bowers, Steve Lichti, and all of the various producer types around these parts. These parts being itunes.com panoply the panoply network. Yeah. Enjoy the craft beer episode next week and we will come back with a slightly more regular episode in January.