Annie Lowrey’s new book, The Time Tax, argues that the most regressive levy in American life is the hours each of us must spend on hold, in waiting rooms, and filling out forms a competent state would have pre-filled — roughly fifty a year on average, and far more if you’re poor. Tyler spends much of this conversation pressing the opposite case, asking whether that bureaucracy is quietly serving a useful purpose by rationing knee surgeries that don’t work, deterring fraud, or screening for immigrants with gumption.
So Tyler and Annie hash it out over an hour, covering why TANF and other welfare programs are the worst offenders, the political economy of submerged benefits like the child tax credit, whether the postal service should be zeroed out over ten years the way Denmark did, whether the government should be nudging people out of rural areas, lessons from the COVID unemployment fraud, areas where the time tax is flat instead of regressive, which private sector time taxes are most onerous, whether AI agents will pay these taxes for us within five years, the logic of easy benefits plus randomized harsh audits, the case for less federalism, whether voting should be easier or harder, how the UBI studies changed her priors, where you can find the best moss in the world, her favorite example of Brutalist architecture, tattoos as permanent ephemera, Christianity’s role in liberalism and the post-Christian right, how reporting beats tourism, the time tax of friendship, what she’ll learn next, and more.
Watch the full conversation
Recorded September 1st, 2026.
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I’m very happy to be chatting with Annie Lowrey. She has a new book out, new and excellent book called The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It. The government does not just waste your money. Annie is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She has worked in the past and written for New York Times, Slate.com, and many other outlets. She also has an earlier book, Give People Money, on universal basic income. Annie, welcome.
ANNIE LOWREY: Thank you.
COWEN: Could you start by giving us a single clear example of your main thesis about The Time Tax?
LOWREY: Absolutely. In most of our peer countries, so wealthy countries, democratic countries with decent public administration, you do not have to do your own taxes. In Japan, if you earn a salary, you do not have to do anything. You do not have to engage in the tax process at all. In many other countries, they pre-fill your tax forms, send them to you. You can make a correction if desired or if necessary. The tax authority does much of the work for you. We could do this. Nine in 10 American households take the standard deduction and have fairly simple tax situations. We do not do this. The IRS is legally not allowed to do it.
COWEN: If you had to pick a part of government, taxes aside, where in general these obstacles and time taxes are the worst, what else would you name?
LOWREY: The single worst program in my mind is TANF, which is cash welfare and a lot of other things. This is the program that hypothetically is supposed to address child poverty. It does not change the child poverty rate. It is enormously onerous and punitive to comply with. It’s a terrible waste of the $16.5 billion a year associated with it. Just in general, I would say safety net programs are not great. Programs that are mostly used by higher-income Americans are much, much, much better. The safety net, and specifically welfare, is the worst.
COWEN: As you know, under Biden, for a brief while, we had a child tax credit. It seemed to me from a distance pretty clean and simple. Yet it was not greatly loved. What is your read of the political economy of that?
LOWREY: I think that there is a tension with all submerged benefits. They work much better. They’re easier for the government to administer. They have higher participation or take-up rates because most people do file a tax return. It’s fairly unusual not to. Even very, very low income, because below a certain level, you’re not actually required to file federal taxes. That’s pretty uncommon.
They work better. The problem with them is, and I look to Suzanne Mettler’s work on this, is that people don’t know that they are receiving benefits. These programs are not visible. They’re not understood by the recipients. You could look at the CTC. I remember I went reporting about it. People had no idea what it was even when they were getting the money. I think that there’s ways to get around that. You could send checks. The IRS could send checks with the program name on it instead of direct deposit. That’s a little bit less elegant too.
COWEN: If you had to pick an area of government that works pretty well, US government, and does not have such a big time tax overall, what would you point to as us getting it right?
LOWREY: The postal service and Social Security’s retirement programs. Those are both pretty good. Social Security also has other programs, SSI, which is mostly used by very, very low-income seniors with disabilities or who are blind. Disability insurance is run by the Social Security Administration. The retirement program, it’s less than 1 percent overhead. It’s great. It does all the work for you.
COWEN: Isn’t our whole postal service a time tax in the aggregate? Denmark, just this year, abolished its postal service. They don’t have any. Now, I understand we’re not in a position to do exactly the same, but shouldn’t we be moving away from postal service, basically zeroing it out over the next 10 years?
LOWREY: Did they make it so that it’s all digital? Did they digitize things?
COWEN: Well, I don’t know who the “they” is. Direct mail there has gone away.
LOWREY: Oh, yes, that’s interesting. I don’t know. I think in a high inequality country such as ours, where you still have a lot of people who don’t have smartphones and don’t have computers, that’s why I would be very concerned about the postal service going away.
COWEN: That’s why we need 10 years. You want to tax people, tax in the broad sense of the term, living in rural areas, if only because it’s much harder to have government help them, right?
LOWREY: Yes.
COWEN: If rural areas don’t get mail anymore, maybe that’s a good thing.
LOWREY: I don’t think that that’s a good thing for the people in the rural areas, though. There’s always going to be people in rural areas. As a general point, do you want the government to be encouraging people to not live in rural areas?
COWEN: Absolutely, that’s me. Welcome to the show.
LOWREY: That’s feels very nanny state-ish of you, Tyler.
COWEN: I don’t want to subsidize rural areas, and we do it in so many ways, including with our farm programs.
LOWREY: We do. We really, really absolutely do.
COWEN: It gets harder to help people with government. There’s a lot more market power in rural areas, like how many supermarkets are there, how many hospitals, probably just one, if that. Let’s get everyone into the suburbs, or heaven forbid, the cities.
LOWREY: I can’t imagine a less popular policy than that.
COWEN: Absolutely.
LOWREY: All of our policies are aimed at allowing people to be in place. We’re very stuck as people. We don’t move in the way that we used to. You can never suggest that we should just depopulate places. If you’re running for president, Tyler, I don’t think you’re going to win.
COWEN: Now let’s think about our COVID experience. In a number of ways, we relaxed controls on benefits.
LOWREY: We did.
COWEN: It became much easier to get unemployment insurance. Interviews were just hard to pull off flat out, right?
LOWREY: Yes.
COWEN: It seems that fraud went up a lot. In net terms, maybe we need the time taxes and the other nonsense just to prevent what happens when we take them away. We tried that in 2020, 2021, it didn’t go that well.
LOWREY: I do not think that time taxes, administrative burdens, having more of them, would have prevented the fraud at all. This was, in part, because we didn’t have these programs set up. There were two things that they were taking advantage of. A lot of it was criminal groups, criminal actors. One was the aid to small businesses. They were setting up sham small businesses and getting checks. That was legitimately a really big problem.
Again, the book is about people, so I would separate that. I didn’t get into business regulation. This is entirely about individual citizens. Then in UI, this was really bad. This was a catastrophe. The problem is, even going into the pandemic, every single recession that we have, we have this conversation about how stupid it is that we have these ancient infrastructures, literally, programs running on COBOL, and that states don’t have the right incentive to upgrade service delivery and their digital systems.
If you’re a governor and you have a low unemployment rate, what governor is going to devote a huge amount of money to upgrading a state UI system? Some states have gotten better systems since, but broadly, no. They’re just as bad. Then the next time the next recession comes, we’ll have the exact same conversation over again. I think that the government actually having more state capacity and more agile digital systems would help with fraud prevention. I do not think that putting more work on individuals is going to reduce the amount of fraud.
COWEN: Let me give you another example: Medicare. It’s a big chunk of the federal budget, right?
LOWREY: Huge, yes.
COWEN: It seems to me they cover too many medical procedures. You’re going to have knee surgery. You can just get it covered. Wouldn’t it be better if you had to go through a big time tax to get your knee surgery covered than just indiscriminately having Medicare pick up the bill?
LOWREY: No.
COWEN: Why not?
LOWREY: There are many other ways to reduce medical spending, and I really do think that we should look at those ways. There’s no more popular policy proposal out there for both Democrats and Republicans than having the government do price controls in more pharmaceuticals. That would really, really help with medical spending. I do not think making it onerous to get your knee repaired is a good use of anybody’s time. It is not a way to ration medical care. It’s not fair. It shouldn’t be that if you are going to get your knee repaired, it’s because you have Medicare and are good at paperwork. It’s not a nice way to ration.
COWEN: Even if we want to do these other policies to lower costs, there’s way too many knee surgeries. A lot of them don’t work. There’s also a problem with back surgeries. Shouldn’t we just be tougher and force people to go through more hoops? I know it’s not nice, but most ways of saving money are not nice. If it’s not an effective medical procedure, let’s be much tougher. Maybe not cover it at all. Just give people some cash.
LOWREY: Why not lower the payment rate?
COWEN: Absolutely. Make it like Medicaid.
LOWREY: Make it so that it’s not profitable for doctors to perform in that case. There’s got to be other ways to do it. You could tax things that you can produce more of. More work, more income, more natural resources. You can’t give people more time. I think it should be a really serious thing to take it away from them. I just think that there’s a lot of policy options to accomplish the goal that you’re describing, and I see the addition of paperwork as being a particularly illegitimate way to go about it.
COWEN: Let’s consider another example. Medicaid fraud in Minnesota over Somali autism claims. I’m not sure it’s a lot of money. I know it’s debated. I looked into it. It’s probably not a lot of money, but it became a big headline, and people claim it’s a lot of money. They feel outraged. There’s an immigration issue, maybe there’s a race issue, there’s an autism issue. The result is that it turns into a big thing, and it makes policy much worse, it makes discourse much worse, but there was clearly some fraud. Would we not have been better off with more procedures to limit Somali autism claim fraud through Medicaid just to protect the rest of the integrity of the systems? Now it seems like the whole system is fraudulent.
LOWREY: I think that public confidence in programs is very, very important. I think that reducing fraud is part of that. I think if we had simpler systems that the government was better at administering, we would have less fraud and people would feel more supportive of the government. I also think that we have a huge problem with trust because the government is so ineffective and treats the time of citizens as valueless. I think that we’re lacking confidence in public systems for that reason also, and politicians don’t always take that seriously.
I saw this quite vividly in San Francisco where I lived for many years, that the state was so incompetent at doing anything, the San Francisco government—a lot of this came up in terms of building and housing policy, that there was just like a pox on everybody’s house attitude. I think that that’s a problem, too.
I do note that in Medicare and Medicaid, the problem with fraud is almost all on the provider side. It’s nursing homes that are defrauding the government. It’s doctors’ offices, it’s hospital systems that are defrauding the government. Individual fraud can only be so bad. There’s only so much money that you’re going to get from the government for claims or whatever else it is. To do big fraud, you have to be doing a lot of processing. I would actually love to reduce overhead in other programs so that we can focus on the criminal groups and organizations and legitimate providers that are engaging in fraudulent activity.
COWEN: Voters often seem more outraged by individual fraud, even though it costs less. There were actual Somalians who showed up and said, “My kid has autism,” when the kid probably didn’t have autism. Then people end up turning against immigration, or immigration of Somalians.
LOWREY: Sure.
COWEN: For that reason, don’t we need to really be pretty strict with the individuals because that’s what bugs voters?
LOWREY: I think that reducing incidents of fraud is a good and important thing to do. I’m not pro-fraud. I wouldn’t make a pro-fraud argument. However, I think that there are ways to do it that don’t require inconveniencing everyone and the 99.9 percent of people who are not engaging in fraud. I do think that fraud has also been a way of making these programs seem illegitimate so that voters will tolerate cutting them even if voters might want us to have more progressivity or the current level of progressivity in the current system.
COWEN: Maybe this is impossible to do, but in the aggregate, if you had to estimate, how much time does the time tax cost us, say per person, how many minutes or hours in a day, what’s your best estimate?
LOWREY: The best estimate I have come up with comes from the American Time Use Survey. The problem with the American Time Use Survey when it comes to measuring what people are doing is that it’s very ineffective at measuring time use when you are doing many things at once. If you are waiting on hold on the telephone while you’re cooking dinner, you’re only doing one thing. It might say that you’re cooking or you’re taking care of your kids. The other thing is, the time tax is in all kinds of little different categories, and so it’s not agglomerated. If you’re looking at what I think of as roughly as bureaucratic time total spent, it’s 50 hours per person per year.
COWEN: It’s close to an hour a week?
LOWREY: Yes, something like that. Some people it’s way more, some people it’s way less. There’s a lot of inequality in it.
COWEN: I would think it’s higher than that, but obviously you’ve studied this.
LOWREY: Again, I don’t think that ATUS is picking up a lot of data. The other issue is that OIRA does not measure this functionally at all.
COWEN: What best predicts the inequality? Who are the groups that pay the highest time taxes?
LOWREY: People with involvement with the criminal justice system, immigrants, and poor people.
COWEN: Of the wealthy, which are the wealthy who pay the highest time taxes? They may pay it indirectly. Their subordinates have to do things, but they have to pay the subordinates more, right?
LOWREY: Yes. They vault over them. I think a lot of it is subordination. It’s really interesting to see the places where the wealthy have to use the same services or have to pay the same time taxes as lower income people. The one that I think bizarrely has no care for whether you’re wealthy or poor is something like permitting to renovate your house. Even very, very wealthy people in San Francisco will wait 500 days for a permit, going through many rounds of public comment.
Low-income San Franciscans are not renovating their homes, they’re very unlikely to own them, and probably don’t have the money for renovation. That’s one where I think something like taxes, high-income people obviously are much, much, much, much, much more likely to itemize, so their tax process is going to be much longer, but they’re also much more likely to use a high-priced accountant, something like that.
COWEN: They’re still paying the tax. They have to pay for the accountant.
LOWREY: Yes, they’re paying the accountant.
COWEN: Now, you mentioned something like an hour a week, say it’s somewhat more than that, but how much of that time do you think people really don’t mind that much?
LOWREY: Sort of in the same way that people enjoy errands.
COWEN: Yes. I go shopping when I could just order from Amazon. And I enjoy the shopping—I’m not sure I enjoy it; but I don’t stop doing it either.
LOWREY: I don’t know anybody who likes this stuff. I know a handful of people, I should say, who like this stuff. I think that some people like doing their own taxes. I’m sure you know people who act as a VITA, like a volunteer tax preparer, but a lot of this is just quite miserable and pointless. I don’t think that there are necessarily people who find it rewarding. There’s always somebody, but I don’t know.
COWEN: Putting aside the extreme cases like, oh, you’re sent to jail, or, oh, you’re kicked out of the country, but of tasks that you do and finish and complete, which is psychologically the most tortuous in your view? Like, I hate filling out visa applications, because I always have these photos, and I have to shrink them down to a smaller JPEG size and then upload it to a website, and I’m terrible at that.
LOWREY: Do you mean for me personally?
COWEN: For you and then just overall.
LOWREY: For me personally, the great irony is that I am terrible at all of these bureaucratic things, and I am married to a person who has a very different brain and is very on top of them and manages basically all of the personal administration, the household administration. I didn’t go to the dentist for 20 years, not because I have something against dentistry, but just because it wasn’t front of mind.
I’m currently having an issue where when I moved from California to New York, I didn’t get a New York driver’s license, but now I’ve lost my California license, and it appears to be that the only way to get a driver’s license and thus to be able to rent a rental car is for me to go get a learner’s permit from the state of New York, and I have to go to driving school. I have to take the test, the written and the test, but I don’t have a car, so I’m going to have to borrow a car to take the driving test because I can’t rent one. Anyway. All of them. I am bad at absolutely all of them.
Also, I have a rare degenerative disease which requires a lot of documentation and managing of medical stuff. I had to trigger my short-term disability policy. That took forever. I needed The Atlantic to give me a second computer, which they wanted to do, so I simply had to get a letter from a doctor. It took forever. I hate all of this. This is the stuff that I personally struggle with the most.
In terms of the burdens that the government is putting on other people, the psychologically torturous stuff is really, really bad. On many assistance applications, there are detailed questions about your height and your weight, which can be painful for some people. Questions about the paternity of your children, where your children were conceived, what day they were conceived. That’s the stuff that I think it’s the government saying that it doesn’t care about you. That it wants it to be painful. It’s really, really invasive and really upsetting. Child support, as a general point, I agree with it in concept, but as actually administered can be really painful for people to deal with.
COWEN: Let’s say we’re comparing with the private sector. Now, say, medicine, it’s half public-funded, give or take. That’s a joint public-private sector.
LOWREY: I consider it public, just given how heavily regulated it is and how big the government is. I have private insurance, but the government is setting the rules there.
COWEN: Something that is more or less pure private sector, where is the worst time tax both for you, and you think in the aggregate? Amazon is a tiny time tax. You fill it out, you click, the package comes. It’s great. Where is it bad?
LOWREY: I think that there’s nothing like the health system in terms of just the bureaucratic morass. I think as a general point, businesses have every incentive to reduce time taxes for people who are consuming things and to increase them as much as they are legally allowed to and as much as is practical for people who are trying to stop spending, which I think you can see. A lot of businesses don’t do it because it’s bad for business for people to hate your business. They’re cross-pressured in that way. I think that there’s nothing like healthcare and associated, like getting your parents into a skilled nursing facility type thing—it’s absolutely miserable.
COWEN: This is a small thing, but it bugs me all the time. I’m on a purely private sector website. I can’t blame the government at all, and it turns out I already have an account at the website. I try to register as a guest, and it’s never that simple.
LOWREY: No.
COWEN: Why does this go wrong? Why is this not fixed in a world with AI agents?
LOWREY: I’m convinced that white-collar technology, labor-saving stuff, I’m convinced it’s all Jevons paradoxical. I think that basically anything that is designed like email to make your life easier will at some point make it worse. We’ve made it so that it just multiplies the number of tasks. The things that companies can do to you multiplies. I do not want to use passkeys. It feels like private companies are just hell-bent on—I don’t want to know what a passkey is—getting you to use them. It’s absolutely nutty. The password managers, but then you have to manage the manager. It’s all a lot.
COWEN: If I travel to Harvard and maybe I bought a plane ticket for $400 and I can get reimbursement, that is hell. That’s one of the worst private sector experiences I have is learning a new software system to be reimbursed for a small sum of money and having to go through a whole rigmarole.
LOWREY: Yes, exactly. There’s some amount that you just won’t do it because you value your own time and your blood pressure, right? It’s absolutely annoying. There were these rules that used to make airlines reimburse you if they bounced you off a plane. That’s gone. Anything having to do with airlines, and they’re like, “We’ve severely inconvenienced you, so we’ve given you some miles,” or some credit or something. This is the first book: Give People Money. Give them cash. They like that.
COWEN: Now, government, virtually by definition, operates at scale, unless it’s, say, a small town. How long will it be before AI agents are just built to do almost all of this for us? You just say to your agent, “Hey, fill out these benefits form,” and then you go away, you go to sleep and it’s done? Won’t that happen within five years?
LOWREY: I imagine so. The questions that I have are, one, are the lower-income people, who are the users of the most burdensome programs, do they know about those agents? Do they feel comfortable using them? I don’t know.
COWEN: Not now—
LOWREY: Not now.
COWEN: —but, say, within five years—
LOWREY: Yes, definitely.
COWEN: —if it’s just a pure gain.
LOWREY: The second thing is that a lot of it is not really paperwork. It’s mandatory interviews, it’s urine screens, it’s collecting data that might be hard to collect, and answering questions that an AI agent might not be able to answer for you. For instance, unlike other programs, jobless benefits are given to the individual. It’s state and individual.
SNAP benefits depend on your household. You, in some cases, will have to say how you split up the cost of staples with the people in your house. It’s really hard because the government doesn’t have a stable definition of what a household is, and it could be very hard to say who is in your household and how you’re splitting things up. I think that AI will help with a lot of this. I was skeptical, but the best civic technologist I know thinks that it’ll help a lot—and he’s a guy who’s been in the muck of this for a really long time, and knows the technology part of it—he’s convinced that AI will help. I don’t know.
COWEN: The AI can interview you and say, “Well, please tell me these things. I’m going to need it to answer the questions for your SNAP benefit.” You intermediate through the AI, which is nicer, friendlier, easier to deal with, and then it deals with the nasty person in the government.
LOWREY: Yes, and very often, the government will ask you a question in a way that some lawyer wrote in some very legalistic fashion. I think the AI is unusually good at saying, “Oh, this is what they’re actually asking, and this is what the general advice is for how to do that.”
COWEN: Now, very big picture question. Fertility rates are low in the US, lower elsewhere. They’re not going to pop up anytime very soon. The future of this country, it really depends on the quality of immigrants we attract. If we have a welfare system where it’s really hard to get benefits, don’t we, in fact, attract a higher quality of immigrant, more ambitious people and more self-sustaining, than if benefits are just easy to get? Isn’t the significance of that really quite large in a future where native fertility is so low?
LOWREY: Why do you think it is that if we have such a clunky system now we’ve managed to attract such a good quality of immigrants thus far?
COWEN: Because people who want to come just to get the benefits might say, “Oh, in Europe, they’ll just hand me the money, give me the free apartment, put me up in the hotel.”
LOWREY: I see what you mean.
COWEN: You come to the US, it’s a huge pain. Maybe there’s a wisdom in that.
LOWREY: Yes, and you can come. My understanding was that the welfare magnet hypothesis didn’t pan out. It makes some sense, but I think that the issue is, can you actually get here and come here is a big problem. Then you’re barred from accessing the safety net as an immigrant for long periods of it.
COWEN: Part. Much of it, yes. Not all of it.
LOWREY: Yes, not all of it. Your children, especially if they’re born here, they have access, so there’s that. In general, I think the policies work well when they have a direct goal rather than relying on indirect mechanisms like these. If we want to attract more and better immigrants, why don’t we just create policies that will get them to come here. Like, if you get your PhD here, you automatically get a Green Card, that kind of thing. I think that that would lead a lot of immigrants to come back.
COWEN: The current system, it selects for people having stamina, conscientiousness, focus, drive, willing to put up with indignities, and smart enough to get through the systems that may not be in their language. You could argue what we have is those policies. I know plenty of lazy PhDs. Most PhDs are lazy, I would say.
LOWREY: Really?
COWEN: I don’t want that to be the standard. Of course, they are. It’s become negative selection, relative to IQ.
LOWREY: Huh. You’re looking for entrepreneurial people with a lot of get-up-and-go, people who can make it through the maze that we have set up.
COWEN: More O-1s, and then somewhat reform H-1B, and to have more of them, and none of these crazy $100,000 fees.
LOWREY: If you’re thinking that the H-1B and the O-1 is working well, why not just make those much, much, much bigger programs?
COWEN: Oh, of course, but keep the benefits tough and stingy, or, in some cases, impossible, which is not a time tax. If you know you can’t get it, you don’t bother to apply, but it’s like a time tax in the sense that it keeps you away from the benefit.
LOWREY: Right. I just don’t think that you should be creating chaos and taking people’s time by making the actual administrative part of it difficult. I think there’s always many other ways to get the policy outcome that you are searching for than larding the government up. It means that the government is wasting more money. Your overhead cost is going to be higher. I know that immigration is self-financing because we are applying these fees, but nevertheless, I just think that there’s better ways to go about it.
COWEN: Here’s a question from a reader, which I’m paraphrasing: “Do you favor much easier access to benefits, but randomized harsh, credible punishments for offenders? So you audit one in every 100, every 1,000 applications. If the person did something wrong, you come down on them really hard. The time tax mostly vanishes, but there’s still this somewhat arbitrary punishment meted out to some of the people who are frauds.”
LOWREY: I think you have to separate out the issue of improper payments from purposeful fraud. Improper payments are a function of the complexity of this system. If the system were easier and the rules were more straightforward, and you weren’t asking people who don’t own a computer for their monthly gross income and also their net income over the past six months, and that’s really hard to do, and a million other little questions, the improper payment rate would go down if the government were doing more work and the rules were simpler. You would also have lower bureaucratic costs. Yes, I absolutely support making the rules much simpler.
And maybe that means that you have to adjust the benefit threshold. Meaning that you get it, and then auditing on the back end. I don’t know that I think that you have to have obscenely harsh punishment, though. Why do you need the harsh punishment as opposed to the auditing and the threat of that and the threat of civil penalties?
COWEN: If you only audit one in 5,000, people will think, “Oh, I can get away with it.” The punishment needs to really be harsh to scare them off.
LOWREY: Yes. I think you could just do more reasonable audits. I don’t necessarily think that you need to have extremely harsh punishments for this kind of thing. Also, for fraud, intent is important, to show that they intended; they knew that they didn’t have access to the benefit, they knew that they put the wrong paperwork in there. As a general point, I think that the benefit fraud rate is quite low. I’m not concerned that we’re losing too much money to fraud.
COWEN: Now, from 1990 to 2014, the number of people on disability insurance increased by about four times. Even though jobs got safer, the number of people killed by their job went down steadily. Does that not mean that disability insurance should just be much tougher to get? More bureaucracy, more standards, more process, more whatever.
LOWREY: Yes. I think that there were some reasons that more Americans became disabled. Population aging is one, the general rise of chronic health conditions related to obesity is another. And so I think that we should be somewhat more neutral in saying, “Is it people defrauding the system just because that number has gone up so much?” I don’t think so. I don’t think so.
Disability is extraordinarily onerous to apply for and has very, very stringent fraud checks already. In 5 percent of applications, the applicant submits more than 1,000 pages of medical paperwork. It’s a lot. 11,000 Americans die waiting on a disability determination each year. Yes, the caseload has gone up, but recently it’s been going down, so I don’t think that we’re worrying that it’s just going up and up and up and up and up and up.
COWEN: Yes, it’s gone down a lot since 2014.
LOWREY: Gone down a lot, right?
COWEN: The job market got better, is part of it.
LOWREY: I worry that we are giving benefits to people who are not disabled and do not need them. I also worry that we are denying benefits to people who actually do, so I don’t know that I see a strong case for making disability much more burdensome as opposed to looking for other ways to help the system. Disability, I do think that it’s a program that is extremely important. It is the only long-term help for people who are impaired in their ability to work, but it’s an extremely burdensome program for the government to manage, so I don’t know that I see the case for adding paperwork to it at this juncture.
COWEN: If I look at governments where processes seem pretty straightforward, they very often seem to have smaller populations, say, below 20 million. Now, I’m not sure what is causing what here, but what do you think is the exact reason why a small population is correlated with better processes? Is it less federalism? Is it somehow the smaller number of people; they feel more cooperative, or is it something else? Do you have a view on that?
LOWREY: Yes, I think it’s, in some cases, federalism. I think it’s homogeneity. Finland, it’s basically mostly ethnically Finnish people. The United States is quite unusual in our ethnic and racial diversity. I think when you’re thinking about small nations, they tend to be fairly racially, ethnically homogeneous. It feels like there’s higher social trust. Functionally, everybody is related to one another. That’s really not true in the United States.
COWEN: Should the US have less federalism?
LOWREY: Yes.
COWEN: I’m not saying it’s practical in the sense of getting support, but some way you could bring that about?
LOWREY: Absolutely.
COWEN: What would it be?
LOWREY: I think that there is the case for local control of certain things; some things: policing, sewers. Makes sense, right? We need to do that locally. I think that for the administration of mass programs, if it is legally possible to have the federal government do it, the federal government should be doing it. For one, people move from state to state and locality to locality constantly. It makes sense if you have a jobless insurance program or similar to administer it. There’s just the simple multiplicity effect.
We have more than 100 TANF programs. We have 56 Medicaid programs. In terms of overhead, it just makes sense to have one. The federal government doesn’t have a balanced budget rule. They, every year now, spend more than they take in tax revenue, and I think that generally, federal programs are better managed. Not always, but generally, yes.
COWEN: Should Brooklyn be a separate city from the rest of New York?
LOWREY: No, but I don’t know about Staten Island.
COWEN: It’s big, right? I was just going to ask about Staten Island. New Jersey is clamoring for it, right?
LOWREY: I think so. I guess that the people of Staten Island should self-determine.
COWEN: What do you think they would do?
LOWREY: I don’t know. I don’t know. Actually, I need to go over there and do some surveying and knocking on doors.
COWEN: I haven’t been there in 20 years. Is there Sri Lankan food? Is that the reason to go?
LOWREY: Yes, Sri Lankan food. I took the ferry. The ferry costs $0. You go there and back, and it’s a perfect happy hour, so I did that recently. The time I was there, before that, I’ve not spent a lot of time on Staten Island. I was reporting there a couple of years ago, but look, I don’t have strong views on Staten Island. I think it’s great. I also feel like I haven’t been in New York for long enough; I’m not a New Yorker; I can’t set policy for New York. Brooklyn feels like it should be part of New York to me, now living in Brooklyn.
COWEN: There’s a theme recurring through your book in a number of different places that it’s too hard to vote.
LOWREY: Yes.
COWEN: Now, I’m of the view that it should not be that easy to vote, at least in the United States. What exactly is the gain we get from having more people vote? Given that, for instance, people didn’t even know what the child tax credit was, even if they were receiving it. Don’t we just get better outcomes if, say, only half the people vote, which of course will skew toward the more educated?
LOWREY: I don’t think so.
COWEN: Why not?
LOWREY: I think that democracy is important for reasons of principle that are more important than policies.
COWEN: I’m all for democracy, right? There’s no country where you can vote by just leaning back on your sofa and screaming out whom you favor. There’s some cost. You can set the cost where you want. Americans today seem fine with the costs being higher than in many places. You make the costs lower, you get inferior outcomes, including on the issues you care about.
LOWREY: I don’t know that I think that that’s true. Do we know that?
COWEN: Maybe “no” is too strong a word, but we know that more educated people make better voting choices than less educated people on average.
LOWREY: I think my view is only principled. I don’t care about outcomes. I think if you’re a democracy, people should be able to vote.
COWEN: Oh, sure, they should be able to, but how easily?
LOWREY: As easily as possible.
COWEN: You would, even in countries with high voter participation rates, subsidize voting, give everyone a free ride, do whatever was necessary?
LOWREY: Yes, I think so. I think when you look at countries with very high voter participation rates, do you think that they have worse outcomes, or do you just think that their polities are different such that you end up with different policies?
COWEN: The latter.
LOWREY: Voting is compulsory in some places.
COWEN: They tend to be better educated at the lower end, for one thing.
LOWREY: Right. Then I think, again, you want to do more education. You want to make it easier for people to go to school. You don’t want to make it hard for them to vote.
COWEN: I’m all for making school easier. Now, you have an earlier book called Give People Money, which is basically pro-UBI, to oversimplify a bit.
LOWREY: Indeed.
COWEN: There have been UBI studies since then. How does your current view differ from your earlier view?
LOWREY: I think that the studies have been sobering, and, yes, I have updated my priors, and I think that some of the ancillary benefits that I thought we could see through cash haven’t materialized, and I take that seriously. I think that there is still a case for doing it, because the point of giving people money is to merely give them money so that they can buy things, and I think that the case for that remains. I think it is noncorrupted, that their lives don’t improve as much as I would have thought, I think, isn’t necessarily a case against the policy.
COWEN: There’s an argument that your earlier argument is stronger than you thought. Say AI truly is a big deal, and we all live to 100, but day-to-day, we’re not really happier, per se, because of AI. This, to me, is one plausible scenario. I’m not sure it will happen, but it could happen. Then the purpose of UBI is not to make people happier, but just to stop them from being less happy due to instability.
LOWREY: Yes.
COWEN: The only benchmark is, can UBI keep people where they were at, on some dimensions, and they still get to live to 100, which of course they want, and then overall, it’s just a way of making the system stable?
LOWREY: Yes, absolutely. When I wrote the prior book, the AIs that were out were garbage, and it was really not clear that they would ever get to the place that people said that they would get. I remember even when I first moved out to the Bay Area in 2018, you would talk to people who did AI work and they seemed like religious zealots in some ways.
COWEN: Seemed like?
LOWREY: Yes, they’d be like, “No, I promise it’s going to change everything; I’ve seen inside the machine.” I’d be like, “Okay, buddy. Sure, great. The computer’s not really better, and they aren’t really getting better, and this is a time of really remarkably little technological progress.” I was very wrong about that and really found ChatGPT remarkable when I got access to it, and I do.
I was extremely dismissive at the time of the notion that AIs would necessitate UBI. I don’t know that I would go so far as to say that I think that we’ll need a UBI because of AI, but I certainly think that we should be starting to think about that kind of policy if the improvements that we’re seeing continue forward, and if there is a lot of pressure on the white-collar workforce, which I think we won’t know for a couple of years.
Yes, I think that if we see a situation in which GDP is radically increasing, productivity is increasing, and unemployment is going up, that would be very strange, and I think we would have to start looking at UBI-type functions.
COWEN: Are raccoons evolving into pets?
LOWREY: No, they are not.
COWEN: Should they?
LOWREY: No.
COWEN: Should more things be pets, or fewer things be pets?
LOWREY: Fewer things.
COWEN: No tigers?
LOWREY: No, I don’t think that you should be able to have a nondomesticated animal as a pet. This is one of my strongest-held and probably least popular positions, and that means that I do not think that you should be able to have sugar gliders. I do not think you should be able to have most types of fish. I don’t think you should be able to keep birds.
COWEN: That would be federal or local governments doing that? Getting back to our earlier question.
LOWREY: Federal.
COWEN: Federal?
LOWREY: Nondomesticated birds, I should say. You can have chickens. Chickens are domesticated, but tropical birds, I don’t think you should be able to keep.
COWEN: Why are you visiting Namibia?
LOWREY: Ah, the Namib Desert. I’m very, very excited to see petroglyphs. As a general point, I organize a lot of my travel around deserts and moss, to see those, so I’m very, very excited. I’m very excited for dark skies. I’ve been to South Africa, but I haven’t traveled extensively in that region.
COWEN: You said moss, M-O-S-S?
LOWREY: Moss.
COWEN: Where is the best place in the world to go see moss?
LOWREY: The Pacific Northwest, I think, is the best moss that I have seen in the United States. My understanding is that there are places in Japan that have extraordinary moss. I have only ever been to Tokyo. Have you been to mossy places in Japan? You’re better traveled than I am.
COWEN: I think in retrospect, they seemed mossy, but I wasn’t very aware of it at the time.
LOWREY: You’re not a moss traveler. Have you been to the Sundarbans? I don’t know how to say that. The mangrove forest in Bangladesh?
COWEN: No, never been to Bangladesh at all, I’m sorry to say.
LOWREY: I haven’t either, and I very much want to go.
COWEN: Why do you like architectural brutalism?
LOWREY: Oh, I just find it visually interesting and beautiful. I like to feel tiny in front of buildings, and I like the idea of creating warm spaces within imposing structures that make you feel uncomfortable. It’s like the jolie laide of architecture.
COWEN: My favorite brutalism is in former communist countries. Do you have a favorite brutalism?
LOWREY: Boston City Hall. It’s really ugly.
COWEN: Why are tattoos so popular now, including with women?
LOWREY: For the same reason we scribble on cave walls.
COWEN: One of those is your body, and it’s still somewhat hard to reverse, right? It can take 12 sessions to get it off, and it hurts.
LOWREY: Yes, it’s reversible. I actually think that the capacity to remove tattoos, while wonderful for some people who have a tattoo that is prohibiting them from getting employment, reminding them of something painful, or, goodness forbid, if you have hate speech or similar on your body, I think it’s good that you can take the tattoo off, but in general, I think that the idea of having and then removing tattoos is not good for tattoo culture. I have tattoos, and I think that they’re a really nice reminder of time and place. They’re permanent ephemera.
COWEN: You recently read a book called A History of Christianity. Which one was it, and what was interesting in the book to you?
LOWREY: This was A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. One of the things that really stuck with me was that I, despite being Catholic, had not entirely internalized that Christians start off as a strange, tiny Jewish sect of people that are found to be often mentally unstable and deeply annoying.
COWEN: This book communicates that?
LOWREY: Indeed, that Judaism is not the predominant mode of worship or culture at the time, and Christianity, which then comes to dominate so much of the globe, starts off as an offshoot of that; of people who are insisting that they are seeing apparitions and people walking through walls. It was a very, very, very good book.
COWEN: How essential do you view Christianity to Western liberalism?
LOWREY: When you say “essential,” do you mean “positive,” or do you just mean “influential”?
COWEN: Influential but positive: the notion that Jesus Christ was an individual. It’s a story very different from “might makes right.” We valorize the victim. It easily translates into talk of individual rights and liberties and constitutional procedures, at least that has been argued.
LOWREY: Yes, I agree with that, but I certainly don’t see Christianity as essential to enlightenment or good governance in any way, shape, or form. I do think that it had that effect, but I don’t think that it would be necessary in some other world.
COWEN: Not that many Christian countries have achieved the same, right? You could say Japan has for a while.
LOWREY: Yes, I was going to say Japan.
COWEN: Yes, that’s one.
LOWREY: South Korea?
COWEN: South Korea’s pretty Christian in terms of actual belief. I’m not sure of the numbers.
LOWREY: Did it inform the structure of government, though?
COWEN: I don’t know.
LOWREY: I don’t know. That’s an actual question; I don’t know enough about it. I’ve been to South Korea, but I don’t know that much.
COWEN: Other than Japan, I see very few examples.
LOWREY: Yes. I don’t know. I would have to think about it more. Also, there’s so much Christianity; it gets so everywhere-d that I don’t know. I’m not sure.
COWEN: I tend to worry quite a bit, now that we are genuinely less Christian, that this will hurt the chances of liberalism in our future.
LOWREY: I think that that might be right. I’m not saying, when I’m talking about the church, the political actor “the church,” which obviously has a very checkered history, but I do think that it was good that you had an institution that was so predominant in people’s lives, reminding them of the importance of sin and of being a person of integrity and caring for the neighbor. Although, then again, the world, as it’s become less Christian, it’s become safer, more redistributive, so I’m not really sure.
COWEN: What do you think of Ross Douthat’s famous comment? It’s something like, “Well, if you don’t like the Christian right, wait till you see the post-Christian right,” which he said some while ago, right?
LOWREY: Yes. I think that’s completely accurate, and I think that our most notable Christians are not particularly Christian right now. Again, as a Catholic, the notion of being yelled at specifically by two successive popes, as J. D. Vance has been, it’s tough to imagine that. It’d be very painful.
COWEN: Other than facts about moss, what is it you think you learn when you travel?
LOWREY: Oh, goodness. In some ways, I feel like the emergence of a global monoculture, this idea of it, I do think that shows up especially in urban places. I think that it is really, really important to recognize your own privilege and to see how other people live. I think it’s important in the sense of trusting that people know what they value and value very, very, very different things than you do.
It slows time down, which is a big thing for me. The time I spend traveling seems to go 20 times as slowly as an average day in the office, and I really, really like that telescoping effect, and I look for nondrug ways for that to happen.
COWEN: Could you name a city that you feel more or less successfully rebels against the global monoculture, but it’s not just a complete wreck? You could say Lagos, but Lagos is a complete wreck. A well-run city that avoids the traps of many places, where every coffee shop looks the same or whatever.
LOWREY: That’s a great question. A lot of the traveling I do is for outdoors stuff, and I do think that the global monoculture and Instagram has been very terrible for that, for opening beautiful places up to people who just want to take photographs and leave. It’s really, really awful. There, I understand it’s the “you’re not in traffic, you are traffic” phenomenon, but I really mean people who are desecrating these places that are very fragile ecosystems and where you do want to meter access, and you do want people to, for instance, take out their trash and understand what to do if you encounter a wild animal and that kind of thing.
In terms of a city that feels really, really wildly different, I just think that there’s lots of places I go that there’s no tourists, and they’re wonderful for that. When I report, even more so than being a tourist, being a reporter is the best way to find someplace because I’m always amazed by how much people will tell you about their lives and show you about their lives. You really get to see life on the edge of Lake Victoria or very close to the India-Bangladesh border.
Similarly, going to weddings abroad is another way to do that, if you ever get invited to a wedding. One of my favorite weddings that I went to was in Pakistan, which I never would have gone to Pakistan, I think, without that, or maybe I would have. It was a perfect way to get a glimpse of Pakistani society.
COWEN: That, for me, is a case where the private sector time tax is too high.
LOWREY: Yes. Oh, wow.
COWEN: If it were a half-day wedding, I would go, but a three-day wedding in South Asia, I’d just feel, no, I’ll be wanting to check my email the whole time, and that’s rude.
LOWREY: Oh, yes. No, no. They really, really do weddings well. I would also note that Pakistan, I believe, has much heavier time taxes than we do. There’s a lot of interesting thinking about postcolonial states and paperwork burdens. There’s a good book that I read about Pakistan that I forget the exact title, but it was about Pakistan’s issues with paperwork and the transition from British rule to self-rule.
COWEN: Should friendships have explicit time taxes? For instance, people from the Soviet Union, they often expect their friends to pick them up from the airport—
LOWREY: Oh, I love that. Yes.
COWEN: —even though that’s not a thing anymore. You can just Uber, taxi. It doesn’t matter if your income is high enough. It’s expected that someone goes to pick you up. Is that good/bad?
LOWREY: Yes, there’s no inconvenience in friendship if the point is to do things and spend time together. I note that I think the best way to make friends is not to make yourself available for what other people need but to ask for help. I remember one escalation of a friendship that happened to me recently: My older son had had a dental procedure in the morning, and I needed to pick my younger son up from school. My husband wasn’t around, and no childcare was around, and my mom couldn’t make it. The older son needed an adult to be with him, and I couldn’t leave him alone, so I asked a friend to come over and sit with this kid who had just been given a large dose of ketamine for 20 minutes. I had a bunch of people say yes, and one friend came over and sat with my son in bed and looked at her phone for 20 minutes. There is no inconvenience in friendship. People like to be asked to do things, too, I think.
COWEN: That’s useful, right? Say it’s not really useful, that it’s just an ongoing act of signaling to show you’re a true friend.
LOWREY: Oh, absolutely. Definitely. It’s because I think that the point is to spend time, certainly. Do you find that there are social conventions that you despise having to comply with in your life but still have to do it?
COWEN: I don’t know. I don’t think I ever despise, but there are various slight annoyances, or I wish things were more efficient.
LOWREY: Yes. The one that I really struggle with is that I have email and text and WhatsApp and Signal and lots of other modes—Instagram messages. I really, really despise having to keep up with people on all of those forms of communication. I think of texting as being fundamentally asynchronous, and that you shouldn’t have to socially respond to a text.
I only like socializing in person; I want to see people, I want to be visually with them. I hate all of the digital upkeep, and I’m really, really bad at it, and it’s known among my friends that I’m bad at this. Even my husband is like, “You’re a terrible texter, and you’re mean over text.” I’m like, “Well, I’m not trying to be mean.” I text like a boomer, apparently.
COWEN: My slight gripe is there’s too many networks, so I feel there should be email and one system of texting. There’s Signal, there’s WhatsApp, there’s iMessenger.
LOWREY: It’s too much.
COWEN: There’s other stuff. There’s Twitter Direct Message.
LOWREY: Awful. I don’t do social media anymore, so I don’t do Twitter anymore at all. I have an Instagram account that I’m not on very often. I don’t Facebook, I don’t Bluesky, and I really appreciate the time that I’ve gotten back from that. Particularly X, I think, is a terrible mode of discourse, and I think that it rewards unseemly emotions in people.
COWEN: Just to finish up with the last question, I ask this of many of the guests, but first, to mention your book again, Annie Lowrey, The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It. What is it you wish to learn about next?
LOWREY: Oh, actually, I just got two books about the Mexica people, the Aztecs. I’d like to read those books and then go see Aztec artifacts and structures.
COWEN: That’s a [Inga] Clendinnen book? A lot of people have been reading that lately.
LOWREY: Yes, that was how I saw it. It was a lot of people were reading it. Now I’m like, “Who was it who recommended it?” I had wanted to do more travel in Mexico, so I got Fifth Sun, and then just Aztecs, I think, is the other one, which I’m excited to read. Actually, from your podcast, I got the book on Vermeer, which I’m excited—I know nothing about him, and I’m very excited to read that.
COWEN: Great. Annie Lowrey, thank you very much.
LOWREY: Thank you.