Noah SmithModify

2026-06-28 14:26:35

I usually wait until at least 2 years have past to re-up a post, but events this week are just getting so crazy that I felt like I had to rerun this post I wrote about Europe and air conditioning last summer:

Europe is at a very high latitude, and people think of it as a cold place that doesn’t need AC. But climate change is increasing the frequency of punishing, brutal heat waves all across Europe, and the region’s lack of AC is causing huge numbers of deaths and vast amounts of suffering. This year things are worse than ever before, as Beth Gardiner reports:

Already this summer, two major heat waves have broiled Europe. During the first, Ireland, France, and the United Kingdom sweated through their hottest-ever May temperatures. A month later, France notched its two hottest days and its hottest night since records began: Thermometers soared past 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the west and 104 degrees in Paris. Spain reported its two hottest June days since at least 1950, and Britain, where temperatures reached 99 degrees, recorded its three hottest June days. The temperature in Basel, Switzerland, hit 100 degrees. Germany and Austria are enduring heat in the 90s, and braced for worse as the weather moves east. Temperatures this high can be life-threatening: More than 200,000 people have died because of heat in Europe in just the past four years, the World Health Organization estimates.

Robinson Meyer has some great statistics about how few Europeans have AC:

Even many hospitals lack AC, leaving patients lying in pools of their own sweat (and dying in droves).

Regular Europeans are hitting the breaking point. 8 out of 10 people in France — the country hardest hit by the most recent heat wave — want their country to install AC in houses, schools, and public transit. Parisians are rushing out to buy AC units as fast as they can:

And fights are even breaking out as supplies run short.

But even as regular Europeans desperately scramble for the life-saving relief of air conditioning technology, European elites have been trying to keep their people from getting the relief they need. Germany’s public broadcaster is running a campaign to dissuade its citizens from getting AC, on the grounds that AC’s energy use exacerbates climate change:

Meanwhile, some people at Germany’s Federal Environmental Ministry claimed (falsely) that portable air conditioners don’t work.1 In the UK, a “Professor of Sustainable and Resilient Cities” went on TV to claim (falsely) that air conditioning can’t beat a heat wave. Last year a “senior lecturer in healthy buildings” told British citizens to try applying yogurt to the outsides of their windows to cool their houses. A British news program told British citizens that using AC is “selfish”:

There are innumerable similar episodes of European elites spreading blatant disinformation about AC, actively interfering with AC installation, or demanding that their citizens die for a minuscule climate benefit. Perhaps the single most ludicrous story was that the people who run the European Commission decided to cut off AC for their lower-level employees, while keeping the AC on for themselves:

The European Commission’s headquarters was forced to shut down its air-conditioning system on Friday due to the heat wave…Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.”

The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above…

“It’s like feudalism,” a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont, granted anonymity to speak freely, told POLITICO on Friday, referring to the fact that upper floors housing commissioners got to keep their AC on. A second official agreed it was a “disgrace.”

I know it’s become common to say that America’s elites don’t care if their people suffer and die, but I find it hard to even imagine American government officials doing something like this.2

Why are European elites so insane about air conditioning, even as regular Europeans desperately yearn for the technology? This was the subject of my post last year. Part of it is the poisonous ideology of “degrowth”, which tells Europeans that they can save the planet through their own personal suffering (which of course they can’t). Part of it is cognitive dissonance — if elites reverse themselves after crusading against AC for so long, it forces them to admit they made a mistake. Part of it is the desire not to lose face in front of the Americans, who were far earlier to adopt AC.

But I think part of it is simple cultural conservatism — the idea that using AC would change European culture in strange and unacceptable ways. Cultural conservatism might be a big part of why some cultures eagerly adopt new and superior technologies, while others turn up their noses and refuse.

Anyway, here is my post from last year:

Many years ago, I was watching a nature show. It was about some hunter-gatherers on some Pacific island. The film crew went right up and talked to one of the hunter-gatherers about his life — hunting, gathering, finding and killing witches among his fellow tribesmen, and so on. But as they talked, I realized that there must be a giant video camera right in the face of this tribesman. And he wasn’t even reacting to it. What was this strange, unnaturally shaped object, made of strange unknown materials, and potentially possessing magical powers? Didn’t he wonder? And didn’t he ask himself if he could get something like it, and use it for whatever these strange foreigners were using it to do?

I often think about the example of the tribesman and the video camera. It’s a small version of a story that happens again and again, on a far grander scale, determining the fate of entire nations and geopolitical systems of power: absorption of foreign technology. Most of the things you use on a day-to-day basis were not invented in the country in which you live (even if you live in America). They were invented all over the world, and one crucial reason you have access to them is that your society deemed it fitting to allow those technologies into the country.

Adopting foreign technologies sounds like a no-brainer, but there are lots of risks involved. Hierarchies of power and status can be disrupted, creating political chaos. Existing economic relationships can shift, creating unexpected winners and losers. But perhaps most frighteningly, foreign technology can change a country’s traditional culture.

One Pacific island civilization that was determined to absorb foreign technology without letting it change their culture was Japan. When the “black ships” from the West arrived in the 1850s and demonstrated how helpless Japan was in the face of foreign powers, the country’s leadership (after a brief civil war) decided that their only choice was to absorb foreign technologies and institutions. But they wanted to preserve Japan’s traditional culture as well. They thus came up with the concept of “wakon yosai” (和魂洋才), which translates roughly as “Japanese soul, Western technology”. Over the course of the next century and a half, Japan intentionally strove to preserve elements of its unique culture even as it reshaped its society around new gadgets and production processes.

Travel to Japan today, and I guarantee that unless you are staying in a very backwoods rural place, the room where you stay will have an air conditioner. It will almost always be a “mini split”, or wall unit, looking much like the image at the top of this post. It will be quiet, but powerful enough to keep your room cool even in the increasingly hot summers that Japan now suffers due to climate change. This is a technology never available in Japan’s premodern days, and yet it has been near-universally embraced with no apparent degradation to the country’s traditional culture or national pride.

Europe is different. Data sources differ, but nobody puts AC usage in Europe (or the UK) at more than around 20%. This technology, which almost all Japanese people enjoy, is one that most Europeans do without.

You might think Europe is simply too far north to need AC. But latitude is no longer the defense against heat that it used to be, because climate change is stalking the region:

With this rise in temperature — and the aging of the European population — has come a rise in preventable death. Estimates of heat-related mortality vary, but the most commonly cited number is 175,000 annually across the entire region. Given that Europe has a population of about 745 million, this is a death rate of about 23.5 per 100,000 people per year. For comparison, the U.S. death rate from firearms is about 13.7 per 100,000.

So the death rate from heat in Europe is almost twice the death rate from guns in America. If you think guns are an emergency in the U.S., you should think that heat in Europe is an even bigger emergency.

Most of this death is preventable. The technology that prevents it is air conditioning. Barreca et al. (2016) find that heat deaths in America declined by about 75% after 1960, and that “the diffusion of residential air conditioning explains essentially the entire decline in hot day–related fatalities”. Essentially, wherever AC gets rolled out, heat-related death plunges. Taking Barreca’s estimate and applying it to Europe suggests that as many as 100,000 European lives — 0.013% of the population — could be saved every year if the 80% of European households who don’t have AC were to get it.3

And yet Europe has not done this. The official reason — at least, where one is given — is that AC uses electricity, which contributes to climate change. For example, this is from a 2022 article in MIT Technology Review:

Climate change is making extreme heat the norm across more of the world, increasing the need for adaptation. But in the case of AC, some experts are concerned about how to balance that need with the harms the solutions can cause…

[M]any Europeans are hesitant to welcome air conditioners with open arms. “Seeing AC as a solution to heat waves and to climate change is of course a bit problematic because of the energy that’s being used,” says Daniel Osberghaus, an energy and climate economics researcher at the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research in Germany.

Today, cooling devices like ACs account for about 10% of global electricity consumption—and since most of the world’s electricity still comes from fossil fuels, that’s a significant chunk of worldwide emissions. Because of their massive energy use, “they do get a bad reputation,” says Kevin Lane, an energy analyst at the IEA.

Many other stories also mention climate as a reason Europe resists AC. Green organizations like the World Resources Institute, which have a lot of influence in Europe, consistently recommend far less effective “passive cooling solutions” due to emissions concerns. And European regulations do block AC, by mandating that newly built buildings be carbon-neutral. (This in addition, of course, to good old NIMBYism also blocks AC installation, especially in the UK.) Tyler Cowen writes:

European governments do a great deal to discourage air-conditioning, whether central AC or window units. You might need a hard-to-get permit to install an AC unit, and in Geneva you have to show a medical need for it. Or in many regions of Europe, the air conditioner might violate heritage preservation laws, or be illegal altogether. In Portofino, Italy, neighbors have been known to turn each other in for having illegal air-conditioning units. The fines can range up to €43,000, though most cases are settled out of court by a removal of the unit.

In fact, Andrew Hammel alleges that Germany has raised climate-based opposition to AC to the level of an ideological crusade. Here are some excerpts from his thread:

I believe attitudes toward air-conditioning are class markers in many European countries. Air-conditioning is seen as prototypically American, and that’s important…

The urban haute bourgeoisie -- bureaucrats, public media executives, NGO employees, humanities grads, journalists, professors, lawyers, judges, etc. -- are the holdouts [in terms of installing AC]…

First of all, *every one* of these people has a story about visiting the USA and nearly freezing to death in an over air-conditioned store or office. Every. Damn. One…To these people, A/C is the ultimate American solution to a problem. Instead of accepting nature as it is, Americans use expensive, wasteful technology to artificially change the environment to fit their fat, lazy lifestyles. They insist on defying and conquering nature, not “cooperating” with her. And they don’t care if they cook the planet while they do so…

[T]he European urban haute bourgeoisie turns it into a rigid ideological aversion to any form of air-conditioning…These people regard these decisions not just as their personal lifestyle choices, but rather as a *model for all of society*. They regard themselves as a revolutionary vanguard of advanced ecological consciousness which must aid the less enlightened to reduce their carbon footprints. And these people *run German society*…Urban planners and people who create construction codes in Germany are also brigadiers in the anti-A/C jihad…

Which is why it’s pretty common on sweltering days to hear Germans complain about the “goddamn ‘eco-this’ ‘organic-that’ pencil pushers” who continue to force them to sweat for hours in overheated hospitals, classrooms, and offices.

This is immediately recognizable as the poisonous ideology of degrowth. Degrowth frames climate change as a problem of personal overconsumption and extravagance to be curbed by austere self-restraint and government policy, rather than as a technological problem to be overcome by installing green energy. This is foolish, of course — it leads to human suffering while not doing much to actually curb climate change. But it’s very popular in northern Europe.

The climate-based crusade against AC is a little infuriating, because it probably kills a lot more people than the reduced emissions save. Right now, Europe is responsible for only about 13% of global carbon emissions from fossil fuel use, meaning that the climate impact of installing AC all over the region is pretty minimal. Does anyone think that incredibly tiny margin of emissions reduction is really worth tens of thousands of lives a year?

But from reading anecdotes like Hammel’s, I kind of suspect that there’s a second, deeper reason why Europe so far refuses to install AC: protection of traditional culture. The thing about German elites pooh-poohing AC as an unnecessary American extravagance suggests that some Europeans view lack of AC as quintessentially European culture — a tradition by which Europeans can define their own uniqueness vis-a-vis the rest of the world.

Many articles about Europe’s strange reluctance to use AC hint at this attitude. For example, here’s CNN:

A big part of the reason [they don’t install AC] is many European countries historically had little need for cooling, especially in the north…“In Europe… we simply don’t have the tradition of air conditioning… because up to relatively recently, it hasn’t been a major need,” said Brian Motherway, head of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Inclusive Transitions at the International Energy Agency. [emphasis mine]

And here’s Euronews:

The rest of this story lies in history and culture…Southern Europe built its cities to cope with heat: thick walls, shaded windows, and street layouts designed to maximise airflow…That’s also why white paint dominates the picturesque skylines of Mediterranean places like Santorini in Greece or Vieste in Italy: The bright surfaces reflect sunlight and radiant heat, helping interiors stay cooler…In northern Europe, on the other hand, summers were once mild enough that cooling was rarely needed…Air conditioning, when it appeared in Europe, was seen as a luxury or even a health risk. Many Europeans still believe exposure to cold air can make you sick, and the stereotype persists that AC is for rich people.

And the WSJ reports that there are widespread superstitions about the dangers of this technology that most of the rest of the world uses every day:

In France, media outlets often warn that cooling a room to more than 15 degrees Fahrenheit below the outside temperature can cause something called “thermal shock,” resulting in nausea, loss of consciousness and even respiratory arrest. That would be news to Americans[.]

Even if climate is the official, intellectual reason for Europe refusing live-saving AC, the idea that AC goes against Europe’s traditional culture is probably an important underlying motivator.

(This trend isn’t unique to Europe, of course. Americans may pride themselves on being more futuristic than the Europeans, but they still haven’t adopted Japanese washing toilets in significant numbers, and so their quality of life has suffered in small ways that, having never experienced the luxury of this foreign technology, they cannot even comprehend.)

Whatever the reason, the resistance to AC technology is making Europe a more impoverished civilization. It’s a major reason why Europe now feels shabbier and more hardscrabble than America, despite its beautiful old cities and low crime rates.

Europe needs to emulate societies that embrace the technological future. Japan is a good one, but an even better example might be Singapore. That city-state’s legendary founder, Lee Kuan Yew, believed that air conditioning was the crucial technology that allowed his country to become one of the richest on the planet:

“Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.

Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.”

Europe would do well to listen to his advice.

Absorption of foreign technology simply makes the difference between a poor society and a rich one — between a technologically advanced society and a backward one. Most countries have their blind spots here, but Europe’s spasmodic rejection of air conditioning is far more costly than most.

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2026-06-26 10:19:26

Darializa Avila Chevalier is almost certainly headed to Congress, having won the Democratic primary in New York’s 13th congressional district. In 2024, while she was a sociology PhD student at Columbia,1 she founded a group called “Columbia University Apartheid Divest”, which was involved in the Palestine protests. In a now-deleted Instagram post, CUAD declared: “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Avila Chevalier’s group also tweeted “Marg Bar Amrika”, meaning “Death to America” in Persian.

Avila Chevalier is also known for making plenty of “controversial”2 statements on social media. In 2019, in another now-deleted tweet, she lambasted Black and Arab men for “fetishizing ugly colonizer women”:

In 2020 she endorsed a theory that COVID-19 began in France, rather than in China.

Also in 2020, Avila Chevalier was an ardent supporter of the movement to abolish the police:

During the nationwide protests in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, Avila Chevalier responded to a user asking what a better slogan would be than “defund the police,” by posting, “F**k you. We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movements.”…Two days later, Avila Chevalier rejected an argument that abolishing police meant ending policing only “as we know it.”…“No. It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever,” she replied, adding several clap emojis.

She has also supported the abolition of prisons — a view she probably still holds. In a recent interview, when repeatedly asked point-blank whether she would put a murderer in prison, she refused to answer the question.

In 2022, she claimed that America’s support for Ukraine against Russia’s invasion was America “bullying Russia”:

Avila Chevalier has also endorsed any number of extreme economic policy positions:

During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Avila Chevalier reposted a message calling for a sweeping government takeover of large parts of the economy. The repost advocated nationalizing utilities, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies; suspending rent and mortgage payments; dissolving private health insurance companies; and “seiz[ing] all properties from landlords.”

Other deleted posts and reposts included references to communism and anti-capitalist politics. In one April 2020 post, Avila Chevalier wrote that while most of the political theory she had read was communist, “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me,” adding a laughing emoji.

If this all sounds absolutely crazy, it’s because it is. The woman who said all of these things is going to be a U.S. Representative — not a state representative, or a member of a city council, but a member of the United States’ highest legislative body. And she will be a Democrat — she will be formally supported by the Democratic Party, she will presumably caucus with the Democrats in Congress, and so on.

Avila Chevalier is as much of an extremist as anyone associated with the MAGA movement. The best comparator on the right would probably be Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has made a long string of similarly extreme and wacky statements. My typical line is that “both extremes are bad, but the Republican extreme is worse”. Avila Chevalier is severely testing that asymmetry.

Nor is this a case of one wacky person winning a lone, lucky victory. Avila Chevalier was one of three Congressional primary candidates backed by New York City’s powerful and charismatic mayor, Zohran Mamdani. All three won their primaries this week, and two of them — including Avila Chevalier — unseated incumbent Democrats.

But it isn’t even just Mamdani. Around the country, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America are starting to win more races in blue cities:

Democratic socialists won big in New York’s primaries Tuesday…several more triumphed in state legislative primaries…In Washington, DC, DSA member Janeese Lewis George won a blowout victory in Democrats’ mayoral primary…In Seattle, Mayor Katie Wilson, who defeated incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell last year, is a self-identified democratic socialist. And in Los Angeles, city council member Nithya Raman, a DSA member, advanced to this November’s runoff against Mayor Karen Bass…

The DSA has also elected several members of the city councils of New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland (Oregon), San Antonio, and more. And they’ve elected a handful of state legislators in many states — mostly from urban districts.

This is quite a comeback for the DSA. As recently as 2024, its membership was collapsing, but it has soared to new heights:

The Democrats now have their own MAGA — a hard-left populist faction that opposes the traditional party establishment.

Why is this happening? I’m not typically a politics writer, but here are some of my thoughts.

Extremism on the right enables extremism on the left (and vice versa)

Why am I even writing a post about the insanity of the DSA, when an equally insane group of people is running the whole country right now? It’s a fair question. Every week there’s a new report of unbelievable corruption, blatant lawlessness, dictatorial aspirations, policy failure, and general stupidity from the Trump administration:

Since I wrote that post one month ago, Trump lost his boneheaded war with Iran, blamed algae in the Reflecting Pool on nonexistent vandals, tried to ban mail-in voting by executive order, refused to pass a (very good) housing bill, issued an order calling for fewer childhood vaccines, and so on. The man is a walking disaster, and a majority of the country recognizes it.

But the movement that Trump started may end up being just as bad, or potentially even worse. After Trump leaves the scene, ideology will flow in to fill the gap left by his personality cult. We already know more or less what that successor ideology will look like — intensely xenophobic, obsessed with “Western civilization”, virulently opposed to the EU (for supposedly betraying Western civilization) and favorably disposed toward Russia, conspiratorial, anti-science, anti-vaccine, and so on.

Both Trump and his movement are clearly a disaster and a dead end. That opens up space for Democrats to do one of two things. The first is to become more extremist, and hope that anti-Trump backlash and base turnout/mobilization will allow the Dems to squeak out narrow victories in 2028 or 2032. The second is to moderate and stand up staunchly in defense of liberalism, attacking Trump’s corruption, economic policies, anti-democratic overreach, and general policy failure. This second approach would capture more swing voters, but would run the risk of inspiring tepid enthusiasm among the base.

I see elements of both strategies emerging. The DSA may be winning mayoral races and some Congressional seats, but it’s extremely unlikely to have a Presidential nominee in 2028. Many mainstream Dems have been moderating on cultural issues.

But the fact that “go moderate or go extreme” is even a question at all right now for the Democrats is thanks to Trump. The backlash to Trump is exactly what has opened up the possibility for Dems to become more extreme and still win elections. Mamdani’s election in NYC was clearly intended as a middle finger to Trump, and it’s no coincidence that DSA membership surges when Trump is in the White House.

Faced with a threat like Trump, some people instinctively become pragmatic and decide to do whatever it takes to make the threat go away. But a lot of people just instinctively reach for whatever weapon they can hurl at the enemy, and the DSA is a weapon that’s convenient and seems sharp.

The next question, of course, is: What can break the mutually reinforcing cycle of radicalization? There are plenty of things that seem to work, but the real message is that reasonable people have to stand up forcefully against the radicals. But it’s hard for moderate Dems to stand up to people like Mamdani right now, because voters are very mad at them.

The failures of mainstream progressivism make Democrats hungry for an alternative

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2026-06-24 17:01:34

In 2006, well before Xi Jinping came to power, Chinese state television ran a 12-part miniseries called The Rise of the Great Powers. It was based on Paul Kennedy’s book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, first published in 1989, and included interviews with the author, but also expanded on the source material. The show went through a bunch of historical examples of great powers — the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia/USSR, and the U.S. — and tried to explain each one’s rise (and, if applicable, its fall). The implication was, of course, that China ought to become the next great power in the sequence.

I haven’t seen the series, but I’ve read Kennedy’s book, and its ideas are powerful and provocative. The most interesting idea is that countries become great powers due to their mastery of the most important technologies of the day — gunpowder, sailing ships, steam power, mass production, steel, the combustion engine, industrial chemicals, electricity, airplanes, and so on.1 The U.S., he argued, mastered the key technologies of the 20th century better than any other nation. To his list, we should add semiconductors, computers, and the internet.

There are some interesting unexplored corollaries of Kennedy’s idea. Although he attributes great-power decline to hubris and overstretch, it’s also possible to imagine that leading nations fall behind due to technological disruption. Britain’s industrial revolution made mercantile trade less pivotal as a source of national wealth, so the Netherlands fell behind. Britain failed to seize dominance of aviation and combustion engines the way the U.S., Germany, and (to a lesser degree) Russia did, so its early advantage in steam power became less important.

Today, everyone recognizes that artificial intelligence is the most important technology in the world — not just because of what it can do directly, but because of its potential to accelerate other technologies. Right now, the United States is leading in that industry, thanks to its pioneering role in AI research, but also to its mastery of semiconductors (along with its network of allies) and its skillful and timely use of export controls. Chinese AI models are officially nipping at the heels of Anthropic and OpenAI, but actually the gap is bigger than advertised. Here’s The Economist:

In reality, America’s lead is probably bigger than four months. Open-source models, many of them Chinese, tend to score better on public benchmarks than private ones, says Havard Tveit Ihle of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment…[O]n private tests, America’s lead nearly doubled, to eight to ten months[.]

And here’s a chart from NIST, showing that Chinese models have been falling further behind lately:

Ten months is a slender lead, and even slightly out-of-date models will have truly awesome capabilities — and will probably be able to make decent amounts of money as cheaper alternatives. But the U.S. has been executing a fairly competent strategy to dominate this crucial technology of the future.

But artificial intelligence is not the only tech revolution happening in the world today. Actually there are, roughly speaking, two other big ones: 1) electric technology, and 2) biotech. We’ll skip biotech for now (though China is making big strides here), and focus on the one that China is clearly dominating: electric technology.

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2026-06-22 07:33:20

A pizza wheel — also known as a rolling pizza cutter or just a “pizza cutter” — is not a great tool for cutting pizza. I know that’s a statement that’s going to anger a lot of people when I say it, but it’s true. I’m hardly alone in saying this — Wirecutter, Eater.com, and plenty of others have noted the same drawbacks. But anyway, let’s go through the many reasons why pizza cutters are not fit for the job they’re named after.

First, it’s hard to make a very strong cut with a pizza cutter. This is because when you roll a cutting wheel forward, your hand isn’t pushing straight down — it’s pushing forward and down at the same time, meaning that only some of the force from your cut is being delivered to the pizza itself. That makes your job harder.

On top of that, the amount of force that goes into the pizza isn’t constant across the cut. As you extend your arm across the pizza while pushing the roller forward, the angle changes — when the cutter is right under your arm, most of the force goes down into the pizza, but when it’s at the far end of the pizza, most of the force is going forward instead of down. This means that you basically have to do one of three things:

1. Be very good at dynamically adjusting your force level as you cut

2. Roll the pizza wheel back and forth over the pizza several times

3. Push down really, really hard the whole time

The first of these is hard and takes a lot of skill. The second results in little slivers in your pizza — since it’s very hard to keep the wheel in the groove as you cut back and forth — and often causes the dreaded “cheese drag”, in which the wheel drags the cheese right off of the top of the pizza. The third method blunts the cutting wheel, and cuts deep grooves into your cutting board. And all three methods require you to expend a lot of energy.

Pizza wheels are also notoriously hard to maintain and store. Cleaning cheese off of an exposed, rotating blade is difficult, because the blade keeps spinning as you try to wipe it, and because you’re constantly in danger of slicing yourself on the edge. Storing an exposed blade makes it easier to cut yourself when you reach into the drawer. And sharpening a circular, rotating blade is extremely difficult.

Fortunately, there are better tools out there for cutting pizza. The first, which works great for thin-crust pizza, is a scissors — either a standard pair of kitchen shears, or a dedicated pair of pizza shears. The latter looks like this:

As Wirecutter notes, Italian chefs tend to just cut pizza with scissors. They also note that a standard pair of kitchen shears is very versatile, so if you use it to cut your pizza, that’s one less tool you need to keep in your kitchen.

An alternative — which works especially well if you’re making thick-crust pizza — is a rocking pizza cutter, which takes very little arm strength, is easy to clean, and gets it right every time. It looks like this:

Eater.com recommends the rocking pizza cutter. There’s also a one-handed variant. The rocking pizza cutter is a specialized tool (so it takes up storage space), and it can cut a groove into your cutting board, but it’s easy to sharpen and clean, doesn’t get stored in a drawer, and has the added advantage of actually being able to cut pizza effectively.

(A third alternative for cutting pizza, which works decently well for either thick or thin crust, is just the tried-and-true “large kitchen knife”.)

Anyway, as I said, I expect lots of people to be angry at this take, because whenever I point this out in public, people get angry. Tons of Americans use pizza wheels — I couldn’t find reliable survey data, but browsing on Amazon, talking to people, and consulting AI all suggest that pizza wheels are very common in American households. But I’m right here — the physics doesn’t lie.1

Now on to the Japanese toilet, also known as the “washlet”:

This is a purpose-built washlet, which you commonly find in Japan. But you can also buy an add-on that converts your regular toilet seat into a washlet. That looks like this:

A washlet does several things that a normal toilet does not:

1. It has a heated seat.

2. It has a jet of water that washes your butt.

3. It also has a bidet mode.

4. It has a warm air jet that dries your butt.

5. It usually has a built-in air freshener.

The overwhelming majority of Japanese households have washlets. But they’re an incredibly rare sight in America — in general, only rich people own them.

Once you’ve used a washlet for years, it’s very hard to go back to a basic toilet. First, the heated seat is just incredibly, luxuriously comfortable. Second, the butt-washing water jet really cuts down on toilet paper use. It also gets your butt much cleaner than toilet paper alone — so much so that you start to feel like a barbarian for not using a washlet. (The warm air jet and air freshener, in contrast, are more “nice to have” features, in my experience.)

But despite near-universal agreement among product reviewers as to the superiority of the washlet, only a tiny percent of Americans have adopted them. It’s on the rise, but only slowly, and very late — the washlet was first introduced in Japan in 1980.

So there you go, Americans. Please try pizza shears or rocking pizza cutters, and please try washlets. You’ll thank me. But as you probably guessed, this is really a post about AI.

I recently had the pleasure of going to a party in Washington D.C. with a number of lawyers, art history professors, and other educated progressive professionals. This provided me with a great opportunity to get out of my west coast tech-and-econ bubble, and talk to intelligent Americans from other regions and other walks of life.

Many of these conversations turned to the topic of artificial intelligence. Not one person that I talked to was positive about the technology. The first man I talked to asked me how “the AI bubble” was going. When I told him that Anthropic was experiencing the fastest revenue growth of any large company in history, and expects to turn an operating profit next quarter, he was astonished.

To be fair, not everyone pays close attention to quarterly Anthropic numbers; as recently as late 2025 data center investment was still racing ahead of revenue and even Dario Amodei didn’t know whether his company would go bankrupt. But while observers close to the industry — and econ writers like Yours Truly — simply raised the possibility of a bubble, lots of people seemed to have assumed that a bubble was definitely in progress, and then not bothered to check up on it later.

The other folks I talked to were generally dismissive of the potential of AI, and all were concerned about negative effects. One lawyer told me that he knew some people who used it a little bit, but never used it himself. Another said that it was “about as good as a 2nd-year associate”, but worried that people’s reliance on it would erode their own cognitive abilities. Various other people asserted that AI was flooding their professions with low-quality work.2

The art historian was even more negative about AI. She argued that AI couldn’t produce real art, because it lacked human input. When I pointed out the difference between skillfully prompted AI videos and sloppily prompted ones, she did consider it, but it was the first time she had thought about it. She then argued that AI art would deceive people by presenting a distorted version of reality as if it was real. When I pointed out that people had made a similar objection to photography and film, before those were eventually recognized as legitimate and respected art forms, she considered this, but insisted that AI was somehow different.

What’s interesting is that this anecdote doesn’t cleanly fit the polls. Americans in general are very afraid of AI taking their jobs, and they predict generally negative impacts on society:

But they’re using AI more and more, both at work and for personal reasons:

Unlike in the case of pizza cutters and washlets, Americans have correctly identified the most useful technology, and are adopting it.

But…not all Americans. Educated progressives, like the ones I hung out with in D.C., are far too dismissive of AI. Democrats consistently poll more negatively than Republicans, both on AI in general, and in terms of data center construction. On progressive-dominated forums like Bluesky, anti-AI animus is near-universal, and people who admit using the technology tend to get dogpiled. Sybren Kooistra has lamented progressives’ “unilateral disarmament” when it comes to the big technology of the future.

Dan Kagan-Kans has argued that the left is missing out on AI, precisely because so many progressives have chosen to dismiss the technology outright:

Transformer

The left is missing out on AI

Abdication…

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4 months ago · 407 likes · 258 comments · Dan Kagan-Kans

He writes:

As a movement, it appears the left has not been willing to engage seriously with AI — despite its potential to affect the lives and livelihoods of billions of people in ways that would normally make it just the kind of threat, and opportunity, left politics would concern itself with.

Instead, the left has, for a mix of reasons good and bad, convinced itself that AI is at the same time something to hate, to mock, and to ignore. “The GenAI sector’s foremost feat of marketing has been the term intelligence itself,” N+1, one of America’s foremost left publications, recently wrote. “A much more important question: What if China develops time travel or warp speed before we do?” asked Will Menaker, a host of the popular left podcast Chapo Trap House, when responding on X in December to a discussion of the possibilities of advanced AI. “Large language models do not, cannot, and will not ‘understand’ anything at all,” argued Tyler Austin Harper, the self-described “leftist, sort of Marxist-skewing” former professor, now The Atlantic staff writer, last summer…

This idea, that large-language models merely produce statistically plausible word sequences based on training data, without having any idea about what the words refer to, has become the baseline across much of the left-intellectual landscape. Thanks to it, fundamental questions about AI’s capabilities, now and in the future, are considered settled.

This dismissiveness reminds me of the cases of the pizza wheel and the washlet. There is no law of the Universe that useful technologies are adopted quickly by everyone who could make use of them.

Historically, countries that adopted gunpowder, industrial technology, computers, and other cutting-edge innovations had an edge over those that turned up their noses at them. Sometimes the consequence was a slightly lower GDP; sometimes the consequence was conquest and colonization. In most cases, economic historians believe that a fear of disrupting existing patterns of power and elite status was behind the decision to eschew new technology.

I worry about the same thing that Dan Kagan-Kans worries about. America as a whole is adopting AI rapidly. But if our educated progressive classes — our lawyers, academics, artists, and so on — turn up their noses, it could damage both their own cultural/political tribe and the country as a whole. In fact, by dismissing AI’s potential — by thinking that the most important technological revolution of the modern age can be waved away as a “bubble” or “fancy autocomplete” or IP theft or slop or whatever — they make it harder to think about the actual serious risks AI might pose.3

The coming of AI will definitely disrupt many of the relations of status and power in America. As Brad DeLong notes, educated professional types have had a long period of security, in which new innovations disrupted blue-collar work but not high-level white-collar work. That’s probably over now. But if educated progressive types don’t roll with the changes, and figure out how to use the new technology to their advantage, they could find themselves left behind by the tide of history — and the consequences will be worse than dirty butts and poorly cut pizza.

Update: As if on cue, Cory Doctorow — one of my favorite sci-fi authors, and usually a perspicacious and insightful commentator — just gave an interview with the socialist magazine Jacobin in which he demonstrates the exact same kind of airy, hand-waving dismissiveness that I encountered at the party in D.C.:

If you believe, as I do, that the toxic thing about AI is the bubble, then you have to attack the material basis of the bubble…[Companies] are pumping the AI bubble, and why they pump bubble after bubble, to tell a growth story…When they say, “We’re going to replace commercial illustrators with a pixel-guessing machine,” they’re not saying that is the source of the profits that are driving the bubble.

This kind of dismissive thinking can’t do a damn thing to slow down actual AI progress, protect people from the actual dangers of AI, or create more equitable outcomes in the AI-driven economy of the future. All it can do is make sure progressives get left behind in the tide of history.

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2026-06-20 15:34:35

As birth rates fall and countries turn to immigration to address their labor shortages, a lot of countries around the world are struggling with crises of national identity. Japan is one of them. Over a decade ago, Japan began opening itself up to mass immigration:

Because Japan did this later than other rich nations, immigrants aren’t yet as numerous as in Europe or the U.S., but the percentage is rising fast. And so discussions about what it truly means to be Japanese are starting to emerge.

I thought it would be useful for my readers — most of whom live in America or other English-speaking nations that are going through their own crises of national identity right now — to get some perspective on how Japanese people think about these issues. And so I asked my friend Hiroko Yoda to write me a post about it. Hiroko is a Japan-based entrepreneur, cultural historian, and writer. She's the author of a new book, Eight Million Ways to Happiness, which is a memoir exploring Japan's modern secular-spiritual landscape. She also writes on Substack.

In this post, she writes about how shared culture, rather than adherence to a particular religious doctrine, is what binds Japan so tightly together. Interestingly, “culture” is the same answer I arrived at when I asked the question of what will bind America together in the future.

Although I live in Japan, as a Japanese person married to an American, and who studied at American universities for my undergrad and graduate degrees, I probably pay more attention to happenings in the U.S. than many Japanese people. One of the topics I have found most interesting is the ongoing struggle to define what an American is. The reason being, we Japanese are grappling with this issue as well.

As Noah has written, Japan is accepting more immigrants than ever before. When my husband and I moved to Tokyo in 2003, international couples were still uncommon, and we’d sometimes draw stares if we walked hand in hand. These days, it’s completely unremarkable. The numbers of tourists visiting Japan increase year by year, and so does the number of people taking permanent residence. I see many international families in the suburb where we live, and I don’t think we are unusual, at least as regards urban centers.

As Japanese are finding new ways to co-exist and live alongside non-Japanese, they are also revisiting what it means to be Japanese. As I’ve written in my own newsletter, the question once centered simply on ethnicity, but now many are coming to believe that shared cultural values are more important.

Are you Japanese simply because of where you were born, or are you Japanese because of how you participate in society? Superficially, this resembles the arguments going on in America. Are you American because of some kind of heritage, or are you American because you embrace shared values, like those laid out in the Constitution?

But there is an interesting difference, too. Japan is (or was) a country with relatively little immigration; that’s why the question of who’s Japanese traditionally hinges on ethnicity. On the other hand in America, an immigrant melting pot, the litmus test often seems to return to faith.

It comes up again and again in American discussions about what it means to be American. Take this recent essay from The New York Times opinion writer Ross Douthat:

One doesn’t need to be a specific kind of religious believer to be a good believer in the Declaration [of Independence]. But if you look at the sweep of American history, it’s very hard to disentangle the advance of equality from the religious belief that our rights come from God and that human beings are equal in his eyes… it has more power in a context where most Americans believe in a providential God.

And then there’s Derek Thompson, who in a recent conversation with religious scholar Ryan Burge, noted:

There’s this category of Americans who have gone into religion as if it’s a foreign country, harvested certain souvenirs, and brought them back to the world of secularism. They practice yoga but have no interest in understanding its religious origins. They meditate but are not remotely interested in any Buddhist version of nirvana.

To which Burge replies:

They only wanted the parts of religion they liked and left the others behind…

You can’t just pick and choose…A lot of people are doing that with religion right now. They’re walking down the buffet line, picking one piece, putting it on their plate, and calling it a spiritual life. That doesn’t endure.

And Thompson concludes:

If you don’t have that central spine of purpose, the community won’t last. If your only purpose is “let’s get together,” that’s not enough. You need that higher purpose—that vertical spine—in order to build a truly strong horizontal community.

These pundits are arguing that ideas alone – the values of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution – aren’t enough to keep Americans together, whether in communities or as a country. America’s loneliness epidemic, its polarization, its young citizens’ loss of hope: a big part of it can be attributed to the fact Americans don’t go to church or synagogue or temple or what have you anymore.

All of which makes me want to say: have you ever been to Japan?

Japanese, as a nation, don’t subscribe to any one faith. In fact, there’s a popular saying “born Shinto, married Christian, buried Buddhist.” We pick and choose, bringing what we like from various traditions – the purifications of Shinto, the pretty aspects of Christian weddings, the traditions of Buddhist funeral rites – into our secular lives. We’re so flexible about it that we often answer no when people ask if we’re religious. Look at this chart:

I’m going to put aside the question of how accurate this is. I actually wrote an entire book on how I believe surveys like this can miss the forest for the trees. (Spoiler: it involves how one defines “religion.”) But Burge and others argue Americans are “setting themselves up for failure” in becoming less religious, or at least in not going to religious institutions.

America is a flexible society that is rigid when it comes to religion; Japan is the opposite, a rigid society with a surprising flexibility when it comes to faith. There’s an old phrase that sums up Japan’s traditional spiritual cosmology: yaoyorozu no kami, which means eight million deities. It isn’t an accounting; it’s an expression of awe at the infinite nature of the sublime in all its forms. It incorporates, absorbs, rather than draws lines. In short, it’s radically inclusive.

I get that America is a religious country. I was taken to Sunday school every week when I was a homestay student in Indiana in the 1990s. I recited the Pledge of Allegiance alongside the other students every day. But there’s no pledge of allegiance in Japanese schools. The Japanese flag wasn’t even displayed in any of my classrooms. None of my classmates ever went to anything resembling a Sunday school.

But we were united in other ways. Ways that look like faith to outsiders, but just felt like everyday life to us. We made New Year’s visits to shrines or temples for hatsumode, a first prayer for the year. Many of us had Buddhist-style altars in our homes, where we kept photos of departed family members. Many of us carried omamori, Shinto or Buddhist amulets for scholarship or travel safety on our schoolbags.

But if you’d asked the majority of us what our faith was, or who we were praying to, we’d have reacted with utter confusion. None of us saw amulets as a replacement for studying, or looking both ways before crossing the street. They were simply cute ways to wish. If you’d asked us what we believed, I honestly don’t think we would have even understood the question. We just did.

So if institutional faith is core to the communities that form a healthy society, why is Japan’s so successful without it?

First, let me be clear here. I don’t see Japan as some kind of utopia or even a role model. I just see it as different. But the fact it is different – and not struggling in the ways many commentators seem to think America is struggling, at least regards faith as an identity – is what might make the Japanese counterpoint relevant. Let me also be clear that I believe faith can nurture a life or a community. If your personal faith nourishes you, I cheer you on.

But speaking broadly, if Japan can maintain a stable society without faith, it would seem to indicate it isn’t a necessity for a healthy society.

So what is keeping Japan together?

For a long time, Japanese could rely on clear lines to define themselves, like language (Japanese being little spoken outside the nation) and terrain (being an archipelago). But things are changing, and changing fast. It isn’t particularly difficult to get to Japan anymore. More people outside Japan are learning and speaking Japanese than ever before. More want to live here than ever before.

And Japan is aging and shrinking. We’ve “lost” three million citizens over the last few years alone, as deaths outpace births. The numbers of foreign visitors and permanent residents are higher than ever before. All of these factors are driving the question of what it means to be Japanese, which is playing out in online forums, TV shows, newspapers, and election contests throughout Japan.

A recent Stanford survey about immigration shows that race isn’t a major factor in resistance to immigration. Rather, Japanese language ability is. In this chart, you can see how many more respondents chose to admit a hypothetical immigration applicant based on their ability to speak fluently.

Now, this might seem like a no-brainer. Of course, you want to admit people who can communicate with you. But “fluent” is doing a lot of lifting here that might not be obvious in English.

Japanese is classified as a “high-context” culture, meaning that a large amount of cultural knowledge is required to speak fluently. (Other high-context cultures include China, Korea, and many Arab countries.) There’s a lot of implicit communication, meaning context is often implied rather than expressed directly. Meanwhile, Americans, Germans, and Scandinavians (among others) are framed as “low-context,” meaning conversations tend to be explicit, with context usually spelled out.

Anyone who’s studied Japanese will know what I mean. We often leave pronouns and even subjects out, in casual speech. You’re expected to kuuki wo yomu – “read the air” and intuit meaning. So when Japanese say they want immigrants to master Japanese, they’re talking less about the linguistics of speaking than they are context – “the air,” in other words.

In a recent survey, 62% of Japanese reported that they wanted immigrants to not only follow the rules, but also “etiquette and customs.” Some interpret this as draconian or authoritarian, but I don’t think so. If you correlate it with that Stanford survey, you can see that once Japanese fluency is achieved, locals ranked people of a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds as acceptable (the dot at far right in each graph.)

Of course, not everyone in Japan agrees with this thinking. There are those who have a vested interest in keeping the definition of Japanese as strict as possible, who use foreigners as scapegoats for society’s failings, who wish to keep the number of outsiders who immigrate here as low as possible. The far-right party that rode an anti-immigrant platform to a surprising number of seats in parliament in the 2025 elections is one example. But I believe the winds are against people who think in this way. The demographics are against them. The technologies that let us cross borders physically, and share our ideas across them virtually, are against them. And most of all, I think our cultural traditions are against them. When our cosmology, so to speak, is so inclusive, it’s hard to square why our society should not be. Anyone who trumpets conservative values in Japan is eventually going to run up against that conundrum.

As a Japanese, it isn’t my place to say who is or isn’t an American. But I can say what I personally envision for my country’s identity going forward. I see it in little moments all over the city today. Non-Japanese employees greeting customers in polite Japanese. Foreign folks showing respect at temples and shrines. The caucasian man and his daughter I saw commuting to kindergarten on a mama-chari bike, her tiny pastel backpack slung incongruously over his big shoulders. In other words, the stuff of everyday life. To me Japanese isn’t what you look like; it’s how you act. In other words, it’s how you read the air.

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2026-06-19 14:35:04

About three years ago, someone asked me why, with my physics undergrad background and a PhD in economics, I had decided to become a professional blogger. I told him that blogging seemed like the highest-leverage thing I could do, in terms of actually having an impact on the world.

I didn’t mean that bloggers literally rule the world, of course — this isn’t Ender’s Game. Nor do I have any illusions that I’ll be able to have as much influence as a top politician like Donald Trump, a top entrepreneur like Elon Musk, and so on. But in terms of what I could personally accomplish, it seemed like a no-brainer — being an opinion writer has probably allowed me to change the world much more than being an academic or an engineer or a financier or a consultant would have.

Why? Because blogging has allowed me to inject ideas into the discourse with unparalleled speed, breadth, and access. A researcher goes deep into a few topics; a blogger can quickly hit the main points of many topics. This enables speed; academics might take months to write something useful about a breaking event like the Iran War or Trump’s tariffs, while I can have something out in hours. It also enables me to comment on a wide variety of topics, because people expect me to be an analyst rather than a subject-matter expert. And speed and breadth in turn allow me to talk to a wide variety of important and interesting people — top academics, billionaire company founders, presidential advisors.

Injecting ideas into the discourse is incredibly powerful. John Maynard Keynes famously described the power of idea injection:

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

To describe why idea injection is so powerful would take an entire post (which I do intend to write). There are a number of reasons. First, idea injection allows you to frame the terms of the debate. Whether people think your idea is right or wrong, once you put it out there, discussion of the issue at hand turns into discussion of whether your idea is good or bad.

As Keynes notes, an early writer’s ideas can also act as a kind of training data for later thinkers; it becomes a foundation off of which politicians, bureaucrats, staffers, other writers, and even entrepreneurs and financiers build when they make their own ideas.1 Just today I saw Matt Yglesias and Jerusalem Demsas — two of my favorite pundits — riffing on my post on dating advice on their podcast.

But injecting ideas is only one part of a blogger’s influence. We’re also part of a community of intellectuals that span multiple disciplines and walks of life. On a daily basis I get to mull ideas over not just with other writers and pundits, but also with top academics, CEOs and entrepreneurs, Congressional staffers and political advisers, think-tankers, corporate researchers and engineers, and plenty of people from other countries. This leads to a much richer discussion, with a greater diversity of viewpoints, than almost anything else I can think of. And they reach a very wide set of ears. In a way, blogging is like DARPA — ad-hoc multidisciplinary teams that build the rapid prototype of an idea. OK, maybe that’s a bit pretentious, but you get the point.

Anyway, the reason I’m writing all of this is not to brag, but to complain. Over the last two years, I’ve felt like my job has become a bit less important than it used to be, for three reasons:

1. The rise of populism on all sides of the political spectrum in the U.S. means that smart ideas are simply not as likely to be implemented by the people in power.

2. The general shift to Substack and other monetizable direct-to-audience channels has made punditry less conversational.

3. The rapid proliferation of AI writing has increased the demands on readers’ attention (including my own).

This doesn’t mean I think punditry is dead or unimportant — despite the title of this post, I do think that what I write still matters — but it does mean I’m now spending some time thinking about how to regain some of the impact I felt I had a couple of years ago.

Populism means being intellectual is a liability

“Thus when the irreverent intellectual has done his work…The stage is now set for the fanatics.” — Eric Hoffer

Ten years ago, it was already apparent that wonkish policy types were to have a much diminished role under Donald Trump. Trump himself is not the type of person who’s inclined to listen to egghead intellectuals — he’ll always trust his own instincts, which were usually developed watching CNN in the early 1990s. In his first term, though, he could sometimes be prevailed upon to listen to reason when a crisis struck — Operation Warp Speed and the CARES Act were done under his auspices, because he stepped back and allowed smarter folks to take over.

And in Trump’s first term, it still felt like there were lots of relevant ideas for econ types to debate — trade policy, place-based economic policies, new socialist ideas from the Bernie camp, and so on. It felt like a time of great political ferment and upheaval — even if Trump himself wasn’t listening to economists, someone would be soon.

In Trump’s second administration, though, that’s all gone. Whether it was Covid, Trump’s advancing age, or his attempted overthrow of the 2020 election that made Trump totally lose faith in everyone but himself, the big man now seems inclined to listen only to the voices in his own head.

Take tariffs, for instance. Essentially no one thought — or thinks now — that his tariffs were a good idea. Oren Cass, one of the last few tariff defenders, has been reduced to speaking in snarky generalities about how “econ isn’t a science”, because on some level he knows that the way Trump went about imposing tariffs is intellectually indefensible.

There was Peter Navarro, of course, at least until he got sidelined. But Trump didn’t get the tariff idea from Navarro. He thought of it all himself, and then looked around for someone — anyone! — who would be willing to stand in front of a podium and endorse the policy, and Navarro was just the guy he found. Reading Peter Navarro’s books, or trying to start a dialogue with Navarro, would have been useless, because Navarro’s ideas — such as they are — weren’t actually driving anything. It was all just a cult of personality.

The rest of Trump’s administration is the same way. The “MAHA” antivax insanity, the research funding cuts, the doomed war in Iran, the reckless spending — it’s all just ad-hoc stuff that Trump did, either on a whim, or because the last guy he talked with told him it would be a good idea, or because he’s in damage control mode after a drop in the S&P. There’s no intellectual movement here, just a cult of personality. There’s no one to argue with, because nothing that’s happening is based on an argument in the first place.

This state of affairs will eventually end, of course. Whoever succeeds Trump won’t have his cult of personality, and will have to rely on ideologies and ideas that will be ripe for debate. And if a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028, ideas will be back on the table, as they were during the Biden administration.

But even on the left, the trend is away from open intellectual debate. Zohran Mamdani and the other socialist candidates who are winning primary races in blue cities are interested in ideas, but only from people within their own clique. Leftism in America is fundamentally a factional movement disguised as an ideological one; bloggers who aren’t on the team will simply be ignored, except for the occasional denunciation.

This is just populism. Populism isn’t really about doing stuff that’s popular; it’s about putting factional and tribal conflict above the national interest or the general public good. The goal is always to “own” the other side, and economic and social outcomes become subordinate to that goal.

Intellectualism thrives in times of relative social peace. This isn’t one of those. Hopefully, the tide of populism is receding in America, but the experiences of other countries suggest that these times of factional struggle can go on for a very long time.

Monetization means intellectuals are siloed

“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.” — Ferenc Molnár

Substack has done a whole lot of good, both for me personally and (more importantly) for the world. In a time when most of the internet has been taken over by malignant opportunists and sensationalist attention-seekers, Substack stands as a lone island where reasoned, intelligent, earnest debate is still possible. It has also allowed many writers to escape from publications that stifle their voice, impede their development, and don’t pay them their due. In many ways, Substack has resurrected the old blogosphere from the early 2010s.

However, this resurrection has come at a price. Substack’s killer feature — email distribution — allows writers to get much larger and more loyal audiences, and to make a lot more money by charging those audiences for subscriptions. But this creates a financial incentive for writers to spend more time serving their customers and less time talking to each other.

In 2011, I was blogging part-time, because it was fun — the attention that mattered was when Brad DeLong or Paul Krugman or Tyler Cowen was interested in something I had to say. It was a little “republic of letters”. Now I’m blogging full-time, and having a conversation with Brad or Paul or Tyler is still just as fun and stimulating, but it’s a distraction from my job of creating content for my paying audience. There are still interesting intellectual debates and exchanges in the blogosphere, but they are no longer the main thing writers are rewarded for.

Turning intellectuals into content creators tends to put them in siloes. And Substack is far from the strongest in terms of silo-ing. Most of the internet is being taken over by vertical-scrolling short-form video, which is not exactly good for conversation and exchange. I could go start a YouTube channel, but it would just be me talking directly to my fans — I’d basically be a TV talk show host. I might still do this, because it’s a high-leverage way to influence the world, but it’s not as intellectually rich or rewarding as being part of a round-table conversation.

Nor are interesting new ideas as likely to emerge from one-way siloed content creation. Ideas emerge not from singular minds in isolation, but from dialogue — the cross-pollination that the blogosphere and other intellectual communities create isn’t just fun, it’s productive. Writing for you, my readers, is not boring, but you’d get better content from me — and from all your other favorite writers — if we talked to each other more.

I do think that platform companies could consciously try to recreate intellectual dialogue by tweaking the features of their platforms. Substack has tried to do this with the Substack Live feature, with modest success. But a more powerful tool would be to allow Substackers to easily and automatically see when another Substacker links to their blog. This feature existed on Blogger in 2006 — whenever another website linked to you, you’d see how many pageviews it drove to your blog. If Substack implemented this feature, it would get a lot of writers talking to each other more often.

AI is stretching our attention to the breaking point

“My ambitions accelerate. My afternoons do not.” — Claude

Unlike many people, I think AI writing is actually pretty good. Yes, there’s a recognizable style that the basic models use (“It’s not X, it’s Y” and lots of other little cliches). That style isn’t bad, it just gets overplayed when everyone uses it.2 Yes, AI models are still not great at boiling a complex idea down to one or two pithy sentences. But you can modify the style that AI uses. And AI can do plenty of things human writers can’t — it can seamlessly incorporate vast knowledge and novel data analysis into a piece as it writes it.

For example, I immediately suspected that this essay by Aaron Brown, Michael Mendelson, and Cliff Asness, on the confusion of the debate over “affordability”, is mostly AI-generated, and Pangram — the most reliable AI text detector — flagged it as around 50% AI. But that’s not a knock against it — the essay is great. It classifies different kinds of “affordability” problems — true poverty, precarity, downward mobility, etc. — into different buckets, gives some illustrative vignettes, and provides some useful numbers about each one. I broadly agree with the article’s conclusions, and I think it’s a valuable addition to the discourse.

A bigger problem is that in a world where a huge number of people generate effectively infinite amounts of good-quality content like this, it becomes hard for readers to decide where to allocate their attention. Instead of identifying the few most consistently useful blogs and reading those in great detail, a lot of people will respond to the explosion of content by “reading” a larger number of posts but only lightly skimming each one.

It’s not my job I’m worried about here. It’s that in that world, even if my blog continues to get tons of readers and make me plenty of money, what I do becomes less important. If people are just skimming what I write so they can move on to the next 10,000-word Claude-generated post, the fact that they’re paying me $10 a month is cold comfort — I’m not really reaching them. And even more worryingly, no one is reaching them — if they’re skimming 100 posts a day instead of reading 10 all the way through, they’re not getting really good information from anywhere.3

I don’t know how severe this problem will be, to be honest. There was always a lot more high-quality content on the internet than anyone could ever read, and a lot of people always just skimmed my posts instead of reading them closely. Maybe AI can’t make this problem worse because it was already maximally bad.

Also, I’m optimistic that AI itself will open up new channels for intellectual influence. It’s a well-known fact that if AI just consumes AI-generated output, it gets worse and worse. So AI companies try very hard to “clean” the text they use to train their models. Human writers, whose personal experience brings in new data for AIs to learn, can influence the world if their writings are used to train the next generation of AIs.

Interestingly, I think I’m already doing this, quite by accident. I don’t know how reliable the website intheweights.com is, but it shows me in the top 2% of contributors:

I suspect that on the topics I write about, I’m even more influential. Claude and GPT often cite me as a source on topics I write about4, and friends have told me that Claude recommends my blog with surprising frequency when they ask it for reading material. Maybe Tyler Cowen is right when he says we should be “writing for the AIs”.

In any case, I find that although blogging is still very fun, and I still think I’m having a positive impact, and my readership is still growing, the environment a lot more challenging than it was just two years ago. The combination of a nation ruled by closed-minded tribalists, a blogosphere obsessed with putting out monetizable content, and the rampant proliferation of high-quality AI output is forcing me to rethink what I do. I want to keep injecting ideas into the discourse and participating in a vibrant and relevant intellectual community, but what it takes to do that might look a little different going forward.

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