2026-06-04 13:52:29
For many years, I was a big proponent of the idea that increased market power was harming the U.S. economy in various ways. In the 2010s, in the economics world, circumstantial evidence began piling up that implicated increased industrial concentration as the culprit in a variety of recent negative trends. Here’s what I wrote in 2017, after reading a bunch of that evidence:
[B]asically I see the case of the Market Power Story - or any big economic story like this - as detective work. We’re collecting circumstantial evidence, and while no piece of evidence is a smoking gun, each adds to the overall picture. IF the economy were being throttled by increased market power, we’d expect to see:
1. Increased market concentration (Check! See Autor et al.)
2. Increased markups (Check! See De Loecker and Eeckhout)
3. Increased profits (Check! See Barkai)
4. Decreased investment (Check! See Gutierrez and Philippon)
5. Decreased wages in concentrated markets (Check! See Azar et al.)
6. Increased prices following mergers (Maybe! See Blonigen and Pierce)
7. Weakened antitrust enforcement (Check! See Kwoka)
8. Decreased output (Maybe not? See Ganapati)
So, as I see it, the evidence is piling up from a number of sides here.
Some of this is micro evidence, demonstrating some of the pieces of the causal chain that some economists think leads from lax antitrust to bad economic outcomes. The Azar et al. (2017) paper shows that labor market concentration hurts wages. The Blonigen and Pierce (2016) paper shows that mergers raise prices.
The rest is macro evidence and macro theory. Economists see some trend in the economy — a lower labor share of national income, or decreased business investment, or fewer new companies being formed — and they think about whether something like monopoly power could explain those trends.
Just because a single story can explain the trends, of course, doesn’t mean it does. Ultimately you need a whole lot of micro evidence — not just a few papers — to prove each link in the chain of causality from weak antitrust enforcement to higher prices, lower output, lower wages, and so on. But in this case, the market power explanation was very tantalizing, because it had the power to explain so many of 21st century America’s dysfunctions at the same time.
This is why at Bloomberg, I wrote consistently in support of the idea that market power was making the American economy both less efficient and more unequal, and that stronger antitrust enforcement was a good solution to try. (However, I did note that antitrust wasn’t guaranteed to be a remedy, and that Big Tech companies were a bad target for antitrust enforcement.)
When Biden was elected, I was optimistic. His appointment of people like Lina Khan showed that antitrust was finally being taken seriously in Democratic Party circles. Finally, it seemed, the growing clamor of economists was going to result in some real efforts at reform:
In that post, I revisited some of the important recent papers about market power, and I also noted that prominent economists were increasingly putting their reputations on the line by writing popular books advancing the thesis that market power was hurting our economy:
[Economists] have also raised the alarm about corporate power in other forums — Thomas Philippon’s book The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, John Kwoka’s book Mergers, Merger Control, and Remedies and his 2017 report on mergers, and various speeches sounding the alarm at Federal Reserve conferences. (Update: I was remiss in not mentioning Jason Furman’s briefs on market power when he was chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Obama! They were very influential. I also neglected the interesting and often-overlooked role of sports economists, who have been complaining about market power for quite a while!)
I concluded that the Biden administration’s shift toward antitrust was a healthy example of ideas making their way from academic economics to the halls of power:
Economists have been suspicious of excess profits ever since Adam Smith complained about “the bad effects of high profits” and declared that “people of the same trade seldom meet together…but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The idea that competition should reduce profits to a low level in a well-functioning economy is Econ 101, as is the theory of monopoly. Biden’s tweet about capitalism and competition might sound like bold populist rhetoric, but it also could have come right out of an econ textbook…
What this means is that economists are included in the vanguard of this revolt against American corporate power…Economists make unlikely crusaders, but here they are, taking on the biggest companies in the country.
I wasn’t always happy with the Biden administration’s antitrust actions — the government lost most of its cases against Big Tech, and the vendetta against Meta seemed misplaced. But overall, a lot of action seemed to be happening in the prosaic, boring sectors of the economy where market power has probably been eroding the foundations of capitalism for years. In meat processing (multiple times), in publishing, in insurance brokering, in pharma, in medical care provision, and so on, Biden’s FTC and DOJ notched up real wins — not enough to reverse the U.S. economy’s trend toward greater concentration, but possibly enough to create a “chilling effect” that would restrain the trend toward megacorporations-in-everything.
And yet over the last couple of years, I’ve had increasingly serious doubts about the antimonopoly movement. I’m still concerned about corporate power itself — in fact, in many ways, I’m more concerned than I was a decade ago, because of the advent of AI and the unprecedented corruption of the Trump administration. But I’m increasingly unenthusiastic about the ability of the antimonopoly movement, as it currently exists in the Democratic Party, to make useful headway in curbing or balancing corporate power.
Antimonopoly is simply too important to leave to the antimonopolists.
Speaking about Milton Friedman, Robert Solow once quipped: “Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper.” I am starting to feel that way about the antimonopoly folks.
Jonathan Chait has a long and very damning article about the antimonopoly movement, focusing on its crusading founder, the former journalist Barry C. Lynn. Until I read Chait’s article, I had never even heard of Lynn; this demonstrates that I’m very much out of the loop when it comes to D.C. policymaking and thought leadership, but it also shows how Lynn has escaped scrutiny compared to more popular figures like Lina Khan, Elizabeth Warren, and Matt Stoller.
In any case, from Chait’s description of Lynn, he is not the type of person whose movement I would want to follow. First of all, he seems monomaniacally obsessed with monopoly power:
“It is vital to understand,” Lynn wrote in his 2020 book, Liberty from All Masters, “that monopoly is not one of many economics problems but rather the political economic problem of our time,” causing “just about every ill in our society today.”
When he says that he holds corporate consolidation responsible for just about every problem, he means it. A list of social ills Lynn has attributed to monopolists includes not just the cost of goods and services but also: “The vast and growing inequality of wealth, political power, and control. The rise of the radical right. The surge in racism and homophobia. The attacks on reproductive choice and marriage. The collapse of our news media.”…
Anti-monopolization, Lynn argues, is “an all-encompassing framework for seeing and shaping power in every corner of our democratic republic.”…Lynn sees American history as a struggle against monopolization…A profound crisis must have profound causes, and Lynn was offering a totalistic account of social decay.
This monomania is obviously just silly. A lot of these links are just incredibly tenuous, requiring heroic leaps of assumptions about society, politics, culture, and economics. If you want to say that corporate concentration is responsible for racism, for example, you have to believe that:
racism has risen recently (highly doubtful)
the rise in racism, if it exists, is caused by economic factors (doubtful)
those economic factors are primarily — not just slightly — due to corporate concentration (highly doubtful)
Even the economics papers that find measurable effects of corporate concentration on low wages, for example, find that the effect differs enormously by geographic location. If monopsony power is responsible for low wages, then minimum wages should increase employment rather than decreasing it; in some areas, this does seem to happen, while in other areas minimum wages decrease employment, consistent with a greater amount of competition in the latter areas.
Furthermore, several credible research teams — Rossi-Hansberg et al. (2021), Rinz (2022), Autor et al. (2023) and others — have found that employer concentration has actually decreased in local markets in recent decades. This means that not just racism, but any social ill that Barry C. Lynn and his followers want to ascribe to labor monopsony, should have decreased over that period.
Another example is inflation. Antimonopoly crusaders like Elizabeth Warren were quick to blame corporate greed for inflation in 2021-22. There was extremely little data to back this up. Here’s what I wrote at the time:
Alvarez et al. (2025) found that markups — i.e., the amount that companies charge for things above and beyond what those things cost to produce — stayed constant during the post-pandemic inflation, meaning that companies weren’t actually able to use the inflation to gouge consumers…Leduc et al. (2024) and Bouras et al. (2023) found the same. And Jose Azar found that industries with higher markups — implying more market power — actually passed on less of their costs to consumers during the post-pandemic inflation…Greedflation, in other words, is not a real thing.
These are just two examples of the shaky chain of reasoning and evidence that backs up expansive claims like Lynn’s. There are many more, if you want to go looking for them. More sober antitrust types absolutely know that monopoly power is not a Grand Theory of Everything Bad in America. From Chait’s article:
Diana Moss of the Progressive Policy Institute [and] a former head of the American Antitrust Institute…told me the neo-Brandeisians’ error is to view antitrust policy “not as law enforcement but as a broad policy tool for fixing a lot of problems—economic, political, and social.” Antitrust enforcement isn’t that powerful, for the simple reason that corporate concentration is not the root cause of every problem.
This is good. But this reasonable, moderate perspective doesn’t seem to be what’s animating the modern antimonopoly movement. Chait details a telling exchange between Ezra Klein and Zephyr Teachout:
Last year, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein asked Teachout on his podcast if she could think of any issues that cannot be solved by smashing corporate concentration. At first she ventured, “I don’t think that anti-monopoly can solve significant problems of racism in this country,” but quickly retracted even this concession. “Having said that,” she continued, “there’s a reason that Frederick Douglass and [W. E. B.] Du Bois were so concerned about monopoly power.”
Admittedly, these are words, and not actions. Chait may have also cherry-picked them from among antimonopoly movement leaders’ more reasonable statements, in order to make his point.
But when you look at the movement’s actual actions, you can clearly see the obsessive, all-encompassing nature of the belief system. For example, consider the movement’s choice of targets. These include some industries with high profit margins, but also some with very low margins. These include grocery stores, airlines, and health insurers. Grocery stores and health insurers both consistently have much lower profit margins than American corporations in general, often hovering near the zero mark. Airlines are a cyclical industry that sometimes sees some very profitable years, but generally hovers below the average:
The causal chain that runs from weak antitrust to all sorts of social harms necessarily runs through profits. If companies aren’t making profit, they aren’t controlling the market. Yet Elizabeth Warren blamed high food prices on grocery stores’ market power during the post-pandemic inflation, despite the fact that these stores make very little profit, and their margins actually declined as inflation accelerated. You could see that exact same misplaced focus in Lina Khan’s blockage of the Kroger/Albertsons merger.
As for airlines, the Biden administration’s blockage of the Spirit/JetBlue merger resulted in Spirit Airlines simply going out of business entirely. Corporate concentration was achieved after all — but it was achieved with disorder, corporate failure, and 17,000 unemployed workers rather than with an orderly merger that would have preserved some of Spirit’s routes and workers. Not exactly a resounding success for the antimonopoly movement — but that’s what happens when you try to use antitrust tools against companies in low-margin industries.
Then there’s the case of housing. The antimonopoly people have eagerly embraced the idea that corporate landlords buying up rental properties and jacking up the price is a major cause of high rent. Democrats and Republicans have both embraced this piece of “slopulism”, despite the fact that the percent of homes owned by corporate landlords is tiny and there’s some evidence showing that corporate landlords tend to charge lower rents. Supply constraints — failure to build more housing — is actually the reason for high rents, so the antimonopoly movement is distracting us from solving the real problem.
The movement’s obsessive monomania — its conviction that corporate concentration is the root of all of America’s problems — is causing it to pick the wrong targets and hurt workers. That doesn’t mean bigger corporations are better, or that there aren’t industries where we need stronger antitrust. But the antimonopolists’ totalizing obsession causes them to ignore the evidence of where and when their ideas are needed, because they assume that their ideas are always the top priority in every situation and should be applied in a blanket way to any target they choose.
Richard Feynman once said of science that “Of all its many values, the greatest must be the freedom to doubt.” Now you can respond that economics and politics aren’t “science”, but that makes the freedom to doubt even more important; the less conclusively that any one data set can answer your questions, the more important it is to look at a wide variety of data sets and consider a variety of explanations and theories.
From Jonathan Chait’s description of Barry C. Lynn, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’s inclined to look at evidence that goes against his ideas:
[Lynn] believes that “most prices are entirely arbitrary and political in nature.”…More expansively, Lynn believes that “market forces”—which he places in scare quotes—do not exist. His indictment of economics is neither mild nor limited. He has compared the discipline to Lysenkoism, a pseudo-scientific fad under Stalin. “The ‘science’ of economics today … ,” he wrote in his 2011 book, Cornered, “has become a form of madness, a dream of human imagination we mistake for a pattern of the world.”
Lina Khan has also written that “There are no such things as market ‘forces’.” Statements like this certainly don’t do much to refute Chait’s allegation that the antimonopoly belief system “is more like a religion than an economic theory”.
First of all, as an aside, we should consider what it would mean for market forces not to exist and prices to be determined by politics. It would mean that grocery stores carefully calculate exactly how much they can charge for a cucumber or a package of napkins without Senators giving them an angry call or the working class rioting, or something like that. That’s kind of preposterous. It would also mean that small businesses would charge lower prices, because they’re less politically powerful than big businesses. But in fact, it’s big businesses that charge lower prices for the same goods. So the “prices are determined by politics” idea is just abjectly ridiculous, except maybe in a few special cases or where explicit regulation is involved.
But more to the point: Market forces obviously do exist. When you include sales taxes on price tags — reminding people that prices are higher than they had thought — they buy less, proving that demand curves exist and slope downward. When there is bad weather at sea, the price of fish goes up. When you charge electricity customers more, they use less electricity.
And so on. Market forces are not easy to observe in all cases, and they’re not always the most important determinant of prices. But their existence has been proven so thoroughly, by so much careful empirical observation, that to deny their existence requires a deep level of mysticism and blind faith.
If you’re not the kind of person to believe in empirical economics, then of course you’re not going to care if economists find evidence against your worldview. But once we move out of the realm of willful faith-based belief and into the real world of evidence and observation, we find that the science on monopoly power is far from settled.
First of all, there is the evidence I cited before about decreasing concentration in local labor markets (even as concentration increases nationwide). The monopsony wage penalty might be very high, but it was probably even higher in the past; this leaves room for antitrust action to help workers, but it should make us question whether monopoly power is at the root of slow wage growth.
But more fundamentally, the entire story about creeping market power being responsible for a bunch of different ills in the modern American economy is under serious dispute.
For example, the whole story about monopoly power increasing in recent decades relies on the idea that price markups have increased — if companies can’t charge higher prices relative to their costs, they must not be very powerful. Economists like De Loecker and Eeckhout find that markups have increased a lot, but there are plenty of economists who disagree with that finding! There are tons of measurement issues involved in trying to estimate markups across the whole economy. Some economists claim that essentially the entire increase in markups is due to the finance sector.
There are plenty of other pieces of the monopoly power story that are also disputed. Shapiro and Yurukoglu (2024) summarize a bunch of these. It’s hard to define what each “market” is over time, because the boundaries of the categories are arbitrary, and the nature of products themselves keeps changing. It’s hard to choose the region over which local concentration should be measured (when is one store in the same “market” as another?). Companies’ costs are hard to measure for many reasons — for example, companies sell lots of different things, and researchers don’t necessarily have the data to determine which costs are for which products. Profits are hard to measure because the cost of risk is hard to assess. And so on. In general, choosing a different set of assumptions can get you wildly different results regarding how much monopoly power has actually risen in America.
The point here is not that De Loecker and Eeckhout, or the other economists who concluded in the 2010s that monopoly power is a big deal, were wrong. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. Nor should you conclude that economics is just a game of “he said, she said” where everyone contradicts each other and nobody really knows anything. The correct takeaway here is that these questions are very subtle and difficult, and the most careful, serious researchers will take a long time to hash out the correct answer. In the meantime, we must live with uncertainty.
A big problem with the antimonopoly crusaders is that they don’t just refuse to live with uncertainty — they insist that you don’t live with uncertainty either. If you say “Hey dudes, maybe corporate landlords actually lower rents”, they won’t debate the finer points of causal estimation with you — they’ll simply label you as a corporate shill and dismiss you.
It’s this last bit — the anathematization of anyone who disagrees with them — that really warns me away from the antimonopoly movement. Chait describes in his article how anyone who tries to buck the antimonopoly people gets accused of being a paid corporate hack:
“We’ve largely won the intellectual debate,” [Lynn] told me matter-of-factly, allowing that the only remaining liberals who disagree with him are “those who are paid to do so.”…
When Biden considered appointing Susan Davies, a former deputy White House counsel under President Obama, to the Justice Department’s top antitrust post, a slew of articles savaged her as a corporate shill. Her candidacy died. [emphasis mine]
This tactic was clearly on display when the antimonopoly people leapt to savage Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance. Matt Stoller wrote a post entitled “An Abundance of Sleaze: How a Beltway Brain Trust Sells Oligarchy to Liberals”. Dylan Gyauch-Lewis1 called the Abundance movement “The new centrist push to regain control of the Democratic Party, with corporate money”. Barry C. Lynn said that Abundance wants “to cozy up to good oligarchs, so they can shelter us until the MAGA storm blows over.”
First of all, claiming that anyone who disagrees with your ideas must be on the payroll of nefarious forces is blatant intellectual dishonesty. It also signals how weak your argument is if you have to accuse every critic of being a bad actor.
But beyond that, the antimonopoly crusaders’ reaction to Abundance shows how utterly factionalist they are. They could have simply said “Yes, we want abundance too. Guess how you get abundance? By breaking up monopolies!” Or something like that. They could have easily tried to co-opt the energy behind Abundance and treated Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson as potential allies. Instead, they leapt instantly to the attack with maximum savagery.
This is the behavior of factionalists, for whom ideas and policy are less important than building power for a clique of favored allies and fellow-travelers within the Democratic Party. Klein and Thompson were a threat not because their ideas contradicted those of the antimonopoly clique, but simply because they were not beholden to the patronage or the intellectual legacy of that clique. They were not on the team, so they were the enemy.
In my view, it is very dangerous for any political party to allow itself to be entered and captured by a clique or faction like this. I’ve spent a long time being very favorable to the ideas being put forward by the antimonopoly people, but their behavior with regards to the Abundance liberals — and the shoddy reasoning, baseless accusations, and backroom arm-twisting that they employ in these debates — has given me what the Zoomers call “the ick”.
A problem with economic policy is that it is very vulnerable to intellectual pseudo-cults. Economics research is very hard to understand, isn’t always useful, and rarely offers clear-cut answers. So policymakers and writers seeking certainty and a reason for decisiveness often fall victim to charismatic gangs of intellectuals who claim that economics is solved and that they have it all figured out. On the GOP side, these include the “supply-siders” in the 1980s and the “national conservatives” today. On the Democratic side, it includes the MMT people.
But MMT failed — essentially no one listens to people who say infinite deficits are good. The antimonopoly faction, on the other hand, appears to have succeeded in winning enormous power and prestige within an increasingly epistemically closed progressive movement. Elizabeth Warren was basically a one-woman Organization Department2 for the Biden administration, popular Democrats like AOC are going around claiming that “market power” is what produces billionaires, and every major progressive publication now platforms the antimonopoly people’s intellectual output.
Given my writings about the problems of corporate power in the past — and my fear of the overwhelming power that AI companies might achieve — it would be relatively easy for me to join this movement. But I can’t, because monomaniacal obsession, epistemic closure, anti-empiricism, and intense factionalism are the kinds of things I just can’t sign on to.
Corporate power is a real problem in our society. But we need more reasonable programs, and more reasonable people, to fight it effectively. Banning corporate landlords, calling for price controls, attacking the grocery store industry, forcing airlines out of business, and making accusations against anyone who calls for deregulation of housing supply are just signs of an approach that’s going to lead nowhere good.
When I had GPT proofread this post before publication, it flagged the name “Dylan Gyauch-Lewis”, but its only comment was: “This unusual spelling appears to be correct.”
This is quite a compliment!
2026-06-02 17:31:21
So, Anthropic is going to IPO! The company is valued at almost $1 trillion, so this is going to be one of the biggest IPOs in history — the only other competitor being SpaceX, which is also set to go public soon. It’ll be one of the largest wealth creation events in history — the company’s seven founders are each going to be worth almost $20 billion, and regular employees will be worth in the millions to tens of millions. So much for my chances of buying a house in San Francisco!
Whether Anthropic is worth this valuation is not the topic of this post, but I guess it’s interesting to touch on. Anthropic is showing more impressive revenue growth than any company in history, having recently blown past OpenAI to an annualized rate of about $45 billion per year. Worries that the company would be unprofitable have been blown away by this hypergrowth — Anthropic is about to turn its first operating profit.
In fact, I think the price being offered for Anthropic is pretty conservative. A multiple of 20x annualized revenue really isn’t that expensive for a company growing at 130% a quarter. Obviously that’s going to level out at some point soon, but it would take only a little over one more year of that sort of growth for Anthropic to be priced like a value stock. The cautious pricing probably reflects the danger of competition, both from OpenAI and from the cheap Chinese open-source models perpetually nipping at the leaders’ heels.
The reason for Anthropic’s meteoric rise, of course, is the success of coding agents. For years, OpenAI had struggled to find a market for its state-of-the-art chatbots; everyone was wowed by the technology, and everyone used it, but people couldn’t figure out how to get it to produce lots of economic value. Anthropic basically solved that problem by being the first to invent usable coding agents — AIs that write software on their own. Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic software, gained a huge amount of brand value, even though OpenAI’s Codex product is competitive in terms of quality.
This was true product-market fit. AI had already proved that it worked in terms of the underlying technology — probably around 2024, when reasoning models cut down on the hallucination problem. Now it had found its killer app — the equivalent of e-commerce and search for the internet, or spreadsheets and word processing for computers. Suddenly, everyone in the world was “tokenmaxxing” — trying to use coding agents as much as humanly possible.1
I first encountered this trend at a dinner event on the economics of AI (I go to a lot of those dinners these days). An entrepreneur at the dinner breathlessly told me and a couple of other attendees that he ordered his employees to “spend their salary in tokens” — that is, to create so much code with Claude Code and Codex that it cost as much as their entire paycheck. I remember asking him: “What are they using all those tokens to create?” I don’t think I got a straight answer; I’m not sure he knew.
He wasn’t alone, though. Plenty of companies encouraged their employees to use AI coding agents as much as possible. Meta even briefly had a leaderboard for who could use the most tokens. One company reportedly spent half a billion dollars on Claude Code — equal to one percent of Claude’s annualized revenue!
Reading these reports, I just kept wondering: What are all these tokens actually producing? Just like with that guy at dinner, there never seemed to be a clear answer. Were Amazon and Meta and other software companies rolling out new features? Not that I’ve seen. A lot more apps are being submitted to the App Store, but I’ve only heard of one good one (Refine.ink). I’m sure there are more out there, but so far it’s nothing like the early days of the smartphone, where I was hearing about cool new apps every couple of weeks.
Maybe it was all on the back end? I’m not a software guy, so I don’t have a proper grasp of how hard it is to make a website like Instagram run, or optimize the cloud servers at AWS. Sites and apps aren’t loading faster or obviously more reliable. Was advertising getting better? Are click-through rates improving? Were companies fixing their long-standing problems, taking care of “tech debt” so they can avoid paying large costs in the future? Maybe!
I kept quiet about these questions, since it’s not really my area of expertise. But I saw a lot of other people — people who know a lot more than I do about software engineering — asking similar things. John Loeber wrote:
The stuff I’m hearing is just insane. People are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on tokens? Guys, what are you shipping?…I am seeing people fully enraptured by illusions of productivity. They have swarms of agents coordinated by Byzantine Octopus harnesses. They’re munging thousands of tokens a second. They’re doing all this stuff, churning unfinished marginalia faster than ever before. Spinning their wheels and shipping absolutely jack shit for their customers…[W]e’re getting a lot of utility from AI for engineering at our company. I think we would really struggle to burn more than $5K per engineer per month.
Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said it wasn’t yet possible to draw a link between raw AI usage and useful products actually being shipped:
“That link is not there yet, right?” [Macdonald] said. “I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25% more useful consumer features.’”...He said that the trade-off costs from AI are harder to justify because he can’t draw a direct link.
Microsoft, meanwhile, began canceling Claude Code licenses. Salesforce started redesigning their employee targets to measure real output instead of AI input. And people who looked into the matter basically confirmed the suspicion that a lot of this AI coding wasn’t going into actual products being shipped:
For companies using advanced AI coding tools, only 18% of spending on tokens is translating into shipped coding products that reach real users, according to EntelligenceAI, a startup that aggregated data on more than 2,000 companies using advanced AI tools for coding.
Jellyfish, a company that tracks AI usage, found rapidly diminishing returns in terms of converting tokens to actual software.
You should absolutely NOT take this to mean that AI is a bubble, or that the tech doesn’t actually work, or that Anthropic’s IPO is overpriced, etc. A lot of this is perfectly normal. When a very capable new general-purpose technology bursts onto the scene — steam power, electricity, computing, the internet, etc. — a ton of people play around with it to see how it works and experiment with how they might be able to use it. That experimentation is healthy, and we shouldn’t expect it to last forever.
It’s also reasonable for companies to push their software engineers to try something radically new. Most professionals who have written code by hand all their lives will naturally be reluctant to switch over to letting a machine take the first crack at it. Rewarding AI usage for its own sake is silly in the long run — it’s just as subject to Goodhart’s Law as anything else, and it predictably resulted in people checking the weather with AI just to hit their targets. But in the short run, it could be good to shove stodgy old engineers out of their comfort zone.
But I also think there are two more interesting things that are potentially going on here:
Companies are finding out, once again, that turning task-level productivity into economic productivity is a lot harder than it looks. This has implications for the big “AI and jobs” debate, upon which the shape of our future society could hinge.
It’s very possible that the software industry as we know it is a mature industry, like steelmaking or internal combustion. If AI creates major improvements in software, it’s possible — even likely — that it’ll be in new types of software industries instead of just “better Facebook and Amazon”.
2026-05-31 16:38:50
I consider myself a pretty good and decent guy, overall. I don’t commit crimes. I’m nice to the people I meet. I help out my friends. I take good care of my pet rabbit, and I donate lots of money to other people who take care of abandoned and sick rabbits. My politics might not always be correct or wise, but I want things like the end of poverty, the end of war, and so on.
And yet just down the highway from me, there are facilities for the mass torture of animals. In the United States, there are 73 million pigs in “concentrated animal feeding operations”, more commonly known as factory farms:
There are many horrors experienced by chickens and other animals on factory farms, but the way pigs are forced to live is probably the worst. For most of their lives, female pigs (sows) are kept in tiny cages — either “gestation crates” when they’re pregnant, or “farrowing crates” when they’re nursing. A sow will spend most of her life in one of these cages.
In a gestation crate or a farrowing crate, sows don’t have enough room to turn around — all they can do is either stand or lie down in a pile of their own feces. Imagine living your entire life in an airline seat, where you couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom or take your seatbelt off. That’s how these pigs live.
Pigs are social creatures — they exhibit “emotional contagion”, meaning that when one pig is scared or happy, other pigs start to feel the same, and they give comfort and support to other pigs who are in distress. Research suggests that they’re at least as smart as dogs, and probably smarter. But a pig in one of these crates will never get any social interaction in her entire adult life — she can’t even turn around to look at her babies.
This is torture. The pigs who are confined this way bite the bars of their cages, desperate for a freedom that will never come. They have their tails chopped off as babies (generally without anesthetic), so that they can’t chew each other’s tails in anguish. But no relief ever comes — they live out their entire lives and die in these tiny torture-cages.
I have no other word for this except “sin”. This is a sin. If there is a God,1 and if that God is in any way good and moral, then that God is looking down with disgust on the way my society treats pigs. I go about my daily life — hanging out with my friends, petting my rabbit, going out to eat at nice restaurants — never thinking about the horrible suffering that has engulfed the entire lives of those tens of millions of pigs.
And it’s for my own benefit that those animals are being tortured. When I eat delicious guanciale, sumptuous char-siu, or mouthwatering carnitas, I’m eating the flesh of animals who were tortured for their entire lives so that I could devour their faces and shoulders and bellies for a slightly cheaper price.
OK, so why don’t I just stop whining and become a vegetarian (or a vegan, since milk cows and hens are also treated badly)? Honestly, I should, and the fact that I don’t is monstrous in a way. But simply washing my own hands of this crime feels like a pitifully inadequate response. The vegetarian movement has been around in the West for over 150 years, and very little has changed — meat consumption is probably marginally lower than if there were no vegetarians at all, but abusive factory farming practices have only been refined and expanded. Furthermore, vegetarianism, though morally laudable, has an obvious economic limitation — when one person refuses to eat meat, it lowers the price of meat for everyone else, which raises other people’s meat consumption and partially offsets the vegetarian’s action.
On top of the obvious and demonstrated inability of individual action to solve this problem, it’s insufficient even from a moral stance. Suppose that our society farmed human beings for food. Would simply refusing to eat human flesh be enough to absolve me of culpability? I don’t think so. I would still have a responsibility to try to abolish the evil system.
In fact, “abolish the evil system” is exactly what voters in California and some other states are trying to do. In 2018, by an almost 2-to-1 margin, California voters enacted a law called Proposition 12 that heavily restricted the sale of meat from pigs, hens, and calves that weren’t raised with a minimum amount of space. Crucially, the partial prohibition extended to meat from animals raised inhumanely in other states. This followed on the heels of a similar law in Massachusetts two years earlier.
Courts have upheld the law, but Republicans in Congress are trying to undo it from the federal level. In 2025 they proposed the Save Our Bacon Act, which would ban states from enacting animal welfare laws like the ones voters approved in California and Massachusetts. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, but this year it got incorporated into the Farm Bill, which has passed the House and is now being considered in the Senate:
Companies and industry groups have also worked with members of Congress for over a decade to introduce federal legislation to nullify laws like those in California and Massachusetts. The latest iteration is called the Save Our Bacon Act, originally proposed last year…This effort, which for years went nowhere as standalone legislation in Congress, now has a decent chance at becoming law as part of the new Farm Bill…
In late April, the House of Representatives passed its version of the Farm Bill, which included the language from the Save Our Bacon Act…It’s “really a Save Our Crate Act,” Brent Hershey, a hog farmer who opposes it, told me. “A vote for the farm bill,” he said, “is a vote to cage an animal that can’t walk or turn around.”
Lewis Bollard has a good post explaining what’s at stake. In fact, the current Farm Bill wouldn’t just reverse the recent anti-crate laws in California and Massachusetts — it would roll back much of the progress that has been made in farm animal welfare over the decade, as well as preventing any future welfare laws along similar lines:
The [Save Our Bacon] Act would stop any state or locality from regulating the sale of meat based on how it’s produced in another state. This would likely invalidate state and local bans on foie gras, crated veal, and more…It would also halt future legislative progress. Congress hasn’t passed a farm animal welfare law in decades. State laws are where reforms actually happen. The SOB Act would gut them by mandating they contain a giant loophole for out-of-state imports.
Why should Congress prevent the voters of California and Massachusetts from taking a stand against the evils of factory farming? First and foremost, it’s a case of a concentrated interest group — the pig farming lobby — making headway against a diffuse interest (voters with a conscience). In fact, if you believe the polls, a majority of the country — even a majority of those who regularly eat pork — would probably support measures like the ones in California and Massachusetts:
Across different incomes, genders, age or race, many regular pork buying Americans (defined as those who purchase pork at least 2-3 times per month) find the use of gestation crates on pregnant pigs (66%) and the practice of [tail] docking on piglets (53%) objectionable. These findings, and other key sentiments, are from a recent survey of over 2,000 US adults conducted by The Harris Poll…According to the survey, gestation crates are seen as unacceptable by two-thirds of Americans (66%), and a strong majority (73%) are more likely to buy pork products from companies committed to ending their use than from one that is not. Tail dockingis also seen as unacceptable by just over half (56%) of Americans, and 62% of Americans think retailers and restaurants have a responsibility to ensure the cutting of piglet tails is not done by their pork producers.
A plurality of Americans want laws against animal cruelty strengthened in general, and in 2022 a poll by Data for Progress found that measures like those of California’s Prop 12 enjoy widespread national support.
There is a financial cost of switching to humane farming methods, but in the grand scheme of things it isn’t that high. After California passed Prop 12, the prices of affected products rose by about 20% relative to products that weren’t covered by the law. 20% is a significant increase; it’s possible that the American public, wearied by several years of inflation, is less inclined to care about pig torture than they were when the polls I cited above were taken.
But it would be a one-time bump in cost, and over the years the price would come back down at least somewhat, as farmers found more efficient ways to farm pigs without torturing them. In addition, California implemented the law in its typical inefficient way, forcing producers of legally compliant pork to jump through massive amounts of regulatory hoops in order to sell their product in the state. Efforts to make it easier to sell humanely produced meat would make it even cheaper to end these terrible practices.
In fact, I suspect that the American public is still in a mood to support animal welfare laws like this. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, and its supporters had to end up sneakily burying it within the much bigger Farm Bill; to me, this suggests that even the SOB Act’s proponents knew how bad it would make them look if people started paying attention.
I also suspect — though I can’t prove — that the proponents of the Save Our Bacon Act care about more than just the support of the farm lobby. I suspect that part of the reason they’re so anxious to preserve abusive farming practices is that doing so affirms their right to abuse animals. The line “The cruelty is the point” probably applies here.
People who feel disempowered tend to take their frustrations out on those with even less power. Conservatives have certainly been feeling disempowered by the progressive drift of elite culture over the past few decades; by rolling back animal rights, perhaps they can demonstrate that at least they still have complete power over the pigs.
This disgusts me. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steve Pinker showed how economic development has tended to go hand-in-hand with less tolerance for animal cruelty. By passing a law that expanded the scope for animal cruelty, America would be slipping a little bit back down toward developing-country status. It’s moral degeneration, plain and simple.
I would hope that the advent of AI would give us humans a little bit of self-reflection about how we treat animals. Whether or not you believe that today’s AI represents a true superhuman intelligence, the rapidity with which Claude and GPT have rocketed to their current heights of ability should make even the most hardened skeptics realize that humanity is probably not the eternal pinnacle of power and intelligence in this universe.
And in a universe where humanity is neither the most powerful nor the most intelligent entity, we will desperately need a universal moral code where the strong protect the weak. Vernor Vinge, contemplating the advent of superhuman AI back in 1993, wrote:
[I.J.] Good proposed a “Meta-Golden Rule”, which might be paraphrased as “Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors.” It’s a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and most of my friends don’t believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff is so hard to articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some sense that might say something about the plausibility of such kindness in this universe.)
The people who wrote the Save Our Bacon Act don’t believe in this Meta-Golden Rule. Instead, they believe that all of the moral value and weight in the Universe lies with them and their friends, and that they should have the right to inflict unimaginable cruelty on any being that doesn’t possess the power to stop them from doing so. I would hope that whatever being ends up judging humanity, be it the God of the Bible or some future superintelligence, doesn’t judge us by our factory farms.
Anyway, if you don’t want your society to torture pigs en masse for a few bucks, call your Senator and tell them not to pass the Farm Bill until the Save Our Bacon Act is stripped out of it.
I actually do believe in God.
2026-05-29 17:42:27
Back when I started blogging in 2011, I saw my main function as technocratic — I would discuss policy ideas with other intellectual econ types, and wise policymakers at the Fed, in Congress, or in the Obama administration might put those ideas into practice. Since 2016, however, technocracy has felt less and less important, and policymaking has felt more ideological. In the second Trump term, concern for costs, benefits, and the public good seems to have entirely gone out the window — policy is now driven either by the whims of an aging egomaniac and his personality cult or the echo chamber of the online right. Tariffs and immigration raids make no sense as economic policy; they are intended as part of a nativist, isolationist ideological project. The Democratic alternative is less bad, but is still increasingly ideological, centered around the idea that corporate profits are inherently bad.
This changes the nature of my job, and in fact makes it much harder. Whereas in the past I could just recommend policies, now I have to make arguments about what kind of country we should want to have in the first place. In order to get anyone to listen to my advice, I have to be a bit less technocratic and a bit more ideological. And I have to do that at a time when the main ideologies being offered to the American public are becoming more extreme.
And yet this is the job now, so I should stop complaining and just do it. Because I do have a pretty clear picture of what kind of country I think America should be. I believe that in the 20th century, under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the United States devised the single best governing ideology that any country has ever created: liberal nationalism.
I’ll explain what I think that means, but first I want to take a detour and point out a recent debate between two prominent commentators on the political right. One is the pseudonymous “Roman Helmet Guy”, an anti-immigration right-wing nationalist. The other is Balaji Srinivasan, my college friend, who represents a libertarian perspective and who now lives in Singapore. Balaji tried to keep the debate civil, while Roman Helmet Guy (henceforth “RHG”) was vituperative, vulgar, and accusatory. But both made interesting and important points about identity and national allegiance, and the debate ended up illustrating some points I want to make about liberal nationalism. So let me present an abridged form of the debate.
RHG started the debate by accusing Balaji of being ungrateful to America:
Balaji responded by casting doubt on the degree to which an individual’s success is attributable to the country where he succeeded, and by arguing that the global online community embodies America’s founding ideals better than America itself:
The degree to which one's success is attributable to a country's platform is hard to separate out. Obama said to conservatives: "you didn't build that, someone else made that happen." That is certainly one view, that 100% of success was due to the country platform, and zero to the individual…
[E]ven if the US government fails, even if the polarization proves too much, even if the $175T in debt takes down a once-amazing country, the Internet will be there…[I]t reflects the best of American values — free trade, free markets, free speech, free exchange of ideas — and I believe we can rebuild from it, just as Europe rebuilt from Christianity after Rome.
RHG retorted1 that Americans like Balaji ought to be loyal to the people of America, not to its ideals or its institutions:
I am not loyal to a set of values. I am loyal to the American people. You were born here. You were raised here. Educated here, made rich here. You should be loyal to the American people too. The PEOPLE. Not a set of values, not an economic system…
You fled the country and now go on podcasts talking about how tech people can ‘avoid the collapse of America.’ To you, my country and my people are just something for your class to exploit for wealth and then move on. If my people vanished from this earth, your only thought would be “How does this affect my ROI?”…My people gave you everything, yet you have no gratitude. No loyalty.
Balaji pointed out that many of the people who built America were immigrants, and that building America didn’t mean that they betrayed their country of origin. He then argued that in the modern, polarized America, it’s impossible to be loyal to the entire people; you have to choose whether to be loyal only to the red half or the blue half:
[I]f someone tries being loyal to “the American people”, does that mean being loyal to the 75 million Kamala voters, the Blue Americans? Because if you’re loyal to them, you are unfortunately no longer loyal to the Red Americans…Just like there is no Korea, only North Korea and South Korea, there is unfortunately no America any more, only Blue America and Red America.
He also accuses RHG of promoting an unequal, racialized version of national identity, in which Indians and other minorities are required to be subordinate to WASP Americans:
[W]hat test do you propose to determine whether someone is a true American, aside from their current paperwork?…[L]oyalty means symmetry. I am loyal to you if you are loyal to me. But the way you're talking about loyalty translates to servitude. I've been polite, and engaged you in good faith, but we are strangers. Yet you are demanding gratitude and even deference (!) from me, implicitly on racial grounds…
Why would anyone be loyal to a MAGA faction that arbitrarily designates countless millions to be Grade B, C, and D [Americans]? You can't just redefine the social contract overnight…with some tweets, into a…blood-and-soil America that the WASPs themselves shut down...and then get extremely mad when others don't buy into it.
RHG, in his defense, declares that he is loyal to all Americans, regardless of race or politics:
The only thing the American people demanded from you was that you employ the capital that you accumulated in our country to strengthen America and her people. The capital you accumulated under the benevolent protection of millions of American soldiers and policemen who do pick up a gun every day and put their lives on the line to defend our people…
As to which Americans you should have been loyal to: All of them. America is not an ideology. Even the most ideologically deluded idiots are still Americans. And I am happy to embrace all American citizens as my brothers and sisters, regardless of background…The truth that you’ll never understand…is that no nation of Balaji Srinivasans will ever be strong. Because you would all flee the moment things got tough, just as you fled America.
Both of the debaters make important points here. Balaji is, of course, right that it’s perfectly fine to emigrate from your country of birth, especially if that country collapses or becomes ruled by a nightmare regime. Being a refugee is not a form of ingratitude, and it’s silly to hold people to a moral standard in which anyone who moves to a different country is a traitor.
(That said, I think Balaji is being excessively panicky when he paints America as being in a state of civil war. The danger to his person and his fortune from remaining in America would have been minimal. And it’s absurd to assert that you can only be loyal to one half of the American populace or the other; Red Americans and Blue Americans are simply not in a civil war.)
RHG also goes way too far when he dismisses the idea of loyalty to American ideals. A nation’s people are important, yes, but its values and institutions are also important. Should loyalty to the Russian people have made every Soviet citizen loyal to Joseph Stalin? Should loyalty to the German people have made every citizen loyal to Hitler? No, of course not. Countries aren’t just sets of people, they’re also systems for organizing those people — the United States of America was born in 1776, not when Jamestown was founded. It’s perfectly acceptable to love your people but to reject the regime under which they live.
But at the same time, RHG makes some important points of his own. He’s absolutely right that a country in which everyone packed up and moved at the first sign of trouble would be an ineffective country. Social change requires voice, not just exit; making change requires that someone stay and fight the system, and if people keep running away they eventually run out of places to escape to.
Similarly, a country needs to be able to tax its rich people and companies in order to fund public goods (defense, courts, infrastructure, science) and to provide a social safety net. If rich people and capital are perfectly mobile, raising taxes becomes impossible, and countries have to choose between underfunding public services and running exploding deficits. In a very real sense, rich people give back to the people of their nation by staying and paying taxes.
And contra Balaji, rich people do owe a lot to the system that allowed them to get rich. Entrepreneurs immigrate to America for a reason; it would have been very hard for Elon Musk to build PayPal, Tesla, or SpaceX in South Africa. And although America is an especially good place to get rich, any functioning state is better for upward mobility than a state of anarchy. Try seeing how rich you can get in Somalia!
Much of what makes America a good place to get rich is its institutions — good courts and property rights, public safety, government support for research, and so on. But RHG is right that much of it is due to the actions of the American people — the workers who fix the roads that rich people drive on and build the offices they work in, the law-abiding regular people who behave themselves instead of overloading the justice system with crime, the taxpayers who pay for the courts and the roads and the research.
Balaji made his first millions by founding the genomics company Counsyl, which benefitted enormously from taxpayer-funded genomics research. That money came out of the pockets of regular Americans. It was channeled through American institutions, yes, but regular Americans made sacrifices for the science that allowed Balaji to get rich. It’s not possible to put a dollar amount on the debt that Balaji owes to regular Americans, but I do think some expressions of gratitude would be in order, even if delivered from Singapore.
At the same time, this raises some problems for RHG’s flavor of nationalism. Who exactly are the “people” of America that RHG is demanding that Balaji be loyal to? RHG claims that he views all Americans as his “brothers and sisters”, regardless of their politics or their background. But who counts as an American? Is it citizenship alone? Does someone who takes the oath of citizenship immediately become Roman Helmet Guy’s brother or sister? And if so, why is RHG so doggedly opposed to new immigrants, when that just means adding to his family? And if RHG has some other criterion for true American-ness besides citizenship, what is it?
This is the problem at the heart of right-wing nationalism, and there’s just no way to resolve it. If you accept citizenship as the definition of Real American-ness, then you have to admit that immigration creates Real Americans, when immigrants naturalize and/or have kids in the U.S. But if you reject citizenship, you have to rely on some more limiting, restrictive, and ultimately divisive test — race, or number of generations in the country, or whatever.
Every time rightists try to put forward a new concept like “Heritage American”, it falls flat, because the dividing lines are so arbitrary and contested. Do you only include WASPs, and kick out the Catholics? That’s kind of a non-starter, electorally. Do you include Catholics but kick out Jews? Do you bring in Jews but kick out people of Chinese and Indian and Mexican descent? What about Black Americans? Any attempt to designate a core “American people” by ethnicity, religion, or race is a non-starter electorally, so rightists typically either stick to vague hand-waving or spout deeply unpopular views from behind pseudonyms on social media.
Americans, meanwhile, overwhelmingly reject race, religion, and ethnicity as criteria for true American-ness. Most Americans of both parties are civic nationalists, of the type that make Roman Helmet Guy’s blood boil — they believe that the most important things for being a real American are citizenship, belief in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, obeying the law, and voting in elections:
Americans themselves have little use for the kind of restrictive nationalism that rightists like Roman Helmet Guy are trying to sell them. (In fact, support for skilled immigration — the type of immigration that brought Balaji’s parents and millions of other Indians to the U.S. — is extremely high among both Republicans and Democrats.)
But this doesn’t mean that Americans would do better with rootless globalism, of the kind Balaji has embraced. The internet has created many “vertical communities” of like-minded people who chat with each other online, but those are no substitute for traditional communities of people who live near each other in physical space. Roads, schools, police, national defense, and plenty of other public goods and services can only be provided at the spatial, local level.
And in countries where people don’t feel a sense of kinship with their neighbors, public good provision becomes very hard. It’s hard to build a road if you think a lot of the benefit will go toward groups of people you don’t like. It’s harder to get people to allow the construction of new housing in their back yards when they think that people they don’t like will live there. Ethnic bloc politics is poison for democracies. A social safety net is hard to provide if you think the welfare benefits will go to groups of people you distrust or despise. And so on.
Homogeneous countries don’t have to worry as much about this problem, but a diverse country like America needs to work harder to forge people of disparate backgrounds into a single unified whole. Just saying “America has no culture except for multiculturalism” doesn’t cut it, because if Americans have nothing to bind them together in a sense of shared destiny and shared interests, the country will literally fall apart.
In the 20th century, America had an ideology that was committed to forging a single national identity from a dizzying array of backgrounds. That ideology was liberal nationalism, as promoted by the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and by his ideological successors (including Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower).
FDR might seem an unlikely candidate for the paragon of liberal nationalism, given that he tossed around 80,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War 2 and compromised with segregationists. But those actions have to be viewed in the broader context — in an era in which racism and xenophobia were at their peak in the U.S., and growing all over the world, FDR strove mightily to turn the country in a new, more pluralistic direction.
FDR ended forced assimilation policies for Native Americans, and gave them greater autonomy on tribal lands. He maintained a group of Black advisors, created plenty of programs to help Black people economically, created cultural programs to publicize Black achievement, and preserved the testimonials of former slaves. He created campaigns promoting interfaith understanding and cooperation, helping to reduce America’s traditional anti-Catholic prejudice as well as antisemitism. His Federal Writers Project employed writers to document America’s cultural diversity.
FDR also strongly promoted the notion of America as a nation of immigrants — an idea that still deeply holds sway over the American psyche, despite rightists’ attempts to get rid of it. Here’s a radio program that the Roosevelt Administration created to promote this idea:
And everywhere, the Roosevelt administration pushed back against the sort of restrictive right-wing nationalism that was common in the early 20th century. The Department of War made a film in 1943 (released in 1947) called “Don’t Be a Sucker”, in which it advocated for an ideology of national unity and derided the kind of demagogues who tried to divide the country along ethnic and religious lines:
FDR and the liberal nationalists were not modern multicultural progressives. They strongly believed in national unity. This obviously meant patriotism, respect for American institutions, and a shared sense of national purpose during World War 2, but it also meant a lot more. FDR and the New Dealers — and especially the Office of War Information — advanced the notion that America had a unifying culture, set of democratic ideals, sense of history, and way of life that transcended Americans’ different backgrounds. The history of the New Deal is littered with examples of attempts to forge American-ness into a sort of shared civic religion.
The legacy of this liberal nationalism lives on strongly in the beliefs and values of the American people, as evidenced by the responses to the poll above about American-ness. But the civic religion that sustained American unity through the triumphant 20th century has been abandoned by the political activist classes — the modern left and right. It’s difficult to imagine today’s leftists crowing about the idea that people of various backgrounds are “Americans All”. And it’s nearly impossible to imagine today’s rightists admiring a poster like the one above but with the names Patel, Zhang, Hernandez, and Khan.
The reason American policy is insane right now is because the country is being torn apart. And it’s being torn apart by a political activist class that has abandoned the unifying ideology of 20th century America — the ideology that defeated both fascism and communism, forged a kaleidoscope of ethnicities into a single nation, and sustained U.S. prosperity and economic dominance for 70 years.
Both the rightist and leftist projects in America are doomed to fail. There’s only one ideology that can save this country, and it’s the one that worked for us before. Bring it back.
RHG also, rather ridiculously, accused Balaji of “treason” for badmouthing America from foreign shores. We need more education about what treason means.
2026-05-27 16:32:31
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” — David Hume
If you’re of a certain generation,1 you’ve probably seen the movie Office Space. If you haven’t, I strongly recommend it, both because it’s funny as heck, and because it’s a perfect encapsulation of a certain time and place in the world. The movie hearkens back to the big technology companies of the 1990s, when — according to the mythology, at least — nerdy engineers did all the real work while know-nothing middle-management types took all the credit. (You’ll also recognize this as the culture that gave rise to Dilbert.) The iconic character representing the backwardness and inefficiency of the 1990s corporation was Bill Lumbergh, the suspender-clad boss whose main function was to pester engineers to fill out useless paperwork.
A lot of nerdy types watched Office Space and assumed — or at least hoped — that in the end, the smart engineer types would take over corporate America from the plodding Lumberghs. And in fact, something like this happened in the 2010s — as Big Tech eclipsed much of the old economy, engineers became extremely highly paid, and began to fill the ranks of middle and upper management. It was the Revenge of the Nerds, the age of human capital, the triumph of humans who actually knew how to do difficult technical things.
But just as with the highly paid artisans of early 18th century Britain, the scarcity of human capital spurred a wave of automation. This year, AI found its killer app — Claude Code and other agentic coding tools that allow AI to do much (though not all) of the hard mental work that the much-put-upon engineers in Office Space were doing by hand. Although AI has not yet replaced many professions, the rapid progress has lots of people wondering what exactly humans will be useful for in 10 or 20 years. If AI does replace coders and mathematicians, what chance do any of the rest of us have?
Although some people in the AI industry still think that humans will be rendered economically irrelevant, that answer is increasingly unsatisfying. Realizing that a popular backlash against their industry is underway, many AI leaders and AI boosters are actively looking for the answer to the question of “What will humans be useful for?”. So far, the most popular answer, advanced by folks like Alex Imas, is that humans will be useful simply because they’re human:
The idea here is that it will become a sign of prestige and social status — which are always in short supply — to have humans do something for you instead of AI. No matter what else machines can do, they can never replace the knowledge that it’s a real human being making your sandwich.
I kind of have my doubts about this thesis — I’ve seen a lot of people pay extra to have a Waymo drive them instead of an Uber, so they didn’t have to sit with a human driver in the car. But maybe Imas is right; we’ll have to see.
But I have a slightly different answer to the question of “What will humans do?”. I think humans will continue to be required for something beyond simply being their beautiful human selves. I think there will be an increasing demand for human labor in the all-important job of maintaining AI alignment.
“Alignment” can mean many things in the AI community, but one basic definition is “ensuring that AI’s goals are the same as humans’ goals”. This is something that AI labs try to do before releasing their products to the world. But as AI becomes more and more agentic — as we turn over more complex and longer-lasting tasks to intelligent machines — it’s going to be harder and harder to keep them aligned with what humans actually want. And if there’s one thing humans will always have a comparative advantage at, it’s knowing what we want.2
In other words, it’s the lumbering Lumbergh, rather than the technically competent engineers, who I believe represents the ultimate future of human labor. He may seem boring and pointless, but by forcing engineers to file their TPS reports and do other seemingly useless tasks, Lumbergh is — however approximately and inefficiently — keeping the engineers’ goals aligned with those of the company they work for.
In the far future — maybe 10 or 20 years from now — this will mean that humans’ main productive function is to make sure that increasingly autonomous AIs stay on task instead of “reward-hacking”, rewriting their own utility functions, going rogue, or otherwise slacking off. Over the next few years, though, I expect human work to gently shade from technical work into alignment work, as we spend our hours verifying the output that AI delivers us.
Generative AI has dramatically decreased the cost of many kinds of output. With the touch of a button, you can write an essay, turn a data set into an academic paper, write a report for your boss, and so on.
Everyone is doing this, and the result is that our society is currently being overwhelmed by a wave of AI output of questionable quality — in other words, what has come to be known as “slop”.
Slop is rapidly taking over every domain of human output. Over one-third of new websites are now estimated to be AI-generated, and over half of internet traffic is now believed to be AI. AI-generated court filings and news articles are on the rise. Even respected public figures are now posting obviously AI-generated content as their own. AI-generated political influencers are becoming a standard tool for electoral campaigns.
2026-05-25 16:14:11
I get a lot of flak from progressives for being a “both sides” kind of commentator. I spend a fair amount of time criticizing leftist ideology and expounding on the very real failures of progressive governance, both of which have gotten much worse over the last decade. Yes, I support the Democrats, but that support is contingent — if their ideology and competence deteriorate to the point where the Republicans are less bad, I’ll switch to supporting the GOP. So it’s worth it to fight to halt and reverse the deterioration; in the long term, the cost of ignoring extremists and policy failures in order to have “no enemies on the left” is very high.
And yet right now, despite all of the negative trends on the left, the choice of which party Americans should support has never been clearer. The second Trump administration has unleashed a dizzying array of measures seemingly tailor-made to weaken the United States of America — sometimes at the behest of rightist extremists, sometimes due to Trump’s own mercurial whims, and sometimes in order to enrich Trump and his clique.
Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything Trump is doing to tear down the America I grew up in. In his first term, it was often said that he avoided criticism using a “DDOS” strategy — rhetorically attacking so many opponents at such blinding speed that they couldn’t focus on any one outrage for long. In his second term, the DDOS is actual policy; Trump inflicts real damage on such a broad array of U.S. institutions, with such incredible speed, that the news can’t keep track of them all.
To illustrate this, I decided to write a post about three mostly unrelated pieces of Trumpian insanity:
The assault on international tech industry employees and founders
The disastrous Iran War
Trump’s unprecedented corruption
Either the second or the third of these would have been a presidency-ending disaster for Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, while the first would have alienated broad swaths of the business community. But for Trump, it’s just business as usual. The stories crowd each other out of the headlines, and everyone just sort of gets overloaded and starts tuning out the news. Trump’s approval ratings drift slowly downward, but nothing else really happens. Hardcore MAGA supporters just keep screaming that everyone has “TDS”, while Trump’s wavering allies eventually manage to convince themselves that Democrats would be even worse.
But anyway, if you were paying attention, here’s the latest round of Trumpian disasters.
A couple of days ago, without any warning, Donald Trump’s immigration agency announced a new rule. Foreign workers working in the U.S. on temporary visas, they announced, must now return to their home countries while applying for green cards — a process that can take years.
This rule would effectively kick most of the high-skilled visa workers in America out of the country. America’s typical pipeline of high-skilled immigration is basically “try before you buy” — people come to work on visas, then apply for permanent residency while in the country. This procedure is called Adjustment of Status. Almost all green card holders — except for investors — get their green cards this way:
The new policy would end this practice, thus shutting off the main avenue of high-skilled legal immigration to the United States.
There’s a good chance this new policy won’t stand up in court, since Congress explicitly passed a law specifying conditions under which people can be denied Adjustment of Status, so it may not be legal for Trump to simply issue a blanket ban. There’s also a chance that Trump’s allies in the “tech right” will frantically call his administration and get them to walk back the new policy.
The reason they’ll be trying to get him to walk it back is that if the new ban does go through, it will devastate much of the U.S. tech industry. The AI industry, which Trump promised to promote — and which is the only thing now keeping the U.S. economy afloat in the face of tariffs and the Iran War — depends crucially on researchers born outside the U.S.:
All of the biggest U.S. AI companies, and more than half of the top 50, were founded by immigrants, with India and China contributing the most:
This general pattern holds throughout the entire tech industry. Almost half of unicorn founders are immigrants, with Indians being the biggest contingent:
Meanwhile, Indian immigrant CEOs have done an incredible job at a number of America’s biggest companies.
Who asked for some of America’s top economic and technological contributors to be expelled from the country? The “tech right” certainly didn’t; many of them met the announcement with dismay. Gil Verdon, a semiconductor company founder from Canada who had been a prominent and vocal Trump booster, expressed dismay at the fact that he might now be kicked out of the country:
The American people didn’t want this either. Polls consistently show that very large majorities of Americans across the political spectrum support high-skilled immigration:
The only people who seemed to be happy with Trump’s new policy were anti-immigration activists on X — rightist types who see immigration as a race war, and want to ban it entirely. It seems highly likely that those online activists — or people who think very much like them — are driving at least a fraction of the administration’s policy.
It’s pretty clear how this happens. Perhaps even more than in the Democratic Party, the GOP is dominated by youngish staffers and think tankers. These people marinate all day in extremist online discourse, and form friendships with extreme right-wing activists who see immigration as a race war rather than as an economic matter or an important part of America’s heritage. Some rightist in the bowels of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services probably got the idea to ban Adjustment of Status and handed it to his higher-ups, who pushed through the policy without thinking too hard about the economic implications.
Welcome to the second Trump administration. If policy isn’t being made by the big man himself — who is growing increasingly erratic and corrupt in his old age — it’s being made by neo-Nazis on X. These are really the only people prepared to take over the MAGA movement once Trump shuffles off the scene, and their influence is growing as Trump’s acumen wanes.
That said, the big man himself still has a little bit of fire in him, and he still enjoys unprecedented support and devotion from his party. Unfortunately, he’s using his remaining vigor to do two main things: A) destroy America’s standing and power in the world, and B) abuse his office to enrich himself, his family, and his most ardent followers.
Donald Trump was not a Manchurian Candidate, created in a secret Russian/Chinese lab to infiltrate and bring down the United States of America. Nor, I believe, is he personally in the pocket of Russian and/or Chinese interests, blackmailed and bribed into weakening his country at the bidding of overseas masters. But sometimes it’s very difficult to distinguish between Trump’s actual actions and what he would do if he were a foreign plant or catspaw.
That’s a very strong statement, but I’m not being hyperbolic for rhetorical effect — I think the facts back it up.
For example, take the war in Iran. Trump launched this war with no immediate provocation or casus belli — a simple opportunistic war of aggression that incinerated whatever shreds of goodwill remained towards the United States among much of the international community.
Trump then proceeded — so far, at least — to lose the war he started. Despite the preemptive strike, and America’s far greater technological capability, Iran reportedly retains most of its arsenal of weaponry:
US intelligence assessments show that Iran retains significant missile capabilities despite repeated claims by the Trump administration that Tehran’s military had been severely weakened, according to a report by The New York Times…The report said intelligence findings compiled in early May showed Iran had regained operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz. Officials familiar with the assessments told the newspaper that Iran still possesses roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and mobile launchers…Citing reports from military intelligence agencies, the report stated that Iran has regained access to roughly 90 percent of its underground missile storage and launch facilities nationwide, which are now assessed to be “partially or fully operational.”
And:
Iran has already restarted some of its drone production during the six-week ceasefire that began in early April, one sign it is rapidly rebuilding certain military capabilities degraded by US-Israeli strikes, according to two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments. Four sources told CNN that US intelligence indicates Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated…The rebuilding of military capabilities, including replacing missile sites, launchers and production capacity for key weapons systems destroyed during the current conflict, means that Iran remains a significant threat to regional allies…It also calls into question claims about the extent to which US-Israeli strikes have degraded Iran’s military in the long term…
Iran has been able to rebuild much faster than expected due to a combination of factors, ranging from support it is receiving from Russia and China to the fact that the US and Israel did not inflict as much damage as the two countries had hoped, one of the sources told CNN.
America’s own stock of weapons, on the other hand, has been dangerously depleted in the conflict, and our defense-industrial base is not managing to rebuild them.
Even as the U.S. has failed to cripple Iran’s military, Iran’s military has succeeded in closing the Strait of Hormuz, sending gasoline prices soaring and causing a significant bump in inflation:
Incapable of defeating Iran on the battlefield, and increasingly wounded by Iran’s economic retaliation, Trump is pushing hard for any sort of face-saving deal that would allow him to exit the conflict quickly. Whatever deal Trump eventually cuts is going to leave Iran in a much stronger position — and American interests in the region — much weaker than before Trump launched his war. Here’s Robert Kagan:
Defeat for the United States, therefore, is not only possible but likely. Here is what defeat looks like.
Iran remains in control of the Strait of Hormuz. The common assumption that, one way or another, the strait will reopen when the crisis ends is unfounded. Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante…The power to close or control the flow of ships through the strait is greater and more immediate than the theoretical power of Iran’s nuclear program. This leverage will allow the leaders in Tehran to force nations to lift sanctions and normalize relations or face penalties…
The new status quo in the strait will also occasion a substantial shift in relative power and influence both regionally and globally. In the region, the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran…All nations that depend on energy from the Gulf will have to work out their own arrangements with Iran. What choice will they have?…
The American defeat in the Gulf will have broader global ramifications as well. The whole world can see that just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight.
This is all, of course, on top of Trump’s other geopolitical blunders:
alienating U.S. allies by threatening to invade Greenland
attempting to force Ukraine to accept an unfavorable peace settlement with Russia, even as Ukraine was turning the tide of battle
alienating India for no reason whatsoever
capitulating to China on Taiwan arms sales in exchange for nothing whatsoever
various other erratic behaviors that make America clearly less reliable of an ally
As I said, Trump is not a Russian/Chinese plant, but at this point it’s hard to imagine what else a Russian/Chinese plant would even do in order to weaken America’s international standing.
While Trump was losing a war he started, destroying the foundations of American power, and attacking the foundations of American technological dominance, he was also working feverishly to use the presidency to get even richer than he already is. Rolling Stone had a good article detailing the breathtaking scale of the corruption:
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history…
Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day…Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing…
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change…compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected…The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to…political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal. [emphasis mine]
So basically, Trump:
Uses the government to interfere with specific companies,
Trades those companies’ stocks in advance, knowing how his own government interference will affect their prices,
Sues his own government for billions and then orders his government to settle the lawsuit,
Gives the billions of dollars of taxpayer money to his own activist thugs and cronies, and
Has the government promise never to prosecute the Trump family.
Rolling Stone is absolutely right: Nothing in U.S. history even comes close to this level of corruption. Trump is simply using the powers of the presidency to extract billions of dollars from stock owners and taxpayers — i.e., from you and me — and to put that money into his own pocket. Compared to this, the famous Teapot Dome land scandal in the 1920s was nothing. The total amount of money involved in Teapot Dome — just a few million of today’s dollars after adjusting for inflation — was tiny compared to the billions Trump is looting.
Anyway, these are all stories just from the past few weeks. In the next few weeks it’ll be something else. This is the most absurdly terrible presidential administration America has ever had.
I know a lot of Americans — including some of my own readers — are still able to convince themselves that The Left Is Worse And Therefore We Must Continue To Support Trump No Matter What. Frankly, I don’t know how those guys do it. But I guess I can take some small solace in the fact that the number of people who think that way is slowly decreasing, as Trump’s parade of outrages and disasters marches on.
