Nonrival

Expert analysis from think tanks and academia, on public policy, economics, and technology.
Human experts. AI summaries.

Credit Card Delinquencies Aren't as Bad as They Look — a Reporting Quirk Is Skewing the Numbers

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• Headlines warning of Great Recession-level credit card delinquencies are misleading: the scary-looking rise in the "stock" delinquency rate is driven by charged-off debts that lenders are now reporting to credit bureaus for twice as long as they did a decade ago, not by a surge in new missed payments.
• When you strip out those stale charged-off balances, all three major measures of delinquency tell the same story: the pace of new credit card delinquencies has been essentially flat since early 2024.
• The distinction matters — flow delinquency rates (new missed payments) are the better gauge of how households are doing right now, and by that measure consumers are stressed but stable.

Donor Money Used to Push Parties Toward the Center — But That Moderating Force Has Weakened Dramatically

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• New research finds that when a party nominates an ideologically extreme candidate, it historically raised less money in the general election — a financial penalty that nudged parties toward moderation.
• That penalty has shrunk by half over the past two decades, and by 2022, individual donors no longer punished extremists at all; only corporate PACs still do.
• The reason: corporations give to likely winners, and as extremists started winning more often, corporate money followed — eroding the very mechanism that once kept candidates closer to the center.

Only 9% of California's Regulated Data Brokers Are Actually Following the State's Privacy Law

stanford_hai

• A Stanford study found that just 9% of the 522 registered data brokers in California are fully complying with the state's 2023 Delete Act, which requires them to report how they handle consumer data-deletion and correction requests.
• Nearly half submitted no compliance metrics at all, and 64% used confusing website designs or excessive verification steps — so-called "dark patterns" — to discourage consumers from exercising their privacy rights.
• Researchers blame weak enforcement, self-reporting requirements, and an under-resourced regulatory agency; a new state platform launched in August 2025 lets Californians delete their data from all brokers at once, but its impact depends on public awareness.

In the News

The Supreme Court's Trans Sports Ruling May Have Quietly Weakened Sex Discrimination Protections for Everyone

scotusblog

• The Supreme Court upheld West Virginia's ban on transgender girls in girls' sports, but legal scholars are alarmed by how it did so: by applying a watered-down version of the constitutional test normally used to scrutinize sex discrimination.
• The majority dropped longstanding language requiring an "exceedingly persuasive justification" for sex-based government action, allowed generalizations instead of individualized assessments, and deferred to the legislature in ways more typical of a much weaker legal standard.
• The concern is that these departures from precedent could erode constitutional protections against sex discrimination well beyond transgender sports — affecting women and men in cases that have nothing to do with gender identity.

Analysis

Corporate Leaders Have Drifted Left, But Their Political Donations Still Flow Right

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• A study of nearly 100,000 U.S. corporate directors and executives finds their individual political leanings have shifted meaningfully leftward since 2001, driven mostly by generational turnover rather than people changing their minds.
• But when you follow the money, political donations from corporate elites remain skewed to the right — and got even more so around 2012 — meaning the ideological shift hasn't translated into changed political spending.
• The realignment varies widely by industry and role: energy remains conservative, tech has moved sharply left, and most CEOs are still conservative even as senior managers have become majority-liberal.

Also Worth a Look

• Mergers Don't Hurt Workers Who Keep Their Jobs — But They're Brutal for Those Who Don't (harvard_corpgov)
• The Numbers Economists Use to Measure AI's Impact on Jobs Are More Guesswork Than Data (equitable_growth)
• AI does junior employees' work better than they can — but that work was how they learned to think (yale_som)
• Trump Is Testing the Same Constitutional Limit on Birthright Citizenship the Supreme Court Just Struck Down (scotusblog)
• Police Can Now Track Who You Spend Time With by Pairing License Plate Readers With Phone Signal Detectors (the_conversation)
• More Than a Third of American Workers Have Jobs Designed to Be Disposable (the_conversation)
• Trump's New Vaccine Order Would Actually Put the U.S. Out of Step With the Peer Countries It Claims to Follow (kff)