Derek Thompson | The Atlantic

The Orality Theory of Everything

2026-02-22T07:00:00-05:00

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The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The housing theory of everything pins inequality, climate change, obesity, and declining fertility on the West’s inability to build enough homes. If you treat theories of everything as literal theories of everything, you will be disappointed to find that they all have holes. I prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking through the ways that single phenomena can have large and unpredictable second-order effects.

My new favorite theory of everything is the orality theory of everything. This theory emerges from the work of mid-20th-century media theorists, especially Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. They argued that the invention of the alphabet and the rise of literacy were among the most important events in human history. These developments shifted communications from an age of orality—in which all information was spoken and all learning was social—to an age of literacy, in which writing could fix words in place, allowing people to write alone, read alone, and develop ever more complicated ideas that would have been impossible to memorize. The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that form the basis of all modern technology. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking person.

The most enthusiastic modern proponent of the orality theory of everything that I know of is Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, the co-host of the Odd Lots podcast. We discussed orality, literacy, and the implications for politics, storytelling, expertise, social relations, and much more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity, brevity, and the goal of making both speakers sound a bit smarter.

Derek Thompson: The return of orality: Why do you think it explains everything?

Joe Weisenthal: I don’t think it explains everything. I think it only explains 99 percent of everything.

I believe that human communication is becoming more oral. And by that I don’t just mean that people are talking more with their mouths, although I do think that is the case. It’s more that communication in general, whether in the spoken form or in the digital form, has the characteristics of conversation. And it truly harkens back to a time before, really, the written word, or certainly before mass literacy.

In 2016, during the presidential election, I started reading the work of Walter Ong. He was a Jesuit priest. He studied with Marshall McLuhan. He was at Saint Louis University and wrote this really incredible book called Orality and Literacy. The gist is that humans [in oral cultures] fundamentally think differently when they’re in this world that you can’t write anything down, that you can’t look anything up. For most of human history, there was no way to look up anything at all. There was no reference material and so forth. And as such, people had to optimize their communication for the conditions of that time.

Through a lot of study of Homer and other ancient epics, people realized that there were certain patterns of communication. People spoke with rhythm and rhyme and musicality, because it helps people memorize things. Certain phrases just get repeated over and over again. Repetition, communication, and information were optimized for memorability, in packets, and what we would call “going viral.” When I started reading this book, I was like, Look, this has a lot of explanatory power. These things that characterize the Homeric times—the way society prioritized and packaged information—greatly resemble what we see today. My big thesis is that as communication becomes more of this back-and-forthness, it’s changing the way that we communicate and the way we think.

Thompson: To drill down on why the shift to literacy was so important for the way we think, for the way we transmit knowledge, for the way we build institutions, I want to quote two great scholars here. The first is Joshua Meyrowitz, an emeritus professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire. He writes in No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior:

The break from total reliance on oral communication allows people to become more introspective, rational, and individualistic. Abstract thought develops. From the circular world of sound with its round huts and round villages, people move, over time, toward linear, cause and effect thinking, grid-like cities, and a one thing at a time and one thing after another world that mimics the linear lines of writing and type.

The second is from another great scholar named Joe Weisenthal:

Many of the things that modern institutions are built on—enlightenment thinking, formal logic, reason, meritocracy, examining the evidence—are downstream from the ability to contemplate the written word at a distance.

Why don’t you expand on either quote?

Weisenthal: People can probably feel this. When you’re in a conversation, online or offline, what are you doing? You’re often trying to impress someone. You might be trying to one-up someone. Maybe if there’s a few people there, you’re trying to put someone down to look cool for the other person. These are all things that occur that don’t occur when you’re in solitude. A solo interaction with language can only be done really with the written word. Even setting aside the logical arguments for the connection between the alphabet and left-to-right thinking and linear thinking, most people, I think, could intuitively understand that interactive environments foster different priorities.

[Adam Kirsch: Reading is a vice]

When you’re writing a letter, or certainly, let’s say, you’re writing a book as you have, you don’t necessarily have the reader in mind at that exact moment. In fact, you have the luxury of writing and not having to think about what the reader is going to be doing at this moment. These are all luxuries that occur in the context of literacy—the written word—that are separate from a conversation. And so the written word creates all kinds of new opportunities to think through these things, to take time, to not respond right away.

Thompson: Thinking used to be something that had to be done socially. It was impossible to learn The Odyssey on your own. It was transmitted to you from a person. You would rehearse it with someone else. The mode of information transfer was necessarily social. Books are written alone, and books are typically read alone. And so this age of literacy gave rise to this privilege of solitude and interiority that I think is really, really important.

Walter Ong, our mutual hero, has a great quote that I want to throw to you and then get your reaction to, because it goes right to this point. He said:

Human beings in primary oral cultures … do not “study.” They learn by apprenticeship—hunting with experienced hunters, for example—by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship, by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them … not by study in the strict sense.

I’m very interested in a phenomenon that I call the antisocial century, the idea that for a variety of reasons, we are spending much more time alone. And that is having a bunch of second- and third-order effects. And it really is interesting to me, as I was going deeper into this project, to think that it’s the age of literacy that in many ways allowed us to be alone as we learned, and to prize a certain kind of interiority.

Weisenthal: Marshall McLuhan had this observation: The alphabet is the most detribalizing technology that’s ever existed. It speaks to this idea that prior to the written word, all knowledge was, per se, communal. It had to be in a group. If you have multiple texts in front of you, then you trust the one that feels most logical. But you don’t have that luxury when all knowledge is communal. Being part of the crowd has to be part of learning.

The ear and the eye are very different organs. You can close your eyes, which you can’t do with your ears. You can get perspective from your eye and establish perspective in a way you can’t do with your ears. So it’s like you go into a room and you can stand back at the corner so you can make sure that you can see everything going on in the room. The ear is very different. We’re at the center of everything constantly. You can’t close it. The ear continues to work while we’re sleeping. There’s an evolutionary purpose for the fact that we can still hear when we’re sleeping, because if there’s an intruder or a wild animal or something, it wakes us up and we can run.

So the ear, McLuhan said, is inherently a source of terror. It feels very digital. Even though we do look at the internet, there is this sense in which we can never remove ourselves from it. Even if we’re reading the internet, it almost feels more like we’re hearing it. There’s an immersiveness in contemporary digital discourse that I think is much more like hearing than it is about seeing. So I think there’s all kinds of different ways that we are sort of returning to this realm.

Thompson: We had the age of orality, which was the age of the ear. Then we had the high-water mark of literacy, which is the high-water mark of the age of the eye. And now we’re in this messy third stage where it’s like there’s some human facial organ that’s an eye and an ear mashed together, because we have TV and radio and social media and TikTok. And what’s interesting about these technologies is that they are all oral. What is radio, if not oral? What is television, if not oral? What is TikTok, if not spoken and live?

But there’s a lasting record of your tweets. There’s a lasting record of that TikTok, which can be shared. And the fact that these pieces of media can be recorded means that in many ways they are also of a piece with the age of literacy, of literate recorded artifacts. What do we make of this weird synthetic new stage that we’re in? What do we call it? How do we describe it?

Weisenthal: Andrey Mir, who has written some of the best stuff updating Ong’s ideas, calls it digital orality. I like that. One thing that’s interesting, though, is that we might not really have those records in the future. For one thing, things disappear. Two, we don’t really trust pictures anymore. The archive is sort of tenuous. We maybe had this brief period where we had a lot of digital archives and we could trust them, but digital archives are disappearing and you’re going to have facsimiles, things that looked like they happened that didn’t actually happen, which, incidentally, Ong talks about.

So he talks about how in a lot of oral cultures, history was malleable. He talks about biblical genealogies: So-and-so begat so-and-so begat so-and-so begat so-and-so begat, on forever. There are a lot of examples in oral cultures where, when something is no longer convenient—maybe there are some lineage of kings and that king falls into disrepute and they switch it—they’ll just come up with a new poem. And so there isn’t the idea of a fixed history. I think that’s probably what’s going to happen today. We’re going to have books for a very long time, but history will be manufactured in accordance with the sort of contemporary values of the moment.

Thompson: This is a period that some people call post-literate. Reading is in decline. Standardized-test scores are in decline. As I’ve written, it sometimes feels like everything is trying to become television. Social media is becoming TV; podcasts are becoming TV. People are going to the movies less. Everything is evolving toward short-form video. I wonder how you feel about this general thesis that in a post-literate age, everything is evolving toward short-form video.

Weisenthal: This idea of post-literacy, I think there’s a sort of figurative meaning and a literal meaning. On the one hand, again, when I hear the word post-literacy or when I’ve used the term, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people don’t know how to read. I still think it’s mostly useful as a term to describe conditions of information and conditions of communication that are very distinct from solitary, literate communications. So I think the fact that so much is talk, so much is back-and-forthness, so much is information designed to be viral, memorable, repeatable—this is mostly what I am thinking of when I think about post-literacy.

Incidentally, I don’t think people know how to read either. I look at myself and I think I read way more books than 99 percent of the population. But I’ll read two pages and then I’ll check my Twitter mentions, and then I’ll read two pages and check my Twitter mentions. Isn’t that everyone? Can anyone actually read three pages anymore? Maybe it’s just me, and my attention span is just totally bombed out, which is possible, because, again, I spend all day looking at a screen. I’ll fully cop to that.

Thompson: I do also have the sense when I’m reading that there’s often, especially if my phone is anywhere within reach or sight, something calling me away from that book at all times.

Weisenthal: In some of the writing from the ’60s and ’70s, one of the things that I’ve noticed is people talking about phones interrupting people having sex. This is a common observation. They talk about unplugging the phone before couples had sex or whatever it was. And I think, again, one of the things people talk about right now, which I find fascinating, is the big fertility drops and people are trying to figure it out. And this is something that is occurring in almost every country around the world, including China, which does not resemble the rest of the world and has avoided many contemporary pathologies. Even there, it’s happening.

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

And I do think it’s very interesting that—if you go back and look at how many people noticed this phenomenon when everyone started getting phones—the degree to which it was as if the phone was the third person there, interrupting the privacy of the couple. That’s a very powerful observation that I think then has a lot of explanatory effects for what came afterwards, when everyone started holding a phone on them, every waking minute.

Thompson: I want to apply your theories to some domains of modern life, starting with politics. I went to look up Donald Trump’s nicknames, because I know that you’re very interested in his propensity for epithets, for nicknames. It’s nearly Homeric. Fortunately for our purposes, Wikipedia keeps track of all of Trump’s nicknames, so I didn’t have to remember them—speaking of outsourced memory. Here are some of them. Steve Bannon was “Sloppy Steve,” Joe Biden was “Sleepy Joe,” Mike Bloomberg was “Mini Mike,” Jeb Bush was, of course, “Low-Energy Jeb.”

This plays into this classic tradition of orality. The wine-dark seas, swift-footed Achilles. And Walter Ong has a great passage where he writes about this, which I would love to get your reaction to:

The cliches in political denunciations in many low-technology developing cultures—enemy of the people, capitalist war-mongers—that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary essentials of oral thought processes.

It’s so interesting to think that Ong is saying that it is low-technology developing countries where these nicknames are prevalent. But you wake up today and the richest country in the world is presided over by a now two-time president whose facility for nicknames is very famous. What significance do you put on this? Why is it important that a figure like Trump plays into these old-fashioned oral traditions?

Weisenthal: It’s interesting—when you say things like, Oh, Trump has a sort of Homeric quality in the way he speaks, that repels a lot of people. Like, What are you talking about? This is nothing like Homer. But my theory, which I can’t prove, is that the original bards who composed Homer were probably Trump-like characters. So rather than saying Trump is a Homeric character, we could say that the people who gathered around and told these ancient stories were probably the Trump-like characters of their time. Colorful, very big characters, people who were loud, who could really get attention, who would captivate people when they talked. One of Ong’s observations in Orality and Literacy is about heavy and light characters in oral societies. Heavy characters are like Cerberus, the three-headed dog; Medusa; Zeus—these larger-than-life, frequently grotesque, visually grotesque characters.

The modern world has elevated a lot of what I think Ong would call heavy characters. I certainly think Trump is a heavy character, with his makeup, his hair, and his whole visual presentation. I think Elon Musk is a heavy character. We are in the time of the heavy character.

If you look at icons of the previous age, John F. Kennedy was not a heavy character. That’s a light character, a certain coolness. Barack Obama was a light character; there was a certain coolness to him. One of the things that people debate a lot is, like, If Obama could run again, wouldn’t he just clean up? If Democrats could just bring Obama back for a third time, wouldn’t that just solve all of Democrats’ electoral problems? And I think in 2016, I probably would’ve believed that. And maybe in 2020, I would’ve believed that. But I’m certainly less confident now. I feel like Obama is a character of a cooler, different time. A character from a pre-TikTok time, in many respects.

Thompson: Let me push back here. I think Obama in 2004, with the first Democratic National Committee speech, was a heavy character. I think the presidency lightened him. I think Trump in 2015 was a heavy character, and he is a lighter character now having suffered overexposure. Maybe the fissures that you see in the Republican Party are that Trump, the once heavy character, is losing the weight that used to be necessary to keep this coalition together. And people are seeing he’s kind of lost it. I wonder if there’s some idea that in politics, many people debut as the heavy character. But experience and time and failure lightens them. And that’s part of the reason no president seems to survive more than one year of positive approval ratings. We have learned to hate everybody.

Weisenthal: Since you mentioned this phenomenon, that no president can sustain high approval ratings (which does seem like a phenomenon basically everywhere), could we pivot? Could I bring in Meyrowitz here?

Meyrowitz, in 1985, was talking about electronic media before anyone really conceived of that idea. One of his observations is that everybody has an onstage and a backstage. We talk on this podcast in a certain way. But that is different from how we would talk at home with our family. Or you and I might talk differently when we hang up this podcast and we’re saying goodbye or something. This is a very normal thing, which is that you just talk differently in different environments.

What Meyrowitz anticipated in No Sense of Place is this idea that electronic media would cause us to be suspicious of people who talk differently in one environment versus another. If someone code-switched, if someone talked differently on the campaign trail than they did in their private life, then we would come to think, This person’s a phony. Something about Trump is that there are very few examples of him ever talking differently in one environment than in any other. People could be totally repelled by things that he said in public or private. But he’s not a hypocrite in the way that a lot of people use that word. He is the same in almost every environment. This is precisely what Meyrowitz would’ve anticipated, that we would gravitate toward people who act the same onstage and backstage, that we would come to view that consistency of character as a value.

Thompson: The name of Meyrowitz’s book is No Sense of Place. And I want to just slow down on that title, because it’s a pun. By no sense of place, Meyrowitz is saying that electronic media extends our consciousness outward, so we don’t really know where we are. I could be reading Twitter in Arlington, Virginia, but feel myself becoming emotional about Gaza or Ukraine or Minneapolis, in a way that was impossible in the age before television or radio. This new age of communications media takes us out of where we are and puts us right in front of the faces of people who are thousands of miles away.

But he also means no sense of place in a hierarchical sense. He means that people will be able, with electronic media, to operate outside of their slot in the hierarchy: The poor will be able to scream at the billionaires. And this, he said, is going to create more social unrest. It’s going to create more, I think he would agree, of something like populism. And this really interesting idea that electronic media not only unmoors us from where we are geographically but that it also demolishes hierarchies—I think it was incredibly insightful, considering it was written 41 years ago.

But he goes one step further in a way that’s really surprising, and this is the part I’d really love you to comment on. He says this about our future relationship to expertise—and God only knows how many people have talked about what’s happened to expertise in the last few decades: “Our increasingly complex technological and social world has made us rely more and more heavily on ‘expert information,’ but the general exposure of ‘experts’ as fallible human beings has lessened our faith in them as people. The change in our image of leaders and experts leaves us with”—and this is exactly your point—“a distrust of power, but also with a seemingly powerless dependence on those in whom we have little trust.”

Weisenthal: It’s crazy. It does feel like this could be in The Atlantic in 2025. It’s just so far ahead of its time. You mentioned the poor can scream at the billionaires. I think most people would say, Look, technology is an enabled environment in which the poor can have their voice heard and billionaires are brought low and can be hectored, and we see that happen every day online. Most people intuitively think that’s a very positive development. That’s, like, an egalitarian development. But by the same token, there are other things that most people are not as comfortable with. I think this whole field of study offers a certain way of viewing history that is not entirely satisfying to anyone or anyone’s political project currently.

Thompson: Speaking of topics that aren’t particularly comfortable with any political project, I have a question for you about AI and how AI slots into orality versus literacy. I want to come at it from what I hope is an interesting angle. This is a quote from Ong’s Orality and Literacy:

A written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a person to explain his or her statement, you can get an explanation; if you ask a text, you get back nothing except the same, often stupid, words which called for your question in the first place.

I reread that section on a plane recently, and I jolted up in my seat. That’s what AI has changed. You can enter into conversations with text. That is true either at a literal level—like, I can download a PDF of a book and give it to Claude and be like, Claude, can we talk about this book?—but also, at a higher abstract level, we’re talking about a technology that is pretrained on text. It’s pretrained on literacy. But we have an oral, which is to say conversational, relationship with that training corpus. It’s weird.

Weisenthal: The jury is out still on how AI slots into this. Because on the one hand, you can upload some texts to Claude and ask questions, and it becomes an interactive thing. That’s oral; that’s conversation.

[Read: The problem with using AI in your personal life]

But those conversations with AI, they don’t feel like other conversations that exist online. The AI is not going to insult you. The AI is not going to speak to you in memes. The AI is not going to use epithets. I’m not trying to one-up the AI either. Ong used the word agonistic; oral cultures are competitive. We see that online, how we’re always competing with one another when we’re talking.

AI chatbot communications aren’t agonistically toned. Just the opposite. Most people’s complaint with AI is that it’s too obsequious, that it’s not confrontational enough. I’ll say something stupid to the chatbot, and it’ll say, That’s a really good idea, Joe! Let’s explore that further. This is actually one of the big problems of AI, which is that it’s insufficiently opinionated. The chatbots do not correct you. AI is conversational, but it doesn’t have a lot of these other aspects of conversation that other digital conversations have.

Thompson: Maybe the age of social media really was the revenge of orality. But an age of AI would be much more like the revenge of literacy.

Ong and Meyrowitz both point to this idea that literacy pulled us into ourselves. Reading is interior. And then novels, in response to the interiority of reading, became more interior. Nineteenth-century novels are incredibly rich about what it is like to be thinking and alive in this moment. It’s not plot, plot, plot. It’s not genealogy. It’s fully inside the phenomenological experience of the characters.

And AI, to me, feels much more subvocal. It feels like I’m having a conversation with myself. It’s not myself. It’s this machine that I’m talking with, but it feels more like daydreaming with myself than the antagonistic experience of being on Twitter, where I’m inside the minds of other people, thrust into the faces of strangers whom I’ve never met.

Weisenthal: It’s very plausible. It’s not going to look exactly like the previous age of literacy, but it never does. These things come and go. The current age of orality is different, obviously, from the original one. The return to solitude. If you’re going back and forth with the chatbot, you close the computer, you don’t feel that same Oh, they’re still arguing there without me. They’re talking online about me and I’m not there to defend myself. Whatever it is. You don’t quite have that same pull. I think all these things—they’ll live with each other, and there’ll be shades of the past that we hear echoes of, and they’ll be different, and they’ll be similar. And I think it’s good to recognize these patterns and observe them, just for one’s own sanity—to have a sense of what’s pulling you in various different directions.

Thompson: To close with the Joeism “What’d I miss?”—what’s important in this space that we didn’t have time to talk about or that I didn’t sufficiently ask?

Weisenthal: I just think, by and large, that there are a lot of contemporary pathologies. People point to digital media, the phones, et cetera, as drivers of them. What I would just say is, there’s a lot of writing that I think helps answer these questions, that was written before any of this existed. I would like it if more people became familiar with Josh Meyrowitz, Walter Ong, Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and so forth. I think I would like that. I just want to talk to people about them.

This article was adapted from a post on Derek Thompson’s Substack.

The Affordability Curse

2025-11-07T07:30:00-05:00

To understand what just happened in this week’s elections—notably Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City, Mikie Sherrill’s win in New Jersey, and Abigail Spanberger’s win in Virginia—wind back the clock five years.

In 2020, Joe Biden won by promising that he could restore normalcy to American life. That did not happen. As the biological emergency of the coronavirus pandemic wound down, the economic emergency (inflation) took off. An affordability crisis broke out around the world. The public revolted. Last year, practically every incumbent party in every developed country lost ground at the ballot box.

So it went in the United States. In 2024, Donald Trump won an “affordability election.” I’m calling it that because affordability is what Trump’s voters said they wanted more of. Gallup found that the economy was the only issue that a majority of voters considered “extremely important.” A CBS analysis of exit-poll data found that eight in 10 of those who said they were worse off financially compared with four years ago backed Trump. The AP’s 120,000-respondent VoteCast survey found that voters who cited inflation as their most important factor were almost twice as likely to back Trump.

So Trump won. And for the second straight election, the president has violated his mandate to restore normalcy. Elected to be an affordability president, Trump has governed as an authoritarian dilettante. He has raised tariffs without the consultation of Congress, openly threatened comedians who made jokes about him, pardoned billionaires who gave him and his family money, arrested people without due process, overseen the unconstitutional obliteration of the federal-government workforce, and, with the bulldozing of the White House East Wing, provided an admirably vivid metaphor for his general approach to governance, norms, and decorum.

[Read: ‘None of this is good for Republicans’]

A recent NBC poll asked voters whether they thought Trump had lived up to their expectations for getting inflation under control and improving the cost of living. Only 30 percent said yes. It was his lowest number for any issue polled. The affordability issue, which seemed to be a rocket exploding upwards 12 months ago, now looks more like a bomb to which the Republican Party finds itself tightly strapped.

So again, we have an affordability election on our hands.

On the surface, Mamdani, Spanberger, and Sherrill emerged victorious in three very different campaigns. Mamdani defeated an older Democrat in an ocean-blue metropolis. In Virginia, Spanberger crushed a bizarre Republican candidate in a state that was ground zero for DOGE cuts. In New Jersey, Sherrill—whose victory margin was the surprise of the evening—romped in a state that had been sliding toward the Republican column.

Despite these cosmetic differences, what unified the three victories was the Democratic candidates’ ability to turn the affordability curse against the sitting president, transforming Republicans’ 2024 advantage into a 2025 albatross. Here’s Shane Goldmacher at The New York Times:

Democratic victories in New Jersey and Virginia were built on promises to address the sky-high cost of living in those states while blaming Mr. Trump and his allies for all that ails those places. In New York City, the sudden rise of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist with an ambitious agenda to lower the cost of living, put a punctuation mark on affordability as a political force in 2025.

Each candidate arguably got more out of affordability than any other approach. Mamdani’s focus on the cost of living in New York—which included some genuinely brilliant ads on, for example, “Halalflation” and street-vendor permits—has been widely covered. Less ballyhooed, but just as important, is that Spanberger and Sherrill also found that the affordability message had the biggest bang for the buck in their own advertisements. An analysis shared with me by the polling and data firm Blue Rose Research found that “the best-testing ads in both Virginia and New Jersey focused on affordability, tying rising costs to Trump and Congressional Republicans.”

Tuesday night showed what affordability can be for the Democratic Party—not a policy, but a prompt, an opportunity for Democrats to fit different messages under the same tentpole while contributing to a shared national party identity: The president’s a crook, and we care about the cost of living. In New York City, Mamdani won renters by 24 percentage points with a specific promise: freeze the rent. In New Jersey, Sherrill won with a day-one pledge to declare a state of emergency on utility costs, which would allow her to halt rates and delete red tape that holds back energy generation. (The opening line of her mission statement: “Life in New Jersey is too expensive and every single New Jerseyan who pays the bills knows it.”) In Virginia, Spanberger went another way, relentlessly blaming rising costs on Trump.

What’s notable is not just what the above messages have in common but what they don’t. Sherrill focused on utility costs, whereas Mamdani focused on rent. Mamdani ran a socialist campaign to energize a young left-wing electorate, whereas Spanberger’s task was to win a purple state with an outgoing Republican governor. Each candidate answered the affordability prompt with a message tailored to the electorate: Affordability is a big tent.

The affordability message was especially successful at bringing young voters back to the Democratic fold. After the 2024 election, it looked like young people were listing to the right. Tuesday night was not the ideal test of that theory, because off-year elections tend to have a smaller and more educated (and therefore more naturally anti-Trump) electorate. But the pollster John Della Volpe reported that young voters “anchored the Democratic turnaround” in Virginia, where 18-to-29-year-olds delivered a 35-point margin for Spanberger, the largest for Democrats since 2017.

It’s easy to understand why young voters would appreciate an emphasis on the cost of living. Just this week, the National Association of Realtors announced that the median age of first-time U.S. homebuyers has jumped to a new record of 40. “Zohran’s campaign centered cost-of-living issues, and he at least appeared consistently willing to look for answers wherever they may present themselves,” Daniel Racz, a 23-year-old sport-data analyst who lives in New York, told me. “I think of his mentions of the history of sewer socialism, proposed trial runs of public grocery stores on an experimental basis, and his past free-bus pilot program, which showcased a political curiosity grounded in gathering information to improve his constituents’ lives.”

Amanda Litman, a co-founder and the president of Run for Something, oversees a national recruitment effort to help progressives run for downballot office. On Tuesday, the organization had 222 candidates in general elections across the country. “Nearly every candidate who won an election for municipal or state legislative office was talking about affordability, especially as it relates to housing,” she told me. “Housing is the No. 1 issue we’ve seen people bring up as a reason to run for office this year.”

The affordability approach has several strengths. Because it is a prompt rather than a policy, it allows Democrats to be organized in their thematic positioning but heterodox in their policies. A socialist can run on affordability in a blue city and win with socialist policies; a moderate can run on affordability in a purple state and win with the sort of supply-side reforms for housing and energy that animate the abundance movement. At a time when Democrats are screaming at one another online and off about populism versus moderation, the affordability tent allows them to be diverse yet united: They can run on tying Trump to the affordability crisis while creating messages fit for their respective electorates.

[Read: An antidote to shamelessness]

This next bit is a little speculative, but another advantage of centering affordability may be that it is easier for members of a political coalition to negotiate on material politics than on post-material politics. Put differently, economic disagreements within a group are more likely to produce debate and even compromise, whereas cultural disagreements are more likely to produce purity tests and excommunication. If a YIMBY left-centrist and a democratic socialist disagree about the correct balance of price controls and supply-side reforms to reduce housing inflation in New York City, that might lead to a perfectly pleasant conversation. But perfectly pleasant conversations between political commentators about, say, ICE deportations or trans women in college sports don’t seem common. If this is true, it would suggest that the spotlight of Democratic attention shifting toward affordability might ameliorate the culture of progressive purity tests in a way that would make for a bigger tent.

Affordability politics also poses a distinct challenge. At the national level, Democrats do not have their hands on the price levers, and they won’t for at least four more calendar years. Even if they did, the best ways to reduce prices at the national level include higher interest rates (painful), meaningful spending cuts (excruciating), or a national tax increase (dial 911). Even at the local level, affordability politics in an age of elevated inflation, rapidly growing AI, and complex impediments to affordable housing can easily promise too much—or, to be more exact, offer a set of dangerously falsifiable promises.

Affordability politics thrives because of the specificity and clarity of its pledge: Prices are too high; I’ll fix it if you give me power. But politics isn’t just about the words you put on your bumper stickers; it’s about what you do if the bumper stickers work. Building houses takes time, even after reducing barriers to development and improving access to financing. Actually lowering prices can take even longer. Energy inflation is a bear of a problem, with transmission prices rising and data-center construction exploding. After Americans learn whose affordability messages win at the ballot box, they’ll learn whose affordability policies actually work and (perhaps) keep them in office.

Affordability is good politics, and a Democratic Party that focuses on affordability at the national level, and supports motley approaches to solving the cost-of-living crisis at the local level, is in a strong position going into 2026. But saying the word affordability over and over doesn’t necessarily guarantee good policy outcomes. In fact, it doesn’t guarantee anything. Which is why at some point on the road back to relevance, the Democratic Party needs to become obsessed with not only winning back power but also governing effectively in the places where they have it.

This article was adapted from a post on Derek Thompson’s Substack.

The Era of Step-on-a-Rake Capitalism

2025-09-11T08:00:00-04:00

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Is Donald Trump a staunch capitalist, a secret socialist, a blend of the two, or none of the above? Depending on the day, it’s hard to tell.

Some of his initiatives are pure Ronald Reagan, such as his corporate-income tax cuts and deregulation efforts targeted at oil and gas. Some of his interventions would impress a Democratic Socialists of America chapter, such as demanding a public stake in Intel, requesting 15 percent of revenues from Nvidia’s chip sales to China, and securing a “golden share” of U.S. Steel to retain veto power over its decision making. As for the rest of Trump’s economic policy, it is a hodgepodge of 19th-century mercantilism, developing-world authoritarianism, and extremely online weirdness. The U.S. tariff rate stands near a 100-year high. When Trump isn’t firing the statisticians who calculate unemployment, he’s waging war against the independent central bank or posting about the fierce urgency of corporate-logo design.

To put it simply, or at least as simply as one can: Trump’s economic agenda is deeply Reaganite and deeply anti-conservative; somewhat capitalist and frequently socialist; declaratively obsessed with “American greatness” yet constantly sidetracked by online outrages that do nothing for the country.

So, what is Trumponomics?

[From the April 2025 issue: The real goal of the Trump economy]

The most interesting answer I’ve heard is “state capitalism with American characteristics,” which The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip defined as “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.” This diagnosis makes Trump’s economic policy seem more evolutionary than revolutionary. In the past 70 years, the U.S. government has frequently intervened in corporate affairs, especially in response to emergencies such as World War II (the Defense Production Act), the Great Recession (the bank bailouts), and COVID (the Paycheck Protection Program). Under Joe Biden, Democrats waded into industrial policy with subsidies for clean energy and semiconductors. By one interpretation, Trumponomics doesn’t stand out in history; it’s just the latest example of the federal government taking a more activist role in directing the economy, especially as we try to compete with the juggernaut of authoritarian China, whose modern development was known as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

But Trumponomics is too erratic to deserve any comparison with state capitalism, especially in relation to China. As the author Dan Wang writes in his new book, Breakneck, China is an “engineering state,” where Beijing’s control over the economy both emerges from long-term planning and radiates outward through millions of local-government representatives. “The core characteristic of China’s state capitalism is discipline,” Wang told Ip. “Trump is the complete opposite of that.”

Consider, for example, two simple questions: What are Trump’s tariffs supposed to accomplish, and what are they actually accomplishing? The White House, including the economic adviser Stephen Miran, has repeatedly stressed that higher import taxes will bring back manufacturing and revitalize exports. Neither is happening. Manufacturing output has declined every month since the tariffs were announced, and many firms have explicitly blamed Trump’s tariffs. Meanwhile, the president recently struck a deal requiring Nvidia and AMD to pay the government 15 percent of revenue on the sale of AI chips to China. The logic is genuinely hard to follow on a week-to-week basis. Promoting exports with global tariffs (which might be illegal) is one thing. Taxing exports (which might also be illegal) is another thing. But taxing imports and exports simultaneously doesn’t really comport with any coherent economic strategy. As the economy lists toward stagflation, the White House is not doing “state capitalism” so much as it’s doing “step-on-a-rake capitalism”—a tragicomic bungling of economic growth that fails to advance the very objectives it claims to prioritize.

The problem with evaluating this administration’s economic agenda is that Trumponomics is about Trump far more than it is about economics. There is no clear theory of growth steering the U.S. economy, just one man’s desire to colonize every square inch of American attention and experience, which happens to include international markets.

Trumponomics, then, is best understood as Trump’s formula for controlling everything around him, rather than an ideology with a telos. That formula has three main components. The first is declaring an emergency to justify intervention. The second is making threats to force private actors to do his bidding. The third is demanding tribute.

All presidents have the power to declare emergencies. None has used this power as frequently as Donald Trump.

Since 1981, the typical president has declared about seven national emergencies in each four-year term. In the first six months of his second term, Trump has already declared nine, plus a “crime emergency” in Washington. He’s invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport foreigners during a war or invasion, Title X to deploy the National Guard in various cities, and other congressional acts to expedite mining on federal lands. “Even when Trump doesn’t declare a legal emergency, he describes crises that justify dramatic action,” The New York Times’ Adam Kushner wrote. At this rate, Trump is on pace to announce 70 emergencies in this administration, which would nearly match the total number of emergencies announced from 1980 to 2025, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Emergency declarations have been core to Trump’s economic agenda. Tariffs, the most significant policy initiative of Trump’s current term, kicked off with an emergency declaration. On February 3, the White House announced its first round of tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China. Although import taxes are typically the domain of the legislature, Trump as president claimed the authority to tax imports under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, because of these countries’ alleged failure to stop the flow of migrants and fentanyl.

The IEEPA is a 1977 law that allows the president to impose financial regulations, such as sanctions or export restrictions, during a national emergency. But no president before Trump ever used IEEPA to tax imported goods. In August, a federal court of appeals struck down the tariffs as unconstitutional, pointing out that IEEPA gives the executive branch authority to regulate imports but not to tax them. Now that net immigration has plummeted to historic lows, it doesn’t even make sense to claim the power to tax imports based on an alleged migration emergency that has, by all accounts, ended. But the White House has said it will fight for the right to impose tariffs all the way to the Supreme Court.

I have said before that the No. 1 rule for understanding Trump is that “a lot happens under this administration, but a lot un-happens, too.” This also is a function of Trump’s “everything is an emergency” style of governance—constantly bending the law into unnatural shapes to justify whatever action the president seeks in the moment.

Just as Trump depends on emergency declarations, he also depends on threats. The president creates pain, then demands tribute, at which point he removes the pain.

To punish ABC for its negative coverage, Trump threatened to revoke its broadcast license, accepted a $16 million financial tribute from the Walt Disney Company, and then backed down. To punish law firms for litigation against him or his allies, Trump threatened several firms with limited access to government contracts before accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in promised pro bono services to Trump-approved causes. To punish Columbia University for a litany of perceived sins, including its DEI policies, Trump froze hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding before the university agreed to pay a large tribute and change its policies.

Trump applies the same pain-tribute method to direct international trade and private-firm behavior. In the spring, Trump threatened new tariffs on Japanese and European Union exports. (Pain created.) In response, Japan and the EU agreed to invest more than $1 trillion in the U.S., and Trump himself claimed the authority to direct some of the investment to his favored causes. (Tribute offered.) Then Trump cut both tariff rates by about half. (Pain removed.) Last month, Trump called for Lip-Bu Tan to resign as the chief executive of Intel. (Pain created.) Days later, Tan met with Trump at the White House to work out a deal, and when they emerged, the U.S. government owned 10 percent of his company. (Tribute offered.) Tan remains the CEO of Intel. (Pain removed.)

In the aftermath of any one of these events, you might come up with a philosophical justification. You could defend high tariffs because they raise revenue, or you could defend reduced tariffs because they increase the flow of trade among allies. You could defend firing Tan for his alleged Chinese connections and poor performance, or you could defend retaining Tan as long as the U.S. gets a slice of Intel. But you can’t defend all of these opinions at the same time. Each one represents a specific ideological position, and Trumponomics—outside of a basic distrust of trade and fondness for tariffs—is mostly beyond any ideology. The president’s personalist style of politics is optimally designed not to achieve any specific policy outcome but rather to achieve the vanquishing of a counterparty. Tariffs, insults, threats, and Truth Social posts perform a similar function: They create leverage that Trump can use to claim victory, tribute, or both.

Trump’s personalist style of politics thrusts America back to the late 19th century and the Gilded Age, when corruption was so rampant that it was broadly considered the cost of doing business. The intercontinental railroads depended on insider trading and stock manipulation, as the historian Richard White has said. Andrew Carnegie illegally supplied information to politicians in exchange for their protection of his steel monopoly. The big industrialists in rail, oil, and steel would promise congressmen and senators jobs after leaving office if they did the companies’ bidding.

[Annie Lowrey: Trump is a degrowther]

Corruption oozes out of this White House as well. In his first six months in office, Trump accepted a luxury jet as a gift from Qatar and solicited family-business investments from several Arab states; countries around the world are now racing to build Trump golf courses and towers in a rather transparent bid for his approval. When a crypto mogul under fraud investigation bought $75 million in Trump-backed tokens, the SEC paused his civil case, citing the “public’s interest.”

I can imagine a Trump supporter who has somehow made it this far into the essay thinking: You just don’t get it. The Chinese are eating our lunch. They’re not just catching up on AI. They make two-thirds of the world’s electric vehicles, more than three-quarters of its electric batteries, 80 percent of its consumer drones, and 90 percent of its solar panels. They make 13 times more steel than the U.S. and build naval ships several orders of magnitude faster than we do. We need a big, rude state-capitalist authoritarian to stand up to the state-capitalist authoritarian that is China.

My response to this is: Okay, maybe, but show me any evidence that, given the choice between helping the U.S. against China or helping himself, Trump will actually choose the former? In his first term, Trump insisted that Congress force TikTok to sell itself to a non-Chinese company. In fact, I’d agree that the largest news source for Gen Z probably shouldn’t have an intimate legal entanglement with the Chinese Communist Party. Acting under this logic, House Republicans under Biden voted 186–25 to force a TikTok sale. But after meeting with an investor in ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, Trump reversed course and has used his executive power to delay the very TikTok sale that (a) he called for and that (b) Congress has legally mandated.

There is no secret plan to help America sell more stuff. If anything, it is American policy itself that has been put up for sale.

The No. 1 Rule for Understanding Trump

2025-06-03T06:00:00-04:00

A useful one-sentence guide to the second Trump administration might go something like this: A lot happens under Donald Trump, but a lot un-happens, too.

In the past four months, President Trump has announced tariffs on Canada, paused tariffs on Canada, restarted tariffs on Canada, ruled out tariffs on certain Canadian goods, and then ruled in, and even raised, tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.

And that’s just for starters. On April 2, so-called Liberation Day, Trump announced a broader set of tariffs on almost every country in the world. Soon after, the plan was half-suspended. Then Trump announced a new set of elevated tariffs on China, from which he backtracked as well. Next the courts, as often happens, took over the job of erasing the president’s previously announced policies. Last week, a trade court struck down the president’s entire Liberation Day tariff regime as unconstitutional, only for a federal circuit court to reinstate the tariffs shortly thereafter. Now a higher court has the opportunity to do the funniest thing: undo the undoing of the undoing of the tariffs, which have been in a permanent state of being undone ever since they were created.

Got all that? No, you most certainly do not, and neither does anybody else. Economists and corporate executives I’ve interviewed to understand future tariff policy have communicated to me a combination of confusion, fury, and resignation. Commentators have noticed the chaos too, of course. Observing how frequently Trump seems to back out of his own brinkmanship, the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong memorably deemed this trend TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out.”

[David A. Graham: The TACO presidency]

Un-happening doesn’t affect just trade and economic policy. In the realm of foreign policy, the Trump administration paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine after the ignominious on-camera spat between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Vice President J. D. Vance. Trump went further, claiming that Ukraine had started the war and that Zelensky was a dictator—raising the prospect that the administration was on the verge of explicitly aligning with Russia. Days later, the administration reversed course and resumed intelligence sharing and security assistance. Trump has since attacked Russian President Vladimir Putin for being “absolutely CRAZY!”

Un-happening also affects media, immigration, science, and education policy. Judges have ruled that the administration improperly froze grant money, inappropriately blocked the Associated Press from the White House press pool, and illegally sought to place sanctions on law firms that have done work, or employed lawyers, that Trump found unsuitable. On immigration, judges have blocked several of the administration’s measures, including its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to remove migrants and its attempt to bar Harvard’s international students. Federal judges have blocked so much of the Trump agenda that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has described the constitutional balance of power as a form of “judicial tyranny.” “I know this is inflammatory,” Vance said in an interview with The New York Times, “but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people.”

The administration’s claims to monarchical power are a real threat to America’s constitutional order. But its executive orders and policy feints are so haphazard and poorly articulated that they amount to a kind of autocratic takeover written in smudge-able crayon: terrifying, cartoonish, and vulnerable to erasure, all at once.

[J. Michael Luttig: The end of rule of law in America]

This is not to say that Americans should ignore Trump’s efforts to make confetti of the Constitution. Rather, when evaluating any one Trump policy, one has to keep front of mind the possibility that it simply won’t exist by the end of the week. Despite an energetic effort by some right-wing intellectuals to make Trump out to be some kind of 14-dimensional-chess player, his approach doesn’t resemble chess so much as a denial-of-service attack on a functioning government.

All this un-happening shows both the upside and the downside of Trump’s political instincts. The president’s slippery relationship to his own policy agenda can serve as a kind of superpower, as Ross Douthat wrote in The New York Times. The TACO reputation is “crucial to Trump’s political resilience,” because “the willingness to swerve and backpedal and contradict himself is a big part of what keeps the president viable.” The constant backtracking gives Trump the ability to both bend the Constitution to its breaking point and always step back to claim that “anything extreme is also provisional,” Douthat wrote. Indeed, Trump’s approval rating for trade has rebounded since its Liberation Day implosion, according to several polls.

Questions of popularity aside, however, businesses tend to prefer certainty over promises and threats that keep disappearing. At some point, Trump’s pledge to reinvigorate American industry and energy will require fat investments in factories and supply chains. Multi-hundred-million-dollar investments require clear expectations of financial return. Those aren’t going to happen in a world where each policy idea boasts a half-life of 48 hours. Steve Bannon coined one of the most famous Trump-world truisms when he revealed MAGA’s media strategy to “flood the zone with shit.” Far stranger, however, is the administration’s insistence on flooding the policy zone with Schrödinger’s cats—executive orders and Truth Social posts that exist in a liminal state among existence, nonexistence, and imminent radioactive decay.

The substantive problem with the MAGA agenda isn’t just that too much is happening for any median voter to follow; it’s that too much is un-happening for employers, investors, and consumers to know what the hell to do about it.

The Disturbing Rise of MAGA Maoism

2025-05-08T07:00:00-04:00

China may well come to dominate the next century—because President Donald Trump is taking a page from the most famous Chinese leader of the previous one.

The United States remains the world’s preeminent soft power. It’s a financial and cultural juggernaut, whose entertainment and celebrities bestride the planet. But as an industrial power, the U.S. is not so much at risk of falling behind as it is objectively behind already. A recent essay in the journal Foreign Affairs by Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell, both China experts who served in the Biden administration, made the case with alarming specificity. China makes 20 times more cement and 13 times more steel than the U.S. It makes more than two-thirds of the world’s electric vehicles, more than three-quarters of its electric batteries, 80 percent of its consumer drones, and 90 percent of its solar panels. China’s shipbuilding capacity is several orders of magnitude larger than America’s, and its navy will be 50 percent larger than the U.S. Navy by 2030.

The Trump administration clearly recognizes the need to rebuild industrial capacity. In its executive order published on “Liberation Day,” the White House suggested that, without high tariffs, America’s “defense-industrial base” is too “dependent on foreign adversaries”—a clear allusion to China.

But Trump’s approach to countering China has been so scattershot, so inept, so face-smackingly absurd, that it sometimes seems like covert policy to destroy America’s reputation. Rather than build a global trading and supply-chain alliance to match the scale of China, we’ve threatened to invade Canada and slapped new tariffs on our European and East Asian allies. Rather than invest in scientific discovery, which is the basis of our technological supremacy, the administration threatens to decimate the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation while attacking major research universities, including Harvard and Columbia. Rather than compete on clean energy, the White House has targeted solar and wind subsidies for destruction. Rather than invest in nuclear power by expanding the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which provides billion-dollar loan guarantees for nuclear projects, the administration dismissed 60 percent of its staff. Rather than secure our reputation as the world’s premier destination for global talent, we’re driving away foreign students.

“If you take every asymmetric American advantage”—our universities, our science, our reputation for attracting the world’s smartest young people—“we’re going after each of them in a fit of cultural Maoism,” Doshi told me last week. Mao Zedong, who led China’s one-party state after World War II, oversaw a fraught and fatal attempt to industrialize the country, known as the Great Leap Forward. His regime was infamous for its cult of personality and its purging of ideological enemies, not to mention millions of deaths from starvation.

Doshi does not think that Trump will starve millions of Americans to death (nor do I). But he does see Trump’s second term featuring a “cult of personality,” he told me, which may not quite be Maoist but does feel Mao-ish. The first 100 days of this administration were “defined by the relentless targeting of individuals and organizations for their heretical views and purges within the administration for those deemed insufficiently loyal. And its destination is the destruction of state capacity and leading institutions as fervor and zeal overwhelm any prudence and planning.”

Doshi isn’t the only one making this analogy. Several weeks ago, the writer Rotimi Adeoye identified what he called “MAGA Maoism” in The Washington Post. Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he said, the Trumpist right seems obsessed with scrubbing any vestige of progressive thought from government libraries and government-funded museums. As The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has written, the White House has yanked books by Black, female, and Jewish authors from the Naval Academy (while leaving Mein Kampf in place), accused the National Museum of African American History and Culture of spreading “improper ideology,” and urged the National Park Service to rewrite its history of the Underground Railroad.

[Clint Smith: What it means to tell the truth about America]

Another eerie echo of Mao has been MAGA’s glorification of strong men doing strong things and its dreams of sending the liberal elites to the factories and the fields to teach them a lesson. In a commencement address at the University of Alabama, Trump encouraged business majors “to apply your great skills that you’ve learned … to forging the steel and pouring the concrete of new American factories, plants, shipyards, and even cities.” As the journalist Michael Moynihan observed, this sounded curiously like Mao’s suggestion in 1957 that “the intellectuals”—including “writers, artists, teachers, and scientific-research workers”—should “seize every opportunity to get close to the workers and peasants,” even if it meant living in rural China for several years to work as “technicians in factories” or “technical personnel in agriculture.”

For years, both major parties have looked to China with envy. How can they make so much, so quickly, while we struggle to build sufficient housing in major cities—much less advanced electronics, computer chips, robots, and ships? Under Trump, China envy has taken a strange turn. Rather than compete, we seem to be ceding the future to China while emulating its past—casually gutting the government’s ability to support science and key technologies while hunting down wrongthink with the same ferocity that Trump supporters once despised among progressives.

In the past week, the Mao vibes have gotten especially weird. In the 1950s and ’60s, Mao demanded that ordinary Chinese families sacrifice for the general good—for example, by melting their kitchen utensils and other metallic items to increase national steel production. (This mostly produced a lot of useless pig iron.) Trump, for his part, has become fixated on new methods of economic sacrifice. “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally,” he said, in defense of his tariffs’ likely effect of obliterating the toy business. Going further, he told NBC that students “don’t need to have 250 pencils, they can have five.” Just over 100 days into this term, what the Trump supporter Bill Ackman called “the most pro-growth, pro-business administration” in modern history is defending the rationing of Elsa dolls and No. 2 pencils.

Trump’s administration is still young, and it has an uncanny ability to pack each week with a year’s worth of news. Optimistically, there are many more weeks for Trump’s economic and cultural policy to get better. Realistically, there is plenty of time for both to get worse. By driving away talented immigrants, by targeting our most successful universities, by torching our trading alliances, by dismantling our industrial policy, by slashing our scientific funding, and by hurting America’s reputation around the world at the precise moment that we need global scale to build a secure counterpart to China’s industrial dominance, Trump has responded to the threat of China by mimicking the ghost of its past.

When I asked the Foreign Affairs co-author Kurt Campbell for his assessment of Trump, he told me that he has had alarming conversations with analysts in China. “Some of them will candidly say, ‘You know, we had our timetables for how we might come at you … for how we might pull [you] away [from] your allies,’” Campbell said. “‘And what you’re doing in three or four months exceeds what we would have hoped to do in five or 10 years.’” The ultimate accomplishment of American Maoism would be this: Our great leap backward would give China the global preeminence that Mao himself failed to achieve on his own.

Something Alarming Is Happening to the Job Market

2025-04-30T06:00:00-04:00

Something strange, and potentially alarming, is happening to the job market for young, educated workers.

According to the New York Federal Reserve, labor conditions for recent college graduates have “deteriorated noticeably” in the past few months, and the unemployment rate now stands at an unusually high 5.8 percent. Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work. Meanwhile, law-school applications are surging—an ominous echo of when young people used graduate school to bunker down during the great financial crisis.

What’s going on? I see three plausible explanations, and each might be a little bit true.

The first theory is that the labor market for young people never fully recovered from the coronavirus pandemic—or even, arguably, from the Great Recession. “Young people are having a harder time finding a job than they used to, and it’s been going on for a while, at least 10 years,” David Deming, an economist at Harvard, told me. The Great Recession led not only to mass layoffs but also to hiring freezes at many employers, and caused particular hardships for young people. After unemployment peaked in 2009, the labor market took time to heal, improving slowly until the pandemic shattered that progress. And just when a tech boom seemed around the corner, inflation roared back, leading the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates and cool demand across the economy. White-collar industries—especially technology—were among the hardest hit. The number of job openings in software development and IT operations plunged. The share of jobs posted on Indeed in software programming has declined by more than 50 percent since 2022. For new grads hoping to start a career in tech, consulting, or finance, the market simply isn’t that strong.

[Read: ]The job market is frozen

A second theory points to a deeper, more structural shift: College doesn’t confer the same labor advantages that it did 15 years ago. According to research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve, 2010 marked a turning point, when the lifetime-earnings gap between college grads and high-school graduates stopped widening. At the same time, the share of online job postings seeking workers with a college degree has declined.

To be clear: College still pays off, on average. The college wage premium was never going to rise forever, and the fact that non-college workers have done a little better since 2010 isn’t bad news; it’s actually great news for less educated workers. But the upshot is a labor market where the return on investment for college is more uncertain.

The third theory is that the relatively weak labor market for college grads could be an early sign that artificial intelligence is starting to transform the economy.

“When you think from first principles about what generative AI can do, and what jobs it can replace, it’s the kind of things that young college grads have done” in white-collar firms, Deming told me. “They read and synthesize information and data. They produce reports and presentations.”

Consider, then, a novel economic indicator: the recent-grad gap. It’s the difference between the unemployment of young college graduates and the overall labor force. Going back four decades, young college graduates almost always have a lower—sometimes much lower—unemployment rate than the overall economy, because they are relatively cheap labor and have just spent four years marinating in a (theoretically) enriching environment.

But last month’s recent-grad gap hit an all-time low. That is, today’s college graduates are entering an economy that is relatively worse for young college grads than any month on record, going back at least four decades.

The Atlantic

The strong interpretation of this graph is that it’s exactly what one would expect to see if firms replaced young workers with machines. As law firms leaned on AI for more paralegal work, and consulting firms realized that five 22-year-olds with ChatGPT could do the work of 20 recent grads, and tech firms turned over their software programming to a handful of superstars working with AI co-pilots, the entry level of America’s white-collar economy would contract. The chaotic Trump economy could make things worse. Recessions can accelerate technological change, as firms use the downturn to cut less efficient workers and squeeze productivity from whatever technology is available. And even if employers aren’t directly substituting AI for human workers, high spending on AI infrastructure may be crowding out spending on new hires.

Luckily for humans, though, skepticism of the strong interpretation is warranted. For one thing, supercharged productivity growth, which an intelligence explosion would likely produce, is hard to find in the data. For another, a New York Fed survey of firms released last year found that AI was having a negligible effect on hiring. Karin Kimbrough, the chief economist at LinkedIn, told me she’s not seeing clear evidence of job displacement due to AI just yet. Instead, she said, today’s grads are entering an uncertain economy where some businesses are so focused on tomorrow’s profit margin that they’re less willing to hire large numbers of entry-level workers, who “often take time to learn on the job.”

No matter the interpretation, the labor market for young grads is flashing a yellow light. It could be the signal of short-term economic drag, or medium-term changes to the value of the college degree, or long-term changes to the relationship between people and AI. This is a number to watch.

A Trade War With China Is a Very Bad Idea

2025-04-18T06:00:00-04:00

Like land wars in Asia, trade wars with China are, generally speaking, unadvisable. But if, for whatever reason, you were insistent on the idea, you’d want to follow two rules.

First, find strength in numbers. China is an industrial juggernaut with more than 1 billion citizens. The U.S. is a finance-and-tech giant with fewer than 400 million people. To maximize success, the U.S. would have to assemble an Avengers team of trading partners across North America, Europe, and Asia. This would help keep our supply chains resilient if China cut off access to important products and materials, such as smartphone parts and processed lithium. What’s more, this so-called friend-shoring approach would squeeze China and hurt its ability to find alternative export markets, making retaliation less likely.

Second, clarity is king. Reindustrialization—that is, building more factories and plants to make essential machines for AI, computing, energy, and national security—is expensive. To maximize domestic financing and even foreign investment, we’d want investors to understand that the tax and tariff rates we announce one Tuesday will hold up until the Tuesday after that, and the Tuesday after that, and even hundreds of Tuesdays stretching into the future. Nobody is going to break ground on a factory in Iowa based on a policy that they expect to disappear next Wednesday.

I would not say the White House is “violating” these two rules. More precisely, I would say it is lighting the rules on fire and throwing the burning pages into the sky like confetti. Rather than deepen our relationships with overseas allies and Canada, we’ve announced high tariffs on the former and hinted at plans to subsume the latter. Rather than clearly laying out a tariff plan for the world, the administration has made a habit of announcing, then un-announcing, then re-announcing trade policies, like an older brother pretending to give candy to his sibling and yanking it away every five seconds.

[William J. Bernstein: No one wins a trade war]

As far as I can tell, this is the state of America’s trade war with China. In February, the Trump administration imposed a 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods. In March, the new tariff was raised to 20 percent. In April, it rose again to 145 percent. After a few days, the administration clarified that many electronics parts made in China would be exempt from these new tariffs. A few hours later, it flop-flipped on the flip-flop and declared that no, actually, new tariffs on electronics were on the way, except nobody could say what those numbers would be (or how many times they, too, would be revised).

This much seems clear: The Trump administration is executing its trade war with China with the same care and thoughtfulness with which it accidentally cut the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Security Administration, mistakenly offered buyouts to mission-critical workers in the Veterans Affairs office, and proposed sudden cuts to customer-service employees at the Social Security Administration. That is to say: with very little care and even less thoughtfulness.

But unlike firing and unfiring a VA worker, which can happen in a matter of hours, unwinding the trade war with China seems unlikely to be a day’s work. China has responded to escalating tariffs by restricting exports on several metals that are processed almost exclusively in China. It has suspended exports of crucial materials used by America’s top manufacturers of cars, airplanes, military equipment, and computers.

This is bad, bad news. “For certain product categories— smartphones, laptops, toys, lithium-ion batteries—it’s difficult to see how we quickly decouple from China, because China accounts for such a large share of our imports in those categories,” Jason Miller, a professor at Michigan State University and an expert on supply-chain management, told me.

I called Miller because I wanted to understand something very straightforward: For what products do we most depend on China, and for what products does China most depend on us?

[David Frum: How Trump lost his trade war]

According to Miller’s data, America’s deepest dependencies fit into two buckets. The first is typical family products. As a share of all U.S. imports, China accounts for 99 percent of child safety seats with detachable hard shells, 96 percent of pet toys, 95 percent of cooking appliances, 93 percent of children’s coloring books, 88 percent of microwave ovens, and more than 70 percent of toys for children under 12. Altogether, these imports amount to many billions of dollars of annual spending. “These items simply will not be available or they’re going to double in price,” Miller said.

The pain of a trade war over toys would not be trivial. The toy-and-hobby industry supports about 400,000 to 600,000 jobs in the U.S., mostly in warehousing and retail. But more than 80 percent of toys are still made in China, because of the country’s ability to combine a wide range of industrial functions—textile production, plastic molding, electronic manufacturing, and safety testing—all at scale. “I think what the American consumer will discover very quickly is how dependent we are on China for a lot of these items,” Miller said.

The second category of Chinese dominance is in metals and electronics, which are imperative for U.S. manufacturing and energy. China is the world leader in smartphone production. The country accounts for 50 percent or more of global processing for lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese, which are necessary for manufacturing batteries and other electronics. If China tightens its export controls, the U.S. could quickly see surging prices for batteries and grid storage, which would raise energy prices and significantly drive up the cost of electric vehicles.

America exports more than $100 billion worth of goods to China as well. This makes China somewhat dependent on America, but it also makes some U.S. industries dependent on China. As a share of global exports, China buys 89 percent of America’s grain sorghum and 52 percent of its soybeans. It buys more than 70 percent of our frozen-pig-organ exports and more than 20 percent of our frozen beef. It buys 51 percent of our optical instruments for inspecting and making computer chips and 32 percent of our semiconductor processors.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Trump’s trade war handed China a strategic advantage]

These figures reveal a dangerous asymmetry. Although the U.S. can’t substitute China’s toy and electronics manufacturing—there really isn’t another country that can produce so many toys or phones so efficiently—China would have an easier time shifting its supply chains to make up for a trade war with the U.S. “The Chinese can turn around and buy semiconductor-manufacturing equipment from Japan or Europe,” Miller said. China could import more of its soybeans from countries such as Brazil. Many American farmers would be “wiped out” if billions of dollars of agricultural exports were erased from their books, and would require another round of bailouts. The cost of a trade war isn’t just the export income you sacrifice; it’s the higher spending required to shield Americans from the fallout.

A U.S. trade war with China would be a highly uncertain and chaotic affair. It could scramble global alliances, reshape international supply chains, and damage not only the countries on either end of the war but also the entire planet’s economy. But the U.S. has special reason to fear the outcome. China is a choke point on the global manufacture of some of the world’s most important metals and machines—including the very metals and machines that the U.S. needs in order to rebuild its industrial base.

Trump Is Burning Down the House

2025-04-09T11:15:00-04:00

Imagine this: One day on a walk in your neighborhood, you see several men in construction gear. “What are you guys up to?” you ask. “We’re rebuilding this dilapidated house!” the group’s leader responds. “It used to be beautiful, but the previous owners let it fall into disrepair.”

Admittedly, the home has been an eyesore for years. But as you watch the contractors at work, confusion and alarm set in. One guy is hauling furniture out of the living room and setting it on fire in the driveway. Another is smashing windows with a hammer and tossing glass shards into the neighbor’s yard. Yet another is holding an industrial-size hose hooked up to a tank labeled TOXIC WASTE, which he’s aiming ominously at the open front door. As the flames lick higher into the sky, you say to yourself: If these gentlemen think this is what rebuilding a house looks like, I don’t even want to know what they think destroying a house entails.

My allegory is not subtle, nor is it meant to be. Under the banner of attempting to fix the foundation of the U.S. economy, President Donald Trump has unleashed a whirlwind of chaos that could bring down our house.

In the interest of fairness, we should acknowledge the dilapidated structure that is American manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs have declined as a share of the economy in the past 20 years (and plummeted in the 50 years before that). Total U.S. industrial production has been roughly flat since 2007. Ford and GM stocks have barely increased since the 2010s. The U.S. struggles to produce high-tech machines that are crucial to our national security: We can’t build ships, our military arsenal is out-of-date, and we depend on other countries to churn out the most advanced computer chips. And as all of this is happening, China is plowing trillions of dollars into expanding its position as a manufacturing juggernaut.

[Annie Lowery: This economic crisis is very bad and very voluntary]

A policy to grow U.S. manufacturing in areas core to our national interest would be fine. It might involve public subsidies for new manufacturers; a concerted effort to work with friendly trading partners in Europe, Asia, and North America to expand supply chains; and a clearly communicated set of rules to govern trade for the next generation, to encourage billions of dollars of private-sector investment. It might even look a bit like the CHIPS and Science Act. Passed under President Joe Biden, this law authorized hundreds of billions of dollars for the manufacture of high-end computer chips and other science and tech projects that could be central to U.S. national security, including unmanned aerial vehicles, spacecraft, and quantum computing.

The Trump plan, however, manages to achieve the opposite of all of these goals, all at once. Rather than build on the CHIPS and Science Act, Trump has called to destroy it. Rather than build a trade alliance with American allies, he kicked off this whole mess by announcing 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, alongside threats to conquer and annex the latter. Rather than deepen our supply-chain resilience in Europe to build a bulwark against China, he’s slapped tariffs on European countries without consultation or guidance. Rather than increase confidence in financial markets to encourage long-term investment in U.S. manufacturing, he’s unleashed chaos. Nobody from the White House can say what the tariff regime will look like in one day, much less one week, much less one year.

Trump’s policies are burning the very house he intends to save in so many different ways that it’s hard to keep track. Manufacturing firms typically rely on loans and access to credit markets to expand. But “cracks are forming” in loan markets, and “credit markets are paralyzed” because of the Trump tariffs, according to Bloomberg. On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Michigan’s economy seems to be “the first victim of Trump’s trade war.” Auto suppliers in the state are looking at higher prices on parts, including hinges, brackets, and aluminum. “There is no way we can absorb these tariffs,” the chief executive of one supplier said. “The epicenter for job losses due to these tariffs is somewhere between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Canada,” said the chief executive of a Michigan consulting firm that specializes in automotive markets.

[David Frum: Trump has a screw loose about tariffs]

Even if you were convinced that imposing tariffs on imports from every country in the world was a good idea, there is still no defense for the way this policy is being rolled out. The Financial Times reported today that cars and car parts from Mexico and Canada, which are supposed to be exempt from the tariffs, will still be assessed 25 percent duties at the border. This is causing automakers to stop shipments into the U.S., potentially holding up the final assembly of cars. It’s utter madness to suddenly freeze supply chains under the guise of trying to help America’s biggest manufacturers make more stuff.

Every defense of the Trump tariffs seems to be at odds with the actual underlying policy. Some of Trump’s most high-profile defenders, such as the investor and podcaster Chamath Palihapitiya, have claimed that the “singular goal” of the Trump tariffs is to reduce interest rates, which would help the U.S. refinance its debt. “Interest rates hit their low for the year, so I’m expecting mortgage applications to pick up,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Sunday. But this plan doesn’t seem to be working at all. In the days after these comments, the 10-year Treasury yield shot up.

“We are under siege by hostile adversaries trying to erode our manufacturing and defense industrial base and disrupt our financial system,” Stephen Miran, the chair of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, said. But at this moment, the siege is coming from inside the house. Trump’s policies are hurting U.S. manufacturers. They are disrupting the U.S. financial system. Having identified U.S. manufacturing as a worthy renovation job, the president has unleashed a torrent of nonsense that threatens to destroy the very thing he insists on saving. If this is what it looks like when Trump decides he wants to save the economy, God help us if he ever decides to destroy it.

There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs

2025-04-03T16:33:55-04:00

Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump celebrated America’s so-called Liberation Day by announcing a slew of tariffs on dozens of countries. His plan, if fully implemented, will return the United States to the highest tariff duty as a share of the economy since the late 1800s, before the invention of the automobile, aspirin, and the incandescent light bulb. Michael Cembalest, the widely read analyst at JP Morgan Wealth Management, wrote that the White House announcement “borders on twilight zone territory.”

The most fitting analysis for this moment, however, does not come from an economist or a financial researcher. It comes from the screenwriter William Goldman, who pithily captured his industry’s lack of foresight with one of the most famous aphorisms in Hollywood history: “Nobody knows anything.”

You’re not going to find a better three-word summary of the Trump tariffs than that. If there’s anything worse than an economic plan that attempts to revive the 19th-century protectionist U.S. economy, it’s the fact that the people responsible for explaining and implementing it don’t seem to have any idea what they’re doing, or why.

[Rogé Karma: Trump’s tariffs are designed to backfire]

On one side, you have the longtime Trump aide Peter Navarro, who has said that Trump’s tariffs will raise $6 trillion over the next decade, making it the largest tax increase in American history. On another, you have pro-Trump tech folks, such as Palmer Luckey, who have instead claimed that the goal is the opposite: a world of fully free trade, as countries remove their existing trade barriers in the face of the new penalties. On yet another track, there is Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, who has suggested that the tariff salvo is part of a master plan to rebalance America’s relationship with the global economy by reducing the value of the dollar and reviving manufacturing employment in the United States.

These three alleged goals—raising revenue, restoring free trade, and rejiggering the global economy—are incompatible with one another. The first and second explanations are mutually exclusive: The state can’t raise tax revenue in the long run with a levy that is designed to disappear. The second and third explanations are mutually exclusive too: You can’t reindustrialize by doubling down on the global-trade free-for-all that supposedly immiserated the Rust Belt in the first place. Either global free trade is an economic Valhalla worth fighting for, or it’s the cursed political order that we’re trying desperately to destroy.

As for Trump’s alleged devotion to bringing back manufacturing jobs, the administration has attacked the implementation of the CHIPS bill, which invested in the very same high-tech semiconductors that a strategic reindustrialization effort would seek to prioritize. There is no single coherent explanation for the tariffs, only competing hypotheses that violate one another’s internal logic because, when it comes to explaining this economic policy, nobody knows anything.

One might expect clarity from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But even he doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on. The “tariff gun will always be loaded and on the table, but rarely discharged,” he said last year. So much for that. Yesterday, a Bloomberg reporter asked Bessent if the Trump administration has plans to negotiate with America’s trading partners. “We’re just going to have to wait and see,” he said. Was the administration ready to negotiate with the European Union, China, or India? “We’ll see.” Asked why Canada and Mexico were missing from the president’s list of tariffs, he switched it up: “I’m not sure.” Nobody knows anything.

By the numbers, the tariffs are less an expression of economic theory and more a Dadaist art piece about the meaninglessness of expertise. The Trump administration slapped 10 percent tariffs on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which are uninhabited, and on the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose residents are mostly American and British military service members. One of the highest tariff rates, 50 percent, was imposed on the African nation of Lesotho, whose average citizen earns less than $5 a day. Why? Because the administration’s formula for supposedly “reciprocal” tariff rates apparently has nothing to do with tariffs. The Trump team seems to have calculated each penalty by dividing the U.S. trade deficit with a given country by how much the U.S. imports from it and then doing a rough adjustment. Because Lesotho’s citizens are too poor to afford most U.S. exports, while the U.S. imports $237 million in diamonds and other goods from the small landlocked nation, we have reserved close to our highest-possible tariff rate for one of the world’s poorest countries. The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence.

[Read: The good news about Trump’s tariffs]

If the tariffs violate their own internal logic and basic common sense, what are they? Most likely, they represent little more than the all-of-government metastasis of Trump’s personality, which sees grandiosity as a strategy to pull counterparties to the negotiating table and strike deals that benefit Trump’s ego or wallet. This personality style is clear, and it has been clearly stated, even if its application to geopolitics is confounding to observe. “My style of deal-making is pretty simple and straightforward,” Trump writes in The Art of the Deal. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”

One can see this playbook—threat, leverage, concession, repeat—playing out across all of society. It’s happening in trade. It’s happening in law. It’s happening in academia. In the first two months of his second term, Trump has already squeezed enormous concessions out of white-shoe law firms and major universities. Trump appears to care more about the process of gaining leverage over others—including other countries—than he does about any particular effective tariff rate. The endgame here is that there is no endgame, only the infinite game of power and leverage.

Trump’s defenders praise the president for using chaos to shake up broken systems. But they fail to see the downside of uncertainty. Is a textile company really supposed to open a U.S. factory when our trade policy seems likely to change every month as Trump personally negotiates with the entire planet? Are manufacturing firms really supposed to invest in expensive factory expansions when the Liberation Day tariffs caused a global sell-off that signals an international downturn? Trump’s personality is, and has always been, zero-sum and urgent, craving chaos, but economic growth is positive-sum and long-term-oriented, craving certainty for its largest investments. The scariest thing about the Trump tariffs isn’t the numbers, but the underlying message. We’re all living inside the president’s head, and nobody knows anything.

The Story of the Gilded Age Wasn’t Wealth. It Was Corruption.

2025-04-03T07:00:00-04:00

Is the U.S. in a second Gilded Age? Many in the news media seem to think so: You’ll find the claim in The New Yorker, NPR, Politico, and these pages. The White House, for its part, seems to think that would be a good thing: “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” Donald Trump said days into his second presidential term, a period that covers—that’s right—the Gilded Age. Although the claim was factually lacking, it was politically prophetic. Trump has governed like a late-19th-century president, with his penchant for tariffs, his unusual relationship with a major industrial titan, and his bald-faced corruption.

It’s widely understood that the late 19th century was an age of technological splendor and economic consolidation, and this is true enough. Thomas Scott and Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould dominated the railroads. John D. Rockefeller dominated oil. Andrew Carnegie dominated steel. J. P. Morgan dominated finance. We can see echoes here in the titans of modern industry: Jeff Bezos and the Waltons in commerce; Tim Cook and smartphones; Mark Zuckerberg and our attention; Elon Musk in space.

But some of the most interesting echoes of the Gilded Age involve the government’s relationship to business. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family held talks to pardon a major crypto executive who had pleaded guilty to money laundering. In exchange, they would secure a stake in his company, Binance. Similarly, in the late 19th century, which was an era of unusual grift, a range of public servants—from White House Cabinet members to local deputy sheriffs—were unembarrassed about skimming fees and taking bribes.

[Read: The specter of American oligarchy]

To understand what made the late 19th century gilded, I spoke with Richard White, the historian and author of The Republic for Which It Stands, a mammoth history of America between the end of the Civil War and the end of the 19th century. This conversation, which originally appeared on the podcast Plain English, has been truncated and edited.

Derek Thompson: The driving of the golden spike at Promontory Point in 1869 marked the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The Gilded Age begins just after and extends into the early 1900s. How did the transcontinental rail system set the stage for the Gilded Age?

Richard White: At the end of the Civil War, the United States was a country of vast ambitions and relatively little money. What it wanted to do was build an infrastructure to connect California to the rest of the United States. It didn’t have the money to do that, so it resorted to a series of subsidies and cooperation with private capital. The railroads were the great corporations of the United States at the core of the American economy. But the railroads depended on a system of insider dealing, corruption, and stock manipulation, in which people who accrued great wealth accrued great influence over the course of the United States. This system went on to define the Gilded Age.

Thompson: In the introduction of The Republic for Which It Stands, you write: “The Gilded Age was corrupt and corruption in government and business mattered. Corruption suffused government and the economy.” How?

White: People described each other as “friends.” They weren’t friendly in any colloquial sense that we understand. Friendship in the 19th-century sense was a relationship devoid of any affection in which people pursued common ends by scratching each other’s back. The railroad businessmen were friends with politicians, friends with newspapermen, friends with bankers. It was an age of dishonest cooperation.

Thompson: There are so many incredible characters from this period of American history: Rockefeller, Carnegie, J. P. Morgan. Who was John Rockefeller, and how did his style of cooperation typify this era of corrupt monopoly?

White: Rockefeller created what became the model corporation: Standard Oil. What he wanted to do was to organize a system he saw as too competitive and wildly inefficient. Rockefeller realized that there was just too much oil. He realized that if you were going to get profit, you had to eliminate the number of refineries. So Rockefeller went to the railroads and said, “I will give you all of my oil, but you have to kick back money to me—and don’t do it for my competitors.” Competitors soon found they couldn’t compete with Rockefeller, and so he came in and bought them out. By the 1890s, he was saying, “This is a new age, an age of cooperation.” And what he called cooperation, his opponents called monopoly.

Thompson: The U.S. government protected the monopolies in several ways. Steel tariffs helped Andrew Carnegie build his business, and in exchange Carnegie fed information to politicians. The government also quashed labor when it threatened big businesses in the late 19th century. Why does the state side with the monopolies again and again in this period?

White: Very often, the people in office were corrupt. The big industrialists would tell congressmen and senators: “When this is done, you’re going to serve a term or two, then come to work for us.” Or: “I’ll loan you a few thousand dollars to invest it in this.” Or: “I got a land grant from you, and in return, I’ll use part of the land grant to kick back to you under a fake trustee.” I mean, the industrialist Cosby Huntington wrote a letter to his associates that said: “I just bought 1,000 wheels from Senator Barnum from Connecticut, because he does pretty much what I want.”

Thompson: What was it about the character of government or the rules and customs of the time that you think made the late 19th century so corrupt as far as government goes?

White: The United States was becoming a major industrial country and a continent-spanning country. At the same time, it was incredibly averse to taxes and would not fund its necessary infrastructure and services. So it came to what scholars have called “fee-based governance.” In the 19th century, to get something done, you’d subsidize a corporation to do it, and that’s one source of corruption. The other thing is you take things like collecting the tariffs: Somebody has got to collect it, and that’s why the customs house becomes one of the plum appointments you can get. The head of the customs house in New York City makes more than the president of the United States because he gets to keep a certain amount of the customs he collects. You make sheriffs and deputy marshals tax collectors, and they keep a certain proportion of the taxes. That means that there’s going to be corruption from the post office all the way up to the sheriffs, to the customs houses, to people who are appointed offices. Everywhere in this system is going to get a fee, a bounty, and opportunity, which allows private profit to perform a public service. The result is corruption that is rampant throughout the whole system.

Thompson: One paradox of this era is that it was an astonishing time for material progress and also a decrepit time for human welfare. You write that men and women in this era suffered “the decline of virtually every measure of physical well-being.”

White: By 1880, in the middle of the Gilded Age, if you lived to be 10 years old, you would die at 48, if you’re an American white male, and you would be 5 feet 5 inches tall. You would lead a briefer life and be shorter than your Revolutionary ancestor. And you were one of the lucky ones, because on average, 20 percent of infants would die before age 5. You’re living in an environment where, as America urbanizes, there’s no reliable sewage system. There’s no pure water. There’s no public health.

Thompson: What did the Gilded Age build that’s most worth remembering?

White: It began to build public infrastructure—which allowed Americans to live better and to be in better health—and transportation infrastructure. The United States, unlike Europe, is this single country without tariff barriers between states, which can use the resources of the entire country. Did we do it efficiently? No. But we did it. And in the end, it became the basic source for much of the growth that followed.

[Read: The other fear of the founders]

The other thing we started to do, at Edison’s lab and at the Gilded Age universities, is build a way to create useful knowledge. We’d always been a nation of tinkerers and inventors, but then we began to systematize it for the public good. The final thing, and it’s not so popular anymore, is we begin to create a set of experts and expert organizations, which begin to take that kind of knowledge and to put it to public use.

Thompson: How did the excesses of the Gilded Age set the stage for the next era of American history and government, which was the Progressive era?

White: I think that the best way to understand the Progressive era is that the Progressives saw society as a machine. You don’t let a machine evolve. You design a machine. When a machine breaks down, you repair the machine. When you can get a better machine, you build a better machine. So Progressives begin to think civil society is something which is going to have to be managed all the time.

The great advantage of Progressivism is what it did in terms of distribution and equity. But the major drawback of Progressivism, which we struggle with still today, is that in essence, it becomes undemocratic. There’s tension in a democracy between rule of experts and having a country which ostensibly is under the control of people through their votes and setting the goals. That tension appears in the Progressive era, and it has never, ever gone away.

The Political Fight of the Century

2025-03-18T07:00:00-04:00

Donald Trump has promised a “golden age of America.” But for all his bluster about being the champion of an American century, Trump’s actual policies point to something different: not an expansive vision of the future, but a shrunken vision of the present.

Throughout the opening months of his administration, the Trump White House has consistently pointed to existing shortages to demand new sacrifices. The administration says America cannot afford its debt, and therefore we cannot afford health care for the poor. The administration says America doesn’t have a healthy economy, and therefore we have to accept economic “hardship.” The administration says America doesn’t have enough manufacturing, and so we must suffer the consequences of less trade. The administration says America doesn’t have enough housing, and so we need fewer immigrants. The administration says American scientists aren’t focused on the right research, and so we have to gut our federal science programs. Again and again, Americans are being fed the line that everything that we don’t have requires the elimination of something that we need.

This essay has been excerpted from Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s new book, Abundance

The MAGA movement might try to justify its wrecking-ball style by arguing that its extreme approach is commensurate with the level of anger that voters feel about the status quo. But just because Trump is a product of American rage does not mean he is a solution to it.

In housing, for example, Americans have every right to be furious. Home construction has lagged behind our national needs for decades. Today, the median age of first-time homebuyers has surged to a record high of 38. Large declines in young homeownership have likely prevented many young people from dating, marrying, and starting a family. Although Trump was swept into office on a wave of economic frustration, his initial foray into economic policy has done little to help the situation. As the National Association of Home Builders pointed out in an alarmed March 7 memo, his persistent threat of tariffs on Mexico and Canada could drive up the cost of crucial materials, such as softwood lumber and drywall gypsum, which are “largely sourced from Canada and Mexico, respectively.” Meanwhile, Trump’s anti-immigrant policies foretell new labor shortages in the construction industry, where roughly 25 percent or more workers are foreign-born.

This is where Democrats should be able to stand up and show that they have a winning response to the less-is-less politics from the right. But in many places run by Democrats, the solution on offer is another variety of scarcity. Blue cities are laden with rules and litigation procedures that block new housing and transit construction. As my colleague Yoni Appelbaum has noted, in California cities where the share of progressives votes goes up by 10 points, the number of housing permits issued declines by 30 percent. Where the supply of homes is constricted, housing prices soar, and homelessness rises. As of 2023, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness were New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington—all run by Democrats.

[From the March 2025 issue: How progressives froze the American dream]

As the cost of living rises in blue states, tens of thousands of families are leaving them. But the left isn’t just losing people. It’s losing an argument. It has become a coalition of Kindness Is Everything signs in front yards zoned for single-family homes. Liberals say they want to save the planet from climate change, but in practice, many liberal areas have shut down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protested solar-power projects, leaving it to red states such as Texas to lead the nation in renewable-energy generation. Democrats cannot afford to become the party of language over outcomes, of ever more lawn signs and ever fewer working-class families.

If Trump’s opponents are going to win at the polls, they will need to construct a new political movement, one that aims for abundance instead of scarcity. Such a movement would combine the progressive virtue of care for the working class and a traditionally conservative celebration of national greatness, while taking a page from the libertarian obsession with eliminating harmful regulations to make the most important markets work better. It would braid a negative critique of Trump’s attack on the government with a positive vision of actual good governance in America—while providing a rigorous focus on removing the bottlenecks that stand in the way.

Abundance begins with specific goals for America’s future. Imagine much more housing where it’s most in demand. An economy powered by plentiful clean energy. A revitalized national science policy prioritizing high-risk discoveries that extend lives and improve health. And a national invention agenda that seeks to pull forward technologies in transportation, medicine, energy, and beyond that would improve people’s lives.

Sometimes what stand in the way of abundance are special interests, powerful incumbents, and conservatives. Oil and gas companies have at times thwarted the rise of renewable energy. The MAGA faithful seem to care much more about protecting their own than the rule of law and redirecting income into their own pockets rather than redistributing it to the poor.

But if Democrats want to understand why they’re failing to achieve their goals in the places they control, they need to concede that the faulty party also lives in the mirror. Look at California. Its most populous cities are run by Democrats. Every statewide elected official in California is a Democrat. Liberals should be able to say: “Vote for Democrats, and we’ll turn America into California!” Instead, with the state’s infamously high cost of living and stark homelessness crisis, it is conservatives who can say: “Vote for Democrats, and they’ll turn America into California.” Liberal governance should be an advertisement for itself, not for its opposition.

Saying for sure what has gone wrong is difficult, because so much has clearly gone wrong. But undoubtedly the character of liberalism has changed in the past few decades. New Deal liberalism believed in building. After the industrial explosion of World War II, the war machine was transformed into a peacetime growth machine. The construction of houses, energy, roads, bridges, and infrastructure boomed. Then came the backlash; the growth machine became an anti-growth machine. Environmental laws arose in the 1960s and ’70s that both helped counteract the real problem of pollution and created new problems for anybody who wanted to alter the physical world. New legal norms and court decisions made it easier and more common for citizens to sue to block the state. As the historian Paul Sabin argued in his book Public Citizens, the result was a liberalism that regarded government not as a partner in the solution of societal problems but rather as the source of those very problems. "It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again," Sabin wrote.

I can imagine somebody opposed to the MAGA movement reading all of this and thinking: Why, at a time when Trump presents such a clear threat to the American project, is it appropriate to focus such criticism on the Democratic side?

First, to make the argument for a liberal alternative to Trumpism, Democrats have to show Americans that voting for liberals actually works. Often, to be sure, it works beautifully. The cliché of the “tax-and-spend liberal” belies the good that taxing and spending can do. Social programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public education, and housing vouchers are essential parts of a modern state, and they require, yes, taxes on the wealthy. But people on the left are sometimes so fixated on spending money that they lose sight of what that spending does in the world. In 2008, California approved $33 billion for a high-speed rail system that has lingered in construction purgatory for more than a decade. San Francisco’s procedural kludge somehow drove up the cost of a public toilet to $1.7 million. New York City’s archaic laws have combined with modern complacency to make the Long Island Rail Road home to the world’s most expensive mile of underground track. Chicago’s mayor recently bragged that his city “invested $11 billion in contracting to build 10,000 more units to offer affordable housing”—that is, $1.1 million per affordable unit. The Biden White House passed “the biggest infrastructure bill in generations”—but states found using the money so onerous that billions of dollars in broadband expansion were simply never spent. If Democrats want to represent the coalition that believes in government, they have to guarantee that government can actually build what it intends to.

Second, Americans are furious about the status quo—the youngest voters are “more jaded than ever about the state of American leadership,” according to the Harvard Political Review—and liberals need a new style of politics for the age of anti-establishment anger. The right’s answer to rage is chaos in search of an agenda. MAGA acts like a drunk toddler with a chain saw, carelessly slashing through state programs with a high risk of self-harm. But Democrats should not allow the forces of negative polarization to turn them into the party that reflexively defends the status quo at every turn, even when it means refusing to reform institutions that have lost the public’s trust. Quite the opposite: Abundance should be a movement of proud, active, and even obsessive institutional renewal.

Consider U.S. science policy, an area that is under attack from the right at this moment. As the centerpiece of U.S. biomedical funding, the National Institutes of Health has accomplished extraordinary things; you will have a hard time finding many scientific breakthroughs in the past 50 years—in heart disease, genetics, epidemiology—that were not irrigated by its funding.

[Read: Inside the collapse at the NIH]

But many of the same factors that have infamously plagued our housing and energy markets—paperwork, bureaucratic drift, entrenched incumbent interests—have become fixtures in American science. It is practically a cliché among researchers that the NIH privileges incremental science over the sort of high-risk, high-reward investigations that would likely uncover the most important new truths. Surveys indicate that the typical U.S. researcher spends up to 40 percent of their time preparing grant proposals and filling out paperwork rather than actually conducting science. As John Doench, the director of research and development in functional genomics at the Broad Institute, told me: “Folks need to understand how broken the system is.”

As the nation’s preeminent scientific institution, the NIH should take a page from science itself and run more experiments to find new ways to encourage researchers to pursue their most promising inquiries. To reduce the paperwork burden, it could run pilots that eliminate major parts of the application process. For some applications, it could replace the existing selection process with a lottery. And then, over years and decades, it would collect data and study the results, and determine if in fact there is a better way to fund science and cure disease.

It is a travesty that the Trump administration has brought biomedical research to the brink of crisis by attempting to freeze grants, fire workers, slash overall funding, and bully universities. But in an age of institutional anger—when, as NBC pollsters recently put it, “we have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism”—liberals cannot allow themselves to be painted as America’s true conservatives, the party that readily and blindly defends a flawed status quo.

The news is full of political strife. But the University of Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle believes that the parties’ subtle agreements about the direction of economic and foreign policy are what really shape American history. He coined the term political order to refer to the “constellation of ideologies, policies, and constituencies that shape American politics in ways that endure beyond the two-, four-, and six-year election cycles.”

Two political orders have defined the past 100 years. Each was forged by an internal crisis and external threat. From the 1930s until the 1960s, the New Deal reigned over American life. It enlarged the government in response to the Great Depression and provided an American reply to the global specter of communism. In the 1970s and ’80s, stagflation converged with the gradual decline of the Soviet Union to make way for the rise of a second era: neoliberalism. For decades, conservatives fought to make government smaller, while progressives such as Ralph Nader found ways to make government weaker by submerging the state in lawsuits. If the New Deal birthed the age of bureaucracy, neoliberalism produced an age of vetocracy. Now we are living with the consequences of both. We have a government that is, oddly, both big and weak.

Today, we seem to be in a rare period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another. This crackup was decades in the making. It started with the Great Recession, which shattered a broad belief in free and unregulated markets. It continued throughout the 2010s, as slow economic recovery fueled public resentment of inequality, and an affordability crisis gathered steam. In 2020, the pandemic obliterated many Americans’ trust in government, or what was left of it. And from 2021 to 2024, inflation brought national attention to the interlocking crises of scarcity, supply, and unaffordability. For years, the boundaries of American politics had felt fixed, even settled. But now they are falling.

“For a political order to triumph, it must have a narrative, a story it tells about the good life,” Gerstle told me. Today’s politics are suffused with pessimism about government because “a way of living sold to us as good and achievable is no longer good, or no longer achievable.” In 2016, the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right revealed how many Americans had stopped believing that the life they had been promised was achievable. What both the socialist left and the populist-authoritarian right understood was that the story that had been told by the establishments of both parties, the story that had kept their movements consigned to the margins, had come to its end.

Political movements succeed when they build a vision of the future that is imbued with the virtues of the past. Franklin D. Roosevelt pitched his expansive view of government as a sentinel for American freedoms: of speech, of worship, from want, from fear. Decades later, Ronald Reagan recast government as freedom’s nemesis rather than its protector. Abundance, too, is about redefining freedom for our own time. It is about the freedom to build in an age of blocking; the freedom to move and live where you want in an age of a stuck working class; the freedom from curable diseases that come from scientific breakthroughs. Trump has defined his second term by demolition and deprivation. America can instead choose abundance.

This essay has been excerpted from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance.

How the British Broke Their Own Economy

2025-03-03T07:00:00-05:00

What’s the matter with the United Kingdom? Great Britain is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, which ushered in an era of energy super-production and launched an epoch of productivity advancements that made many life essentials, such as clothes and food, more affordable. Today, the country suffers from the converse of these achievements: a profound energy shortage and a deep affordability crisis. In February, the Bank of England reported an ongoing productivity slump so mysterious that its own economists “cannot account fully” for it. Real wages have barely grown for 16 years. British politics seems stuck in a cycle of disappointment followed by dramatic promises of growth, followed by yet more disappointment.

A new report, titled “Foundations,” captures the country’s economic malaise in detail. The U.K. desperately needs more houses, more energy, and more transportation infrastructure. “No system can be fixed by people who do not know why it is broken,” write the report’s authors, Sam Bowman, Samuel Hughes, and Ben Southwood. They argue that the source of the country’s woes as well as “the most important economic fact about modern Britain [is] that it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere.” The nation is gripped by laws and customs that make essentials unacceptably scarce and drive up the cost of construction across the board.

Housing is an especially alarming case in point. The homeownership rate for the typical British worker aged 25 to 34 declined by more than half from the 1990s to the 2010s. In that same time, average housing prices more than doubled, even after adjusting for inflation, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

[Read: How the U.K. became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe]

The housing shortage traces back to the postwar period, when a frenzy of nationalization swept the country. The U.K. created the National Health Service, brought hundreds of coal mines under state control, and centralized many of the country’s railways and trucking and electricity providers. In 1947, the U.K. passed the Town and Country Planning Act, which forms the basis of modern housing policy. The TCPA effectively prohibited new development without special permission from the state; “green belts” were established to restrict sprawl into the countryside. Rates of private-home building never returned to their typical prewar levels. With some spikes and troughs, new homes built as a share of the total housing stock have generally declined over the past 60 years.

The TCPA was considered reasonable and even wise at the time. Postwar Britain had been swept up by the theory that nationalization created economies of scale that gave citizens better outcomes than pure capitalism. “There was an idea that if we could rationalize the planning system … then we could build things in the right way—considered, and planned, and environmentally friendly,” Bowman told me.

But the costs of nationalization became clear within a few decades. With more choke points for permitting, construction languished from the 1950s through the ’70s. Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives rolled back nationalization in several areas, such as electricity and gas production. But their efforts to loosen housing policy from the grip of government control was a tremendous failure, especially once it was revealed that Thatcher’s head of housing policy himself opposed new housing developments near his home.

Housing is, as I’ve written, the quantum field of urban policy, touching every station of urban life. Broken housing policies have a ripple effect. In London, Bowman said, the most common options are subsidized flats for the low-income and luxury units for the rich, creating a dearth of middle-class housing. As a result, the city is bifurcated between the über-wealthy and the subsidized poor. “I think housing policy is a major driver of a lot of anti-foreigner, white-supremacist, anti-Black, anti-Muslim attitudes among young people who are frustrated that so-called these people get free houses while they have to live in a bedsit or move somewhere an hour outside the city and commute in,” Bowman said.

[Read: The urban family exodus is a warning for progressives]

Constrictive housing policy in Britain has also arguably prevented other great cities from being born. If the University of Cambridge’s breakthroughs in biotech had happened in the 19th century, Bowman said, the city of Cambridge might have bloomed to accommodate new companies and residents, the same way Glasgow grew by an order of magnitude around shipbuilding in the 1800s. Instead Cambridge remains a small city of fewer than 150,000 people, its potential stymied by rules all but prohibiting its growth.

The story for transit and energy is similar: Rules and attitudes that make it difficult to build things in the world have made life worse for the British. “On a per-mile basis, Britain now faces some of the highest railway costs in the world,” Bowman, Hughes, and Southwood write. “This has led to some profoundly dissatisfying outcomes. Leeds is now the largest city in Europe without a metro system.” Despite Thatcher’s embrace of North Sea gas, and more recent attempts to loosen fracking regulations, Britain’s energy markets are still an omnishambles. Per capita electricity generation in the U.K. is now roughly one-third that of the United States, and energy use per unit of GDP is the lowest in the G7. By these measures, at least, Britain may be the most energy-starved nation in the developed world.

Scarcity is a policy choice. This is as true in energy as it is in housing. In the 1960s, Britain was home to about half of the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors. Today, the U.K. has extraordinarily high nuclear-construction costs compared with Asia, and it’s behind much of Europe in the share of its electricity generated from nuclear power—not only France but also Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Romania.

What happened to British nuclear power? After North Sea oil and gas production ramped up in the 1970s and ’80s, Britain redirected its energy production away from nuclear power. Even this shift has had its own complications. In the past few years, the U.K. has passed several measures to reduce shale-gas extraction, citing earthquake risks, environmental costs, and public opposition. As a result, gas production in the U.K. has declined 70 percent since 2000. Although the country’s renewable-energy market has grown, solar and wind power haven’t increased nearly enough to make up the gap.

The comparison with France makes clear Britain’s policy error: In 2003, very large businesses in both countries paid about the same price for electricity. But by 2024, after decades of self-imposed scarcity and the supply shock of the war in Ukraine, electricity in the U.K. was more than twice as expensive as in France.

There is an inconvenient subcurrent to the U.K.’s scarcity crisis—and ours. Sixty years ago, the environmentalist revolution transformed the way governments, courts, and individuals thought about their relationship to the natural world. This revolution was not only successful but, in many ways, enormously beneficial. In the U.S., the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act brought about exactly that. But over time, American environmental rules, such as those in the National Environmental Policy Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, have been used to stop new housing developments and, ironically, even clean-energy additions. Similarly, in the U.K., any individual who sues to stop a new project on environmental grounds—say, to oppose a new road or airport—generally has their legal damages capped at £5,000, if they lose in court. “Once you’ve done that,” Bowman said, “you’ve created a one-way system, where people have little incentive to not bring spurious cases to challenge any new development.” Last year, Britain’s high-speed-rail initiative was compelled to spend an additional £100 million on a shield to protect bats in the woods of Buckinghamshire. Finding private investment is generally difficult for infrastructure developers when the path to completion is strewn with nine-figure surprise fees.

Some of Britain’s problems echo across the European continent, including slow growth and high energy prices. More than a decade ago, Germany began to phase out nuclear power while failing to ramp up other energy production. The result has been catastrophic for citizens and for the ruling government. In the first half of 2024, Germans paid the highest electricity prices in the European Union. This month, Social Democrats were punished at the polls with their worst defeat since World War II. Bowman offered a droll summary: “Europe has an energy problem; the Anglosphere has a housing problem; Britain has both.”

These problems are obvious to many British politicians. Leaders in the Conservative and Labour Parties often comment on expensive energy and scarce housing. But their goals haven’t been translated into priorities and policies that lead to growth. “Few leaders in the U.K. have thought seriously about the scale of change that we need,” Bowman said. Comprehensive reform is necessary to unlock private investment in housing and energy—including overhauling the TCPA, reducing incentives for anti-growth lawsuits, and directly encouraging nuclear and gas production to build a bridge to a low-carbon-energy economy.

Effective 21st-century governance requires something more than the ability to win elections by decrying the establishment and bemoaning sclerotic institutions. Progress requires a positive vision of the future, a deep understanding of the bottlenecks in the way of building that future, and a plan to add or remove policies to overcome those blockages. In a U.S. context, that might mean making it easier to build advanced semiconductors, or removing bureaucratic kludge for scientists while adding staff at the FDA to accelerate drug approval.

[Read: A simple plan to solve all of America’s problems]

In the U.K., the bottlenecks are all too clear: Decades-old rules make it too easy for the state to block housing developments or for frivolous lawsuits to freeze out energy and infrastructure investment. In their conclusion, Bowman and his co-authors strike a similar tone. “Britain can enjoy such a renewal once more,” they write. “To do so, it need simply remove the barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do.”

DOGE’s Reign of Ineptitude

2025-02-19T12:00:45-05:00

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By reputation, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are builders. Musk has grown two of the largest hardware-innovation companies in the world, Tesla and SpaceX. As for Trump, he once told Golf Digest: “I own buildings. I’m a builder; I know how to build. Nobody can build like I can build.”

But now, united in Washington, the duumvirate of Trump and Musk has made its mark not by building, but by the opposite: demolition.

With the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has claimed for himself an extraordinary amount of power: Serving as the iron fist of the White House, he’s rooting out what he sees as the plague of wokeism in government, halting grants, freezing payments, lighting fires in various departments, and generally firing as many people as he can get away with. On Monday, DOGE claimed to have already saved the government more than $50 billion. Meanwhile, federal judges have ruled that Trump and Musk have violated the law, typically by exceeding the powers of the executive branch and attempting to defund agencies that were initially funded by Congress.

In theory, DOGE exists to promote efficiency. And the need for efficiency is real. The federal government is deeply in debt. Its interest payments now exceed what it spends on defense. Even if the United States had no issue with its debt, it would still be a mitzvah to find ways to make government work better—to take the same tax dollar further, to do one more unit of good. But judging by DOGE’s early returns, the only objective conclusion one can reach about the agency seems to be that it’s out of control. What we’re witnessing in government right now—across the Departments of Energy, Veterans Affairs, Education, and beyond—is not only a bonfire of cruelty but a reign of ineptitude.

[Read: It’s a model of government efficiency, but DOGE wants it gone]

Let’s start with the Department of Energy, which recently faced the brunt of massive DOGE layoffs. Among those who lost their job were dozens of staff members at the National Nuclear Security Administration—scientists, engineers, and safety officials responsible for safeguarding and assembling nuclear warheads. Roughly 100 people were reportedly laid off from the Pantex Plant, in Texas, the most important nuclear-assembly-and-disassembly plant in the country, before they were called back to the office. As Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the nonpartisan Arms Control Association, said: “The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for.”

Next, there’s Veterans Affairs, where the Trump administration offered buyouts to tens of thousands of employees before realizing that, once again, they’d made a mistake. Far from the typical impression some might have of government workers just moving paper around all day, the VA provides health and psychiatric care to millions of U.S. veterans. That means if you offer buyouts to the VA, what you’ll get is a lot of underpaid doctors, nurses, and psychologists taking up offers to leave offices that are already understaffed—which is exactly what happened. Days after the buyout offer, thousands of doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other essential staff got a notice that they were exempt from the offer.

At the Department of Education, which the Trump administration seems to want to destroy, DOGE terminated $1 billion in contracts. But rather than end ideological programs that Musk says he wants to eliminate, these cuts decimated the Institute for Education Sciences, which funds many of the longest-running and most famous studies in education research, including several longitudinal studies on student achievement and school effectiveness. It’s hard to think of a better nonpartisan role for government than data collection. But Musk and his team have gutted some of the best education-data tools we have. Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told The Washington Post: “There’s a lot of bloat in IES. There’s a lot of problems to be solved. These are problems you solve with a scalpel and maybe a hatchet, but not a bulldozer.”

[Read: The government waste DOGE should be cutting]

DOGE’s cuts will go much further. At the FDA, the Trump administration has fired hundreds of employees, including those involved in testing food and medical devices. At the CDC, more cuts have reached the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which pays disease detectives around the world and stops epidemics in other countries before they spread. At the National Institutes of Health, the administration is set to slash personnel and funding in a variety of ways. If you’re a fan of Musk and Trump, your hope is that these cuts will be all fat and no bone. But remember: This is the same administration that, in an attempt to refocus the Department of Energy on nuclear security, initially gutted the division with the words nuclear security in it.

So far, few DOGE actions have received more attention than the agency’s attack on USAID, which is responsible for foreign aid and global-health spending. Musk seems to be on a gleeful and personal mission to destroy USAID, placing most of its employees on leave, closing its headquarters, and moving what’s left of it to the State Department. According to one report, the administration says that it plans to reduce USAID staffers from 10,000 to about 600. As Musk recently posted on X, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

There is irony here. And there is tragedy. The irony is that, when he was a U.S. senator, Marco Rubio was one of the most outspoken defenders of global aid. In February 2017, he called foreign aid “critical to our national security.” In 2019, he said: “Anybody who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us to balance is lying to you.” Today, however, Rubio is in the morally compromising position of overseeing, as secretary of state, the dismantling of the very aid agency he once praised.

[Read: DOGE is failing on its own terms]

The tragedy will be felt at the individual level, with immense human costs. Unless the administration course-corrects and immediately replenishes our global-health grants, there’s just no getting around the fact that a lot of people around the world are going to suffer and die in order to save the typical American taxpayer a negligible sum. The U.S. pays for insecticide sprays in Uganda, for pregnancy services in Zambia, for health-care clinics in the poorest parts of the world. Most notably, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has saved an estimated 25 million lives and prevented more than 5 million babies from being born with HIV. It’s not yet clear whether PEPFAR will be spared or left to wither away. This wrecking-ball approach to reform has astonished even the most famous critics of U.S. aid programs. William Easterly, an economist who has written that much of American aid props up dictators and goes to waste, told The New Yorker that Trump’s USAID-demolition plan is “horrific,” “illegal,” and “undemocratic.”

Musk has hinted, amid rising criticism, that DOGE will simply reverse any measures that go too far. This sounds good in theory. Move fast; cut stuff; add back whatever you miss. But in practice, you can’t just slash 10,000 programs at once and then reinstall them on a one-by-one basis depending on whether the volume of criticism passes some imaginary threshold. Whatever you think of the failures of progressive governance, “mess around and find out” is not a suitable replacement. Unfortunately, it does appear to be the current methodology of the executive branch.

How COVID Pushed a Generation of Young People to the Right

2025-02-18T07:00:00-05:00

For decades, America’s young voters have been deeply—and famously—progressive. In 2008, a youthquake sent Barack Obama to the White House. In 2016, voters ages 18 to 29 broke for Hillary Clinton by 18 points. In 2020, they voted for Joe Biden by 24 points. In 2024, Donald Trump closed most of the gap, losing voters under 30 by a 51–47 margin. In one recent CBS poll, Americans under 30 weren’t just evenly split between the parties. They were even more pro-Trump than Boomers over 65.

Precisely polling teens and 20-somethings is a fraught business; some surveys suggest that Trump’s advantage among young people might already be fading. But young people’s apparent lurch right is not an American-only trend.

“Far-right parties are surging across Europe—and young voters are buying in,” the journalist Hanne Cokelaere wrote for Politico last year. In France, Germany, Finland, and beyond, young voters are swinging their support toward anti-establishment far-right parties “in numbers equal to and even exceeding older voters.” In Germany, a 2024 survey of 2,000 people showed that young people have adopted a relatively new “gloomy outlook” on the future. No surprise, then, that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has become the most popular party among Germans under 30. Like most interesting phenomena, this one even has a German name: Rechtsruck, or rightward shift.

[Read: Why the COVID deniers won]

What’s driving this global Rechtsruck? It’s hard to say for sure. Maybe the entire world is casting a protest vote after several years of inflation. Last year was the largest wipeout for political incumbents in the developed world since the end of the Second World War. One level deeper, it wasn’t inflation on its own, but rather the combination of weak real economic growth and record immigration that tilled the soil for far-right upstarts, who can criticize progressive governments on both sides of the Atlantic for their failure to look out for their own citizens first.

There is another potential driver of the global right turn: the pandemic.

Pandemics might not initially seem to cash out in any particular political direction. After all, in the spring of 2020, one possible implication of the pandemic seemed to be that it would unite people behind a vision of collective sacrifice—or, at least, collective appreciation for health professionals, or for the effect of vaccines to reduce severe illness among adults. But political science suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific authorities. One cross-country analysis published by the Systemic Risk Center at the London School of Economics found that people who experience epidemics between the ages of 18 and 25 have less confidence in their scientific and political leadership. This loss of trust persists for years, even decades, in part because political ideology tends to solidify in a person’s 20s.

The paper certainly matches the survey evidence of young Americans. Young people who cast their first ballot in 2024 were “more jaded than ever about the state of American leadership,” according to the Harvard Political Review. A 2024 analysis of Americans under 30 found the “lowest levels of confidence in most public institutions since the survey began.” In the past decade alone, young Americans’ trust in the president has declined by 60 percent, while their trust in the Supreme Court, Wall Street, and Congress has declined by more than 30 percent.

Another way that COVID may have accelerated young people’s Rechtsruck in America and around the world was by dramatically reducing their physical-world socializing. That led, in turn, to large increases in social-media time that boys and girls spent alone. The Norwegian researcher Ruben B. Mathisen has written that “social media [creates] separate online spheres for men and women.” By trading gender-blended hangouts in basements and restaurants for gender-segregated online spaces, young men’s politics became more distinctly pro-male—and, more to the point, anti-feminist, according to Mathisen. Norwegian boys are more and more drawn to right-wing politics, a phenomenon “driven in large part by a new wave of politically potent anti-feminism,” he wrote. Although Mathisen focused on Nordic youth, he noted that his research built on a body of survey literature showing that “the ideological distance between young men and women has accelerated across several countries.”

[Read: The not-so-woke Generation Z]

These changes may not be durable. But many people’s political preferences solidify when they’re in their teens and 20s; so do other tastes and behaviors, such as musical preferences and even spending habits. Most famously, so-called Depression babies, who grew up in the 1930s, saved more as adults, and there is some evidence that corporate managers born in the ’30s were unusually disinclined to take on loans. Perhaps the 18-to-25-year-old cohort whose youths were thrown into upheaval by COVID will adopt a set of sociopolitical assumptions that form a new sort of ideology that doesn’t quite have a name yet. As The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum has written, many emerging European populist parties now blend vaccine skepticism, “folk magic” mysticism, and deep anti-immigration sentiment. “Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult,” she wrote.

New ideologies are messy to describe and messier still to name. But in a few years, what we’ve grown accustomed to calling Generation Z may reveal itself to contain a subgroup: Generation C, COVID-affected and, for now, strikingly conservative. For this micro-generation of young people in the United States and throughout the West, social media has served as a crucible where several trends have fused together: declining trust in political and scientific authorities, anger about the excesses of feminism and social justice, and a preference for rightward politics.

Why Tom Brady Could Be Worth $375 Million in the Booth

2025-02-09T07:00:00-05:00

Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback in NFL history (for now). He is not the greatest NFL broadcaster of all time (for now). So why is he calling the Super Bowl tonight, and why is Fox Sports paying him $375 million over 10 years—more than any other broadcaster in sports history—as if his excellence in the former job automatically qualifies him for the latter?

By the simplest conventional analysis, Brady’s initial returns make the contract look like a bad bet. His performance in the booth has received mixed reviews, to put things charitably. In a season when NFL ratings have declined overall, they fell more for games on Fox than on CBS, and more people tuned in to CBS on average to watch football than to watch Brady’s late-afternoon slot. In fairness, as Austin Karp at Sports Business Journal pointed out, the games on CBS this year happened to be closer in the fourth quarter, and many people watching Fox might have clicked away because the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Applying any normal ROI analysis to Brady’s contract is difficult for at least four reasons: He is not a normal person, “celebrity sports broadcaster” is not a normal job, the NFL is not a normal industry, and televised football is not a normal business.

For starters, Tom Brady is … uh, Tom Brady. (Yes, this is the high-quality analysis you come to The Atlantic for.) He is the GOAT of quarterbacks by conventional career statistics; he is also the most decorated quarterback in NFL history by championships, a part-owner of an NFL franchise, one of the most famous people in the world, and one of the most annoyingly handsome people alive. If you want somebody with this résumé (or, frankly, even trace elements of this résumé) to commit to working with you for a substantial period of time, you’re going to part with a gargantuan amount of cash.

[Read: How the economists took over the NBA]

Even when they’re not all-time talents with supermodel jawlines, NFL broadcasters are paid like kings. Al Michaels, the legendary play-by-play guy with Amazon, is reportedly paid $15 million annually. So is the nearly-as-legendary Joe Buck, at ESPN. Tony Romo, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback who provides occasionally oracular commentary for CBS, gets closer to $17 million a year. At $37.5 million a year, Brady’s salary seems eye-bleedingly high compared with basically any job, but in the context of other famous commentators, his salary is merely eye-watering.

Nor is Brady just an NFL broadcast personality; he’s a celebrity NFL broadcaster. Celebrity television hosts are mascots, emcees, and gold-plated utility players. For example, Jimmy Kimmel is not only paid handsomely to host a late-night show; he’s also well known within Disney for being the ultimate team player who’s game to schmooze a big advertiser in a pinch or to host the Disney “upfronts,” where the networks show off their upcoming programming to advertisers and media. Fox Sports can theoretically use Brady in a similar way. For their latest IndyCar promotional campaign, Fox taped a short cameo with Brady joking about his jawline. How much marginal ad revenue will the Fox Sports analytics department assign to that one Brady spot? I have no idea, but the very possibility of being able to deploy Tom Frickin’ Brady as a corporate asset is worth an amount of money that exceeds his immediate value as a broadcaster.

There’s another way that Brady’s value to Fox Sports might be greater off-camera than on. Ratings seem more sensitive to the quality of the matchup than to the quality of the commentary from the broadcast booth. At a time when the NFL is trying to expand to streaming—sending Thursday games to Amazon and Christmas games to Netflix—Fox needs every edge it can get to negotiate the best games. Brady, who might be able to leverage his deep connections to the league in a pinch, is the rarest asset. He helps Fox present its broadcast to the league in terms that no other network can match: “We have the GOAT. They don’t.”

[Read: A fake yellow line changed football forever]

Football bestrides American culture like nothing else. It is the last vestige of the defunct 20th-century mainstream and the keystone to the entire multi-hundred-billion-dollar cable bundle. Last year, the NFL accounted for 72 of the 100 most watched television broadcasts. The previous year, football accounted for 93 of the top 100. (Election coverage and an unusually high-profile World Series accounted for almost all of the difference.) Every year, Fox Sports spends about $2 billion for the rights to broadcast NFL games. Tom Brady’s contract is less than 2 percent of that annual licensing fee. Because protecting the relationship with the NFL is worth tens of billions of dollars, an understandable calculation from Fox Sports could be: Does it really make sense to play moneyball with the NFL, or should we just suck it up and pay a 2 percent GOAT tax to guarantee that the most famous person from the most important cultural industry is ours for the next decade, as streaming giants threaten to crash the gates?

Look at it one way, and Tom Brady is paid almost $40 million a year to provide a television service that doesn’t seem to actually drive television viewership. But look at it another way, and you can see Brady as a corporate mascot, a brand-marketing tool, a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency asset, and an affordable “tip” to pay the NFL on top of its licensing deal to secure the best football matchups, which actually do drive viewership.

America’s ‘Marriage Material’ Shortage

2025-02-03T07:00:00-05:00

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Perhaps you’ve heard: Young people aren’t dating anymore. News media and social media are awash in commentary about the decline in youth romance. It’s visible in the corporate data, with dating-app engagement taking a hit. And it’s visible in the survey data, where the share of 12th graders who say they’ve dated has fallen from about 85 percent in the 1980s to less than 50 percent in the early 2020s, with the decline particularly steep in the past few years.

Naturally, young people’s habits are catnip to news commentators. But although I consider the story of declining youth romance important, I don’t find it particularly mysterious. In my essay on the anti-social century, I reported that young people have retreated from all manner of physical-world relationships, whether because of smartphones, over-parenting, or a combination of factors. Compared with previous generations of teens, they have fewer friends, spend significantly less time with the friends they do have, attend fewer parties, and spend much more time alone. Romantic relationships theoretically imply a certain physicality; so it’s easy to imagine that the collapse of physical-world socializing for young people would involve the decline of romance.

[From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social century]

Adults have a way of projecting their anxieties and realities onto their children. In the case of romance, the fixation on young people masks a deeper—and, to me, far more mysterious—phenomenon: What is happening to adult relationships?

American adults are significantly less likely to be married or to live with a partner than they used to be. The national marriage rate is hovering near its all-time low, while the share of women under 65 who aren’t living with a partner has grown steadily since the 1980s. The past decade seems to be the only period since at least the 1970s when women under 35 were more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse.

People’s lives are diverse, and so are their wants and desires and circumstances. It’s hard, and perhaps impossible, to identify a tiny number of factors that explain hundreds of millions of people’s decisions to couple up, split apart, or remain single. But according to Lyman Stone, a researcher at the Institute for Family Studies, the most important reason marriage and coupling are declining in the U.S. is actually quite straightforward: Many young men are falling behind economically.

A marriage or romantic partnership can be many things: friendship, love, sex, someone to gossip with, someone to remind you to take out the trash. But, practically speaking, Stone told me, marriage is also insurance. Women have historically relied on men to act as insurance policies—against the threat of violence, the risk of poverty. To some, this might sound like an old-fashioned, even reactionary, description of marriage, but its logic still applies. “Men’s odds of being in a relationship today are still highly correlated with their income,” Stone said. “Women do not typically invest in long-term relationships with men who have nothing to contribute economically.” In the past few decades, young and especially less educated men’s income has stagnated, even as women have charged into the workforce and seen their college-graduation rates soar. For single non-college-educated men, average inflation-adjusted earnings at age 45 have fallen by nearly 25 percent in the past half century, while for the country as a whole, average real earnings have more than doubled. As a result, “a lot of young men today just don’t look like what women have come to think of as ‘marriage material,’” he said.

In January, the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch published an analysis of the “relationship recession” that lent strong support to Stone’s theory. Contrary to the idea that declining fertility in the U.S. is mostly about happily childless DINKs (dual-income, no-kid couples), “the drop in relationship formation is steepest among the poorest,” he observed. I asked Burn-Murdoch to share his analysis of Current Population Survey data so that I could take a closer look. What I found is that, in the past 40 years, coupling has declined more than twice as fast among Americans without a college degree, compared with college graduates. This represents a dramatic historic inversion. In 1980, Americans ages 25 to 34 without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than college graduates to get married; today, it’s flipped, and the education gap in coupling is widening every year. Marriage produces wealth by pooling two people’s income, but, conversely, wealth also produces marriage.

Contraception technology might also play a role. Before cheap birth control became widespread in the 1970s, sexual activity was generally yoked to commitment: It was a cultural norm for a man to marry a girl if he’d gotten her pregnant, and single parenthood was uncommon. But as the (married!) economists George Akerlof and Janet Yellen observed in a famous 1996 paper, contraception helped disentangle sex and marriage. Couples could sleep together without any implicit promise to stay together. Ultimately, Akerlof and Yellen posit, the availability of contraception, which gave women the tools to control the number and the timing of their kids, decimated the tradition of shotgun marriages, and therefore contributed to an increase in children born to low-income single parents.

The theory that the relationship recession is driven by young men falling behind seems to hold up in the U.S. But what about around the world? Rates of coupling are declining throughout Europe, as well. In England and Wales, the marriage rate for people under 30 has declined by more than 50 percent since 1990.

And it’s not just Europe. The gender researcher Alice Evans has shown that coupling is down just about everywhere. In Iran, annual marriages plummeted by 40 percent in 10 years. Some Islamic authorities blame Western values and social media for the shift. They might have a point. When women are exposed to more Western media, Evans argues, their life expectations expand. Fitted with TikTok and Instagram and other windows into Western culture, young women around the world can seek the independence of a career over the codependency (or, worse, the outright loss of freedom) that might come with marriage in their own country. Social media, a woman veterinarian in Tehran told the Financial Times, also glamorizes the single life “by showing how unmarried people lead carefree and successful lives … People keep comparing their partners to mostly fake idols on social platforms.”

[Read: The happiness trinity]

According to Evans, several trends are driving this global decline in coupling. Smartphones and social media may have narrowed many young people’s lives, pinning them to their couches and bedrooms. But they’ve also opened women’s minds to the possibility of professional and personal development. When men fail to support their dreams, relationships fail to flourish, and the sexes drift apart.

If I had to sum up this big messy story in a sentence, it would be this: Coupling is declining around the world, as women’s expectations rise and lower-income men’s fortunes fall; this combination is subverting the traditional role of straight marriage, in which men are seen as necessary for the economic insurance of their family.

So why does all this matter? Two of the more urgent sociological narratives of this moment are declining fertility and rising unhappiness. The relationship recession makes contact with both. First, marriage and fertility are tightly interconnected. Unsurprisingly, one of the strongest predictors of declining fertility around the world is declining coupling rates, as Burn-Murdoch has written. Second, marriage is strongly associated with happiness. According to General Social Survey data, Americans’ self-described life satisfaction has been decreasing for decades. In a 2023 analysis of the GSS data, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman concluded that marriage was more correlated with this measure of happiness than any other variable he considered, including income. (As Stone would rush to point out here, marriage itself is correlated with income.)

The social crisis of our time is not just that Americans are more socially isolated than ever, but also that social isolation is rising alongside romantic isolation, as the economic and cultural trajectories of men and women move in opposite directions. And, perhaps most troubling, the Americans with the least financial wealth also seem to have the least “social wealth,” so to speak. It is the poor, who might especially need the support of friends and partners, who have the fewest close friends and the fewest long-term partners. Money might not buy happiness, but it can buy the things that buy happiness.

Is Moderate Drinking Okay?

2025-01-16T07:00:00-05:00

Here’s a simple question: Is moderate drinking okay?

Like millions of Americans, I look forward to a glass of wine—sure, occasionally two—while cooking or eating dinner. I strongly believe that an ice-cold pilsner on a hot summer day is, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, suggestive evidence that a divine spirit exists and gets a kick out of seeing us buzzed.

But, like most people, I understand that booze isn’t medicine. I don’t consider a bottle of California cabernet to be the equivalent of a liquid statin. Drinking to excess is dangerous for our bodies and those around us. Having more than three or four drinks a night is strongly related to a host of diseases, including liver cirrhosis, and alcohol addiction is a scourge for those genetically predisposed to dependency.

If the evidence against heavy drinking is clear, the research on my wine-with-dinner habit is a wasteland of confusion and contradiction. This month, the U.S. surgeon general published a new recommendation that all alcohol come with a warning label indicating it increases the risk of cancer. Around the same time, a meta-analysis published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that moderate alcohol drinking is associated with a longer life. Many scientists scoffed at both of these headlines, claiming that the underlying studies are so flawed that to derive strong conclusions from them would be like trying to make a fine wine out of a bunch of supermarket grapes.

I’ve spent the past few weeks poring over studies, meta-analyses, and commentaries. I’ve crashed my web browser with an oversupply of research-paper tabs. I’ve spoken with researchers and then consulted with other scientists who disagreed with those researchers. And I’ve reached two conclusions. First, my seemingly simple question about moderate drinking may not have a simple answer. Second, I’m not making any plans to give up my nightly glass of wine.

Alcohol ambivalence has been with us for almost as long as alcohol. The notion that booze is enjoyable in small doses and hellish in excess was captured well by Eubulus, a Greek comic poet of the fourth century B.C.E., who wrote that although two bowls of wine brought “love and pleasure,” five led to “shouting,” nine led to “bile,” and 10 produced outright “madness, in that it makes people throw things.”

In the late 20th century, however, conventional wisdom lurched strongly toward the idea that moderate drinking was healthy, especially when the beverage of choice was red wine. In 1991, Morley Safer, a correspondent for CBS, recorded a segment of 60 Minutes titled “The French Paradox,” in which he pointed out that the French filled their stomachs with meat, oil, butter, and other sources of fat, yet managed to live long lives with lower rates of cardiovascular disease than their Northern European peers. “The answer to the riddle, the explanation of the paradox, may lie in this inviting glass” of red wine, Safer told viewers. Following the report, demand for red wine in the U.S. surged.

[Read: America has a drinking problem]

The notion that a glass of red wine every night is akin to medicine wasn’t just embraced by a gullible news media. It was assumed as a matter of scientific fact by many researchers. “The evidence amassed is sufficient to bracket skeptics of alcohol’s protective effects with the doubters of manned lunar landings and members of the flat-Earth society,” the behavioral psychologist and health researcher Tim Stockwell wrote in 2000.

Today, however, Stockwell is himself a flat-earther, so to speak. In the past 25 years, he has spent, he told me, “thousands and thousands of hours” reevaluating studies on alcohol and health. And now he’s convinced, as many other scientists are, that the supposed health benefits of moderate drinking were based on bad research and confounded variables.

A technical term for the so-called French paradox is the “J curve.” When you plot the number of drinks people consume along an X axis and their risk of dying along the Y axis, most observational studies show a shallow dip at about one drink a day for women and two drinks a day for men, suggesting protection against all-cause mortality. Then the line rises—and rises and rises—confirming the idea that excessive drinking is plainly unhealthy. The resulting graph looks like a J, hence the name.

The J-curve thesis suffers from many problems, Stockwell told me. It relies on faulty comparisons between moderate drinkers and nondrinkers. Moderate drinkers tend to be richer, healthier, and more social, while nondrinkers are a motley group that includes people who have never had alcohol (who tend to be poorer), people who quit drinking alcohol because they’re sick, and even recovering alcoholics. In short, many moderate drinkers are healthy for reasons that have nothing to do with drinking, and many nondrinkers are less healthy for reasons that have nothing to do with alcohol abstention.

[Read: Not just sober-curious, but neo-temperate]

When Stockwell and his fellow researchers threw out the observational studies that were beyond salvation and adjusted the rest to account for some of the confounders I listed above, “the J curve disappeared,” he told me. By some interpretations, even a small amount of alcohol—as little as three drinks a week—seemed to increase the risk of cancer and death.

The demise of the J curve is profoundly affecting public-health guidance. In 2011, Canada’s public-health agencies said that men could safely enjoy up to three oversize drinks a night with two abstinent days a week—about 15 drinks a week. In 2023, the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction revised its guidelines to define low-risk drinking as no more than two drinks a week.

Here’s my concern: The end of the J curve has made way for a new emerging conventional wisdom—that moderate drinking is seriously risky—that is also built on flawed studies and potentially overconfident conclusions. The pendulum is swinging from flawed “red wine is basically heart medicine!” TV segments to questionable warnings about the risk of moderate drinking and cancer. After all, we’re still dealing with observational studies that struggle to account for the differences between diverse groups.

[Read: Is a glass of wine harmless? Wrong question.]

In a widely read breakdown of alcohol-health research, the scientist and author Vinay Prasad wrote that the observational research on which scientists are still basing their conclusions suffers from a litany of “old data, shitty data, confounded data, weak definitions, measurement error, multiplicity, time-zero problems, and illogical results.” As he memorably summarized the problem: “A meta-analysis is like a juicer, it only tastes as good as what you put in.” Even folks like Stockwell who are trying to turn the flawed data into useful reviews are like well-meaning chefs, toiling in the kitchen, doing their best to make coq au vin out of a lot of chicken droppings.

The U.S. surgeon general’s new report on alcohol recommended adding a more “prominent” warning label on all alcoholic beverages about cancer risks. The top-line findings were startling. Alcohol contributes to about 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 cancer deaths each year, the surgeon general said. The guiding motivation sounded honorable. About three-fourths of adults drink once or more a week, and fewer than half of them are aware of the relationship between alcohol and cancer risk.

But many studies linking alcohol to cancer risk are bedeviled by the confounding problems facing many observational studies. For example, a study can find a relationship between moderate alcohol consumption and breast-cancer detection, but moderate consumption is correlated with income, as is access to mammograms.

One of the best-established mechanisms for alcohol being related to cancer is that alcohol breaks down into acetaldehyde in the body, which binds to and damages DNA, increasing the risk that a new cell grows out of control and becomes a cancerous tumor. This mechanism has been demonstrated in animal studies. But, as Prasad points out, we don’t approve drugs based on animal studies alone; many drugs work in mice and fail in clinical trials in humans. Just because we observe a biological mechanism in mice doesn’t mean you should live your life based on the assumption that the same cellular dance is happening inside your body.

[Read: The truth about breast cancer and drinking red wine—or any alcohol]

I’m willing to believe, even in the absence of slam-dunk evidence, that alcohol increases the risk of developing certain types of cancer for certain people. But as the surgeon general’s report itself points out, it’s important to distinguish between “absolute” and “relative” risk. Owning a swimming pool dramatically increases the relative risk that somebody in the house will drown, but the absolute risk of drowning in your backyard swimming pool is blessedly low. In a similar way, some analyses have concluded that even moderate drinking can increase a person’s odds of getting mouth cancer by about 40 percent. But given that the lifetime absolute risk of developing mouth cancer is less than 1 percent, this means one drink a day increases the typical individual’s chance of developing mouth cancer by about 0.3 percentage points. The surgeon general reports that moderate drinking (say, one drink a night) increases the relative risk of breast cancer by 10 percent, but that merely raises the absolute lifetime risk of getting breast cancer from about 11 percent to about 13 percent. Assuming that the math is sound, I think that’s a good thing to know. But if you pass this information along to a friend, I think you can forgive them for saying: Sorry, I like my chardonnay more than I like your two percentage points with a low confidence interval.

Where does this leave us? Not so far from our ancient-Greek friend Eubulus. Thousands of years and hundreds of studies after the Greek poet observed the dubious benefits of too much wine, we have much more data without much more certainty.

In her review of the literature, the economist Emily Oster concluded that “alcohol isn’t especially good for your health.” I think she’s probably right. But life isn’t—or, at least, shouldn’t be—about avoiding every activity with a whisker of risk. Cookies are not good for your health, either, as Oster points out, but only the grouchiest doctors will instruct their healthy patients to forswear Oreos. Even salubrious activities—trying to bench your body weight, getting in a car to hang out with a friend—incur the real possibility of injury.

[Read: A daily drink is almost certainly not going to hurt you]

An appreciation for uncertainty is nice, but it’s not very memorable. I wanted a takeaway about alcohol and health that I could repeat to a friend if they ever ask me to summarize this article in a sentence. So I pressed Tim Stockwell to define his most cautious conclusions in a memorable way, even if I thought he might be overconfident in his caution.

“One drink a day for men or women will reduce your life expectancy on average by about three months,” he said. Moderate drinkers should have in their mind that “every drink reduces your expected longevity by about five minutes.” (The risk compounds for heavier drinkers, he added. “If you drink at a heavier level, two or three drinks a day, that goes up to like 10, 15, 20 minutes per drink—not per drinking day, but per drink.”)

Every drink takes five minutes off your life. Maybe the thought scares you. Personally, I find great comfort in it—even as I suspect it suffers from the same flaws that plague this entire field. Several months ago, I spoke with the Stanford University scientist Euan Ashley, who studies the cellular effects of exercise. He has concluded that every minute of exercise adds five extra minutes of life.

When you put these two statistics together, you get this wonderful bit of rough longevity arithmetic: For moderate drinkers, every drink reduces your life by the same five minutes that one minute of exercise can add back. There’s a motto for healthy moderation: Have a drink? Have a jog.

Even this kind of arithmetic can miss a bigger point. To reduce our existence to a mere game of minutes gained and lost is to squeeze the life out of life. Alcohol is not like a vitamin or pill that we swiftly consume in the solitude of our bathrooms, which can be straightforwardly evaluated in controlled laboratory testing. At best, moderate alcohol consumption is enmeshed in activities that we share with other people: cooking, dinners, parties, celebrations, rituals, get-togethers—life! It is pleasure, and it is people. It is a social mortar for our age of social isolation.

[Read: The anti-social century]

An underrated aspect of the surgeon general’s report is that it is following, rather than trailblazing, a national shift away from alcohol. As recently as 2005, Americans were more likely to say that alcohol was good for their health, instead of bad. Last year, they were more than five times as likely to say it was bad, instead of good. In the first seven months of 2024, alcohol sales volume declined for beer, wine, and spirits. The decline seemed especially pronounced among young people.

To the extent that alcohol carries a serious risk of excess and addiction, less booze in America seems purely positive. But for those without religious or personal objections, healthy drinking is social drinking, and the decline of alcohol seems related to the fact that Americans now spend less time in face-to-face socializing than any period in modern history. That some Americans are trading the blurry haze of intoxication for the crystal clarity of sobriety is a blessing for their minds and guts. But in some cases, they may be trading an ancient drug of socialization for the novel intoxicants of isolation.

The Anti-Social Century

2025-01-08T06:00:00-05:00

Illustrations by Max Guther

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The Bar Is Closed

A short drive from my home in North Carolina is a small Mexican restaurant, with several tables and four stools at a bar facing the kitchen. On a sweltering afternoon last summer, I walked in with my wife and daughter. The place was empty. But looking closer, I realized that business was booming. The bar was covered with to-go food: nine large brown bags.

As we ate our meal, I watched half a dozen people enter the restaurant without sitting down to eat. Each one pushed open the door, walked to the counter, picked up a bag from the bar, and left. In the delicate choreography between kitchen and customer, not a word was exchanged. The space once reserved for that most garrulous social encounter, the bar hangout, had been reconfigured into a silent depot for customers to grab food to eat at home.

Until the pandemic, the bar was bustling and popular with regulars. “It’s just a few seats, but it was a pretty happening place,” Rae Mosher, the restaurant’s general manager, told me. “I can’t tell you how sad I’ve been about it,” she went on. “I know it hinders communications between customers and staff to have to-go bags taking up the whole bar. But there’s nowhere else for the food to go.” She put up a sign: BAR SEATING CLOSED.

The sign on the bar is a sign of the times for the restaurant business. In the past few decades, the sector has shifted from tables to takeaway, a process that accelerated through the pandemic and continued even as the health emergency abated. In 2023, 74 percent of all restaurant traffic came from “off premises” customers—that is, from takeout and delivery—up from 61 percent before COVID, according to the National Restaurant Association.

The flip side of less dining out is more eating alone. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years. “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business,” the Washington, D.C., restaurateur Steve Salis told me. “I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.” Even when Americans eat at restaurants, they are much more likely to do so by themselves. According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”

The evolution of restaurants is retracing the trajectory of another American industry: Hollywood. In the 1930s, video entertainment existed only in theaters, and the typical American went to the movies several times a month. Film was a necessarily collective experience, something enjoyed with friends and in the company of strangers. But technology has turned film into a home delivery system. Today, the typical American adult buys about three movie tickets a year—and watches almost 19 hours of television, the equivalent of roughly eight movies, on a weekly basis. In entertainment, as in dining, modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.

The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over. According to Enghin Atalay, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021. (He categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are “the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone” or in front of a computer.)

Eroding companionship can be seen in numerous odd and depressing facts of American life today. Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. Since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third.

[Derek Thompson: Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out]

Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many observers have reduced this phenomenon to the topic of loneliness. In 2023, Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden’s surgeon general, published an 81-page warning about America’s “epidemic of loneliness,” claiming that its negative health effects were on par with those of tobacco use and obesity. A growing number of public-health officials seem to regard loneliness as the developed world’s next critical public-health issue. The United Kingdom now has a minister for loneliness. So does Japan.

Max Guther

But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans don’t seem to be reacting to the biological cue to spend more time with other people. Their solitude levels are surging while many measures of loneliness are actually flat or dropping. A 2021 study of the widely used UCLA Loneliness Scale concluded that “the frequently used term ‘loneliness epidemic’ seems exaggerated.” Although young people are lonelier than they once were, there is little evidence that loneliness is rising more broadly today. A 2023 Gallup survey found that the share of Americans who said they experienced loneliness “a lot of the day yesterday” declined by roughly one-third from 2021 to 2023, even as alone time, by Atalay’s calculation, rose slightly.

Day to day, hour to hour, we are choosing this way of life—its comforts, its ready entertainments. But convenience can be a curse. Our habits are creating what Atalay has called a “century of solitude.” This is the anti-social century.

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and technologists about America’s anti-social streak. Although the particulars of these conversations differed, a theme emerged: The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.

The End of the Social Century

The first half of the 20th century was extraordinarily social. From 1900 to 1960, church membership surged, as did labor-union participation. Marriage rates reached a record high after World War II, and the birth rate enjoyed a famous “boom.” Associations of all sorts thrived, including book clubs and volunteer groups. The New Deal made America’s branch-library system the envy of the world; communities and developers across the country built theaters, music venues, playgrounds, and all kinds of gathering places.

But in the 1970s, the U.S. entered an era of withdrawal, as the political scientist Robert D. Putnam famously documented in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone. Some institutions of togetherness, such as marriage, eroded slowly. Others fell away swiftly. From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by nearly half. The decline was astonishingly broad, affecting just about every social activity and every demographic group that Putnam tracked.

What happened in the 1970s? Klinenberg, the sociologist, notes a shift in political priorities: The government dramatically slowed its construction of public spaces. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether,” he told me. Putnam points, among other things, to new moral values, such as the embrace of unbridled individualism. But he found that two of the most important factors were by then ubiquitous technologies: the automobile and the television set.

Starting in the second half of the century, Americans used their cars to move farther and farther away from one another, enabling the growth of the suburbs and, with it, a retreat into private backyard patios, private pools, a more private life. Once Americans got out of the car, they planted themselves in front of the television. From 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained six hours a week in leisure time. They could have devoted that time—300 hours a year!—to community service, or pickup basketball, or reading, or knitting, or all four. Instead, they funneled almost all of this extra time into watching more TV.

Television transformed Americans’ interior decorating, our relationships, and our communities. In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent. Time diaries in the 1990s showed that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they spent talking to each other in a given week. People who said TV was their “primary form of entertainment” were less likely to engage in practically every social activity that Putnam counted: volunteering, churchgoing, attending dinner parties, picnicking, giving blood, even sending greeting cards. Like a murder in Clue, the death of social connections in America had any number of suspects. But in the end, I believe the likeliest culprit is obvious. It was Mr. Farnsworth, in the living room, with the tube.

Phonebound

If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience. The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life.

Some of this screen time is social, after a fashion. But sharing videos or texting friends is a pale imitation of face-to-face interaction. More worrisome than what young people do on their phone is what they aren’t doing. Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.

Max Guther

The decline of hanging out can’t be shrugged off as a benign generational change, something akin to a preference for bell-bottoms over skinny jeans. Human childhood—including adolescence—is a uniquely sensitive period in the whole of the animal kingdom, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation. Although the human brain grows to 90 percent of its full size by age 5, its neural circuitry takes a long time to mature. Our lengthy childhood might be evolution’s way of scheduling an extended apprenticeship in social learning through play. The best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised, allowing children to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young people’s attention is funneled into devices that take them out of their body, denying them the physical-world education they need.

[Read: Jonathan Haidt on the terrible costs of a phone-based childhood]

Teen anxiety and depression are at near-record highs: The latest government survey of high schoolers, conducted in 2023, found that more than half of teen girls said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.” These data are alarming, but shouldn’t be surprising. Young rats and monkeys deprived of play come away socially and emotionally impaired. It would be odd if we, the self-named “social animal,” were different.

Socially underdeveloped childhood leads, almost inexorably, to socially stunted adulthood. A popular trend on TikTok involves 20‑somethings celebrating in creative ways when a friend cancels plans, often because they’re too tired or anxious to leave the house. These clips can be goofy and even quite funny. Surely, sympathy is due; we all know the feeling of relief when we claw back free time in an overscheduled week. But the sheer number of videos is a bit unsettling. If anybody should feel lonely and desperate for physical-world contact, you’d think it would be 20-somethings, who are still recovering from years of pandemic cabin fever. But many nights, it seems, members of America’s most isolated generation aren’t trying to leave the house at all. They’re turning on their cameras to advertise to the world the joy of not hanging out.

If young adults feel overwhelmed by the emotional costs of physical-world togetherness—and prone to keeping even close friends at a physical distance—that suggests that phones aren’t just rewiring adolescence; they’re upending the psychology of friendship as well.

[From the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a generation?]

In the 1960s, Irwin Altman, a psychologist at the Naval Medical Research Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, co-developed a friendship formula characterized by increasing intimacy. In the early stages of friendship, people engage in small talk by sharing trivial details. As they develop trust, their conversations deepen to include more private information until disclosure becomes habitual and easy. Altman later added an important wrinkle: Friends require boundaries as much as they require closeness. Time alone to recharge is essential for maintaining healthy relationships.

Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary. “Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd,” Nicholas Carr, the author of the new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, told me. “Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends and reflective in your downtime.” Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers.

[From the July/August 2008 issue: Nicholas Carr on whether Google is making us stupid]

If Carr is right, modern technology’s always-open window to the outside world makes recharging much harder, leaving many people chronically depleted, a walking battery that is always stuck in the red zone. In a healthy world, people who spend lots of time alone would feel that ancient biological cue: I’m alone and sad; I should make some plans. But we live in a sideways world, where easy home entertainment, oversharing online, and stunted social skills spark a strangely popular response: I’m alone, anxious, and exhausted; thank God my plans were canceled.

Homebound

Last year, the Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey was working on a book about how places shape American lives and economic fortunes. He had a feeling that the rise of remote work might have accelerated a longer-term trend: a shift in the amount of time that people spend inside their home. He ran the numbers and discovered “an astounding change” in our daily habits, much more extreme than he would have guessed. In 2022—notably, after the pandemic had abated—adults spent an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2003.

This finding formed the basis of a 2024 paper, “Homebound,” in which Sharkey calculated that, compared with 2003, Americans are more likely to take meetings from home, to shop from home, to be entertained at home, to eat at home, and even to worship at home. Practically the entire economy has reoriented itself to allow Americans to stay within their four walls. This phenomenon cannot be reduced to remote work. It is something far more totalizing—something more like “remote life.”

One might ask: Why wouldn’t Americans with means want to spend more time at home? In the past few decades, the typical American home has become bigger, more comfortable, and more entertaining. From 1973 to 2023, the size of the average new single-family house increased by 50 percent, and the share of new single-family houses that have air-conditioning doubled, to 98 percent. Streaming services, video-game consoles, and flatscreen TVs make the living room more diverting than any 20th-century theater or arcade. Yet conveniences can indeed be a curse. By Sharkey’s calculations, activities at home were associated with a “strong reduction” in self-reported happiness.

A homebound life doesn’t have to be a solitary life. In the 1970s, the typical household entertained more than once a month. But from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, the frequency of hosting friends for parties, games, dinners, and so on declined by 45 percent, according to data that Robert Putnam gathered. In the 20 years after Bowling Alone was published, the average amount of time that Americans spent hosting or attending social events declined another 32 percent.

As our homes have become less social, residential architecture has become more anti-social. Clifton Harness is a co-founder of TestFit, a firm that makes software to design layouts for new housing developments. He told me that the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design is that every room is built to accommodate maximal screen time. “In design meetings with developers and architects, you have to assure everybody that there will be space for a wall-mounted flatscreen television in every room,” he said. “It used to be ‘Let’s make sure our rooms have great light.’ But now, when the question is ‘How do we give the most comfort to the most people?,’ the answer is to feed their screen addiction.” Bobby Fijan, a real-estate developer, said last year that “for the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill.” From studying floor plans, he noticed that bedrooms, walk-in closets, and other private spaces are growing. “I think we’re building for aloneness,” Fijan told me.

“Secular Monks”

In 2020, the philosopher and writer Andrew Taggart observed in an essay published in the religious journal First Things that a new flavor of masculinity seemed to be emerging: strong, obsessed with personal optimization, and proudly alone. Men and women alike have been delaying family formation; the median age at first marriage for men recently surpassed 30 for the first time in history. Taggart wrote that the men he knew seemed to be forgoing marriage and fatherhood with gusto. Instead of focusing their 30s and 40s on wedding bands and diapers, they were committed to working on their body, their bank account, and their meditation-sharpened minds. Taggart called these men “secular monks” for their combination of old-fashioned austerity and modern solipsism. “Practitioners submit themselves to ever more rigorous, monitored forms of ascetic self-control,” he wrote, “among them, cold showers, intermittent fasting, data-driven health optimization, and meditation boot camps.”

When I read Taggart’s essay last year, I felt a shock of recognition. In the previous months, I’d been captivated by a particular genre of social media: the viral “morning routine” video. If the protagonist is a man, he is typically handsome and rich. We see him wake up. We see him meditate. We see him write in his journal. We see him exercise, take supplements, take a cold plunge. What is most striking about these videos, however, is the element they typically lack: other people. In these little movies of a life well spent, the protagonists generally wake up alone and stay that way. We usually see no friends, no spouse, no children. These videos are advertisements for a luxurious form of modern monasticism that treats the presence of other people as, at best, an unwelcome distraction and, at worst, an unhealthy indulgence that is ideally avoided—like porn, perhaps, or Pop-Tarts.

[Read: The agony of texting with men]

Drawing major conclusions about modern masculinity from a handful of TikToks would be unwise. But the solitary man is not just a social-media phenomenon. Men spend more time alone than women, and young men are increasing their alone time faster than any other group, according to the American Time Use Survey.

Max Guther

Where is this alone time coming from? Liana C. Sayer, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, shared with me her analysis of how leisure time in the 21st century has changed for men and women. Sayer divided leisure into two broad categories: “engaged leisure,” which includes socializing, going to concerts, and playing sports; and “sedentary leisure,” which includes watching TV and playing video games. Compared with engaged leisure, which is more likely to be done with other people, sedentary leisure is more commonly done alone.

The most dramatic tendency that Sayer uncovered is that single men without kids—who have the most leisure time—are overwhelmingly likely to spend these hours by themselves. And the time they spend in solo sedentary leisure has increased, since 2003, more than that of any other group Sayer tracked. This is unfortunate because, as Sayer wrote, “well-being is higher among adults who spend larger shares of leisure with others.” Sedentary leisure, by contrast, was “associated with negative physical and mental health.”

Richard V. Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me that for men, as for women, something hard to define is lost when we pursue a life of isolationist comforts. He calls it “neededness”—the way we make ourselves essential to our families and community. “I think at some level, we all need to feel like we’re a jigsaw piece that’s going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere,” he said. This neededness can come in several forms: social, economic, or communitarian. Our children and partners can depend on us for care or income. Our colleagues can rely on us to finish a project, or to commiserate about an annoying boss. Our religious congregations and weekend poker parties can count on us to fill a pew or bring the dip.

But building these bridges to community takes energy, and today’s young men do not seem to be constructing these relationships in the same way that they used to. In place of neededness, despair is creeping in. Men who are un- or underemployed are especially vulnerable. Feeling unneeded “is actually, in some cases, literally fatal,” Reeves said. “If you look at the words that men use to describe themselves before they take their own lives, they are worthless and useless.” Since 2001, hundreds of thousands of men have died of drug overdoses, mostly from opioids and synthetics such as fentanyl. “If the level of drug-poisoning deaths had remained flat since 2001, we’d have had 400,000 fewer men die,” Reeves said. These drugs, he emphasized, are defined by their solitary nature: Opioids are not party drugs, but rather the opposite.

This Is Your Politics on Solitude

All of this time alone, at home, on the phone, is not just affecting us as individuals. It’s making society weaker, meaner, and more delusional. Marc J. Dunkelman, an author and a research fellow at Brown University, says that to see how chosen solitude is warping society at large, we must first acknowledge something a little counterintuitive: Today, many of our bonds are actually getting stronger.

Parents are spending more time with their children than they did several decades ago, and many couples and families maintain an unbroken flow of communication. “My wife and I have texted 10 times since we said goodbye today,” Dunkelman told me when I reached him at noon on a weekday. “When my 10-year-old daughter buys a Butterfinger at CVS, I get a phone notification about it.”

At the same time, messaging apps, TikTok streams, and subreddits keep us plugged into the thoughts and opinions of the global crowd that shares our interests. “When I watch a Cincinnati Bengals football game, I’m on a group text with beat reporters to whom I can ask questions, and they’ll respond,” Dunkelman said. “I can follow the live thoughts of football analysts on X.com, so that I’m practically watching the game over their shoulder. I live in Rhode Island, and those are connections that could have never existed 30 years ago.”

Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us, which Dunkelman calls the village. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town,” he said. We used to know them well; now we don’t.

The middle ring is key to social cohesion, Dunkelman said. Families teach us love, and tribes teach us loyalty. The village teaches us tolerance. Imagine that a local parent disagrees with you about affirmative action at a PTA meeting. Online, you might write him off as a political opponent who deserves your scorn. But in a school gym full of neighbors, you bite your tongue. As the year rolls on, you discover that your daughters are in the same dance class. At pickup, you swap stories about caring for aging relatives. Although your differences don’t disappear, they’re folded into a peaceful coexistence. And when the two of you sign up for a committee to draft a diversity statement for the school, you find that you can accommodate each other’s opposing views. “It’s politically moderating to meet thoughtful people in the real world who disagree with you,” Dunkelman said. But if PTA meetings are still frequently held in person, many other opportunities to meet and understand one’s neighbors are becoming a thing of the past. “An important implication of the death of the middle ring is that if you have no appreciation for why the other side has their narrative, you’ll want your own side to fight them without compromise.”

The village is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise—in other words, democracy. So it’s no surprise that the erosion of the village has coincided with the emergence of a grotesque style of politics, in which every election feels like an existential quest to vanquish an intramural enemy. For the past five decades, the American National Election Studies surveys have asked Democrats and Republicans to rate the opposing party on a “Feeling Thermometer” that ranges from zero (very cold/unfavorable) to 100 (very warm/favorable). In 2000, just 8 percent of partisans gave the other party a zero. By 2020, that figure had shot up to 40 percent. In a 2021 poll by Generation Lab/Axios, nearly a third of college students who identify as Republican said they wouldn’t even go on a date with a Democrat, and more than two-thirds of Democratic students said the same of members of the GOP.

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election had many causes, including inflation and frustration with Joe Biden’s leadership. But one source of Trump’s success may be that he is an avatar of the all-tribe, no-village style of performative confrontation. He stokes out-group animosity, and speaks to voters who are furiously intolerant of political difference. To cite just a few examples from the campaign, Trump called Democrats “enemies of the democracy” and the news media “enemies of the people,” and promised to “root out” the “radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

Max Guther

Social disconnection also helps explain progressives’ stubborn inability to understand Trump’s appeal. In the fall, one popular Democratic lawn sign read Harris Walz: Obviously. That sentiment, rejected by a majority of voters, indicates a failure to engage with the world as it really is. Dunkelman emailed me after the election to lament Democratic cluelessness. “How did those of us who live in elite circles not see how Trump was gaining popularity even among our literal neighbors?” he wrote. Too many progressives were mainlining left-wing media in the privacy of their home, oblivious that families down the street were drifting right. Even in the highly progressive borough of Brooklyn, New York, three in 10 voters chose Trump. If progressives still consider MAGA an alien movement, it is in part because they have made themselves strangers in their own land.

Practicing politics alone, on the internet, rather than in community isn’t only making us more likely to demonize and alienate our opponents, though that would be bad enough. It may also be encouraging deep nihilism. In 2018, a group of researchers led by Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish political scientist, began asking Americans to evaluate false rumors about Democratic and Republican politicians, including Trump and Hillary Clinton. “We were expecting a clear pattern of polarization,” Petersen told me, with people on the left sharing conspiracies about the right and vice versa. But some participants seemed drawn to any conspiracy theory so long as it was intended to destroy the established order. Members of this cohort commonly harbored racial or economic grievances. Perhaps more important, Petersen said, they tended to feel socially isolated. These aggravated loners agreed with many dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues coined a term to describe this cohort’s motivation: the need for chaos.

[Read: Derek Thompson on the Americans who need chaos]

Although chaotically inclined individuals score highly in a popular measure for loneliness, they don’t seem to seek the obvious remedy. “What they’re reaching out to get isn’t friendship at all but rather recognition and status,” Petersen said. For many socially isolated men in particular, for whom reality consists primarily of glowing screens in empty rooms, a vote for destruction is a politics of last resort—a way to leave one’s mark on a world where collective progress, or collective support of any kind, feels impossible.

The Introversion Delusion

Let us be fair to solitude, for a moment. As the father of a young child, I know well that a quiet night alone can be a balm. I have spent evenings alone at a bar, watching a baseball game, that felt ecstatically close to heaven. People cope with stress and grief and mundane disappointment in complex ways, and sometimes isolation is the best way to restore inner equilibrium.

But the dosage matters. A night alone away from a crying baby is one thing. A decade or more of chronic social disconnection is something else entirely. And people who spend more time alone, year after year, become meaningfully less happy. In his 2023 paper on the rise of 21st-century solitude, Atalay, at the Philadelphia Fed, calculated that by one measure, sociability means considerably more for happiness than money does: A five-percentage-point increase in alone time was associated with about the same decline in life satisfaction as was a 10 percent lower household income.

Max Guther

Nonetheless, many people keep choosing to spend free time alone, in their home, away from other people. Perhaps, one might think, they are making the right choice; after all, they must know themselves best. But a consistent finding of modern psychology is that people often don’t know what they want, or what will make them happy. The saying that “predictions are hard, especially about the future” applies with special weight to predictions about our own life. Time and again, what we expect to bring us peace—a bigger house, a luxury car, a job with twice the pay but half the leisure—only creates more anxiety. And at the top of this pile of things we mistakenly believe we want, there is aloneness.

[From the May 2012 issue: Is Facebook making us lonely?]

Several years ago, Nick Epley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, asked commuter-train passengers to make a prediction: How would they feel if asked to spend the ride talking with a stranger? Most participants predicted that quiet solitude would make for a better commute than having a long chat with someone they didn’t know. Then Epley’s team created an experiment in which some people were asked to keep to themselves, while others were instructed to talk with a stranger (“The longer the conversation, the better,” participants were told). Afterward, people filled out a questionnaire. How did they feel? Despite the broad assumption that the best commute is a silent one, the people instructed to talk with strangers actually reported feeling significantly more positive than those who’d kept to themselves. “A fundamental paradox at the core of human life is that we are highly social and made better in every way by being around people,” Epley said. “And yet over and over, we have opportunities to connect that we don’t take, or even actively reject, and it is a terrible mistake.”

Researchers have repeatedly validated Epley’s discovery. In 2020, the psychologists Seth Margolis and Sonja Lyubomirsky, at UC Riverside, asked people to behave like an extrovert for one week and like an introvert for another. Subjects received several reminders to act “assertive” and “spontaneous” or “quiet” and “reserved” depending on the week’s theme. Participants said they felt more positive emotions at the end of the extroversion week and more negative emotions at the end of the introversion week. Our modern economy, with its home-delivery conveniences, manipulates people into behaving like agoraphobes. But it turns out that we can be manipulated in the opposite direction. And we might be happier for it.

Our “mistaken” preference for solitude could emerge from a misplaced anxiety that other people aren’t that interested in talking with us, or that they would find our company bothersome. “But in reality,” Epley told me, “social interaction is not very uncertain, because of the principle of reciprocity. If you say hello to someone, they’ll typically say hello back to you. If you give somebody a compliment, they’ll typically say thank you.” Many people, it seems, are not social enough for their own good. They too often seek comfort in solitude, when they would actually find joy in connection.

Despite a consumer economy that seems optimized for introverted behavior, we would have happier days, years, and lives if we resisted the undertow of the convenience curse—if we talked with more strangers, belonged to more groups, and left the house for more activities.

The AI Century

The anti-social century has been bad enough: more anxiety and depression; more “need for chaos” in our politics. But I’m sorry to say that our collective detachment could still get worse. Or, to be more precise, weirder.

In May of last year, three employees of OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence company, sat onstage to introduce ChatGPT’s new real-time conversational-speech feature. A research scientist named Mark Chen held up a phone and, smiling, started speaking to it.

“Hey, ChatGPT, I’m Mark. How are you?” Mark said.

“Hello, Mark!” a cheery female voice responded.

“Hey, so I’m onstage right now,” Mark said. “I’m doing a live demo, and frankly I’m feeling a little bit nervous. Can you help me calm my nerves a little bit?”

“Oh, you’re doing a live demo right now?” the voice replied, projecting astonishment with eerie verisimilitude. “That’s awesome! Just take a deep breath and remember: You’re the expert here.”

Mark asked for feedback on his breathing, before panting loudly, like someone who’d just finished a marathon.

“Whoa, slow!” the voice responded. “Mark, you’re not a vacuum cleaner!” Out of frame, the audience laughed. Mark tried breathing audibly again, this time more slowly and deliberately.

“That’s it,” the AI responded. “How do you feel?”

“I feel a lot better,” Mark said. “Thank you so much.”

AI’s ability to speak naturally might seem like an incremental update, as subtle as a camera-lens refinement on a new iPhone. But according to Nick Epley, fluent speech represents a radical advancement in the technology’s ability to encroach on human relationships.

“Once an AI can speak to you, it’ll feel extremely real,” he said, because people process spoken word more intimately and emotionally than they process text. For a study published in 2020, Epley and Amit Kumar, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, randomly assigned participants to contact an old friend via phone or email. Most people said they preferred to send a written message. But those instructed to talk on the phone reported feeling “a significantly stronger bond” with their friend, and a stronger sense that they’d “really connected,” than those who used email.

Speech is rich with what are known as “paralinguistic cues,” such as emphasis and intonation, which can build sympathy and trust in the minds of listeners. In another study, Epley and the behavioral scientist Juliana Schroeder found that employers and potential recruiters were more likely to rate candidates as “more competent, thoughtful, and intelligent” when they heard a why-I’m-right-for-this-job pitch rather than read it.

Even now, before AI has mastered fluent speech, millions of people are already forming intimate relationships with machines, according to Jason Fagone, a journalist who is writing a book about the emergence of AI companions. Character.ai, the most popular platform for AI companions, has tens of millions of monthly users, who spend an average of 93 minutes a day chatting with their AI friend. “No one is getting duped into thinking they’re actually talking to humans,” Fagone told me. “People are freely choosing to enter relationships with artificial partners, and they’re getting deeply attached anyway, because of the emotional capabilities of these systems.” One subject in his book is a young man who, after his fiancée’s death, engineers an AI chatbot to resemble his deceased partner. Another is a bisexual mother who supplements her marriage to a man with an AI that identifies as a woman.

If you find the notion of emotional intercourse with an immaterial entity creepy, consider the many friends and family members who exist in your life mainly as words on a screen. Digital communication has already prepared us for AI companionship, Fagone said, by transforming many of our physical-world relationships into a sequence of text chimes and blue bubbles. “I think part of why AI-companion apps have proven so seductive so quickly is that most of our relationships already happen exclusively through the phone,” he said.

Epley sees the exponential growth of AI companions as a real possibility. “You can set them up to never criticize you, never cheat on you, never have a bad day and insult you, and to always be interested in you.” Unlike the most patient spouses, they could tell us that we’re always right. Unlike the world’s best friend, they could instantly respond to our needs without the all-too-human distraction of having to lead their own life.

“The horrifying part, of course, is that learning how to interact with real human beings who can disagree with you and disappoint you” is essential to living in the world, Epley said. I think he’s right. But Epley was born in the 1970s. I was born in the 1980s. People born in the 2010s, or the 2020s, might not agree with us about the irreplaceability of “real human” friends. These generations may discover that what they want most from their relationships is not a set of people, who might challenge them, but rather a set of feelings—sympathy, humor, validation—that can be more reliably drawn out from silicon than from carbon-based life forms. Long before technologists build a superintelligent machine that can do the work of so many Einsteins, they may build an emotionally sophisticated one that can do the work of so many friends.

The Next 15 Minutes

The anti-social century is as much a result of what’s happened to the exterior world of concrete and steel as it is about advances inside our phones. The decline of government investments in what Eric Klinenberg calls “social infrastructure”—public spaces that shape our relationship to the world—may have begun in the latter part of the 20th century, but it has continued in the 21st. That has arguably affected nearly everyone, but less advantaged Americans most of all.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to poor neighborhoods in big cities, and the community leaders tell me the real crisis for poor teenagers is that there’s just not much for them to do anymore, and nowhere to go,” Klinenberg told me. “I’d like to see the government build social infrastructure for teenagers with the creativity and generosity with which video-game companies build the toys that keep them inside. I’m thinking of athletic fields, and public swimming pools, and libraries with beautiful social areas for young people to hang out together.”

Improved public social infrastructure would not solve all the problems of the anti-social century. But degraded public spaces—and degraded public life—are in some ways the other side of all our investments in video games and phones and bigger, better private space. Just as we needed time to see the invisible emissions of the Industrial Revolution, we are only now coming to grips with the negative externalities of a phonebound and homebound world. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said of technology that every augmentation is also an amputation. We chose our digitally enhanced world. We did not realize the significance of what was being amputated.

Max Guther

But we can choose differently. In his 2015 novel, Seveneves, Neal Stephenson coined the term Amistics to describe the practice of carefully selecting which technologies to accept. The word is a reference to the Amish, who generally shun many modern innovations, including cars and television. Although they are sometimes considered strictly anti-modern, many Amish communities have refrigerators and washing machines, and some use solar power. Instead of dismissing all technology, the Amish adopt only those innovations that support their religious and communal values. In his 1998 dissertation on one Amish community, Tay Keong Tan, then a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, quoted a community member as saying that they didn’t want to adopt TV or radio, because those products “would destroy our visiting practices. We would stay at home with the television or radio rather than meet with other people.”

If the Amish approach to technology is radical in its application, it recognizes something plain and true: Although technology does not have values of its own, its adoption can create values, even in the absence of a coordinated effort. For decades, we’ve adopted whatever technologies removed friction or increased dopamine, embracing what makes life feel easy and good in the moment. But dopamine is a chemical, not a virtue. And what’s easy is not always what’s best for us. We should ask ourselves: What would it mean to select technology based on long-term health rather than instant gratification? And if technology is hurting our community, what can we do to heal it?

A seemingly straightforward prescription is that teenagers should choose to spend less time on their phone, and their parents should choose to invite more friends over for dinner. But in a way, these are collective-action problems. A teenager is more likely to get out of the house if his classmates have already made a habit of hanging out. That teen’s parents are more likely to host if their neighbors have also made a habit of weekly gatherings. There is a word for such deeply etched communal habits: rituals. And one reason, perhaps, that the decline of socializing has synchronized with the decline of religion is that nothing has proved as adept at inscribing ritual into our calendars as faith.

“I have a view that is uncommon among social scientists, which is that moral revolutions are real and they change our culture,” Robert Putnam told me. In the early 20th century, a group of liberal Christians, including the pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, urged other Christians to expand their faith from a narrow concern for personal salvation to a public concern for justice. Their movement, which became known as the Social Gospel, was instrumental in passing major political reforms, such as the abolition of child labor. It also encouraged a more communitarian approach to American life, which manifested in an array of entirely secular congregations that met in union halls and community centers and dining rooms. All of this came out of a particular alchemy of writing and thinking and organizing. No one can say precisely how to change a nation’s moral-emotional atmosphere, but what’s certain is that atmospheres do change. Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.

The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the American Booksellers Association has reported more than 50 percent growth since 2009—and in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., many of them have become miniature theaters, with regular standing-room-only crowds gathered for author readings. More districts and states are banning smartphones in schools, a national experiment that could, optimistically, improve children’s focus and their physical-world relationships. In the past few years, board-game cafés have flowered across the country, and their business is expected to nearly double by 2030. These cafés buck an 80-year trend. Instead of turning a previously social form of entertainment into a private one, they turn a living-room pastime into a destination activity. As sweeping as the social revolution I’ve described might seem, it’s built from the ground up by institutions and decisions that are profoundly within our control: as humble as a café, as small as a new phone locker at school.

When Epley and his lab asked Chicagoans to overcome their preference for solitude and talk with strangers on a train, the experiment probably didn’t change anyone’s life. All it did was marginally improve the experience of one 15-minute block of time. But life is just a long set of 15-minute blocks, one after another. The way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our decades. “No amount of research that I’ve done has changed my life more than this,” Epley told me. “It’s not that I’m never lonely. It’s that my moment-to-moment experience of life is better, because I’ve learned to take the dead space of life and make friends in it.”

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The Anti-Social Century.”

The Most Important Breakthroughs of 2024

2024-12-29T08:00:00-05:00

This is my third time honoring what I see as the year’s most important scientific and technological advances.

In 2022, my theme was the principle of “twin ideas,” when similar inventions emerge around the same time. Just as Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both arguably conceived of the modern telephone in 1876 (and, by some accounts, on the same day!), the U.S. saw a cluster of achievements in generative AI, cancer treatment, and vaccinology.

In 2023, my theme was the long road of progress. My top breakthrough was Casgevy, a gene-editing therapy for patients with sickle-cell anemia. The therapy built on decades of research on CRISPR, an immune defense system borrowed from the world of bacteria.

[View: 2024 in photos: Wrapping up the year]

This year, my theme is the subtler power of incremental improvement, which has also been a motif of technological progress. Although nothing invented in 2024 rivals the gosh-wow debut of ChatGPT or the discovery of GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic, this year witnessed several advancements across medicine, space technology, and AI that extend our knowledge in consequential ways.

An Ingenious Defense Against HIV

Around the world, 40 million people live with HIV, and an estimated 630,000 people die of AIDS-related illness every year. The disease has no cure. But whereas patients in rich developed countries have access to medicine that keeps the virus at bay, many people in poor countries, where the disease is more widespread, do not.

This year, scientists at the pharmaceutical company Gilead announced that a new injectable drug seems to provide exceptional protection from HIV for six months. In one clinical trial of South African and Ugandan girls and young women, the shot, which is called lenacapavir, reduced HIV infections by 100 percent in the intervention group. Another trial of people across several continents reported an efficacy rate of 96 percent. Clinical-trial results don’t get much more successful than that.

This fall, Gilead agreed to let other companies sell cheap generic versions of the shot in poor countries. More controversially, the deal left out middle-income countries, such as Brazil and Mexico, which will have to pay more for access to the therapy.

Lenacapavir works by targeting key “capsid proteins” that act as both sword and shield for HIV’s genetic material—protecting the virus’s RNA and allowing it to invade our cells. Lenacapavir stuns the proteins and disarms their sword-and-shield functions, which makes the HIV viral particles harmless. In naming lenacapavir its breakthrough of the year, the journal Science reported that the same technique could disrupt the proteins that protect countless other deadly viruses, including those that cause common colds or even once-in-a-generation pandemics. The ability to break down the structure and function of these viruses by targeting capsid proteins could help us cure even more diseases in the long run.

The U.S. Enters the Age of Rocket-Catching

For six decades, the U.S. has been pretty good at using propulsion technology to toss heavy objects into space. But catching them when they fall back to Earth? Not so much.

Until this October, when a SpaceX booster plummeted from the sky at 22 times the speed of sound, hit the brakes, slowed down over the same tower that had launched it, and settled into its two giant mechanical arms for a high-tech hug. Sixty-six years after America blasted into the age of rocket-launching, it has finally entered the age of rocket-catching.

[Read: The most powerful rocket in history had a good morning]

So what is this rocket-pincer technology—nicknamed “chopsticks”—actually good for? SpaceX, founded and run by Elon Musk, has already cut the price of getting stuff into space by an order of magnitude. Making rockets fully reusable could cut that price “by another order of magnitude,” writes Eric Hand, a journalist with Science. Just about every aspect of a space-bound economy—running scientific experiments in our solar system, mining asteroids, manufacturing fiber optics and pharmaceuticals in microgravity conditions—runs up against the same basic economic bottleneck: Ejecting things out of our atmosphere is still very expensive. But cheap, large, and reusable rockets are the prerequisite for building any kind of world outside our own, whether it’s a small fleet of automated factories humming in low-orbit or, well, a multiplanetary civilization.

A Quantum Breakthrough

In December, Google announced that its new quantum computer, based on a chip called Willow, solved a math problem in five minutes that would take one of the fastest supercomputers roughly “10 septillion years” to crack. For context, 10 septillion years is the entire history of the universe—about 14 billion years—repeated several trillion times over. The achievement was so audacious that some people speculated that Google’s computer worked by borrowing computing power from parallel universes.

If that paragraph caused a nauseous combination of wonder and bafflement, that feels about right. Quantum computers don’t make sense to most people, in part because they’ve been hyped up as the ultimate supercomputer. But as the science journalist Cleo Abram has explained, that’s a misnomer. You shouldn’t think of quantum computers as being bigger, faster, or smarter than the computers that run our day-to-day life. You should think of them as being fundamentally different.

Traditional computers, such as your smartphone and laptop, process information as a parade of binary switches that flip between 1 and 0. Quantum computers use qubits, which harness quantum mechanics, the weird physics that governs particles smaller than atoms. A qubit can represent both a 1 and a 0 simultaneously, thanks to a property called superposition. As you add more qubits, the computational power grows exponentially, which theoretically allows quantum computers to solve problems of dizzying complexity.

Qubits are finicky and prone to error. That’s one reason quantum computers are held in special containers refrigerated to almost 0 kelvin, a temperature colder than deep space. But Google’s chip, which connects 105 qubits, is among the first to show that the number of errors can decline as more qubits are added—a discovery that future quantum-computing teams can surely build on.

Optimistically, quantum computers could help us understand the rules of subatomic activity, which undergird all physical reality. That could mean designing better electric batteries by allowing researchers to simulate the behavior of electrons in metals, or revolutionizing drug discovery by predicting interactions between our immune system and viruses at the tiniest level.

But the possibilities aren’t all pretty. The U.S., China, and other countries are locked in a multibillion-dollar race toward quantum supremacy, in part because it’s broadly understood that a fully functioning quantum computer could also solve the sort of complex mathematical problems that form the basis of public-key cryptography. In other words, a working quantum computer could render null and void most internet encryption. Here again, the technological power to do more good tends to rise commensurately with the power to cause more chaos.

Another Year of Generative-AI Wizardry

This might just be the era when any plausible list of the year’s most important technological advances ends with the sentence Oh, and also, artificial-intelligence researchers did a bunch of crazy stuff.

In just the past three months, a small study found that ChatGPT outperformed human physicians at solving medical case histories; several AI companies released a torrent of impressive video generators, including Google DeepMind’s Veo 2 and OpenAI’s Sora; Google announced an AI agent whose weather forecasts outperformed the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts—the “world leader in atmospheric prediction,” according to The New York Times; and OpenAI released a new “reasoning” system that blew away industry standards in coding and complex math problems.

[Read: The generative-AI revolution may be a bubble]

I continue to be interested in how the transformer technology behind large language models handles the most complex logic systems. With ChatGPT, researchers showed that an AI could master the grammar of language well enough to produce plausible sentences, code, and poetry. But the cosmos is filled with other languages—that is, other logical systems that obey a finite number of rules to produce predictable results. One example is DNA. After all, what is DNA if not a language? With a vocabulary based on just four letters, or nucleotides, our genetic code spells out how our proteins, cells, organs, and bodies should function, replicate, and evolve. If one LLM can master the logic of English and computer programming, perhaps another could master the grammar of DNA—allowing scientists to synthesize biology in laboratories the same way you or I could produce synthetic paragraphs on our personal computers.

To that end, this year researchers at the Arc Institute, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley created Evo, a new AI model trained on 2.7 million genomes from microbes and viruses. Evo acts as a master linguist, learning the rules of DNA across billions of years of evolution to predict functions, analyze mutations, and even design new genetic sequences.

What could scientists do with generative AI for biology? Think about CRISPR technology. Scientists use a special protein to cut a cell’s DNA, like a pair of molecular scissors, allowing researchers to make basic edits to the snipped genome. This year, Evo scientists designed a wholly original protein, unknown in nature, that could perform a similar gene-editing task. As Patrick Hsu, the core investigator at Arc Institute and an assistant professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley, said, just as tools like ChatGPT have “revolutionized how we work with text, audio, and video, these same creative capabilities can now be applied to life’s fundamental codes.”

A Mysterious Health Wave Is Breaking Out Across the U.S.

2024-12-19T07:00:00-05:00

Americans are unusually likely to die young compared with citizens of other developed countries. The U.S. has more fatalities from gun violence, drug overdoses, and auto accidents than just about any other similarly rich nation, and its obesity rate is about 50 percent higher than the European average. Put this all together and the U.S. is rightly considered a “rich death trap” for its young and middle-aged citizens, whose premature death is the leading reason for America’s unusually short lifespans.

But without much media fanfare, the U.S. has recently experienced a boomlet in good health news. In May 2024, the U.S. government reported that drug-overdose deaths fell 3 percent from 2022 to 2023, a rare bright spot in a century of escalating drug deaths. In June, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that traffic fatalities continued to decline after a huge rise in 2020 and 2021—and that this happened despite a rise in total vehicle miles traveled. In September, the U.S. government announced that the adult-obesity rate had declined in its most recent count, which ended in August 2023. Also in September, FBI analysis confirmed a double-digit decline in the national murder rate.

[Read: America fails the civilization test]

How rare is this inside straight of good news? Some government estimates—such as rates of obesity and overdose deaths—have reporting lags of one to two years, meaning that these causes of mortality are not necessarily all currently declining. Still, by my count, this year marks the first time in the 21st century that obesity, overdose deaths, traffic fatalities, and murders all declined in the official data analysis. The level of premature death in the U.S. is still unacceptably high. But progress isn’t just about where you are; it’s also about what direction you’re going in. And by the latter definition, 2024 was arguably the best year for American health reports in decades.

It would be convenient—for both efficient punditry and public-policy clarity—if a small number of factors explained all of these trends. After all, if we could isolate a handful of lessons, we could carry them forward and unleash a golden age of American health. Unfortunately, reality is messy and does not always comport with our preference for simple explanations.

Take, for example, the decrease in overdose deaths, which might be the most surprising news of the bunch. “This is the largest decline we’ve seen in recent data, going back at least back to 1999, which is remarkable because overdoses have been going up so steadily,” Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told me. But the exact cause of the decline is mysterious. “I could tell you a policy story,” he said, “such as the fact that we’ve made it easier for people to access drug-addiction treatment and we’ve significantly expanded the availability of Narcan”—an opioid antagonist that rapidly reverses the effects of overdose.

[Read: An anti-overdose drug is getting stronger. Maybe that’s a bad thing?]

But Lehman said he’s not convinced that these policy changes explain all—or even most—of the decline in overdose deaths. “Most of the evidence suggests that the effect size of these interventions should be small and universal across states,” he said. “But instead the U.S. is seeing a decline in overdose deaths that is both large and geographically concentrated in the East, where the overdose crisis started.”

According to Lehman, these facts point to other explanations. Maybe the overdose surge is burning out on its own. Drug waves tend to crest and fall in the absence of a coordinated policy response, because the people most likely to get hooked on any one generation of deadly drugs can’t remain indefinitely addicted—they either recover, seek treatment, or die. Or maybe a surge in suicides in 2021 created an unusual and unsustained spike in mortality. “This is grim, but for lack of a better phrase, folks who died during the pandemic can’t die later, and so maybe we should have always expected overdose deaths to decline” after the COVID crisis, he said.

Another possibility is that the fentanyl available on the street became weaker because of relatively lax immigration enforcement under the Biden administration. “There’s an idea known as the ‘iron law of prohibition,’ which says that the more intensive the law enforcement, the more intense the drug,” Lehman said. Perhaps as the risk of contraband confiscation at the border declined, cartels adjusted by moving more units of narcotics across the border while switching to a less concentrated product on a per-unit basis.

The frequency of maybes and perhapses in the above paragraphs makes my point. The decline in overdose deaths was either the direct result of good policy, the ironic result of bad policy, the mathematically inevitable result of lots of addicts dying during the peak pandemic years, or some combination of all three. Celebrating a nice-looking chart is much easier than understanding exactly what is making the line change direction.

A similar theme of uncertainty holds for the obesity story. This fall, the National Health and Nutrition Examination reported that the prevalence of obesity among U.S. adults declined from 41.9 percent to 40.3 percent in its latest sample of several thousand individuals. “Obesity prevalence is potentially plateauing in the United States,” one CDC official told The Washington Post. “We may have passed peak obesity,” the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch wrote of the news.

[Read: The ‘peak obesity’ illusion]

Obesity has declined before by the government’s count, only to continue rising within a few years. One reason to think that this time is different is the rise of GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic and Mounjaro, which are remarkably adept at reducing appetite, leading to weight loss. Roughly one in eight Americans has taken a GLP-1 drug, and one in 16 is currently doing so, according to a survey by the health nonprofit KFF. It seems inevitable that as more Americans take therapies that put a lid on their appetite, obesity should mechanically decline.

Another possibility is that the developed world might be running up against a natural limit in overall obesity. In 2023, a team of Greek researchers wrote that obesity rates might stabilize in developed countries in the next few years, as “obesity has reached a biological limit … [or] a saturation threshold for the proportion of people who can become obese.” In fact, international evidence suggests that obesity has already “stabilized in children and adolescents of most economically advanced countries since 2000,” they wrote. (They also conceded that “the trends in adults are mixed and ambiguous and do not unequivocally support the obesity plateau hypothesis.”)

Finally, there’s the sudden decline in violent crime in the past few years—by some accounts, one of the fastest declines in homicide rates since the 1960s. One explanation is that the early 2020s marked the second time in a decade when the U.S. experienced the double whiplash of what some sociologists call the “Ferguson effect.” This theory holds that public outrage about police shootings reduces police activity and leads to an increase in violent crime. Adherents of this theory argue that in 2014, the death of Michael Brown created a backlash against policing, and in 2020, the death of George Floyd created another; in both cases, a high-profile killing created social unrest, which, they argue, may also have reduced police activity, possibly causing an overall increase in violent crime. As the health emergency wound down, policing picked up, and the spell of violence broke.

Another related explanation is that violent crime surged when lockdowns and other social disruptions unmoored young men from their routines in 2020 and 2021. But in the “great normalization” of 2022, young people returned to their pre-COVID schedules, and violent behavior quickly reverted to its pre-COVID rates. As John Roman, the director of the Center on Public Safety and Justice at NORC at the University of Chicago, told The Atlantic’s Rogé Karma, the beginning of the decline in violent crime coincided with the beginning of the 2022–23 school year, when pre-pandemic norms resumed for America’s teenagers.

This theory—that the pandemic created a brief bubble of abnormal and deadly behavior—would also explain why the U.S. saw an increase in auto fatalities during the first years of the pandemic. In March 2022, The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan summarized the berserk sociology of the moment pithily: “Everyone is acting so weird!” But, with time, people acted a little less weird. They resumed, among other things, their pre-pandemic manners of driving—that is to say, normally reckless, rather than completely out-of-control reckless.

[Read: The murder rate is suddenly falling]

Public policy may have played a small but meaningful role in declining crime and auto fatalities too. One creative explanation, from Bloomberg’s Justin Fox, is that Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan sent hundreds of billions of dollars to governors and mayors, which allowed them to increase law-enforcement spending to crack down on both violent criminals and out-of-control drivers. In fact, state and local government spending increased in 2022 by nearly 8 percent, its largest annual increase since the Great Recession. This coincided with a voter push toward tougher policing standards, as “Minneapolis voters rejected a plan to replace the city’s police department,” “San Franciscans threw out their progressive district attorney,” and “New Yorkers elected a former cop as mayor,” Fox wrote.

At the heights of government power, there is currently a “rift” in the debate over “how to make America healthier,” as Gina Kolata of The New York Times recently pointed out. On one side are techno-optimists such as Elon Musk, who trust in science and technology. “Nothing would do more to improve the health, lifespan and quality of life for Americans than making GLP inhibitors super low cost to the public,” he posted on X. On the other side, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is deeply skeptical of technology—as varied as nuclear power plants and the polio vaccine—and he has stressed that “lifestyle” is the more important determinant of health.

Kennedy gets this much right: Our lifespans are shaped as much by our behavior as they are medically determined by the health-care system. But rather than scaremongering about effective vaccines, we should be laser-focused on the truly scary causes of premature death in America and what it really takes to eliminate them—and on figuring out what’s gone right in the past few years.

RFK Jr. Is a Bellwether

2024-12-04T07:00:00-05:00

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a tangle of biographical ironies. He is an anti-elite renegade bearing the most elite surname in politics. Once feared for his left-wing radicalism when Barack Obama considered him for a Cabinet appointment in 2008, he has now been nominated to lead a major department for a right-wing administration. A notorious vaccine skeptic, Kennedy is set to direct health policy under the president who oversaw Operation Warp Speed, the country’s most successful vaccine-development program.

These inconsistencies, along with Kennedy’s colorful history of interactions with the animal kingdom, have made him the object of relentless derision in the press. I’m not interested in taking Kennedy’s side in these debates; he has said many things that are plainly wrong. But Kennedy embodies several trends across media, politics, science, and society, all of which require careful attention to understand how America is changing—and what sorts of people are, like Kennedy himself, poised to take advantage of those changes in the future.

The first, and most obvious, phenomenon to loft Kennedy to power has been the long shadow cast by COVID. Much of his popularity is an echo of pandemic anger over perceptions of government overreach, including lockdowns, mask mandates, extended school closures, vaccine requirements, and what many see as the hypocritical and inconsistent application of these rules.

[Read: RFK Jr. is in the wrong agency]

Kennedy’s outspoken position on vaccine safety has revealed—and also helped drive—the GOP-ification of the anti-vax position. Until just a few years ago, vaccine skepticism was nonpartisan. It was associated both with a hippie approach to health, which chiefly appealed to affluent lefties, and with the doctrine of political liberty, which appealed more to conservatives. In Kennedy, these anxieties are fused. He both exaggerates the risks of vaccine ingredients and also frames his objection to vaccination policies as a defense of personal choice. President Joe Biden “violated one of the central principles of freedom” with the vaccine mandates, Kennedy said in a video posted to X earlier this year. Those views align him with the Republican Party, which has become much more distrustful of science and scientists in the past few years.

Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism must be placed in a broader context to understand its political power. A lifelong crusader against corporations, Kennedy has few good things to say about almost any technological invention. He has voiced histrionic fears about nuclear reactors, said that Wi-Fi can cause “leaky brain,” suggested that chemicals in the water supply might make kids transgender, wondered aloud if Prozac might contribute to school shootings, and posted support for the so-called chemtrails conspiracy, which holds that the government uses the contrails, or condensation trails, of jetliners to spread toxic chemicals. At the same time, he is a big fan of products and behaviors that predate, say, modern agriculture. In October, he pledged to end the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of, among other things, “raw milk,” “clean foods,” “exercise,” and “sunshine.”

This primitive romanticism is the core of the modern Republican Party. To the extent that any single attitude unites the motley coalitions under Donald Trump, it is a pervasive distrust of incumbents, establishments, and legacy organizations. In Pew Research surveys, less than half of Republicans say they believe that higher education, Big Business, tech firms, the media, the entertainment industry, or unions have a positive effect on society. Although more than 60 percent of Democrats say they trust a variety of news organizations, including CNN and The New York Times, there is not one media company that more than 60 percent of Republicans say they trust, including Fox News.

One common explanation for Democrats’ recent losses among young and nonwhite voters is the “diploma divide.” College-educated Americans are moving left while less-educated Americans are moving right. Kennedy’s rise reveals a similar but distinct phenomenon, which is the “institutional-trust divide.” As the Vox writer Eric Levitz pointed out, young, nonwhite, and less-educated voters tend to have less trust in major institutions. They are more interested in “a paranoid vision of American life and a populist contempt for the nation’s political system,” he wrote. And these are precisely the groups that are moving fastest away from the Democratic Party. One might say that Democrats have become the party of bureaucratic rules, with their emphasis on guardrails and their appeals to democracy, while the GOP has become the party of anti-establishment rulers—swashbuckling outsiders who pledge to use their power to burn down the system.

Kennedy is also at the forefront of fitness politics. Since joining the Trump campaign, Kennedy has launched a spin-off movement: MAHA, or “Make America healthy again.” Brad Stulberg, a personal-development author and faculty member at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, told me that he sees MAHA as emblematic of an emerging phenomenon, which he calls “performative health.”

Whereas personal health is a just-the-basics approach to diet and exercise, Stulberg defines performative health as “a macho aesthetic” that messily combines a distrust of FDA-approved therapies, an enthusiasm for supplements, and a fixation with manly strength, especially strength that can be captured by front-facing cameras in gyms and posted to social media. Performative health is overtly masculine, Stulberg told me, and Kennedy is its champion, with his exercise videos, his relentless criticisms of the FDA, his reliance on vitamins and supplements, and his endorsement of testosterone-replacement therapy.

How can someone be a skeptic of federally approved therapies that have gone through rounds of clinical testing but also an outspoken fan of infrequently tested (or untested) supplements and risky drug regimens? One possibility goes back to institutions: Therapeutics that carry the stink of FDA and Big Pharma are automatically questionable. Another explanation is that supplements, vitamins, and antiaging treatments sound like tools for the already strong to get stronger, whereas pharmaceutical companies make therapies for sick people. By this somewhat Nietzschean calculation, supplements help the healthy (thus: good), whereas drugs are a corporate conspiracy to entrap the weak (thus: bad).

Although this is certainly a simplistic worldview, it might hold appeal for some young men who are looking for a model of masculinity. “I think many young men are drawn to this attitude toward fitness, and it’s being delivered by people who are coded as conservative,” Stulberg said. According to an analysis of voter behavior by the pollster Patrick Ruffini, men younger than 45 shifted 13 points toward Trump between the 2020 and 2024 elections. (Nonwhite noncollege men shifted right more than 20 points.) Kennedy, Stulberg said, shows how these concepts of strength, masculinity, and conservatism can be fused inside America’s majority-male party.

[Read: America stopped cooking with tallow for a reason]

The final trend that Kennedy epitomizes is the political dominance of elites who make “anti-elitism” their political brand. Kennedy has modeled this approach for years. He has spent his entire life as a celebrity. But for about as long as he’s been in the public eye, he has played the part of an insider’s outsider, combining a powerful name with a contempt for power. “I always had the feeling that we were all involved in some great crusade,” he once wrote, and his lifelong crusade has taken him from anti-corporate environmental lawyer to anti-government health crusader.

This style—the elite who despise the elite—describes some of Trump’s most influential backers, including Elon Musk, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and the financier Bill Ackman. What’s notable about these figures isn’t that they’re wealthy people supporting the conservative candidate; that’s a dog-bites-man story. Rather it’s that they’ve all couched their support for Trump as anti-establishment—whether it’s Ackman against colleges and the DEI bureaucracy, Musk against legacy media, or Andreessen against the Biden administration’s crypto policies. Each of these immensely powerful men has recognized that, in an age of anti-incumbency, the best way to promote one’s cause is to align oneself with the common man’s plight and to frame one’s opinions as a war against power.

Kennedy has, rather ingeniously, situated himself at the intersection of the most important trends in American politics and society, including but not limited to post-COVID anger at government overreach, the polarization of vaccine skepticism, the rise of anti-institutional crusaders in the GOP, the emergence of performative health as a branch of pro-masculine politics, and the triumph of anti-elite elitism. His specific views may not deserve support. But his political style deserves attention.

How Donald Trump Won Everywhere

2024-11-06T15:05:00-05:00

In 2022, pollsters and political analysts predicted a red wave in the midterms that didn’t materialize. Last night, polls anticipated a whisker-thin election, and instead we got a red wave that carried Donald Trump to victory.

The breadth of Trump’s improvement over 2020 is astonishing. In the previous two elections, we saw narrow demographic shifts—for example, non-college-educated white people moved toward Trump in 2016, and high-income suburban voters raced toward Biden in 2020. But last night’s election apparently featured a more uniform shift toward Trump, according to a county-by-county analysis shared with me by Thomas Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University. The “really simple story,” he said, “is that secular dissatisfaction with Biden’s economic stewardship affected most demographic groups in a fairly homogeneous way.”

Trump improved his margins not only in swing states but also in once comfortable Democratic strongholds. In 2020, Biden won New Jersey by 16 points. In 2024, Harris seems poised to win by just five points. Harris ran behind Biden in rural Texas border towns, where many Hispanic people live, and in rural Kentucky, where very few Hispanic people live. She ran behind Biden in high-income suburbs, such as Loudoun County, Virginia, and in counties with college towns, including Dane County (home to the University of Wisconsin) and Centre County (home to Penn State).

Perhaps most surprising, Trump improved his margins in some of America’s largest metro areas. In the past two cycles, Democrats could comfort themselves by counting on urban counties to continue moving left even as rural areas shifted right. That comfort was dashed last night, at least among counties with more than 90 percent of their results reported. In the New York City metro area, New York County (Manhattan) shifted nine points right, Kings County (Brooklyn) shifted 12 points right, Queens County shifted 21 points right, and Bronx County shifted 22 points right. In Florida, Orange County (Orlando) shifted 10 points right and Miami-Dade shifted 19 points right. In Texas, Harris County (Houston) and Bexar County (San Antonio) both shifted eight points right and Dallas County shifted 10 points right. In and around the “Blue Wall” states, Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia County shifted five points right, Michigan’s Wayne County (Detroit) shifted nine points right, and Illinois’ Cook County (Chicago) shifted 11 points right.

[David Frum: Trump won. Now what?]

Other than Atlanta, which moved left, many of the largest U.S. metros moved right even more than many rural areas. You cannot explain this shift by criticizing specific campaign decisions (If only she had named Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro her vice president…). You can’t pin this shift exclusively on, say, Arab Americans in Michigan who voted for Jill Stein, or Russian trolls who called in bomb threats to Georgia.

A better, more comprehensive way to explain the outcome is to conceptualize 2024 as the second pandemic election. Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020. In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one.

The pandemic was a health emergency, followed by an economic emergency. Both trends were global. But only the former was widely seen as international and directly caused by the pandemic. Although Americans understood that millions of people were dying in Europe and Asia and South America, they did not have an equally clear sense that supply-chain disruptions, combined with an increase in spending, sent prices surging around the world. As I reported earlier this year, inflation at its peak exceeded 6 percent in France, 7 percent in Canada, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in the United Kingdom, 10 percent in Italy, and 20 percent in Argentina, Turkey, and Ethiopia.

Inflation proved as contagious as a coronavirus. Many voters didn’t directly blame their leaders for a biological nemesis that seemed like an act of god, but they did blame their leaders for an economic nemesis that seemed all too human in its origin. And the global rise in prices has created a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world. The ruling parties of several major countries, including the U.K., Germany, and South Africa, suffered historic defeats this year. Even strongmen, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lost ground in an election that many experts assumed would be a rousing coronation.

This has been a year of global anti-incumbency within a century of American anti-incumbency. Since 2000, every midterm and presidential election has seen a change in control of the House, Senate, or White House except for 2004 (when George W. Bush eked out a win) and 2012 (when Barack Obama won reelection while Republicans held the House). The U.S. appears to be in an age of unusually close elections that swing back and forth, in which every sitting president spends the majority of his term with an underwater approval rating.

There will be a rush to blame Kamala Harris—the candidate, her campaign, and her messaging. But there is no escaping the circumstances that Harris herself could never outrun. She is the vice president of a profoundly unpopular president, whose approval was laid low by the same factors—such as inflation and anti-incumbency bias—that have waylaid ruling parties everywhere. An analysis by the political scientist John Sides predicted that a sitting president with Biden’s approval rating should be expected to win no more than 48 percent of the two-party vote. As of Wednesday afternoon, Kamala Harris is currently projected to win about 47.5 percent of the popular vote. Her result does not scream underperformance. In context, it seems more like a normal performance.

[Annie Lowrey: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

A national wave of this magnitude should, and likely will, inspire some soul searching among Democrats. Preliminary CNN exit polls show that Trump is poised to be the first GOP candidate to win Hispanic men in at least 50 years; other recent surveys have pointed to a dramatic shift right among young and nonwhite men. One interpretation of this shift is that progressives need to find a cultural message that connects with young men. Perhaps. Another possibility is that Democrats need a fresh way to talk about economic issues that make all Americans, including young men, believe that they are more concerned about a growth agenda that increases prosperity for all.

If there is cold comfort for Democrats, it is this: We are in an age of politics when every victory is Pyrrhic, because to gain office is to become the very thing—the establishment, the incumbent—that a part of your citizenry will inevitably want to replace. Democrats have been temporarily banished to the wilderness by a counterrevolution, but if the trends of the 21st century hold, then the very anti-incumbent mechanisms that brought them defeat this year will eventually bring them back to power.

Three Tips for Following Election Results Without Losing Your Mind

2024-11-05T15:58:20-05:00

Election Night is upon us, with all of its nail-biting anxiety, its cortisol-driven fear, and, for roughly half the country, the possibility of ecstatic relief after another surreal presidential campaign.

Results could take days, even weeks, to shake out. But the state of the race could also reveal itself surprisingly quickly. At 7 p.m. eastern time tonight, polls will close in the battleground state of Georgia. At 7:30 p.m., polls will close in North Carolina, another crucial toss-up. Both swing states are known for counting their ballots quickly, because of state laws that allow them to tally early and mail-in votes before Election Day.

[Read: Election anxiety is telling you something]

So when will we know the results, how can we sensibly extrapolate the early returns, and—perhaps most important—what information and analysis should we ignore? David Wasserman, a political analyst with the Cook Political Report, joined my podcast, Plain English, to explain how to watch the election returns like a pro—without falling for false hope or conspiracy theories. Here are three tips for following Election Night without losing your mind.

**1. This might sound weird, but don’t expect this election to be as close as 2016 or 2020.**

Wait, what? Aren’t Kamala Harris and Donald Trump essentially tied in national and swing-state polling averages? Didn’t Nate Silver put the odds that Harris will win this election at an exquisitely decimaled number between 50.00 and 50.99 percent? Isn’t there a nonzero chance that both candidates win 269 electoral votes?

Yes, yes, and yes. “This is the closest election in polling that I’ve covered in my 17 years, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to produce the closest result,” Wasserman told me. The 2016 and 2020 elections were absurdly close contests, both of them decided by about 78,000 votes. But, he said, “even elections as balanced as 2024 aren’t likely to hinge on 80,000 votes distributed across a handful of states.” Close polling does not predict historically close elections.

To understand what Wasserman means, perhaps a sports analogy is useful. Both sports betting and political polling try to express uncertain future events in the language of probabilities. The 2016 and 2020 elections were a bit like Super Bowls that went into overtime—something that’s happened only twice in the game’s six-decade history. Let’s say the next Super Bowl, in 2025, looks like a statistical dead heat, with two 13–4 teams with the exact same point differential. Let’s furthermore say that Vegas sports books throw up their hands and declare the game a “pick-’em,” meaning neither team is favored to win. Even with all of this balance, it’s still very unlikely that the game will go to overtime, because so few games ever go to overtime. It’s the same with this election. We are still a normal polling error from either Trump or Harris winning the seven closest swing states, which would be a decisive victory.

[Brian Klaas: The truth about polling]

We don’t know how to forecast future events in any language outside of probabilities, and it’s hard to make peace with a world of probabilities. If you flip a coin 10 times, the median outcome is five heads and five tails. But you shouldn’t expect that 10 flips will yield five heads, because that outcome has less than a 25 percent chance of occurring. You’re actually three times more likely to get a number of heads other than five. So don’t get too invested in any particular electoral map. It’s very unlikely that your highly specific prediction will come to pass, and that includes an election decided by 80,000 votes.

2. Ignore the exit polls.

Exit polls are exciting, because they provide a morsel of data during a highly anxious evening when audiences and news organizations are starving to know what’s going to happen in the next four hours, or four days. But there’s nothing particularly special about an exit poll. In many ways, it’s just another poll, but with a larger—and possibly misleading—sample. Exit polls might actually be less useful than other public-opinion surveys, Wasserman said, because the majority of voters now cast their ballots before Election Day.

If you’re watching a newscast that’s making a huge deal out of exit polls, it might have more to do with the need to fill time before we get actual election results. Rather, if you want to get an early sense of how things are trending on Election Night, the best thing to do is focus on county-level results that report the complete tally of votes. That means you’ll also want to avoid being overconfident about election results that are incomplete.

3. For the earliest bellwether counties, watch Nash, Cobb, Baldwin, and Saginaw.

By the end of the night, we’re likely to have nearly complete results from counties in Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan. Here are a few to watch:

Nash County, North Carolina

If you’re looking for a coin-flip county in a coin-flip election, it’s hard to find a better one than Nash, just outside North Carolina’s Research Triangle. According to Wasserman, the county has been decided by fewer than 1,000 votes in every presidential race since 2004. In 2016, out of about 47,000 votes counted, Trump won by fewer than 100 ballots. In 2020, out of about 52,000 votes counted, Joe Biden won by fewer than 200 ballots. If Harris keeps Nash in the Democratic column, it would suggest that she can fight Trump to a draw in poorer areas while she racks up votes in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.

[Listen: It could all come down to North Carolina]

Cobb County, Georgia

Metro Atlanta makes up most of Georgia’s vote, and Cobb County is packed with the sort of highly educated suburban dwellers who have shifted left in the Trump years. In 2012, Mitt Romney won Cobb by more than 12 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won the county by 14 points. For Harris to win the election, she’ll need double-digit margins in highly educated counties like Cobb across other swing states.

Baldwin County, Georgia

Although most eyes will be on Atlanta’s Fulton County, Wasserman told me that he’ll also be scrutinizing smaller and midsize Georgia counties, such as Baldwin County. Just outside Macon, in the middle of the state, Baldwin County is about 40 percent Black, and as a college town, it has a lot of young people. In 2016, Baldwin voted for Hillary Clinton by 1.7 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won it by 1.3 points. If Trump breaks through in Baldwin, Wasserman said, “it would be a sign that Harris is perhaps underperforming in both turnout and vote preference among younger Black voters and young voters” across the country.

Saginaw County, Michigan

How will we know if polls yet again undercounted Trump’s support among white men without a college degree? By looking at working-class counties like Saginaw, where Democrats won cycle after cycle before 2016. No Republican presidential candidate had won the plurality of votes in Saginaw since 1984, until Trump carried the county by just over one percentage point against Clinton, only for Biden to claw Saginaw back into the Democratic column by a mere 0.3 percentage points in 2020. “This is a place where organized labor powered Democrats to victory for many years,” Wasserman said. “If Trump wins Saginaw by five points, it’s going to be very difficult for Harris to overcome that.”

The New Law of Electoral Politics

2024-08-21T06:00:00-04:00

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More than 60 countries, home to half the global population, are holding or have already held national elections this year. What many political analysts forecast as “the year of democracy” is turning out to be the year of the insurgents, as ruling parties fall around the world. It is a trend that Democrats are desperately hoping won’t apply to Kamala Harris this November.

After 14 years in power, the U.K.’s Conservative Party faced its worst-ever electoral defeat. The far-right party Alternative for Germany surged in European Parliament elections, as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats suffered their own worst-ever defeat. South Africa’s African National Congress lost its majority for the first time since the end of apartheid. South Korea’s conservatives were knocked out of power, and in Senegal, the ruling coalition fell to an anti-corruption candidate. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi—by some accounts the most popular leader in the world—held on after a surprisingly tight election. And in France’s snap elections, voters lurched toward the far right in an initial round before consolidating behind a left-wing government in the ensuing runoff.

The most universal theme of these results has not been the rise of far-right populism or the ascendancy of far-left socialists. It has been the downfall of the establishment, the disease of incumbency, a sweeping revolt against elites. Voters of the world are sick and tired of whoever’s in charge. “By and large, people are unhappy with their governments, much more unhappy with their governments than they were 10 or 20, 30, 40 years ago,” Steve Levitsky, a government professor at Harvard, told NPR. “So, with some exceptions, being an incumbent is increasingly a disadvantage.”

One obvious culprit is the world economy. Even as pandemic deaths wound down in 2021 and 2022, supply-chain disruptions, combined with fidgety spenders who’d spent months in lockdown, sent prices surging around the world. At its peak, inflation exceeded 6 percent in France, 7 percent in Canada, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in the United Kingdom, and 10 percent in Italy. In other countries—Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey, Ethiopia—inflation exceeded 20 percent. Inflation erodes not only voters’ buying power but also their confidence in the ruling class. When voters feel poorer, they predictably take it out on their leaders.

[Read: ]The White House’s Kamala Harris blunder

But the success of political insurgents in 2024 cannot be reduced exclusively to materialist factors such as prices and economic growth. Voters are cultural creatures too, and dissatisfaction with global elites may represent a cultural evolution as much as a rebellion against higher prices.

In his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public, the former CIA analyst Martin Gurri observed that when the digital revolution unleashed a flood of “information flows”—articles, websites, posts, comments—it permanently altered the public’s relationship with elites. For example, in the age of Walter Cronkite, the dominant media technology was broadcast television, where a handful of channels monopolized audience attention. But the internet fragmented those channels into a zillion pieces, making it impossible for any group, no matter how elite, to fully control the flow of information to the public.

Gurri observed that the internet and social media tend to empower populists, fuel conspiracism, erode institutional trust, and engender a kind of nihilistic negativity among the public that makes governing with a mandate of legitimacy much harder. Under this interpretation, elites aren’t failing more than they used to; it’s that the impression of elite failure is rising. News headlines are relentlessly biased toward negativity, which can make it challenging for some incumbents to prove that the “real world” is better off than the news-media simulacrum of it. If Gurri is correct, then an internet-connected world is one where all power carries a trust tax, and incumbents are reliably punished at the polls for their power.

The United States is hardly immune to these forces. In the past 40 years, incumbent politicians have evolved from a protected class into a beleaguered one. In 1983, the University of Georgia political scientist James E. Campbell wrote that the incumbency advantage in U.S. politics, especially in Congress, was “one of the most elemental facts of political life in America.” Indeed, the U.S. saw relatively little turnover in national power during the 1930s and ’40s, when New Deal Democrats dominated politics. The ’50s were such a snooze that in 1956, Dwight Eisenhower crushed Adlai Stevenson for a second straight election, while the party balance of the Senate remained unchanged. Campbell seemed to consider the advantage of incumbency a natural element within democracy, akin to social inertia. “In the space of two years, the political conditions, the voters, the voters’ opinions, and the incumbent himself probably change very little,” he wrote. Beyond this inertia, he added, familiarity bred fondness in politicians, and voters were more comfortable with candidates whose time in office advertised their competence. Finally, he noted, voters seemed to associate time in government with experience and ability.

Not anymore. Now exasperation with the ruling class is the iron law of electoral politics. According to Gallup, it’s now been three years since at least 30 percent of Americans said they were satisfied with “the way things are going in the U.S.” This is the longest stretch of dissatisfaction since Gallup started asking the question, in 1979. NBC analysts, who conduct a similar survey, recently said that they “have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.”

Chronic dissatisfaction has bred chronic turnover in the past 25 years. The U.S. has held 12 national elections since 2000, including midterms. Ten of those 12 federal elections resulted in a change of party in the White House, the Senate, or the House, meaning just about every election was a de facto change election. In this environment, incumbency advantage seems like a less and less useful concept for understanding electoral politics. A better one might be an extreme version of the theory of “thermostatic public opinion”—the idea that elected representatives often overshoot their mandate, which inspires voters to change the dial from left to right and back again.

This brings us to Harris, whose sudden entry into the 2024 election scrambles the concept of incumbency advantage. Fresh face or incumbent? She is the former, and also the latter, and perhaps both, and sometimes neither, all at once. Her relationship to Joe Biden exists in a quantum superposition of political convenience. When it is useful to claim credit for something that happened under the Biden administration, one hears the inclusive “we.” Where she intends to chart a new path, I is the appropriate pronoun.

Harris’s quantum incumbency has lifted the Democrats’ odds of winning an election, in part because voters seem to consider her a free agent, if not quite a change agent. That is, voters don’t seem to hold her responsible for their least favorite memories of the Biden White House. Whereas Biden’s economic record polled horrendously, Harris is “more trusted than Donald Trump on the US economy,” according to polling by the Financial Times. She seems to have consolidated Biden’s support among Democrats while coconut-pilling enough undecideds to squeeze out a small advantage in the election.

[Read: The one big policy that Kamala Harris needs]

Although these sorts of last-minute leadership switcheroos are incredibly rare in American politics, they appear to have worked in other countries. In June 2019, British Prime Minister Theresa May resigned, and London’s loquacious former mayor Boris Johnson was named the leader of the Conservative Party. Almost instantly, election polls showed conservative support skyrocketing. Before the swap, Conservatives were receiving about 25 percent support in voter surveys. In the October general election, their party won 43 percent of the vote.

The U.S. presidential race is still extremely close and fluid. But on the off chance that Harris wins in November, we may look back at this election as a watershed moment in our understanding of how the public assigns blame and credit to its rulers. By bombing the June debate, Biden may have accidentally created an antidote to the disease of the incumbent: same horse, different rider.

Why the Markets Are Melting Down

2024-08-05T14:12:02-04:00

In the past 24 hours, Japanese stocks suffered their worst collapse since the 1987 crash, other Asian markets cratered, tech stocks plummeted, the Dow plunged, and several additional global markets suffered from various synonyms for “fell a lot.”

What’s going on in global markets? Any attempt at an explanation has to start here: Nobody actually understands how markets work. This is not a cop-out. It’s a boring statement of fact. It is not humanly possible to fully comprehend an equilibrium with tens of thousands of parties and counterparties making decisions based on dynamic and asymmetric information flows. As a result, you should generally distrust almost every article that attempts to explain the causes of stock-market gyrations, just as you should generally distrust people who predict the weather by staring at tea leaves.

But with that massive caveat out of the way, it seems like this historic global market correction is being driven by three major events: recession fears, AI-bubble concerns, and, perhaps most important, the unwinding of a major macro-investor trade involving the Japanese yen.

First, the recession fears. In the past few months, the economy has clearly slowed down, prompting many people to expect the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates for the first time since the inflation crisis began. In its latest meeting, however, the Federal Reserve declined to do so. Last week’s jobs report suggests it might have made a costly mistake. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the official unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3 percent. This is particularly concerning because, in the past year, the jobless rate has increased by 0.8 percentage points, which is historically a worrying indicator of an imminent recession.

[Rogé Karma: The Federal Reserve’s little secret]

Second, while some analysts are worried about a broader economic slowdown, others are alarmed by the amount of money that major tech companies—such as Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta—are investing in AI. In the past few months, analysts at several major banks, including Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital, and Barclays, have published notes questioning whether AI will generate enough profits to pay off the hundreds of billions of dollars that tech giants and venture capitalists are committing to the technology, as The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong recently wrote. OpenAI, for its part, is expected to lose $5 billion in 2024, almost 10 times its losses in 2022. Artificial intelligence might be the most important platform technology since the invention of the web. To conflate one day’s sell-off with the future earnings potential of an entire tech category would be a mistake. But just as the internet revolution produced and then recovered from the dot-com bubble, some analysts are starting to worry that current investments in artificial intelligence are out of step with the imminent revenue being generated by AI tools.

Third, and most important, is the yen. In the past few years, the central banks of the U.S. and almost every other industrialized economy raised interest rates to burn off inflation. But in Japan, where economic growth has been feeble for years, the central bank declined to raise rates for fear that it might lead to a deep recession. This kept the yen relatively cheap in a world of rising rates, which helped Japanese multinational corporations sell exports in countries with stronger currencies. As a result, Japan’s stock market exploded upward over the past two years.

Japan’s low rates had another side effect: They created the perfect conditions for a popular trade that may have quietly driven the surge in stocks around the world, including in the United States. It worked something like this: Macro investors could borrow Japanese yen—which, again, pay no interest—then convert it to other currencies that paid a higher interest, and invest in higher-yielding assets, like tech stocks. This “carry trade” looked invincible, as Japan seemed determined to keep its rates low. But in July, the Bank of Japan raised rates for the first time in years. The Japanese yen jumped higher, at the same time that U.S. data weakened the dollar, creating a headache for investors. For example, let’s say a trader had borrowed 1 million yen several months ago and converted that amount to, say, $6,000. Suddenly, those dollars bought only 900,000 yen. To address this 100,000-yen shortfall, the investor would need to sell out of other positions to acquire more yen—say, Microsoft and Meta stock. Thus, a massive carry trade interrupted by a sudden increase in the value of the Japanese yen might have triggered a stock-market sell-off. “You can’t unwind the biggest carry trade the world has ever seen without breaking a few heads,” Kit Juckes, the chief foreign-exchange strategist at Societe Generale, said in a research note.

Every article about a stock meltdown should be legally obligated to end with the same message: Just calm down, okay? In any given year, there is a 64 percent chance of a 10 percent correction in the S&P 500. Meanwhile, there is even more reason for Americans to remain calm in 2024. The stock market is coming off an all-time high, and the U.S. economy continues to grow while inflation continues to decline. Breaking news about market meltdowns is a part of life. So is forgetting about the last one.