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Here’s the video interview:
I recently interviewed Shoshana Weissmann, Digital Director for the R Street Institute about the regulations that negatively impact native-born US men.
It’s a great interview, where I learned a lot. The transcript is below:
Cathy: It's so nice to finally meet you.
Shoshana: No same here. Oh my gosh. Thanks for wanting to talk to me.
Cathy: Of course. Shoshana Weissmann. You are social media, comms, and lots of things at R Street Institute. But you just got a new title.
Shoshana: Oh, yeah. I'm now Digital Director. I've functionally been it for a while. We just have a bureaucracy, which sounds bad, especially for people who are like lead, libertarian and stuff, but it's good. I was once Digital Director when I was 24 at another organization. So it's good to be back in it and to head it and now. I'll have two employees under me, so it's exciting.
Cathy: Congratulations. That's wonderful. And you're a sloth aficionado, as well as I am as well.
Shoshana: Wow. I'm glad you like sloths too. They're the best. I'm also an Associate Fellow at the Sloth Institute, which is something I wormed my way into.
Cathy: That's amazing! What are your duties?
Shoshana: Thank you. So initially I was just joking. I was like, can I become an Associate Fellow? Cause it'd be really funny if I was. And then and I'm like, look, I'll promote you. If there's anything I can do. And they're like, actually we need someone with us government experience. So right now I'm working for them to put together a database on every sloth for commercial use in America. There's no way to find out for personal use. I'm working on that actually through the Lima database, once that's released, I'll be able to categorize that for them. Right now I have a spreadsheet of every sloth in every zoo in America, every sloth in a facility that sells sloths, and stuff like that. So I made the database and now they're checking my data and once that's done I'll have a big report out.
Cathy: That's amazing. I love it. So tell me about, I know that you focus a lot on occupational licensure reform. What are some of your other policy areas?
Shoshana: Yeah, so licensure reform is my love. The way regulations hurt people is something I really care about. I have no issues with regulations broadly, but with everything you wanna make sure it does its job and it's not hurting people more than it helps.
I'm also really into Section 230. I never thought I'd get into that, but it's my love of digital media and my love of regulatory reform where I'm like. Why would we put all this liability on these people and make it so they have to punish speech or that speech gets drowned in a sea of spam?
When I joined R Street, we were working on it and I didn't really care. But one day it just clicked for me and I fell in love with it. I do a little antitrust too, because a lot of times people conflate antitrust with Section 230. I'm not like the top, top expert on it, but I have vibes around antitrust.
Then veggie burger policy, like when governments try to say, oh, you can't call that a burger. It's not meat because burger is a type of meat. Apparently it's not a type of meat or almond milk, cauliflower, rice, all that stuff. It's just whatever I vibe with, whatever the mood strikes, I'll pick up a new policy area. But most of it's just regulatory. It's about making sure that compliance isn't in the way so that people can start reasonable businesses and live their lives.
I never thought that regulatory reform would be like my love, but that's where I live.
Cathy: You know, one thing I really love about it, and this is where I think you and I really vibe, or at least I vibe with what I know of you online, is that what frustrates me is that I wanna get the left more involved in where is the government perpetrating upwards power transfers?
And all of these are areas where the government is taking from people who have less power and giving to people who have more unearned, unfair advantages. I really vibe with all of that and appreciate the work that you're doing.
I wanted to talk to you today, specifically. I've been writing a lot about native-born men in the US and things that I've noticed, just reading about sex and gender, that's kind of my jam. I'm also into regulations, but you know, I also like to talk about, what's the future of marriage in America. What's the present of sex and all that. And so, what we're seeing is a bunch of trends that may or may not relate to each other. So you've got a large cohort of young American native-born men who are not in education, employment, or training. They're NEETt. You have declining marriage rates.
You have declining fertility rates. You have declining economic mobility rates. You have declining geographic mobility. You have costs rising on the things that people, you know, their big purchases – cars, houses, education, healthcare – you've got resentment politics, grievance politics, nativism, rising fascism.
So what I'm curious about. What are some potential policy fixes to some of these problems? First and foremost, how do we get young, native-born American men into something productive with their days? What are the unnecessary government barriers to getting them activated?
Shoshana: A lot of this resonates with my work. I've started to read about the subject, like I wanna say, and I might be totally wrong, but I think it was Spain, where I read about that there are a lot of guys who just play video games all day and live with their parents. But it's almost become a cultural thing. That's like a class of men there.
I know that there's different, but similar, kinds of trends in different parts of Europe and Japan and stuff like that. So I've read about it. I wanna say it was a Z's book and like some other books too. I enjoy learning about this stuff. So it's funny you mentioning it, cause it crosses my mind from time to time.
But yeah, so like you're talking about with geographic mobility, it's a huge indicator of economic mobility. If you can move somewhere to get a better job, that's like a really big deal. And occupational licensing decreases that. There's fixes.
Let's assume that all licensing is totally okay. No matter what, even if that's the case, you still want licenses to be able to move. So in 2019 Governor Ducey made Arizona the first state to have universal licensing recognition. It's not perfect. There's improvements that can be made. But basically if you move to Arizona, your license can transfer.
There's a process. And it's been working really well. And that's how it should work. If you go somewhere new, your license should transfer. So I think that's one really big thing that we need more of. Almost 20 states have some variation of it. Some states have a residency requirement, which I don't think should exist.
It kind of varies, but you wanna increase that mobility. And if someone has a license in one place, it should be fine in another. It's funny. You'll always hear these lobbies say, oh, well, electricians from their state are not like electricians in ours or doctors in their states are, and it's nonsense.
It's all nonsense. I'm also very big on it because it allows people to work in multiple states at a time, a little bit better than recognition in certain cases. Although compacts can also encourage people to increase licensing standards, not because of safety, but because, ‘Will they do it like this? We wanna be on par.’ That's something to be cautious of. Generally, if a license exists, you want it to be mobile. I think that's something that's really good and can help with that mobility.
Also just barriers to entry. All licenses, whether or not they're good and make sense, are barriers to entry. You wanna reduce them as much as is reasonably possible and will protect people. Like I'm chill with doctors licenses, but I also think immigrants who are doctors and move shouldn’t have a shot at being doctors. In so many cases, they have to start their training over from zero, repeat residencies, whether or not their training's up to par with ours. We just don't have the systems for transferring them in. So you wanna reduce all barriers as much as it makes sense. Expand scope of practice, allow pharmacists to give more shots, stuff like that.
And then figure out what makes sense. Like, cosmetologists will scream til the end of the time that you need to have a license to protect people against disease. Well, salons spread infection at crazy rates. Every study out there just shows it's like very, very high rates of infection.
Maybe health inspections are a better barrier. So you're not just saying, ‘Here's your license,’ but ‘Hey, let's check in. Let's make sure this is all safe.’ Just like with food safety, same deal. Sometimes lower barriers are more effective. So reducing barriers as much as is reasonably possible and also making sure you're not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, which is something in my personal life I'm really bad about. I'm such a perfectionist, but that can be bad.
There's just great data, I think it's from the Department of Labor, but the Merc Institute did a great piece about it. Basically, it might make sense to license electricians. That's something that I think could be reasonable. But the data show that where electricians are licensed, there's lower supply. People try their hand at it themselves, which is way worse than a guy who's like, learned about electricity and all that kind of stuff and how to work with it.
So there's unintended consequences. I think you have to study this stuff, compare states with and without licenses, and see what works best and try to reduce barriers as much as reasonably possible.
Also, there's college education stuff. I don't work on this, but I have a friend who does, who does great work here. The ROI of college is really bad. For a lot of degrees at a lot of universities, you have negative lifetime ROI. That's horrible. We shouldn't be forcing people into these programs or saying, oh, you need a degree to do something that functionally doesn't really require a degree.
Cathy: I completely agree with everything that you're saying. My big question is, how much is it really gonna matter? And so I wanna ask you that, but then I'm gonna ask you something more specific first. We also have a bunch of NEET men and a huge dearth of construction labor and also trade labor. I want you to shed any insight you might have on why this mismatch exists, what barriers there are to getting these NEET men into these trade and construction jobs.
Shoshana: Oh yeah. I mean, those are the licensed professions. It's not unusual that you don't just need to be licensed in one type of manual labor, but several types in order to perform a job. And, you know, I'm not against it in all cases. But maybe you just need one person licensed to oversee the rest. Or maybe you need less training. You just wanna make sure that the training is being effective and that that's solving the problem. And if it's not solving the problem, or if there's an easier way to get from point A to B, we should be looking into that. Also a lot of times I see construction jobs justified by like, ‘Oh, well, what if they skip out of town with your money after you've paid them?’ But there's a lower barrier. You don't need training, not to skip out of town with someone's money. You need mandatory registration and just say, ‘Hey, all his tax information is here. All her information is here. So if let's say she leaves town with your money, we can find her. You have all this information.’ There's all different barriers that are a lot lower. So yeah, those are professions that are highly licensed and it's different barriers in college and degrees and stuff, but they're still barriers and it still makes sense to lower them as much as possible. Increase apprenticeship so people can learn on the job, and not have all this opportunity cost time where they're not making money or they're not learning the real trade.
Cathy: Totally, totally. Poor planning on my part, but my computer's about to run outta battery. So any last thoughts on the topic at hand and then where can people find more of your brilliant thoughts?
Shoshana: Oh, you're so sweet. No, thank you so much for having me. https://twitter.com/senatorshoshana is where I post everything I'm thinking ever, from mountains to sloths to hiking. And I really like the perspective you're looking at it from. I think it's something that people don't often tie together, the education requirements and where young men are at in life.
I think it's something that we're not really thinking about all the time in the occupational licensing or reform world. But I'm glad that you're thinking about it.
Cathy: Same. Yeah, I really appreciate your work. And it was so nice to finally speak to you after following you from afar for such a long time. I highly recommend following Senator on Twitter. She's a great follow. And thank you so much for your time. I'd love to have you on again.
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