Noah SmithModify

2025-04-24 04:52:09

“The blood of Numenor is all but spent, its pride and dignity forgotten” — Elrond

“Oh, Daddy was a caveman/ He played ball in skins, with shirts/ He dreamed of lights up in the sky/ While scratching in the dirt” — Tom Orley

I suppose it’s natural, when your country is in a state of steep decline, to take heart in the great achievements of your ancestors. Yishan Wong, the former CEO of Reddit, is from Pittsburgh, but his ancestors are from China. In a long post on X, he expounded a theory that China will always renew itself and rise to meet any challenge, because it’s conscious of its 5000 years of history:

Every kid in China grows up knowing that they're part of a 5000-year-old civilization…What it means is that even if you're a bunch of peasants right NOW, your people have always had civilization. The civilizations aren't perfect or eternal - they rise and fall when the rulers get corrupt and stupid - but civilization is part of the fate of your people, almost the natural default state of things. Even when it's fallen, it's always come back, because that's how your people DO things…

It's like knowing your family has been rich for generations and you're just in one of the down periods. That's different from having been poor and primitive from the beginning of time. It means that Chinese people internalize a default notion of "yeah, we have a civilization, it's just a down period right now, but eventually another strong leader will come about, we'll all work hard, and our civilization will rise again as it has dozens and dozens of times throughout history."…[F]or most Chinese history, China was the world-leading civilization and Chinese people know that…

I was lucky in my youth to work for a boss who was executing a long-term project plan (years long)…The West has less experience like that (on a generational scale). In the 1970s and 80s, China embarked on the long road to industrializing itself…These days, people often say, "it'll take 20 years to get manufacturing started again in the US." And the inherent unspoken response to that is, "oh man, that's too long, I guess we're sunk." But the Chinese response is, "Okay, better start working on it then and we'll have it in 20 years."…

I'm trying to express this deep idea of "they always knew it was in their blood, because it was part of their history."

Now, there are a bunch of reactions you can have to this, and the simplest, object-level response is that it’s a bunch of romanticized nonsense. China didn’t take a longer, harder road to industrialization than the West did — in fact, it’s exactly the opposite. China went from $3000 in per capita GDP to $19,000 in just 34 years; this took the UK more than 200 years, from 1760 to 1976:

It was people in the West who had to endure the long hard slog of gradual industrialization, getting up every day to labor for a future that only their descendants would ever be able to see; China zoomed to modernity in a single generation, taking some shortcuts along the way.

Nor is it the case that China’s current economic ascent is simply a return to former greatness. The Han Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty were certainly mighty and wealthy civilizations for their day, but the industrialization that China has accomplished since 1979 has no precedent or analogy in the imperial past. A long-term graph of China’s living standards looks even more like a hockey-stick than it does for other countries; at the height of Tang power, the average Chinese person was living a life that we’d now think of as one of desperate, inescapable poverty.

Like the rest of us, modern China is in uncharted territory, both in terms of its stunning achievements and in terms of its long-term challenges.

But simply observing that Wong’s reading of history is wrong overlooks the more important point, which is that the story he tells has real power — at least to him, and probably to a lot of other people as well. No, it’s not literally true that China’s modern greatness is a reclamation of past greatness, but if that myth gives Chinese people (or ethnically Chinese people) the confidence to get up and work hard day after day, then it has served an important purpose.

This kind of motivating myth is by no means unique to China. Plenty of White Americans draw inspiration from the greatness of Greece and Rome, or the British Empire. Just yesterday an Iranian tech founder was telling me about the greatness of the Achaemenids. V.S. Naipaul, who grew up in Trinidad, waxed lyrical over the temples of Hampi. A number of Black intellectuals in 20th century America devoted considerable thought to the greatness of past African empires. There are some Jewish Americans who will be happy to tell you about their own “5000 years of history” — after all, by the Jewish calendar, this is the year 5785.1

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2025-04-22 16:43:08

“There are no American troops in Baghdad!” — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf

Around the middle of 2022, it became apparent that the Biden administration was going to go all-in on industrial policy. The policies that Biden implemented — the CHIPS Act, and the green energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act — had already been in the works for quite a while. But so had a bunch of other Democratic policy ideas that didn’t end up making it into law.1 So it wasn’t until 2022 that we realized that industrial policy was going to be Biden’s Big Thing.

I was personally overjoyed about this trend. For years, I had worried that America’s eroding manufacturing base made it less capable of standing up to China and other authoritarian adversaries. I was also optimistic that a big push for green energy could accelerate decarbonization both at home and abroad. And for years, I had been deeply interested in the successful industrial policies of East Asian countries like Korea and Japan during their catch-up development phases. I was eager to see America try its hand at something similar, in order to revive its stagnant industrial base.

At the same time, I didn’t agree with everything the administration was trying to do. I realized that if the U.S. did experience a manufacturing revival, it would be by leveraging our strengths in automation and technology — in other words, even in the best-case scenario, the era of good plentiful blue-collar manufacturing jobs wasn’t going to come back. Some people in the Biden administration didn’t seem to understand that, and appeared to view industrial policy as a jobs program.

I also disagreed with some of the ways that the Biden administration tried to implement industrial policy. The “buy American” provisions were unnecessary and unhelpful (local demand will foster a network of domestic suppliers anyway). The “everything bagel” requirements for subsidies were too onerous, particularly the union labor requirements in states with very few union workers.

As one of the more prominent commentators writing about these policies, I had a choice to make. I had to decide whether to emphasize my criticisms of Biden’s approach, or my overall positivity about the idea. Then, as the years went by and we started to see some of the results of Biden’s policies, the choice became even more acute, because some of the policies succeeded and some of them failed.

The administration’s core industrial policies seemed to be bearing fruit; there was a massive factory construction boom, most of it financed with private money (the subsidies acting mainly as a nudge). The TSMC plant in Arizona got back on track after some initial hitches. But at the same time, Biden’s administration failed to build any EV chargers or rural broadband, and new transmission lines were stymied by regulatory hurdles. It seemed like the more the government was directly involved with a project, the less likely it was to ever happen; nudging the private sector worked, but direct government action turned into wasteful jobs programs that built nothing.

I had to make a decision: How vehemently and how frequently should I lambast the Biden administration’s failures, and how vehemently and how frequently should I praise its successes? If I leaned too hard toward praise, I might look like an apparatchik who just parroted administration talking points. And even worse, I might fail to perform one of my core functions as an independent commentator — criticizing policy to help steer it in the right direction. But on the other hand, if I leaned too much toward criticism, the people in the administration might decide that I was their political opponent, and stop listening to me entirely. And I might also throw the baby out with the bathwater by ignoring the real successes.

To be honest, I didn’t actually think very hard about any of these tradeoffs at the time. But perhaps subconsciously, I was making these sort of calculations. In any case, I think I ended up striking a pretty good balance between criticism and praise.

Conservative industrialists, however, are facing a much harder dilemma right now. Biden’s industrial policy was a mixed bag, with more successes than failures. But Trump’s tariff policy is a giant flaming disaster. The dollar is down, as investors flee American bonds, putting the country’s whole financial stability in danger. Forecasts for the real economy are getting more pessimistic by the day. Stocks are down yet again. Here’s a representative headline:

Any time you hear the words “worst since 1932” in connection with the American economy, you know things are not going well.

Given this disaster, commentators who support Trump have a hard choice to make. Do they denounce Trump’s policies, thus condemning themselves to certain excommunication from the MAGA movement, and dropping their influence to basically zero without altering Trump’s course in any perceptible way? Or do they scramble to find some way to put lipstick on the tariff pig?

The latter course of action will preserve their influence within MAGA-land, but will also make them look ridiculous to the rest of the country, who has no such ideological commitments to uphold. And in the process, the commentators will become an accomplice to this act of economic self-mutilation.

Oren Cass, the chief economist at American Compass and a prominent advocate of industrial policy from the right, has chosen the second path. He is continuing to fiercely defend the idea that tariffs are a way to reindustrialize the American economy. In a post on April 4th, shortly after Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, Cass defended the tariffs and made some minor suggestions for how Trump might tweak the policy:

As the economic carnage from the tariffs became more apparent, Cass continued to double down. In a debate with Jason Furman and others a week later, Cass argued that trade had devastated American manufacturing in the 2000s. A few days after that, he argued that many Americans will enjoy working in factories:

[I]f fully 25% of poll respondents say they’d prefer a factory job to their current job, that suggests massive potential unmet by the current labor market…One in four?! That would be 40 million of 160 million employed Americans!…When we talk about reindustrializing America, we are talking about adding millions of manufacturing jobs, not tens of millions—several percentage points of the labor force, not a quarter or more…[P]lease, let’s stop with the “nobody wants to work in a factory,” and even more so the “I don’t see you working in factory.”

And a few days after that, Cass argued that Trump’s tariff strategy is primed to succeed, because meeting American domestic demand is more important than exporting:

Our $1 trillion trade deficit presents an enormous opportunity. Most economic analysis of the American position in the global economy seems to assume that export markets represent the key opportunity for U.S. industry and thus success depends upon winning in those markets. From that perspective, for instance, tariffs on the intermediate goods that manufacturers might use in their own production is a disaster. How can a U.S. producer hope to compete with a German producer if the U.S. producer has to pay a tariff on components from China and the German producer does not?

This assumption makes good sense in the typical developing-country situation where the domestic market is small and trade imbalances are likely a minor factor…But the top priority and major opportunity for the United States is not higher exports, it is recovering the capacity to meet domestic demand with domestic supply…Indeed, the U.S. will be building leading-edge semiconductor fabs to meet domestic demand for a long time before it needs to consider export markets at all.

If you’re going to try and mount an intellectual defense of Trump’s tariff policies — instead of just screaming out memes, pointing fingers, and trying to distract people by talking about immigration instead — this is basically how you have to do it. Nothing good is coming of Trump’s tariffs right now, so if you’re going to defend them, you basically have to argue that they represent short term pain for long term gain. In this case, the long-term “gain” is economic self-sufficiency and a bonanza of factory jobs.

Formally speaking, you can’t prove that this is wrong, except by waiting a bunch of years and then observing that reindustrialization didn’t happen. There are no hard and fast economic laws of the Universe; we have a lot of theories, but economies are complex beasts, and the past is an imperfect guide to the future. I can’t completely rule out the possibility that Trump’s tariffs will cause a vast crop of steel factories and shoe factories and semiconductor factories to spring up from the American topsoil like mushrooms after the rain.

And yet when we look at what’s actually happening to American manufacturing in real time, it doesn’t look anything at all like the beginning of the reindustrialization that Cass imagines. Here’s a quick roundup of news from just the last few days:

• Volvo is cutting 800 jobs at three U.S. factories, citing tariff uncertainty.

• The Philadelphia Manufacturing Survey is plunging, signaling extreme pessimism among U.S. manufacturers.

• Howmet Aerospace, a major aircraft parts manufacturer based in Pittsburgh, has declared that it may halt production due to Trump’s tariffs.

• The April NY Manufacturing Survey is recording some of the most negative conditions that it has ever recorded, with new orders and shipments falling off a cliff:

• The Philadelphia Fed’s survey of manufacturers is also showing a massive dropoff in new orders.

• Falling orders are causing Volvo to lay off hundreds of American workers at two factories.

• Plenty of evidence shows that American manufacturers are pulling back on their capital spending plans because of tariffs:

  Manufacturing pessimism has spiked dramatically in April as industrial producers deal with changing tariff plans and try to assess how global trade policy will impact their costs and operations in the coming months…Several surveys released this week show huge swings in business confidence between January, when most manufacturers had a positive outlook for near-term conditions…and April, when sentiment changed for the much, much worse…Some of the most dramatic declines came from the Equipment Leasing Finance Foundation (ELFF), an organization that represents lenders that help manufacturers obtain new capital equipment for factories. In March, more than half of manufacturers surveyed by that group expected capital spending to increase or stay about the same in the next four months. By April, more than 61% said they expect spending to fall.

• Ford is halting sales of some American-made cars to China. (Note: This will increase America’s trade deficit with China).

• GM is laying off American factory workers too.

• News of various other factory layoffs is proliferating. Cleveland Cliffs, the steel company, is laying off 1200 workers.

It’s not hard to understand why American manufacturing is getting hit hard by tariffs. As I’ve said in many posts, and as knowledgeable folks are screaming from the rooftops, broad tariffs of the type Trump has imposed raise the price of imported components and makes U.S. manufacturers less competitive. Even manufacturers who initially scoffed at this effect are quickly learning what a big problem it is:

And on top of the effect of the tariffs themselves, uncertainty about future tariffs — which has spiked to record levels under Trump — hurts manufacturing even more, because manufacturers don’t know how to plan their future supply chains.

This is not a difficult principle to understand. And yet somehow, Oren Cass appears not to grasp it. In his post that I quoted above, Cass argues that the “imported components” problem only applies to exports, not to manufacturing for the domestic market. That is obviously wrong. For an American auto factory in Kentucky, the cost of components matters just as much whether you’re selling your cars to customers in Dubai or Dallas. Without the ability to source cheap car parts from Mexico and Canada, American manufacturers will see their costs for domestic manufacturing rise.

This is why you can’t just measure the U.S. trade deficit and assume that this amount will be added to U.S. manufacturing if we wall off our economy (as Cass assumes in his post). The amount of domestic demand for manufactured products is not fixed. More expensive components will mean more expensive manufactured products, which will cause Americans to consume less. Americans will become poorer, and they’ll also substitute their consumption away from goods and toward services (whose price will go up by less).

Cass’ hand-waving dismissal of exports also ignores another crucial factor: scale effects. Export markets help American manufacturers scale up their production, which lowers their costs — and thus helps them sell even more to American consumers, capturing more of the U.S. market as well. Commentators like Sam Hammond, who argue that the U.S. should focus on export promotion instead of import substitution, are correct for this reason.

(On top of all that, it’s not clear how much tariffs even reduce trade deficits. As Arnaud Costinot and Ivan Werning show in a new theory paper, it’s possible that even very high tariffs might leave trade deficits mostly unchanged, while simply making an economy poorer.)

All this is theoretical, of course. Cass and other tariff defenders can simply continue to assume that tariffs will reduce trade deficits by a lot, and that this reduction will translate into a whole bunch of new U.S. factories. Perhaps they assume that the unfolding carnage in the U.S. manufacturing industry is simply a temporary disruption, and that after a short period of suffering, American manufacturers will get back on their feet, invest in domestic production capacity, and eventually do better than ever.

Except if that were true, we’d probably see two things. First, we’d see manufacturing stocks doing well, because far-sighted investors would know if American manufacturers would eventually benefit from tariffs. Instead, the stocks of American manufacturers have been crashing. Also, if tariffs provided a protective shield under which American manufacturers could flourish, we’d probably see a bunch of them rushing to invest and build new capacity. But we don’t; capex in the industry is plummeting.

In other words, neither investors nor manufacturers themselves believes in the long-term reindustrialized future that Oren simply assumes will come about. Instead, it appears that tariffs are dramatically accelerating America’s deindustrialization.

And if that’s true, Cass’ other arguments all go up in smoke. Who cares if people like working factory jobs when there are fewer factory jobs to work in? And so on. Every defense of the tariffs is based on this assumption of reindustrialization; if, as looks very likely, that turns out to be a fantasy, the whole edifice collapses.

Oren Cass and other tariff-defending pundits have thus hitched their wagons to a stagecoach that is driving straight off a cliff. They have managed to remain inside the favored circle of the MAGA movement, but this required them to make a terrible sacrifice — they lost their freedom to look out the window and see the calamity unfolding.

I am glad that during the Biden administration, I didn’t have to make any such choice.

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2025-04-20 16:53:49

WARNING: This blog post contains major spoilers for many episodes of the TV show Black Mirror.

I’ve been blogging pretty nonstop about economics, and my last post got pretty bleak. I feel like I deserve a break. What better way to distract myself from my country slowly morphing into a real-life dystopia than to watch TV shows about fantasy dystopias?

I’ve been a fan of Black Mirror since the show first came out 14 years ago. I love sci-fi, as you all know, and this show is (usually) some of the smartest — a worthy successor to The Twilight Zone, and in some ways even better.

But I don’t just watch the show for the high concepts; it’s also full of incredibly well-told stories. Some of these are terrifying and gripping, some are poignant and sad, some are downright silly, but almost all of them are great. I credit the singular genius of the show’s creator and writer, Charlie Brooker. (He also has a habit of spinning story plots from the lyrics of rock songs, which is very cool.)

So today I thought that just for fun, I’d go through and review and rate a whole bunch of Black Mirror episodes. I initially wanted to do all of the episodes, but there are five I don’t remember well anymore, so I just left those five out of the list. I also left out the innovative choose-your-own-adventure movie Bandersnatch, because I actually haven’t seen it.

Anyway, here are 28 episode reviews, along with ratings on a 10-point scale.

“The National Anthem” (5/10)

The first episode of Black Mirror catapulted the show to instant fame, even though it was less about technology than the others. Cerebral cautionary tales about the excesses of technology take a while to work their way into people’s hearts; the sheer grisly spectacle of the British Prime Minister being made to have sex with a pig on live TV is like a direct blow to the head. This episode’s job was to get everyone talking about Black Mirror, and it succeeded.

Interestingly, the reason this episode failed for me is because it was too British. The plot hinges on the kidnapping of a princess, and we Americans just find it hard to understand that sort of reverence for a royal family; I’m just not sure there’s any equivalent figure in the U.S. whose kidnapping would allow a random terrorist to extort the head of state.1 (It’s also probably a reference to an actual scandal in the UK.) Most Black Mirror episodes either could happen in America, or feel like they could; this one felt foreign, and so it didn’t resonate as much.

But at the same time, “The National Anthem” gave me a good sense of who was making this TV show: a Gen X British punk. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the “national anthem” the title referred to was “God Save the Queen” — not the actual UK anthem, but the Sex Pistols version. The climax of the episode is supposed to evoke shock and horror, but I also felt an undertone of glee, as the show’s creator thumbed his nose at the British elite.

“Fifteen Million Merits” (10/10)

This is one of my favorite Black Mirror episodes of all, for a number of reasons. First, the dystopia it creates is holistic and immersive. Most Black Mirror episodes have a 20-minutes-into-the-future feeling — they’re basically the modern day with a few new technologies, usually introduced by one particular company or inventor. But “Fifteen Million Merits” presents you with a whole futuristic landscape, where human beings have to pedal on bikes every day to create energy2 in order to be able to afford tiny rooms where they’re constantly bombarded with advertisements on every wall. Their only hope of escape is to become a TV personality by winning a reality show. It’s a never-ending living nightmare that all of the characters just sort of accept — which, of course, is how most of us treat most of the dystopian aspects of the real world around us.

I also love “Fifteen Million Merits” because it’s one of the most poignant episodes. The protagonist’s desperate longing for the one woman who pays him a tiny bit of attention is both pathetic and relatable. Instead of rebelling against the insane system that keeps people penned in like cattle, the main character instead focuses on wishing he could have the one beautiful thing in his bleak, forsaken universe.

Also, the ending is perfect and hilariously, darkly ironic — Black Mirror at its best.

“The Entire History of You” (9/10)

This is another of my favorites. The central conceit of Black Mirror is that human nature makes us abuse technology and use it to exploit and hurt each other. Technology thus holds up a mirror to reflect our own darker impulses; hence the name of the show.

Sometimes, the show has to really stretch in order to make this motif fit the plot of an episode. Technologists often complain that Black Mirror is too pessimistic about technology, but the truth is that usually it’s just too pessimistic about human nature. In reality, most people use most technologies for benign and productive purposes.

But “The Entire History of You” is definitely not a stretch. It shows an incredibly plausible scenario of how technologies that allow us to record our experiences can force us to confront truths that we’d be better off papering over or forgetting.3 As you watch the episode’s protagonist ruin his life, you keep mentally searching for something that you’d do differently in his place — some critical error or misdeed that you would avoid. And there really just is none. The episode ends with a feeling of dread certainty that any normal person would fall into the same trap.

“The Entire History of You” thus functions not just as an emotionally powerful story, but as an effective warning about a real near-future technology — really a perfect execution of the basic Black Mirror formula.

“Be Right Back” (6/10)

This is one of the most popular and acclaimed episodes in all of Black Mirror, with some lists giving it the top spot. I just can’t agree. It was pretty good, but I don’t think it was one of the best.

“Be Right Back” is about AI technology that lets people feel like they’re interacting with their deceased loved ones. The first half of the episode is just about a chatbot that gets trained on a dead guy’s data and is able to mimic his conversational style. This technology actually exists now, though it didn’t when the episode came out. In the show, this chatbot version of the reanimation tech works fine and doesn’t seem to hurt anyone; the real version seems similarly benign.

Things go wrong in the TV version when the reanimation tech abruptly shifts from the digital to the physical — the company sends the woman a creepy android replica of her dead boyfriend. Unlike the chatbot, this android falls into the uncanny valley and ends up producing existential horror.

I guess the message of this episode is that trying to bring your dead loved ones back from the dead is a bad idea. But the chatbot version of this seems not to cause many problems, both in the show and real life. So instead of some deeper message about trying to play God and cheat death and avoid the natural cycle of grief or whatever, the basic moral seems to be “Stick with chatbots and avoid creepy androids.” Those are words to the wise, to be sure.

“White Bear” (4/10)

In this episode, a woman who’s an accomplice to a murder is sentenced to a punishment where for 100 years, she has to live out the same punishment again and again. Every day she lives out a scary scenario where she’s hunted down. Then at the end of the day, they reveal it’s all an act, but they wipe her memory, so tomorrow she can go through the same ordeal all over again.

This is a pretty silly punishment. If you’re wiping the woman’s memory of the punishment every day, why would you do it for 100 years? The pain and fear isn’t cumulative; it gets erased again and again. And in the meantime you’re paying all these human actors to act out these scenarios, which has to be insanely expensive — all just to punish one criminal. Honestly, jail is a lot worse than whatever this is, and cheaper too.

“The Waldo Moment” (3/10)

In this episode, a goofy TV character named Waldo ends up running for office, and somehow this ends up with Waldo taking over the world and becoming the face of some kind of authoritarian regime. How this happens is never exactly shown.

This episode is pretty forgettable, and the real-life clowns winning elections in America are far more dangerous than imaginary clowns winning them in a fantasy UK. But I was kind of reminded of the Taiwanese politician Lai Pin-yu, a cosplayer who campaigned for office while dressed as Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion — and won. She apparently did a good job in the legislature, before eventually losing her seat in another election.

“White Christmas” (10/10)

This was a special between the second and third seasons of the show, and it’s one of the greatest Black Mirror episodes — and one of the greatest works of dystopian sci-fi — ever created. The episode is divided into three interwoven stories. The plot is impressively complex and intricate, with unexpected twists and turns that somehow resolve into an ending that in retrospect feels inevitable. It’s just masterful storytelling.

There are actually two horrifying, dystopian technologies in “White Christmas”. The first allows people to “block” other people in real life, like they would on a social media site. It’s like a digitally enforced restraining order — if someone blocks you, you just see them as a red blob forever. If your loved one does this to you, there’s no way for you to plead your case, or get back in their good graces — since they’ve blocked you, you can never talk to them again, so one mistake can just annihilate a relationship forever.

This feels like a metaphor for the avoidant attachment style that young people goad each other into online — the impulse to permanently chop anyone out of your life as soon as they say or do anything that upsets you.

The second dystopian technology in “White Christmas” is personality upload, which is a staple of Black Mirror. It features the most horrifying upload scenes I’ve ever seen — a real “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” type plot, where a man gets uploaded and tortured for a near-infinite amount of subjective time. This is the most horrifying moment in all of Black Mirror — and one of the most horrifying things I’ve seen on TV.

“Nosedive” (8/10)

This is another case of flawless Black Mirror execution. The technology in question is a social credit system, a bit along the lines of the system China claimed they were rolling out but didn’t.

In “Nosedive” people are able to rate each other on basically anything, and these interpersonal ratings determine whether you’re rich or poor. As you might expect, this society is filled with fake niceness. The protagonist ends up accidentally having her life ruined by this system, when one initial bad rating eventually causes so many problems in her life that she gets more bad ratings.

This is another case where Black Mirror gave us a clear, concrete, and effective warning about the potential harms from a near-future technology. The episode is also pretty funny and fun to watch.

“Shut Up and Dance” (8/10)

This is another one of the most acclaimed episodes of Black Mirror, and it deserves its reputation. It’s the story of a kid who gets recorded masturbating to child porn by hackers, and who is then blackmailed by those hackers into doing a series of increasingly bizarre and horrifying crimes and stunts.

“Shut Up and Dance” is one of the best-made episodes of Black Mirror. The directing is fast-paced and gripping, and the writing is incredibly realistic. You’re on the edge of your seat for the entire episode. It feels like the kind of thing that could really happen, and you find yourself asking why it hasn’t ever happened. (Some people say that the plot is similar to the real case of Brian Wells, but I don’t see many similarities.)

The episode’s one weakness is the twist at the end. For most of the episode you think the protagonist is being blackmailed over watching normal porn, but at the end you find out it was child porn; this makes his cooperation with the blackmailers more understandable, but also makes him somewhat less sympathetic in retrospect. It adds plausibility, but at the expense of emotional impact.

“San Junipero” (11/10)

This was not only the best episode of Black Mirror by far, but also probably the single best hour of television I have ever watched in my life — an accomplishment so unique and profound that I still get shivers when I think about it. Even if every other episode of Black Mirror had been terrible, it would be worth watching the entire series just to get to “San Junipero”.

If you haven’t seen it, please stop reading this review now and go watch it before getting spoilers.

For those who saw it but don’t remember, “San Junipero” starts with a quiet, touching lesbian romance in a 1980s California beach town. Eventually you find out that they’re in a simulation. One of the women, Yorkie — the shy one who had been a virgin before meeting the more experienced and outgoing Kelly — turns out to be a locked-in invalid who’s trying to get doctor-assisted suicide so she can upload herself to the San Junipero simulation forever instead of just visiting occasionally. Kelly, meanwhile, lost her husband and daughter, and is now just enjoying herself in a retirement community while she waits to die. Eventually Yorkie convinces Kelly to upload herself too, and the two live (presumably) happily ever after in the digital afterlife.

The story is incredibly heart-wrenching and perfectly executed (and it’s based on song lyrics, which I always enjoy). But this is also the episode that changed Black Mirror forever, because it shifted the show’s basic thesis about technology. In the end, simulated reality and personality upload allow both Yorkie and Kelly to live an unambiguously better life than they would have been able to live without the technology. In a show about techno-pessimism, “San Junipero” stands out as one of the most techno-optimistic stories ever told.

It’s also an optimistic story about humanity. In its early episodes, Black Mirror usually depicted humans as weak, selfish, sadistic, or otherwise too flawed to be trusted with the power of technology. In “San Junipero”, every character is good and kind, and they also end up being wise and brave. In most of his stories, Charlie Brooker seems to be testing his characters; in “San Junipero”, finally, you get to see someone ace the test.4

This is enough to make “San Junipero” the best episode of the entire show, but for me, there was something that made it even more powerful. As I watched the very last scene, where a robot places a capsule containing the protagonists’ consciousness into a rack in a vast glittering server farm, I had a quasi-religious experience. Suddenly I felt the absolute conviction that this will happen. Over time, humans have gained the power to perform more and more of the miracles attributed to God in the Bible; one day, we’ll be able to create Heaven and Hell as well.

The power of this realization, and the terror, and the utter strangeness of it, simply overwhelm me. We are animals who crawled up out of the muck and became gods. We have a responsibility to the Universe too profound to even understand yet. Our future is lonely and bizarre and terrifying and full of infinite promise, and we have no possible choice but to embrace it.

All that hit me in the final few seconds of “San Junipero”.

“Men Against Fire” (5/10)

This is a rare episode of Black Mirror that’s actually too optimistic about human nature. It’s about genocidal soldiers who are tricked by the AR technology in their battle armor into thinking that their victims are disgusting and subhuman. Sadly, in real life, that sort of technological trickery isn’t required — lots of people are plenty willing to commit genocide even when they see their victims clearly.

“Hated in the Nation” (8/10)

This is probably the most underrated episode of Black Mirror. It’s about a terrorist who offers Twitter users the (fake) chance to kill someone with their tweets, and who then kills every would-be murderer with a swarm of robotic bees.

The terrorist is supposed to be the bad guy, and of course it’s pretty horrifying to see robotic bees crawling in people’s ears and eating their brains. But the episode also makes a good point about how awful social media is. In the age of Twitter and similar apps, our public discussion has become ruled by the absolute worst people in our society, and it’s hard to deny that this has degraded our democracy.

It’s the kind of actual, real-life technological dystopia that almost makes you think a swarm of robot death-bees would be preferable.

“USS Callister” (7/10)

In this episode, a narcissistic game programmer uploads some innocent people into a Star Trek-like online simulation, so he can dominate and torture them. The digital clones fight back by getting their real-world selves to kill the evil engineer’s real-world self, and then escape into an open-world RPG.

This was a good episode, and the bad guy was really bad, but it was also a little cheesy. I did notice that the ending, while bizarre, was actually fairly happy — the regular folks escape into a video game universe instead of being tortured for eternity. This sort of weird, bittersweet ending turned out to be typical of many of Black Mirror’s newer episodes, and I think it’s often a good fit.

“Hang the DJ” (7/10)

This is a cute episode about personality upload and online dating. The protagonists fall in love in an online dating simulation, only to discover at the end that they’re uploaded digital clones whose job is to test out the romantic compatibility of the real-life people they were cloned from.

I liked the bittersweet ending; like “USS Callister”, it showed how Black Mirror was changing from a downbeat show about the flawed nature of humanity into a show about the fundamental weirdness of technology. This evolution was probably kicked off by the success of “San Junipero”, and it’s a natural and good direction for the show to go in. But I have to say, I was a little disappointed that the digital clones were just wiped. It would have been more fun, and more bizarre, had they gotten to live out their own romance in the digital realm.

“Metalhead” (10/10)

This is the most terrifying episode of Black Mirror, by far. It’s set in a world in which dog-like autonomous robots have killed off most humans and large animals. The story is very simple — it’s just a band of humans desperately trying to survive another day, as they’re hunted by the “dogs”.

This episode is terrifying not just because of the bleak future and harrowing plot, but because the tech is so realistic. Militaries around the world are testing robot combat dogs that look an awful lot like the ones in “Metalhead”. And with AI advancing by leaps and bounds, it’s likely that at some point these robot death-dogs will be autonomous. It’s pretty scary to think about all the ways that could go badly.

“Black Museum” (4/10)

This is another dystopian tale about personality upload, set in a museum where a psychopath uploads and tortures people. The style of this episode is very cartoonish and over-the-top, and it ends up being a little cheesy and unconvincing compared to masterpieces like “White Christmas”.

“Striking Vipers” (7/10)

This was a really interesting and fairly poignant episode about two guys who have sex in a video game but who aren’t interested in each other in real life. It’s a neat exploration of how sexuality will change from things like virtual worlds and AI.

“Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” (8/10)

This is another upbeat story, about an AI doll modeled after a pop star. The doll helps the pop star to escape the control of her evil aunt, and eventually to begin a much more fulfilled, independent life as a rock star. The fun twist at the end is that the whole story turns out to be a silly fantasy-history of a beloved 1990s rock song. Oddly, a lot of people told me they didn’t like this episode, but I thought it was clever, funny, and charmingly irreverent.

“Joan is Awful” (9/10)

This is another underrated episode, about a woman who finds that her life is being turned into a TV show in real time. The plot centers around her trying to get out of the TV show, using increasingly dramatic and hilarious methods. At the very end, more layers of technological wackiness are revealed, and the whole thing gets even zanier. The ending is of the “bittersweet/weird” type that has become the hallmark of the later seasons of Black Mirror. Anyway, I love this one — it made me laugh more than any other episode of the show, by far.

“Loch Henry” (7/10)

In its 6th season, Black Mirror tried branching out in new directions. One of these was mystery; “Loch Henry” isn’t sci-fi at all, but simply a murder mystery set in a small Scottish town. It’s very well-executed, but feels a bit out of place in the show.

“Beyond the Sea” (5/10)

This is a slow, depressing episode about astronauts who send their consciousness back to Earth to occupy remote bodies. It’s set in an alternate 1960s, but this ends up not adding much to the episode. The plot is workmanlike and fine, but nothing here blew me away.

“Demon 79” (3/10)

In its sixth season, Black Mirror started to experiment with new themes, genres, formats, etc. In the season’s final episode, it sarcastically rebranded itself as “Red Mirror” and told a fantasy story about demons killing people and the world getting destroyed. The story is OK as far as it goes, but it didn’t have much of Black Mirror in it; I don’t think that fans really come to this show just to see awful things happen to characters. If the showrunners had kept taking Black Mirror in this direction, I would have given up on it. Fortunately, it didn’t, and the seventh season represented a spectacular return to form.

“Common People” (9/10)

The first episode of Black Mirror’s most recent season is a near-perfect return to the series’ roots. It’s a dark, sad tale of a loving, devoted working-class couple who are slowly ground down and destroyed by the callousness of a software-as-a-service business model.

The wife has a brain tumor, and can only survive by buying a subscription from a company that operates her brain remotely. Although she needs the service just to stay alive and do her job, the company keeps adding things like geographic restrictions and ads that come out of her mouth, and charging the hapless couple ever more money per month in order to avoid these things. The husband works himself to the bone at his blue-collar job, and eventually resorts to humiliating himself on a livestreaming service for tips. At the end it’s just too much and the sweet couple kills themselves.

“Common People” is classic Black Mirror — the story of a powerful new technology corrupted and misused by flawed, greedy humans. The tenderness and innocence and earnest devotion of the couple makes their fate at the hands of callous capitalism all the more bitter.

However, the timing of this episode blunted the impact a little bit. It was released right after Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, and just as Trump was defying a Supreme Court order to bring back a wrongfully arrested man from a foreign torture-dungeon. Watching a dystopia about a biotech company extracting fees from working-class people was still powerful, but perhaps not as powerful as it would have been if far worse things hadn’t been unfolding in the real world at the time.

“Bete Noire” (7/10)

This was a very fun and well-acted episode, although the technology was a little silly.

“Hotel Reverie” (7/10)

The last 20 or 25 minutes of the extra-long “Hotel Reverie” are a beautiful love story between an actress and an AI patterned after a long-dead actress from a previous era. The romance is extremely touching, but the plot that the episode uses to get the protagonists into that situation is pretty laughably unrealistic, and makes it a bit hard to suspend disbelief at times. It also drags on for a little too long. But the payoff of the doomed, bittersweet romance in the last part of the episode is worth it.

“Plaything” (5/10)

Finally, Black Mirror did an episode about AI becoming sentient and taking over the world. They even referenced Roko’s Basilisk. But most of the episode is in flashback/voiceover, which I thought was a bit of a clunky way to tell the story.

“Eulogy” (10/10)

Classic Black Mirror is about flawed humans misusing technology. But “Eulogy” is very different — it’s about technology helping a flawed human, giving him a chance for closure and peace of mind that he never otherwise would have had. The plot is about an old man trying to remember his deceased ex-girlfriend, using an AI assistant and a technology that lets him walk around inside old photographs. Slowly, he realizes that the bitterness and anger against his ex that he’s held onto for most of his life was actually misplaced, and gains a much more positive understanding of his past. The episode was hauntingly beautiful, slow, poignant, and ultimately bittersweet without being weird at all. I hope this episode gets remembered as the triumph it is.

“USS Callister: Into Infinity” (8/10)

This episode is a direct sequel to “USS Callister” from the fourth season. The plot picks right up where it left off, with our digitally cloned heroes zooming around inside an open-world video game. More hijinks ensue, as one of their real-world versions tries to rescue them. The sequel is even funnier and zanier than the original.

Anyway, “USS Callister: Into Infinity” caps a seventh season that really revived Black Mirror after a disappointing set of experiments a couple of years before. Although a little bit of this was a return to the series’ roots (with “Common People”), most of this season’s episodes represented a shift toward a more balanced — dare I say, more realistic — view of how technology changes the world. I hope the show has many more seasons.

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2025-04-19 16:41:46

After Trump was elected, I wrote a post outlining what I thought was the best-case scenario for his second term. I made it clear that I didn’t think this scenario was very likely, but it was at least plausible.

Unfortunately, it didn’t pan out that way. In fact, in some ways, Trump 2.0 has proven to be not only worse than his first term in office, but worse than almost anyone expected during his campaign. The tariffs he has already announced, for example, have been far higher than the (already substantial) numbers he promised as a candidate, and more focused on Mexico and Canada. The policy uncertainty created by his on-again, off-again tariff announcements, and by the divisions within his administration, have also exceeded even the level of incompetence most of his detractors could predict.

It’s now time to talk about worst-case scenarios.

When we think about the worst-case scenario for Trump’s economy,1 we shouldn’t just think about the worst possible effects of his current policies; we need to think about how much damage he could plausibly do with additional bad moves. We need to skate to where the proverbial puck is headed.

Don’t get me wrong — Trump’s tariffs are already very bad, and will cause grinding deindustrialization, a macroeconomic slowdown, and possibly higher inflation. They may even cause continued capital flight, which would raise U.S. borrowing costs, hurt the economy even more, and make the national debt less sustainable. We’re already on the path to some bad economic outcomes, and it’s not clear how bad they’ll get, even if we don’t make any big additional mistakes.

But that’s a very big “if”. In my post about capital flight, I outlined two nightmare scenarios for the endgame of Trumpian economics: a sovereign default and spiraling inflation. Let me just quote my own post a bit:

I suspect Trump will do something more like what he used to do as a businessman when his debt went bad — look for a cheap bailout, and if one doesn’t emerge, declare bankruptcy…

If foreigners are headed for the exits, there’s only one entity with the ability to bail out the U.S. government, and that’s the Fed. If the Fed printed a bunch of money…it would bring long-term interest rates back down…So Trump could try to exert pressure on the Fed to do this…But there’s one big problem with that strategy: inflation…If Trump were to try printing money…it would likely just cause even more capital to flee the country, requiring even more Fed money-printing to push yields back down. It’s hard to see how that wouldn’t result in spiraling inflation.

The other thing Trump could do is to declare bankruptcy — i.e., to have the U.S. default on its sovereign debt….Trump declared bankruptcy quite frequently back in his days as a businessman — it does seem to be his natural instinct…[Interest] costs [on the national debt] are already soaring, so further increases due to capital flight might cause Trump and his people to conclude that there’s no way the U.S. can ever pay down its debt.

Just a few days after I wrote that post, it’s already looking like Trump might be even worse than what I predicted. I suggested Trump might replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell when Powell’s term is up next year. Instead, Trump has suddenly begun talking about firing Powell immediately. Bloomberg reports:

Donald Trump is studying whether he’s able to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, his top economist said Friday, a day after the president publicly criticized the head of the central bank for not moving fast enough to slash interest rates…Hassett went on to suggest that the Fed under Powell, who was appointed by Trump during his first term, had acted politically to benefit Democrats.

Trump wants to get rid of Powell because Trump wants to cut interest rates, and Powell is refusing to do so. Here’s Bloomberg again:

President Donald Trump said he could force out Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, rebuking the notion that the US central bank is independent, and vented frustration that monetary policymakers had not recently cut interest rates…“If I ask him to, he’ll be out of there,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Thursday when asked about an earlier social media post blasting the Fed chair as being too slow to lower rates…

Powell said in a speech at the Economic Club of Chicago Wednesday that the Fed must ensure tariffs don’t trigger a more persistent rise in inflation, and indicated the central bank would “wait for greater clarity before considering any adjustments to our policy stance.”

Those remarks squelched hopes for now that the Fed would jump in with a rate cut that could help stem a weeks-long stock market rout triggered by Trump’s tariff rollout.

Firing Powell in order to appoint a more pliant Fed chair who will lower interest rates at the President’s behest would spell the end of central bank independence in the United States. That would be in keeping with Trump’s strategy of trying to dominate, degrade, and overpower any institution in America that doesn’t bow to his will.

But it would also be extraordinarily dangerous for the economy. Why? Because central bank independence is one of the key institutions that America and other rich nations have set up in order to prevent the kind of catastrophic economic collapses that tend to bedevil developing countries in places like Latin America.

As I wrote in my earlier post, there are basically two truly nightmarish economic scenarios here: 1) Hyperinflation, and 2) Sovereign debt default. They’re not mutually exclusive, of course — you can have both, one can lead to the other and vice versa, and the economic pressures that lead to the two are often similar.

It’s important to understand the chain of events that could lead from the end of the Fed’s independence — in combination with Trump’s tariffs — to hyperinflation and/or sovereign default. All too often, commentators just sort of wave their hands and tell us that if we mess with the Fed and the dollar and the other pillars of the U.S. financial system, we could get those nightmare outcomes. The commentators aren’t wrong. But it’s actually not too hard to understand why these things could happen if Trump keeps pushing in the direction he’s been pushing.

So far, I still consider these extreme scenarios to be pretty unlikely, given all the people in the U.S. who would stand to lose catastrophically if either were to occur. But they’re looking a bit less unlikely than they were a week ago when I wrote my post about capital flight. And they’re probably less unlikely than the rosy best-case scenario I wrote when Trump first got elected.

So let’s go through the two worst-case outcomes, and think about how and why Trump might bring each one about.

Nightmare scenario #1: Hyperinflation

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2025-04-17 17:48:22

Witnessing America’s flamboyantly stupid economic self-harm and its slow descent into authoritarianism has made some people ask whether the 21st century will end up being the Chinese Century. Thomas Friedman says yes:

“There was a time when people came to America to see the future,” [an American businessman in China] said. “Now they come here.”…

President Trump is focused on what teams American transgender athletes can race on, and China is focused on transforming its factories with A.I. so it can outrace all our factories. Trump’s “Liberation Day” strategy is to double down on tariffs while gutting our national scientific institutions and work force that spur U.S. innovation. China’s liberation strategy is to open more research campuses and double down on A.I.-driven innovation…

[W]hat makes China’s manufacturing juggernaut so powerful today is not that it just makes things cheaper; it makes them cheaper, faster, better, smarter and increasingly infused with A.I…China starts with an emphasis on STEM education — science, technology, engineering and math. Each year, the country produces some 3.5 million STEM graduates…[T]he best are world class, and there are a lot of them…

Over 550 Chinese cities are connected by high-speed rail that makes our Amtrak Acela look like the Pony Express.

Matt Yglesias also recently tweeted (and then deleted): “For the first time in my life, I really just think America may be cooked and it's gonna be the Chinese century.”

Tyler Cowen has his doubts, arguing that Chinese success free-rides on a bunch of American-provided public goods:

In the realm of technology, China’s advances are impressive. BYD has the best and cheapest electric vehicles…Chinese AI, in the form of DeepSeek and Manus, has shocked many Westerners with its inventiveness…Yet Western and most of all American hegemony is not over yet. These advances by China are real, but they rest on a foundation of Western values and institutions more than it might appear at first…

The inconvenient truth, for China, is that its scale relies upon American power and influence. The Chinese export machine, for instance, requires a relatively free world trading order…If the world breaks down into bitterly selfish protectionist trading blocs…where will the Chinese sell the rising output from their factories?…

The Chinese growth and stability model also requires relatively secure energy supplies…If the Western alliance system collapses, who is to keep the Middle East relatively stable…China hardly seems up to that task…Another risk on the horizon is nuclear proliferation…The more nuclear powers inhabit the world, the more China is hemmed in with its foreign policy ambitions…

There is much to rue in the first few months of Trump’s foreign and economic policy, but China is far from being able to take the baton. They are running second, and doing a great job of that, precisely because we Americans – in spite of all our mistakes — still have the lead.

Surprisingly, I think Friedman is more right than Tyler here. I’ve written a bit about this topic over the past few years, and I think that when we look back on the 21st century, we’ll probably call it the Chinese Century — or at least, the first half of it.

But the reason I say this is because what it means for a century to “belong” to a specific country will change from what it meant in the 20th — and often in ways that will not be very pleasant.

What does it mean for a century to “belong” to a country?

The 20th century often gets called the “American century”, but there’s no one reason why. It’s just sort of a gestalt impression that the U.S. was the most important country during that century. There were lots of dimensions in which this was true:

• The U.S. had the largest economy in the world, and was the dominant manufacturing nation.

• The U.S. was militarily dominant, having the world’s most powerful military for almost the entire century.

• The U.S. was one of the richest economies, setting the standard for what a modern lifestyle should look like.

• The U.S. was a technological leader, producing by far the largest share of the scientific discoveries, breakthrough inventions, and commercial products that changed the world.

• The U.S. was culturally dominant, through its output of movies, music, television, games, fashion, and ideas.

• The U.S. was geopolitically central; it played a key role in creating and sustaining various international institutions, created the world’s largest and most powerful network of alliances, and provided global public goods like freedom of the seas.

• The U.S. was historically central, playing the most important role in shaping many of the key global events of the 20th century — the World Wars, decolonization, the Cold War, and globalization.

In fact, I would argue that our whole modern notion of assigning centuries to countries was pattered after America’s unusual importance across nearly every single domain in the 20th century. It’s hard to think of other historical examples where one country has had such broad-spectrum dominance.

The closest comparison has got to be Britain in the 19th century, which gave birth to the Industrial Revolution and built a globe-spanning empire. But even the UK was never as militarily or culturally dominant as America was in the 20th century. As for older comparisons, only the Mongol Empire in the 13th and early 14th centuries really measures up. The globe was usually just too fragmented, and technological progress too slow, for one country or empire to overshadow all the others. Even the Roman Empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Tang Dynasty were more regional superpowers than global ones.

Anyway, the point here is that there’s no reason that we should believe, a priori, that the 21st century will be dominated by anyone the way America dominated the 20th. The historical norm is multipolarity, with different countries and empires having modest leads in various different dimensions for various periods of time.

Now, you can argue that globalization and continuous technological progress are both here to stay, meaning that future centuries are permanently more likely to have one dominant country. I think that’s probably true to some extent. But as I’ll explain, I also think that the nature of both globalization and technological progress are changing, in ways that will bias the 21st century toward multipolarity.

And some of these changes will result from the power transition from the U.S. to China. Simply put, 20th century America invented the game that it won, whereas China will use its power to invent (and win) a different sort of game.

China’s greatness will be different from America’s greatness

You might be surprised to hear this, but I actually think China and the U.S. are very culturally similar, rather than representing distinct, alien poles of “Eastern” and “Western” civilization.1 But I’m not much of a cultural determinist; I think technology and institutions tend to matter more. Here, the differences outweigh the similarities.

One area where China already far surpasses America is in state capacity. This is from a post I wrote back in 2023:

In his book China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know (which is excellent and which I heavily recommend), Arthur Kroeber offers a grand unified theory of the country’s economy — that it’s good at rapidly and effectively mobilizing lots of resources, but bad at using those resources in an optimally efficient way. So in the case of say, building too many apartments, or failed Belt and Road projects, or wasteful corporate subsidies, the lack of efficiency can really bite. But if we’re talking about building the world’s biggest high-speed rail system, or creating a world-beating car industry from scratch, or building massive amounts of green energy, then China’s resource-mobilizing approach can accomplish things on a scale no other country has ever accomplished before…

Remember a few years ago, when a bunch of people were sharing this map of a hypothetical U.S. high speed rail system?…Of course, the map and others like it were pure fantasy; in 15 years, California’s much-ballyhooed high speed rail project has managed to almost complete one small segment out in the middle of nowhere. That’s the extent of the U.S.’ high speed rail prowess…But in China, they actually built the map!…In the last 15 years, China, starting from scratch, built a high-speed rail network almost as twice as long as all other high-speed rail networks in the world, combined. I’m not exaggerating; you can look these numbers up on Wikipedia. As of last year, China had 42,000 km of high-speed railways in operation, with another 28,000 km planned. That’s compared to just 2,727 km in Japan, with its famous shinkansen.

The U.S. used to have much higher state capacity than it does now, back in the middle of the 20th century — it was able to outproduce all other nations during World War 2, build the interstate highway system, and so on. But modern Chinese state capacity vastly exceeds even America’s peak.

What other nation could have maintained the kind of draconian, micro-managed Covid lockdowns that China kept all the way through 2022? Of course, past a certain point, these lockdowns were probably counterproductive, and they were certainly dystopian. But they were certainly a demonstration of the awesome power of the Chinese party-state.

China is also bigger than the U.S., and so if its economy continues to mature, it will eventually be even more economically dominant. The UN predicts that by 2030, China will represent 45% of all global manufacturing — higher than the U.S. ever achieved except for a brief moment after World War 2. But also recall that manufacturing is falling as a percent of China’s GDP, as service industries grow. So unless China somehow turns out to be uniquely weak in the service sector, we can probably expect its overall economic dominance to be just as big as America’s was, or bigger.

Nor do I think the loss of U.S. export markets will hurt China much. Tyler asks: “Where will China sell the rising output from their factories?”. The answer to that question is “China”. Contrary to popular belief, China is not that export-intensive of an economy, compared to the likes of France, Germany, or South Korea:

China had a brief period of export-oriented growth in the 2000s, but that’s basically over. Now, China sells most of what it produces to Chinese people. Even the vaunted “Second China Shock” is mostly an overflow phenomenon; for example, China has become the world’s top car exporter, but the vast majority of the vehicles it makes are for domestic consumption.

In this sense, China is becoming more like the 20th century U.S. — a very large economy that has some prominent exports but is fundamentally domestically focused. Lack of demand from America is highly unlikely to cripple or even substantively reduce China’s economic progress, especially as the Chinese economy shifts to services.

(And no, China’s current real estate bust will probably not derail its economic rise, any more than the Great Depression permanently derailed America’s.)

With economic dominance will come military dominance. The smaller nations of the world are probably more able to resist conquest and domination by their larger neighbors now, thanks to nuclear proliferation and the shift of technologies toward tactical defense (basically, drones and missiles blow up vehicles, and guns shoot down drones). But China’s size and manufacturing strength will allow it to overwhelm any nation that resists it, and that threat will be enough to overawe most.

But the similarities probably stop there. China’s vast size, smaller resource endowments, and inefficiently high level of government involvement in the economy will probably stop it from attaining the kind of world-beating living standards that America enjoyed (and still enjoys, at least for the moment). China will be the world’s biggest economy, but only because it’s 4 times the size of America; it probably won’t be the richest. This means that although the people of the world may admire China’s vast train stations, soaring skyscrapers, and endless infrastructure, they may not be clamoring for the chance to live as the Chinese live.

In terms of technological leadership, China will certainly shine — but not in the same way America did. In a post last month, I argued that China overall is a highly innovative country, but that due to weak IP protections and other institutional factors, its innovations tend to be a blizzard of incremental improvements with few dramatic breakthroughs:

To American ears, this sounds like a condemnation of China’s system, but to China’s leaders this is probably just fine. If China simply appropriates or copies any new invention and scales it up more efficiently than anyone else can, it still comes out on top. And my sense is that coming out on top is far more important to China’s leadership than furthering the aggregate progress of human knowledge and prosperity.

If weak IP protections discourage breakthrough discovery and invention all over the world, so what? That just reduces the risk that the rule of the Chinese Communist Party will be destabilized by the emergence of new techno-economic paradigms.

Some might argue that AI will change this equation. If people all over the world are able to create breakthrough innovations on their mobile phones using open-source AI algorithms, the cost of breakthroughs might come down so much that IP protections don’t really matter. If so, the world will enjoy a technological golden age. But even in that scenario, China will likely be able to appropriate, scale, and commercialize all of those innovations. It will still be the technological leader, just not the kind the U.S. was.

In the cultural realm, I expect China to be more isolated and less influential than America was. Partly this is because of language — English is far more internationalized than Chinese will ever be (though AI will erode this barrier significantly). But partly it’s because of social control. China is a deeply repressive nation, with universal surveillance, fine-grained media and speech control, and ubiquitous censorship. That’s the kind of society where only anodyne, cautious artistry can flourish, except in tiny subcultural pockets too small for the government to worry about.

China’s leaders will also probably remain paranoid about allowing in foreign ideas. They will continue to use the Great Firewall to “protect” Chinese people from the memes and ideas produced by the rest of the world. So artistic and cultural ferment will arrive in China only weakly, and with a lag. It will be orphaned from the global discussion, and the country’s creativity will instead be channeled into the technological and commercial space.

So while I expect China to produce some hit video games and big-budget movies, I don’t think it will do much to push the boundaries of culture, despite the individual creativity of its people. Chinese tech products like TikTok will have an influence on global culture, but the key content will be produced elsewhere.

As for geopolitics, I think Tyler is certainly right that China will provide fewer global public goods than America did. It will be less interested in creating freedom of the seas for other nations, and more narrowly concerned with protecting its own trade. Its military will make sure energy supplies reach Chinese shores, but probably won’t be interested in making energy globally abundant. Research is another example; China’s government will make sure China dominates every frontier technology, but won’t care as much about expanding the frontier. And global security is yet another; for all the sneers directed at America’s self-appointed role of “world police”, it was more willing to stand up to regional conquerors than China has proven so far.

But I think Tyler overestimates the negative impact on China from the collapse of American public good provision. If America stops protecting Chinese shipping and energy supplies, China’s military will become perfectly capable of doing it themselves. There is nothing unique about the U.S. Navy, just like there was nothing unique about the British Navy. And in fact, since I predict China will guard only its own trade and energy supplies and leave other countries out to dry, the Chinese Navy may be able to accomplish its goals more cheaply than the U.S. could.

In other words, I expect China to be a far more selfish power than America was in the late 20th century. It’ll be more like the U.S. of Teddy Roosevelt’s time — mostly inwardly focused, but occasionally intervening in smaller countries’ affairs out of economic self-interest or desire for glory. International institutions and forums will become either irrelevant or will be vehicles for China to boss smaller countries around.

In sum, I predict that this will be a “Chinese Century”. This may not hold as strongly in the second half, when China’s low fertility rates start to bite and India really starts hitting the top of its own trajectory. But for the next few decades at least, I expect China to be the world’s preeminent economic and technological power — a historically unmatched marvel of size, resource mobilization, and innovation. America’s orgy of self-destruction will only hasten this future.

And yet I think that the Chinese Century will be disappointing in many ways, especially to people living outside China itself. A world where every invention gets grabbed and copied by Chinese state-sponsored companies is a world less filled with wonder (though AI may help here). A world where Chinese warships guard Chinese trade and leave other nations to fend for themselves is a more chaotic, less secure, less egalitarian world.

A world where China produces everything for itself but has no need of foreign manufactures is one where other developing countries have less opportunity to grow. A world where China tolerates regional conflicts and preserves peace only in its own backyard is a more dangerous, violent one. And a world where the premier nation hides its culture from everyone else is a more drab, less creative one.

In other words, I’m more confident than Tyler about China’s ability to prosper, build, innovate, and dominate in a world where America collapses in on itself. I think Thomas Friedman is right, and that unless something big changes, China is headed for at least half a century as the globe’s preeminent power. But that prospect makes me fairly glum, because a Chinese Century will, in many ways, be a downgrade from the American Century. Perhaps the U.S. efflorescence was a very rare and special thing, whose like we will not soon see again.

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2025-04-15 15:42:30

Even as tariffs begin to send the U.S. economy down the tubes, the Trump administration is doing some other things that are not as flamboyantly stupid, but which could have even longer-reaching and darker consequences. The other day, the Trump administration arrested an innocent Salvadoran man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia and sent him to a prison in El Salvador with no trial or even any accusation of a crime. The administration later admitted that his arrest had been an error — Garcia had been granted court protection against deportation, but Trump’s people grabbed him anyway.

A few days ago, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower court’s order that the Trump administration “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia to the U.S. Trump initially said he would respect the Supreme Court’s decision. But then today, Trump reversed course, declaring that his administration doesn’t have the power to return Abrego Garcia. Bukele, meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, argued that his government also doesn’t have the power to return Abrego Garcia; given that Bukele has already returned several people to the U.S., it’s anyone’s guess as to whether Bukele is simply lying, or whether Abrego Garcia is already dead.

This should scare you, for a number of reasons.

First, there’s the obvious: Trump is going around arresting innocent people, and sending them to foreign torture-dungeons, apparently for the rest of their lives. Bloomberg reports that about 90% of these deportees had no criminal records in the U.S., and most have not been charged with any crime:

Some were arrested simply because they had (non-gang) tattoos. Others didn’t even have any tattoos, and were arrested for no apparent reason.

It’s not clear why the Trump administration is doing this. Perhaps it’s to scare immigrants into leaving the country by making an example of a few. Perhaps it’s to simply assert power, or to test the boundaries of what they can get away with. Maybe they’ve really convinced themselves that all of the people they arrested are gang members. Who knows. But what’s clear is that this is brutal and lawless behavior — the kind of arbitrary arrest and punishment that’s common in authoritarian regimes.

The second thing that should scare you is the lawlessness. The Trump administration insists it didn’t defy the Supreme Court, arguing that simply removing any barriers to Abrego Garcia’s return means that they’re complying with the court order to “facilitate” that return. Trump’s people have also argued that the courts have no right to interfere in the executive branch’s conduct of foreign policy. And on top of that, they’ve declared that their deal with Bukele is classified.

In practice, the administration is arguing that as soon as they arrest someone and ship them overseas, U.S. courts have no right to order their return — ever. That means that Trump could grab you, or me, or anyone else off the street and put us on a plane to El Salvador, and then argue that no U.S. court has the right to order us back, because once we’re on foreign soil it’s the domain of foreign policy. If so, it means that due process and the rule of law in America are effectively dead; the President can simply do anything to anyone, for any reason.

A more clearly worded SCOTUS ruling would help clarify whether Trump is, in fact, openly defying the Court. The recent ruling did order the lower court to have “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” But this is starting to feel like a constitutional crisis.

The third reason the Abrego Garcia case should worry you is that the Trump administration probably intends to go much further. Kilmar Abrego Garcia isn’t an American citizen, but Trump has stated that he wants to start sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador too. Here are three relevant clips from his meeting with Bukele (clip 1, clip 2, clip 3):

Now put all of these things together. Since A) the Trump administration A) argues that anyone being imprisoned in a foreign country is beyond the reach of U.S. courts, B) Trump wants to send U.S. citizens to El Salvador, and C) Trump is arresting people who haven’t been accused of any crime, this means that Trump is asserting the power to unilaterally and arbitrarily send any American citizen to a Salvadoran prison for any reason.

That is the power of a dictator. A few weeks ago I wrote a post asking when, exactly, we could conclude that America had become a dictatorship:

It seems clear that if Trump actually does have the ability to arbitrarily send any American to an overseas prison with zero due process and zero oversight by any court of law, then we do, in fact, live in a dictatorship. It’s notable that immediately after complaining about tariffs, the Declaration of Independence complains about King George sending Americans overseas for “pretend offenses” without jury trial:

I guess some things never change.

In any case, it requires no great stretch of the imagination to realize that Trump would use this power to go after his domestic critics. Already, the administration has deported a Turkish PhD student for writing an op-ed criticizing a university for its stance on the Gaza war, even though there was no evidence that she had any ties to Hamas (or had done anything antisemitic). If the President can punish citizens for their opinions in similar ways, we’re in big trouble.

Already, Trump is trying to use government power to crack down on dissent:

President Donald Trump has a “hope” for his Federal Communications Commission: that the agency will punish CBS for airing “60 Minutes” reports he doesn’t like…Apparently angered by Sunday night’s “60 Minutes” telecast…Trump…said hopefully [FCC chair Brendan] Carr “will impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior.”…Sunday night’s post is the latest example of Trump encouraging his appointees to apply government pressure against his critics. In recent months, Carr has flaunted his MAGA credentials and launched FCC investigations of several media outlets Trump has derided, including ABC and NBC.

That’s not the only example, either:

The Associated Press accused the White House of violating a court order after it was once again banned from an Oval Office event…On Monday, AP writer David Bauder reported that a reporter and photographer were barred from attending a news conference with President Donald Trump and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele…This decision came despite U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden ruling last week that the White House had violated the Constitution by blocking the longtime publication’s access to press events.

Meanwhile, a Trump ally reportedly told CNN’s parent company that they could get back in Trump’s good graces and avoid future lawsuits by making a documentary about Melania Trump, or a TV show about Donald Trump, Jr. — either of which would involve paying the Trump family large amounts of money. This fits with a general pattern of extreme corruption in the Trump administration, but it’s also an attempt to use presidential power to turn the media into outlets for regime propaganda.

How much any of this will affect Trump’s popularity remains to be seen. On one hand, his approval rating continues to inch ever downward, and he appears to have very rapidly lost support among young men:

This poll was taken in March, before the “Liberation Day” tariff madness, so Trump’s authoritarianism may be a factor here.

But on the pessimistic side of things, immigration appears to be the one major issue where voters still like what Trump is doing:

The deportations of innocent people like Kilmar Abrego Garcia are probably seen as part of the immigration issue. The perception that America was being “invaded” by the asylum-seeking migrants that Biden let in was an important part of why Trump got elected, and it’s probably why Trump feels like he has a popular mandate to round up random Salvadorans and Venezuelans and ship them to overseas dungeons. Concerns over authoritarianism may eventually come to outweigh that wave of anti-immigration sentiment, but by then due process may have been eroded to the point where Trump is able to persecute his critics at will.

A few months ago, saying any of this would have drawn accusations of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (and in fact, it will probably still draw a few). Trump’s failure to make America meaningfully more authoritarian in his first term made the possibility of a more successful attempt in his second term seem preposterous even to many outside his core MAGA support base. Even I thought there was a possibility — albeit a remote one — that Trump would mellow in his second term. Now, just a few months later, it’s that best-case scenario that seems risible. That’s how fast things have deteriorated here in America.

However, it’s worth noting that we’re not quite getting the worst-case scenario either — at least, not so far. In his first term, Trump’s approach was famously characterized as “malevolence tempered by incompetence” — he seemed to want to make America a more authoritarian nation, but didn’t seem to have competent personnel who could make that happen. All the competent people in his first administration — Steve Mnuchin, James Mattis, and so on — turned out to be forces for stability and liberalism, while more authoritarian cronies like Stephen Miller and Michael Flynn talked big but didn’t seem to do much.

The big worry, when Trump took office three months ago, was that in his second term his instincts would be just as authoritarian, but his competence would receive a massive boost from the alliance with Elon Musk and the Tech Right. Elon’s government-slashing DOGE blitz in the early days of the administration seemed to confirm that Trump 2.0 had the technical chops that Trump 1.0 had lacked.

In the past few weeks, though, that narrative has looked less likely. Elon has begun to fade a bit from public view, after failing to influence a Wisconsin election, and after getting in a highly public feud with Peter Navarro over tariffs. Trump’s people have begun to leak some very negative comments about Elon, and DOGE has quietly admitted that it has saved the government little if any money so far.

Although it’s still early days, as of now I think it’s looking less likely that Musk and the Tech Right will add that critical missing element of competence to the Trump team. Elon is incredible at building businesses, but Trump commands the nation’s largest personality cult, and at the MAGA movement probably has room for only one Alpha Dog.

Which means that Trump 2.0 is still likely to struggle to get big things done, despite having a few more years to prepare. The sad spectacle of the flailing, off-again-on-again tariff announcements seems like pretty clear evidence of incompetence. Trump is more vengeful and far less constrained this time around, but he still may fail to execute the transition to authoritarianism any more effectively than he’s executing the transition to autarky. He’s not benign, but he’s probably not invincible either.

It is upon this thin thread that we must hang our hopes for democracy.

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