2025-09-12 23:35:23
The Atlantic’s George Packer wrote: “Charlie Kirk’s murder is a tragedy for his family and a disaster for the country. In an atmosphere of national paranoia and hatred, each act of political violence makes the next one more likely.” But that’s not what this post is about. The murder is another example of our broken culture. It’s a stain on our accomplishments. Many of America’s finest achievements took place overseas and have resulted in alliances that have scaled our power. We have wisely nurtured, and invested in, these alliances. Until recently.
The most powerful image of 2024 was Trump defiantly pumping his fist after an assassin’s bullet grazed his ear. Trump also had a hand in this year’s most powerful image — a photo of Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrating their new partnership. The caption for that photo should read “Axis of Own Goal,” as Trump’s geopolitical sclerosis and bullying have isolated America from its allies and united its adversaries.
Presidents of both parties have long understood that our strength doesn’t flow from our economic output, military prowess, or cultural exports, but the capacity to leverage those assets in service of coalitions that are greater than the sum of their parts. That’s not idealism, but pragmatism. The U.S. accounts for 4% of the world’s population and 26% of global GDP. By definition, going it alone would mean taking on 96% of humanity and 74% of Earth’s economic output. As Winston Churchill said, “There’s only one thing worse than fighting a war with allies, and that’s fighting a war without them.”
Less than a year into Trump’s second term, we’ve lost many friends and much influence. With the president praising authoritarians and casting doubt on our mutual defense commitments, our allies can no longer count on us. Demolishing USAID didn’t save much money — at 0.3% of the federal budget, the agency created substantial soft power on the cheap — but it did tell the world’s developing nations to look elsewhere for leadership. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs aren’t the crude tools of protectionism, but cudgels deployed in service of his id. (See: The 50% levy on Brazil for bringing criminal charges against former president Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a coup.) Since World War II, America has provided global security and economic stability, while serving as an (imperfect) vehicle to spread democracy and the rule of law. Under Trump, we’re an amoral chaos agent. Alienating allies weakens our position relative to China.
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush coined the phrase Axis of Evil. Good branding, sub-scale threat. In 2002, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea had a combined GDP of $162 billion, compared to U.S. GDP of $11 trillion. China, Russia, and (now) India are a different story. Combined, the three nations account for 38% of the world’s population and 34% of global GDP. And unlike the Axis of Evil, the Axis of Own Goal isn’t a rhetorical construct, but a product of Trump’s ineptitude. As the Economist put it, “To see the cost of Trump’s bullying, tally the world leaders flocking to China.”
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit was Modi’s first trip to China in seven years. The meeting came just days after Trump’s new tariffs on India took effect, hiking duties on some exports to 50% in retaliation for India’s continued purchases of Russian oil. The tariff increase only added fuel to a fire Trump set in May, when he claimed credit for ending India’s long-running feud with Pakistan. According to Modi, India and Pakistan agreed to a ceasefire on their own, ending a four-day border clash in May. According to Trump and Pakistan, Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
If the plan was to keep India in place as a bulwark against Chinese expansion and drive it away from Russia, the president’s moves backfired spectacularly. India continues buying Russian oil, while stabilizing its relationship with China. At the SCO summit, Xi said China and India should be friends, enable each other’s success, and choose cooperation. Modi highlighted “the positive momentum” in bilateral ties, characterizing the nations’ relationship as “partners rather than rivals.” That’s a remarkable turnaround for two countries that fought a border war in 1962 and have had continued clashes ever since, with the most recent skirmish occurring in 2022. Seeing the photo of Putin, Modi, and Xi, Trump posted, “Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!”
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was supposed to be quick and relatively bloodless. Three years on, it’s a stalemate. Russia has suffered more than 1 million casualties. That would be a disaster for any other country, but Russia’s willingness to sacrifice the lives of soldiers is a competence. In World War II, the Soviet Union lost 10 million soldiers and another 24 million civilians; the U.S. lost roughly 400,000 soldiers and dropped two atomic bombs to avoid further casualties.
Russia’s chief asset is energy. As John McCain once said, “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.” By some estimates, revenue from oil and gas exports has accounted for 30% to 50% of Russia’s budget over the past decade. Sanctioning Russian energy exports has helped Ukraine, but only to a point. The reason? Russia is adding energy clients faster than we can marshal our erstwhile allies in an embargo. Ukraine can’t kill its way to victory, but by shifting its strategy to target Russia’s energy production it may ultimately inflict a price too high for Russia to stomach. We can and should help Ukraine pursue that strategy. Pushing India closer to Russia and China has the opposite effect.
Alice Han argued on our newest Prof G podcast, China Decode, that Trump missed a narrow window to do a “reverse Nixon.” In 1972, Richard Nixon went to China to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow. The gambit worked in geopolitical terms, but it also set the stage for an economic relationship that benefited U.S. corporations and consumers and helped China to lift 600 million people out of poverty between 1981 and 2004. Today, however, China and Russia are united by trade and their opposition to American hegemony, with Beijing as Moscow’s senior partner in a relationship the Chinese foreign minister described as “better than allies.”
Xi has cultivated his relationship with Putin, calling the Russian leader his “best friend.” Last week, with Putin by his side, Xi presided over a military parade that cast China as the allied savior in World War II. In response, Trump posted, “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.” U.S. presidents with FOMO is a bad look.
One of America’s greatest assets is its geography. Two oceans and a pair of friendly neighbors have saved the hundreds of billions another country might have needed to militarize borders and coastlines. China has land borders with 14 nations and maritime borders with an additional 11. In 1969, China and Russia fought a war over border disputes that dated back to the 18th century. Last year, bilateral trade between them reached an all-time high of $245 billion — double what it was in 2020.
China needs Russian energy to expand its economy, but friendly borders are the geopolitical priority. As journalist James Kynge argued on China Decode, the 1,700 miles of the Amur River that delineate the border between Russia and China tell the story in microcosm. Ten years ago, there weren’t any bridges spanning the Amur and commerce was nil. Today there are three bridges and business is booming on both sides of the river. “China’s biggest strategic priority is that, if it has to fight a war with Taiwan on its southern border, it can do so without worrying about its northern border with Russia becoming unstable.”
Zooming out, China has expanded the SCO and invested $1 trillion in “Belt and Road” infrastructure projects in more than 150 countries since 2013. The outreach has paid dividends. In 2000, U.S. trade totaled $2 trillion — 4x China’s total. Since then, U.S. trade has grown 167%; China, now the dominant trade partner for most of the world, has seen its total rise by 1,200% from 2000 to 2024. While China has comparable hegemonic firepower to the U.S. — a dominant military, capital, advanced technology, and cultural influence — we can’t plan beyond the next Congressional budget shutdown. China’s key asset is its ability to play the long game to achieve stability on its borders while spreading influence globally.
Last year, India became the top source of international pupils at U.S. universities, sending 331,602 students — a 23% increase from the previous year and more than any other country, including China. Up until a few months ago, India was one of a handful of countries globally where U.S. favorability remained positive, according to Pew, and one of only five nations where a majority of respondents had confidence in President Trump. Last week a former MMA fighter who showed up at an ICE career expo summed up our deteriorating relationship with India when he told the Washington Post, “I keep seeing these memes where Indians are bragging about taking our tech jobs. So I said, ‘Oh yeah? Well I’m going to work with these guys that are going to arrest you, slam your face on the pavement, and send you home.’”
We need India. Notwithstanding Trump’s folly, India has been a strategic check on Chinese expansion. We share democratic values, even if both nations are backsliding at the moment. English is widely spoken among India’s government officials, business leaders, and knowledge workers, with up to one-third of the population able to understand the language to some degree. India’s economy is growing at 6.4% — faster than any other major economy. Half of India’s population of 1.4 billion people is under the age of 29. Finally, India provides a pipeline of human capital that our universities and corporations can’t do without. Simply put, India’s best asset is its future: It looks like China in 2004, minus the totalitarian baggage. That’s a partner you want to cultivate.
Does India need us? Maybe not. Since its founding in 1947, India has been wary of alliances, preferring “alignment” as a means of navigating geopolitics. India aligned with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But in the 1970s, the U.S. granted India special trade status, allowing its goods to enter American markets duty-free. More recently, Modi has renewed the idea of Indian self-reliance, saying, “When we grow and excel, the world will acknowledge our worth.” He also set a goal of increasing India’s GDP to $10 trillion over the next 12 years — a target that would give India developed nation status. That may be overly ambitious at current growth rates, but according to the World Bank, it’s achievable, if Modi can push through an economic reform agenda.
I often say the best way to predict the future is to make it. Right now, America isn’t making the future — it’s destroying the good will, influence, and leadership it’s been building since the end of World War II. As a former Chinese diplomat explained, “The U.S. under Trump is launching revolution after revolution. The Chinese know about revolutions, and we know that you better know what the consequences will be if you launch a revolution. I don’t think Trump is fully aware of the consequences of all these tremendous forces he’s unleashing around the world.” The American century isn’t ending with a bang, but with tweets and a trade war. We built an empire in 80 years and are torching it in 8. Our edge was never the missile; it was the handshake. Restore alliances, or hand the 21st century to those who keep theirs.
Life is so rich,
P.S. Don’t just listen to me rage, watch me. Raging Moderates now has a dedicated YouTube channel. Subscribe here.
The post Own Goal appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
2025-09-06 00:38:54
Loneliness is lucrative. Leonid Radvinsky, the secretive owner of OnlyFans, received a $700 million windfall last year, while the platform’s top tier of content creators — mostly women — earn millions annually. With $7.2 billion in annual gross revenue and just 46 employees, OnlyFans may be one of the most profitable companies on the planet. The site is viewed as a porn-centric hub where men pay women for sexual content. The company claims it’s giving creators and their 378 million fans (greater than the population of the U.S.) something more: an opportunity to forge “authentic connections.”
Some crazy stats:
We’ve created a platform where 95.8% of men pay nothing but still consume content, while a tiny fraction of “whales” subsidize an entire economy built on loneliness. It’s digital feudalism with OnlyFans as the landlord collecting rent on human connection.
The pitch resonates with millions of men retreating from the high-risk but high-reward activity of forming real-world relationships. It also appeals to women. OnlyFans has paid more than $20 billion to creators since 2016. Women are flocking to the site, with an estimated one million-plus in the U.S. alone. The success of OnlyFans is making some people rich. However, it’s also a symptom of a loneliness epidemic with devastating second-order effects.
Humans are hard-wired to connect. Interacting with families and friends is as essential as food, water, and shelter. Through the 1970s, Americans seemed adept at forming social groups: political associations, labor unions, local memberships. Those bonds have faded. Weekly religious service attendance has fallen to 30% from 42% two decades ago. Marriage rates have plunged. “Third places” — public gathering spots outside home and work — are disappearing.
The driving factor is technology. Addicted to YouTube and TikTok, nearly half of American teens report being online almost constantly. Jonathan Haidt, my NYU colleague, estimates kids’ time with friends has been cut in half. We’ve literally taken childhood and poured it into a screen.
This isn’t just an epidemic. It’s a pandemic.
Loneliness affects nearly one in six people globally, contributing to 100 deaths an hour. The health impact is massive — loneliness is about as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes daily. Social isolation reduces productivity, boosts job turnover, and drives up healthcare costs. The economic toll in the U.S. exceeds $400 billion annually.
Men are especially vulnerable. The most unstable, violent societies have one thing in common: a plethora of lonely young men. We are producing millions of them.
In Japan, 1.5 million people are hikikomori — modern-day recluses who withdraw for more than six months. In Britain, the loneliness crisis costs employers more than $3 billion annually. In Spain, the economic impact equals 1.2% of GDP. Millions of Chinese women seeking companionship are downloading AI boyfriends.
We’re in the midst of a “sex recession,” with rates at record lows. Participation in clubs is waning. Nearly three out of four restaurant orders in the U.S. aren’t eaten in the restaurant. As Esther Perel told me on the Prof G Pod, we’re in an age of artificial intimacy, where “we’re planning our extinction.” At current fertility rates in South Korea, you need to pass 20 people to find one who will have grandchildren.
In Britain, pubs are closing at a rate of one per day — faster than Nazi bombs destroyed them during WWII. Today’s owners blame taxes and costs, but young people increasingly choose online gaming, porn, drugs, Netflix, and OnlyFans over nightlife. I’ve gotten shit for suggesting young people should drink more. So be it. I believe the risks of alcohol to a 25-year-old liver are dwarfed by those of social isolation. When I go out to bars/clubs, I don’t see drunkenness … but togetherness.
My household had little money, but my mom made exceptions. She bought me Izod shirts, Sperry Top-Siders, and Vuarnets because she’d heard they were what cool kids wore, and she wanted me to have social capital. My college girlfriend threatened to stop having sex with me if I didn’t quit smoking weed. My first boss consistently pulled me into conference rooms for brutal feedback. These connections keep us on track and challenge our worldviews. Without them, citizens become vulnerable to radical ideas. A German study linked loneliness to authoritarian political views and conspiracy theories. As Hannah Arendt wrote, isolation and loneliness are preconditions for tyranny. A preview of what’s to come is to witness the behavior of orcas when they are put in isolation tanks. Simply put, they go crazy.
Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts is pushing investment in community infrastructure: centers, pools, green spaces, pedestrian malls. You cannot overfund these projects. Taxpayer-funded Westwood Park gave me a place to play sports and meet kids when I hit a growth spurt and was cut from my high school baseball team.
The best solution? Mandatory national service after high school, uniting young people from different backgrounds in service to something bigger than themselves.
There are glimmers of hope. The movement to ban smartphones in schools is gaining momentum. Independent bookstores are staging a comeback.
But as women flock to OnlyFans, many will ditch education and careers for webcams. There’s likely a one in three chance that an attractive young woman without a college degree outside a major city is on OnlyFans. Meanwhile, men choose frictionless digital connections over challenging but rewarding real ones, forgoing opportunities to find mates, friends, mentors, and business partners. As millennials and Gen Z tire of dating apps, we’re transitioning from a Tinder economy to an OnlyFans economy. The next frontier: AI startups like OhChat, building lifelike digital doubles for “spicy fantasies.”
I think about my sons — 15 and 18 — and the world we’re handing them. A world where human connection has been commoditized, where intimacy is artificial, where young people retreat into digital caves instead of stepping into the messy, and rewarding, complexity of real relationships. Being human is not a solo sport.
The loneliness epidemic isn’t just killing people at 100 deaths per hour. It’s killing our capacity for joy, for surprise, for the random encounters that make life worth living. Every swipe right, every OnlyFans subscription, every AI boyfriend is another step away from the fundamental truth: We not only need each other to survive, but to really live.
We can keep feeding, and ignoring, the machine that profits from our isolation, or we can remember what it means to be gloriously, beautifully human — together. The most subversive act in the 21st century may not be starting a unicorn … but showing up, approaching strangers, asking someone out, grasping for their hand. It’s not OnlyFans that will save us. It’s only us.
Life is so rich,
P.S. Prof G Markets recently unpacked the latest annual report from OnlyFans and the dark side of its growth. Listen here on Apple or Spotify, or watch it here on YouTube.
The post Lonely Fans appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
2025-08-29 21:13:06
Near the end of the pandemic, American workers had enough leverage to mount nearly 400 strikes, marking the greatest number of labor actions in 10 years. A former Department of Labor official and member of the National Labor Relations Board described 2023 — the year that gave us “hot labor summer” — as the “most active period” for labor she’d seen during her 30-year career. Fast-forward a few years and labor’s leverage is (mostly) declining due to economic uncertainty. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has eliminated some jobs at the margins and raised existential questions about the meaning and purpose of work. My views on how we should define and compensate labor, however, haven’t changed. Put simply, we overpay with lip service, underpay in real dollars, and ignore unpaid labor, i.e., caregivers. As I’ve written before, we can do better.
This post was originally published September 9, 2022. Several of the charts have been updated to reflect recent data.
I’ve been thinking about labor and the holiday meant to celebrate our nation’s workers. My observation: “Labor” Day is a ruse, just as “hero” is a moniker typically attached to someone we’ve decided to underpay — teachers, frontline workers, etc. A more honest name for a holiday describing who/what we value would be “Capital” Day.
We don’t honor workers, we throw loaves of bread at them and give them circuses to distract them from their servitude to capital, which captures more of the spoils each year. Over the past five decades, U.S. GDP growth has outpaced wage growth by 63% — in years prior, GDP and wages expanded at the same rate. In 1970 the American middle class received 62% of the country’s aggregate income; today it’s 42%. The top 1% now owns 32% of our nation’s wealth, and the bottom 50% owns 3%. America has never been so disdainful of its workers.
There was a time when 30 years of hard work got you the American Dream: homeownership, college-educated children, retirement, greater economic security than your parents. No longer. Today economic security is defined by the assets you already possess. We impose harsher taxes on income gains (i.e., the fruits of labor) than on capital gains, and reward high-net-worth individuals with tax loopholes and bailouts. America is no longer the best place to get rich, but to stay rich.
Anyway … this week I’ve been thinking about labor. What it means, who performs it, and how the holiday can register real meaning again.
Unions are making positive headlines recently. Some Starbucks workers organized in December 2021. Amazon workers followed in April. So far this year, unions have won 641 elections (the most in nearly two decades) with a 77% win rate (the highest percentage on record). Almost 80,000 American workers have gone on strike in 2022 — three times as many as in the same period last year. Meanwhile, U.S. approval of labor unions is at its highest level since 1965. By the looks of it, unions are making a comeback.
People will say these wins for unions are wins for workers. Maybe. However, in my view, this is a dead cat bounce. Over the past several decades, unions have proven they don’t work.
As Rani Molla wrote, forming a union is the easy part. The hard part is negotiating a contract with the employer. Companies deploy various methods to ensure there is almost never an agreement with the union — usually just stalling. After Amazon’s Staten Island workers voted to organize, Amazon buried them in paperwork. Starbucks did the same. Almost a third of unions don’t reach an agreement within three years. Proving to the National Labor Relations Board (the agency that enforces labor law) that a company is unnecessarily stalling is difficult. And even if you do, per Rani Molla … “there’s not much it can do.” So the union gets tired and discouraged, the employees inevitably turn over, the effort bleeds out, and the company marches on sans union.
In many ways, the union is the corporation’s perfect enemy: disorganized, inexperienced, underfunded, and understaffed. “I want to work for the United Auto Workers union,” said no ambitious college graduate ever. It’s not a coincidence that, despite the recent uptick in union formation, union membership is in freefall.
The need for labor representation remains, however. The balance of power between capital and labor structurally favors capital. Capital has, well, the capital — to hire lobbyists and public relations teams, lawyers and strikebreakers, to outwait workers who need their paychecks to put food on the table. You don’t need to be a labor economist to see this, just review the past 50 years in America. And it’s likely to get worse: Automation is projected to put nearly 40% of American jobs at “high risk” by the early 2030s. We already let offshoring decimate a generation of American labor, we have a moral and economic obligation to better manage this greater transition. But if not labor unions as we know them, who?
There should be one union: the federal government. Unlike small, fragmented groups of workers, this is a force to be reckoned with — and companies must comply with its demands. It should demand more. Dignity in work, for starters. The right to not be sexually harassed or discriminated against is a good thing, but it’s a floor. In America, the wealthiest nation in the world whose corporations are registering the greatest profits in history, you can still work full time and fall below the poverty line. We must raise the minimum wage dramatically. If the federal minimum wage had risen at only the same pace as U.S. productivity since 1960, it would be three times what it is today. A $20-plus federally mandated minimum wage would send some consumer stocks down, and make many small businesses unviable. It would also be worth it.
We often talk about income inequality, the top 1% vs. the 99%, and we should. But there’s another cohort that’s rarely discussed, whose workers on an effort-adjusted basis may be the biggest losers re changes to the tax code: the 90th–99th percent.
Lawyers, doctors, accountants. Smart, ambitious, hardworking, college-educated people who’ve played by the rules and done everything right. While the media often buckets them in with the top 1%, many are actually struggling — but they’re too embarrassed to complain about it.
A lawyer living in San Francisco making $350,000 a year likely pays 49% of their income in federal and state taxes. Most “workhorses” need to live in a high-cost urban area (the average home in San Francisco costs $1.5 million), and things are likely tight. This is not a sob story — many Americans would kill for these problems. However, we’re being heavy-handed with the wrong people, as many could build real wealth and make the jump to light speed if we returned to a progressive tax system that charged the same rates on the top 1%. Asymmetric upside is reserved for the ultra-wealthy — accounting for capital gains tax, they pay lower tax rates than the 90th–99th percent. We have opted for a regressive tax system.
When we discuss labor, we almost exclusively talk about paid labor, the work we do for money. But there is an enormous, critical swath of labor this view overlooks, and it’s important work: caring for one another. Raising our kids, administering to the sick, and caring for the aging.
A good measure of a society is how well it provides for its weakest members. It’s also a good predictor of a society’s future. A poor system for raising children is a recipe for future failure. What’s our system? We turn to women. Among solo-parent households, 82% are headed by single mothers. When it comes to the elderly, 61% of caregivers are women, and they are much more likely to be the primary caregiver.
Besides the inequity, our assumption that Mom will take care of things is brittle. Covid illuminated how brittle. Students fell four months behind in school, and reading and math scores sank by the sharpest margin in three decades. The gender gap in employment and labor participation increased, and a quarter of mothers said they had to either stop working or work less.
In some distant past, when people lived in extended family units, with three or four generations under one roof and a dense network of siblings and cousins ready to pitch in, an “informal” system of caregiving — i.e., no system at all — might have been viable (though it was rarely fair between genders). But that’s not how our society works today, and more important, that’s not how we want it to work. Mobility and migration are the unlocks that have powered a century of innovation, but they mean we need to support people as they care for those who need support.
This is the role of government. It is neither feasible nor fair to expect employers (the paying kind) to abandon their competitive advantage and unilaterally support a societal good. Yet our existing protections for caregivers are deficient. The U.S. is one of only six countries that don’t offer paid family leave. The others? Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga. This is bad company. Every other developed nation provides substantial paid family leave, with the average OECD country offering more than 17 weeks.
The Biden administration tried to advance another much-needed policy to support family care work, the child tax credit. This is something I’ve long advocated for, inspired by Senator Michael Bennet. When we instituted this program on a temporary basis during the pandemic, we kept 3.7 million kids out of poverty and cut hunger by 25%. This was a massive win: Child poverty is a scourge, and its costs on society compound over a lifetime. But the Democrats were forced to strip a provision extending the credit from the Inflation Reduction Act, after Joe Manchin (and, to be fair, the entire GOP caucus) refused to go along. Maybe next year.
The rise of remote work and new flexibilities in employment will allow us to do more. I believe we need to explore an additional employment protection that gives people who care for others rights in flexible work arrangements. If working from home enables a single parent to stay in the workforce, that’s a win for society. Temporary part-time status and flexible schedules can match our needs to our resources. We should incentivize companies to make this happen and level the playing field so they’re not at a competitive disadvantage when they do so.
As always, the criticism of taxpayer support for care work is the cost. However, we spent $800 billion bailing out corporations with PPP loans while offering $1 trillion in tax breaks per year in the form of loopholes. No government agency can provide a good level of care, more efficiently, than a loved one. We need to arm citizens with the resources to care for loved ones.
A substantial increase in the minimum wage, restoration of a progressive tax system, and greater flexibility for caregivers starting with paid family leave. There’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed with what’s right with America. And Americans like to work. All of these efforts would come at a cost, and it’s likely the stock market would go down. But putting more money in the hands of middle-class Americans has one key advantage: They spend it.
Loneliness, stressed young families, a lack of connection, class warfare, the draining of meaning. All of these things plague America. There is no silver bullet. But there is something we can do to help address all of them. We can work.
Life is so rich,
P.S. On Prof G Conversations, I spoke with Esther Perel, psychotherapist and bestselling author, about the state of modern relationships and why friendship and intimacy are in decline. Listen here or watch here.
The post Labor Day appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
2025-08-22 23:29:35
Jessica Tarlov, my Raging Moderates co-host, has talked with a string of Democratic leaders since we launched the podcast about a year ago. Most agree that the party must do a better job of demonstrating what it stands for, not just what it’s against. However, politicians (and the media) devote most of their energy to opposing Trump, responding with outrage to the falsehoods, attacks on the rule of law, and damaging policy initiatives flowing from the White House.
Resistance is vital. But the party must also make a bolder and more specific case for how it plans to tackle concerns over the cost of living, immigration, jobs, AI, healthcare, and a host of other issues. This week, I’ve asked Jessica, a Democratic strategist and panelist on Fox’s The Five, to reflect on what she’s learned over the past 12 months and explore how the party can rebuild trust among disenchanted voters.
by Jessica Tarlov
When almost two-thirds of voters say they don’t like you, the highest level of disapproval in more than three decades, your party is in serious trouble.
This is the position Democrats are in a year after convincing themselves that Kamala Harris was the answer. It’s also been almost a year since Scott and I started Raging Moderates, our twice-weekly podcast and ode to centrism. We’ve spent hours talking to politicians and journalists about the state of the country and the Democratic Party, which most admit is a long way from being campaign-ready.
For now, that might be a good thing. When they’re not campaigning, these Democrats are advocating for smart policy. Their ideas aren’t just reversals of President Trump’s agenda; they are innovative ways to help people buy a home, improve classrooms, and even fix the border. Speaking to politicians on both sides of the aisle about the struggles of boys and men, I was surprised by how often they were not only aware of the problem but had answers about how to solve it.
I was also impressed by how effective podcasting can be in stimulating rich conversations. I heard politicians articulate their plans more deeply and honestly than they do anywhere else. I’m not the first person from television to realize this, but when you want to learn something new, host a podcast. It’s also refreshing for some listeners to hear me speak in longer than a 45-second sound bite. Who knew I could talk for three minutes straight when given the chance?
Last week, I was joined by Hillary Clinton, who told me she would nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize — if he could end Russia’s war in Ukraine without giving away Ukrainian territory. A funny moment, and a great social media clip. As the conversation continued, Trump faded into the background. She told me we have to “double down” on helping young men and women succeed in the AI era, saying young men in particular need support, not just in making a good living but in getting the “respect they deserve.”
She is optimistic about the future of the country and her party. Clinton said the Democrats need to present an alternative vision. Nobody knows what that will be, but right now, who cares? Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, just give me some compelling, concrete ideas. Here are five I’ve heard.
Trump won last year’s election on the issue of affordability, which the media defined as the price of eggs and milk. But before you put food on the table, there has to be a table.
America is in a housing crisis. Nearly a third of American households are “cost-burdened,” spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Half of all renters are in that position. And while more Americans own than rent, there are signs that dynamic could change as Gen Z enters adulthood.
The solution is to build more affordable housing, as all three leading candidates in New York City’s mayoral race will tell you. But many developers aren’t interested, because there is a huge gap between the cost of construction and the rents people can pay. Government intervention can fill it, but only if towns and cities have the resources.
Rep. Greg Landsman, a Democrat from Ohio, spoke with me about our broken economy in May. One of his top pledges: Fund a bank that provides zero-interest loans and forgivable grants to local communities. The loans would pay for housing and infrastructure and, coupled with permitting and zoning reform, allow towns to build “more quickly and in more places.”
It’s an ambitious plan. In Landsman’s own words, it would be the “largest federal investment in housing and community development in U.S. history.” But big problems require big solutions.
Teens who attended high school throughout the pandemic voted for the first time in a presidential election last year. Many lurched to the right. Harris’s vote share among voters aged 18 to 29 dropped 10 points nationwide compared to Biden four years before, according to the Fox News Voter Analysis. The decline was five points steeper in California, which had the lowest in-person schooling of any state.
Democrats can’t be surprised.
Remote learning during the pandemic drove academic and mental health declines. Research shows that kids in school districts that went mostly remote or hybrid in 2020-21 fell behind by more than half a year. Students who mostly attended school in person suffered from learning losses as well, but by only four months.
Many of those students are still in school, so there is time for them to catch up, and research consistently shows that one-on-one support is a great way to do it. Although providing more tutoring is a popular idea — teachers, parents, and unions love it — the problem is scale. Not only is there not enough money to hire tutors for millions of kids, but there also aren’t enough tutors in the first place.
Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss told me that live online tutoring is one of the keys to confronting the challenge, with artificial intelligence potentially complementing the role humans play. Implementing that plan might cause some tension with unions, but it would address the problem of scale. The technology, which is being piloted in programs across the U.S., is only going to advance. Democrats can help accelerate the progress.
Immigration, another area where Democrats missed the mark during the Biden presidency, ranked as the second most important issue in the last election, behind only the economy. Three in 10 voters called it the single biggest factor in their decision. Of those voters, 81% voted for Trump, compared with just 18% for Harris.
On Election Day, however, voters had mixed feelings about Trump’s agenda. While two-thirds favored reducing the number of immigrants allowed to seek asylum when they arrive at the border, only 44% supported deporting undocumented immigrants already living in the country.
Trump has, to his credit, overseen a decline in illegal crossings. But he’s also unleashed chaos and cruelty, from reviving family separation to hunting down immigrants at Home Depot. He pledged to deport “the worst of the worst.” Instead, his administration has detained thousands of people who have no criminal convictions.
James Carville has been blunt about the border for a while, repeatedly blaming the far left’s influence for Biden’s early failures. But when I interviewed him a few weeks ago, he also came with a blueprint for a smarter immigration policy. His solution is a points-based system that would not only expedite entry for high-performing talent, but also reestablish an orderly process for people who are already here.
As he told me: “Somebody who has been in this country for 35 years, held the same job, raised three kids, they’ve all gone to college, that person gets 10 points. Somebody is here for three months and they’ve committed three crimes, they get no points.”
Most voters like immigrants. What they don’t like is disorder. A merit-based immigration system both before and after entry would go a long way toward addressing that.
You’ve heard Scott talk about college a lot. Last year he lamented to the Wall Street Journal that “we still jam everyone through this four-year liberal arts construct.” For a lot of people, the “we” in that sentence means “Democrats.”
That’s why I was surprised and excited to hear from so many guests who wanted to help people find meaningful work, whether they have a degree or not. And in particular, boys and men who are at risk of falling further behind.
New York Rep. Ritchie Torres said work is “not only about economics, it’s about creating meaning in one’s life. It’s about giving someone the dignity of building a foundation on which to raise a family, on which to live a life of meaning and utility.” Torres — a college dropout himself — bemoaned the college-for-all culture, calling it a “profoundly corrosive” contributor to mental illness, substance abuse, and deaths of despair.
Our guests brought a handful of ideas to the table to help people find a fulfilling path. One that stood out for its simplicity and bipartisan appeal was from another New York congressman, Pat Ryan, who told me he wants to double the slots for existing national service programs, where there are currently more applicants than places.
Ryan, who served two combat tours in Iraq, said: “My life was changed by military service, and exposing me to a bunch of people I wouldn’t have otherwise met, forcing me to work together with them towards a common mission. … The greatest reward and joy in life is accomplishing something for a cause greater than yourself.”
There is a difference between bipartisan appeal and bipartisan support. Ryan said some Republicans like the idea but don’t want to put up the money. Still, he’s working with a bipartisan caucus of veterans to get it done.
Many Americans have positive views about joining the military. What happens when they return from service is often a different story. This country has a checkered history when it comes to looking after veterans. It got uglier this year: Thousands of them lost their jobs after Elon Musk slashed the federal workforce.
Veterans were particularly vulnerable to DOGE: They make up nearly 30% of the civilian federal workforce and often struggle to find work elsewhere because of culture gaps and problems translating military skills into regular jobs. They are also younger than some people assume: Nearly 3 in 10 are under the age of 50.
This is DOGE’s problem. Voters want a more efficient government. What they clearly don’t want are indiscriminate cuts that weaken important programs and harm people.
Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego wants to rehire every veteran at the VA and across the federal government. His proposal would include protections to ensure that a worker can still be fired for negligence, or if there is proof that their job is no longer needed. Enacting his bill would give dignity and stability back to veterans who deserve it and prevent the decline in mental health that goes along with long-term unemployment. The cost is negligible, especially when you compare it to Trump’s multitrillion-dollar tax cuts.
Gallego, a Marine veteran, is already seen as a potential presidential contender in 2028. More ideas like these would elevate him even higher on Democratic candidate wish lists.
I thought I knew almost everything about the Democrats. Over the past year, I’ve gained an even deeper understanding, hearing an array of practical solutions that could make a profound difference in the lives of millions of Americans. Blue governance has failed in some of our crown-jewel cities. But we can learn from leaders like Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, who’s working with Republicans on commonsense policies. Her message is simple: “Let’s get it done.”
Trump may be burning down institutions. But the Democrats — fueled by a younger generation of politicians keen to seize the moment and shake up the status quo — can help rebuild a better America. Among them is Mallory McMorrow, a state senator from Michigan who’s running for a U.S. Senate seat and turning 39 tomorrow. As she told me earlier this month, “the new American dream is ours to write.”
Jessica Tarlov
P.S. Hear more conversations about how the Democratic Party is seeking to rebuild and navigate the challenges ahead by following the Raging Moderates podcast. Listen here on Apple or Spotify, or watch us on YouTube.
The post Good Ideas Will Save the Country appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
2025-08-15 23:45:25
One query I get often is “What class/skill would you suggest our kids take/learn to compete in the modern economy?” A few years ago, people expected me to say STEM, or make the contrarian case for a liberal arts education. Today, the expectation is AI. But my answer remains unchanged: To be successful, master storytelling.
Communities with larger proportions of skilled storytellers experience greater levels of cooperation, and … procreation. Storytelling = efficient transmission of survival-relevant information. Among men, being skilled in storytelling increases attractiveness and perceived status to potential long-term mates. The arc of evolution bends toward good storytellers.
In the business world, the flow of capital concentrates around good stories. Entrepreneurs, aka salespeople, aka storytellers, deploy a narrative that captures imaginations and capital to pull the future forward. Valuations aren’t a function of balance sheets, but of the stories that give those balance sheets meaning and direction.
Every business I’ve ever started was based on a compelling story. Prof G Media is no different, though stories are our product. Mia Silverio, our research lead, plays a key role developing the stories I tell. This week, I asked her to write about the art and science of effective storytelling.
by Mia Silverio
I’ve been on hundreds of Zoom calls with Scott (not an exaggeration). Over the past five years, I’ve learned how he crafts powerful presentations. This is how we think about business storytelling at Prof G Media.
Scott will often stop me when we’re reviewing his decks to call for “more drama.” Infusing a narrative with drama and emotion separates an exceptional storyteller from a mediocre one.
A good storyteller is simply a good entertainer. Am I discounting the importance of the underlying content? Somewhat. But the unfortunate truth is that even if you have revelatory information to share, it’s not going to have an impact if no one’s paying attention. As writer and podcaster Derek Thompson observed, “There’s something overlapping in the Venn diagram between what is demanded of standup comics and what is demanded from public intellectuals. And that is: Explain this shit to me — make me feel something.”
Research tells us that experiences that elicit emotions are more memorable than ones that don’t. Your story doesn’t need to make your audience cry or laugh, but it should inspire thoughtfulness or surprise, promote introspection or curiosity, or evoke longing or guilt. At the very least, you need to be self-aware enough to make a deprecating joke about a dull topic.
Two ways to inject emotion into your presentations:
No. 1: Lean into provocative, contrarian takes that surprise your audience or challenge their assumptions.
The first slide of Scott’s 2024 TED talk asked, “Do we love our children?” The question begs an obvious answer — yes. But it sets up the next slides, which show irrefutable evidence that young people today have been handed a sour deal.
If we’ve elected officials who have let the American dream and the promises of capitalism die in the service of older generations’ enrichment, Scott asked, how does that behavior square with really loving our children?
Powerful stories surprise us. Harry Potter running into a brick wall and not getting head trauma is so delightfully perplexing that it prepares you for the magical new world you’re about to enter.
Scott is well known for his surprising takes: “Young people need to drink more.” “The era of the brand is over.” “Tesla is dramatically overvalued.” Etc. But provocative statements only work when they’re anchored in evidence.
If you don’t have the evidence or creative leeway with your content, you can still deliver surprises through how you present. Hide half a chart in PowerPoint and reveal it at a key moment. Drop in a video or audio clip. Bring in a guest. Move — literally. Scott has worn wigs, lip-synched onstage, and jumped up and down shirtless at SXSW. No one expects these stunts, which is why they land. Surprise gets attention and draws your audience into the story.
I never thought I’d use the words “accounting” and “viral” in the same sentence, but a professor at the University of Oklahoma changed that. Instead of droning on about balance sheets, Jonathan Kern runs around his classroom singing about depreciation and leading chants about cash flow. Viral TikTok videos show lecture halls full of engaged students. He made the most boring subject in business school unforgettable by doing the exact opposite of what everyone expects from an accounting class.
No. 2: Use engaging data.
Be selective with your data. And by “selective,” I don’t mean stingy — any persuasive story should include quantitative evidence. What I mean is, select quantitative data that has an outsized qualitative impact.
Use the “wow” test. If a data point, sentence, or slide doesn’t challenge or surprise you, cut it. Dig for the good data, don’t settle for the bland stuff.
For example, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft will together spend $364 billion on capital expenditures this year. I could leave it at that, or I could make that data dramatic (and meaningful) by telling you that for the same amount of money, you could build another International Space Station, reinvent the nuclear bomb, construct six nuclear submarines, dig the Channel Tunnel between England and France, run Japan’s military for an entire year … and still have enough left over to buy everyone in Manhattan and the Bronx an iPhone.
I believe there’s “wow factor” data in every field, no matter how boring. Consider this dull data point: The IRS processed over 266 million tax returns and other forms last year. To add drama, try this: Cumulatively, Americans will spend 7.9 billion hours doing taxes this year. That’s equivalent to about 900,000 years, or three times the amount of time homo sapiens have been on planet Earth.
OK, maybe that’s a bit too dramatic, but you get the idea.
Good stories teach us something new. Good storytellers cultivate the ability to see what others don’t.
I call this “zooming out.” Most people analyze events as if they’re looking through a camera lens, seeing only what’s in focus. Skilled storytellers pull back to capture the wider landscape, revealing potential causes and effects that were invisible in the close-up shot. Put differently, zooming out requires moving from the what happened layer of understanding to the so what? what made it possible? what happens next? layers.
Zooming out is most helpful in the analysis and brainstorming stage, when you’re deciding what story to tell. That’s how I arrived at my prediction that GLP-1s will supercharge the medical aesthetics market. Most GLP-1 news covers how the drug will affect the food and beverage industry. That’s the obvious story. What’s a more interesting one? I zoomed out and asked, what exactly happens after a patient loses 50+ pounds?
Rapid weight loss can create beauty problems: excess skin and “Ozempic face” — the gaunt, aged look you get from losing facial fat too quickly, often “fixed” with filler. I wondered if this was already fueling demand in medical aesthetics. It is: 60% of plastic surgeons say weight-loss drugs are boosting their business.
The numbers are striking. Surgical lifts and tucks are up 20% to 40% since 2019. Facial fat grafting jumped 50% in the past year. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons found that 2 in 5 GLP-1 patients are considering surgery, and 1 in 5 already went under the knife.
Now zoom out further: Probably more than 40% of Americans qualify medically for GLP-1s, but only 2% are taking them. As adoption scales and insurance companies expand coverage, we’re looking at massive demand for cosmetic procedures to address the unwanted byproducts of weight loss.
Zooming out works in investing, too. In 1900 betting on the automobile probably seemed smart. But U.S. automakers delivered mediocre returns thanks to competition and consolidation. The real windfall came decades later from the ripple effects: Cars enabled suburbs, suburbs fueled demand for big-box retail, and Walmart stock returned 1,600x between 1980 and 2020 — roughly 70 times better than Ford over the same period. When everyone spots the primary trend, zoom out to spot the causes and effects.
When Scott presents in a different country, I adapt his deck with region-specific data. Even small details get tailored. People pay more attention when content is personally relevant, so frame your message in a way that makes them care.
Great storytellers do this. Ruth Bader Ginsburg advanced gender equality by taking on cases where men, not women, were harmed by gendered laws — forcing male judges to confront bias in a way that felt personally relevant.
Personalization is only half the battle. The other half is context — framing numbers, concepts, or jargon so their meaning is instantly clear. When Elizabeth Warren protested Trump’s tax bill, she told Congress: “No baby should lose healthcare so Jeff Bezos can buy a third yacht.”
She could have cited the revenue loss in billions, but that wouldn’t land as hard. By putting the cost in human terms and tying it to a vivid image, she gave a dry budgetary trade-off context and made it impossible to ignore.
You can do the same with business data. “Nvidia is worth $4.5 trillion” is just a statistic. But saying “Nvidia is worth more as a percentage of global GDP than the U.K., France, and Germany’s stock markets” provides the context needed to understand the company’s scale, just like Warren’s yacht line made people feel the trade-off.
Context also makes complex topics accessible. Take this stat: Living next to a nuclear power plant for a year exposes you to 0.1 microsieverts of radiation. That sounds terrifying until you learn that eating two bananas gives you nearly twice that dose.
TikTok creator Becca Bloom nails this by explaining finance terminology using colloquial Gen Z language. She defines market cap as the total value of a company’s shares, aka “checking someone’s Hinge profile and instantly knowing if they’re high effort or still figuring life out.”
You can supercharge the power of context through visualization. Data visualization is a defining feature of our work and core to the Prof G Media brand. It also leverages a basic fact about comprehension: The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. Scott’s presentations reflect this. His AI Optimist talk features 13 text-based slides and 104 slides filled with charts, images, and videos.
Here’s an example. I could tell you that AI data centers are major CO₂ contributors. Or I could show you this:
This chart works because it pairs visualization with baseline context. Without showing that the aviation industry accounts for 2.5% of global carbon emissions, how would you know 3.4% is really huge?
Back in 2021, when everyone was losing their minds over the metaverse, Scott was famously bearish. (“Headsets are nothing more than wearable sex repellent.”) I was putting together slides to back up his position, so I pulled Google search data for “metaverse.” The chart looked OK in isolation — a big spike, followed by a higher baseline.
But here’s why context is so important. For fun, I compared searches for the metaverse to something random: Crocs. Those ugly foam shoes consistently outpaced metaverse searches, even at its peak hype moment. If more people were googling Crocs than the supposed future of human interaction, maybe the metaverse wasn’t as inevitable as everyone claimed.
I started calling this the “Crocs Test.” It’s held up surprisingly well. The Crocs Test correctly predicted the collapse of Quibi, NFTs, and Virgin Galactic.
Stories exist to be shared. We tell them to entertain, teach, connect, and move other people. Storytelling is a service — a way of charting a path, yes, but also a mechanism for generating the hope needed to sustain us on our journey.
A well-told story creates a bridge between storyteller and audience, unlocking emotions in all directions. Scott, who the New York Times likened to Howard Stern — always sharp, sometimes crass — gets surprisingly emotional onstage during his presentations. He almost cried while giving his TED Talk, and I almost cried reading the comments on YouTube, not because we were receiving praise, but because we’d given hope:
Good stories help us recognize feelings we couldn’t name, experiences we believed no one else shared, and insights we knew but couldn’t articulate. As Walt Disney said of storytellers, “we instill hope again and again.”
P.S. Did you know women are 20% less likely than men to use AI? True data point. In the most recent Markets newsletter exclusive, we dig into the AI gender gap. Read and subscribe here.
The post See What Others Miss: The Prof G Storytelling Playbook appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
2025-08-08 22:52:20
Economies are defined by scarcity, not abundance (scarcity = value). Today, information is abundant, attention is scarce. The scale of the world’s largest companies, the wealth of its richest people, and the power of governments are all rooted in the extraction, monetization, and custody of attention. The most recent example: American Eagle added $200 million in market cap overnight, not by increasing sales or lowering costs, but by hacking the attention economy with a Sydney Sweeney ad calibrated for the culture war’s choose-your-own-narrative ecosystem. The stock popped another 20% after President Trump praised the ad on his social media platform. Sydney Sweeney doesn’t have great jeans, or genes, but great memes.
Few people understand attention economy dynamics better than Kyla Scanlon. She captured, monetized, and continues to hold my attention on TikTok. (Where else?) She’s a frequent guest on Prof G Markets — listen here for Kyla’s American Eagle take — and the author of In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work. Kyla coined the term “vibecession” to explain the disconnect between the strong fundamentals and gloomy outlook of the Biden economy. This week, I asked her to write about how the attention economy affects young people.
by Kyla Scanlon
We’re all living through a time of immense change. The news cycle is whiplash-inducing, frameworks are being broken, and everything feels unmoored.
Last year on the road talking about my book, In This Economy?, I heard one common thread: worry. A generation-shaping worry. CEOs are worried about their businesses, manufacturers about tariffs, and young people about everything — from identity to employment to whether the world they’re inheriting even makes sense.
Young people today face a triple disruption: technological creative destruction through AI and algorithmic systems, plus political and economic upheaval through tariffs and increasing fiscal uncertainty. While every generation has faced challenges, today’s young people confront a massive reckoning between technology, economic opportunity, and personal identity.
Across the U.S., young people tell me the same thing: They’re worried about jobs, but more important, they question whether the concept of a “career” will even exist in five years. They’re graduating into a Great Uncertainty, where traditional pathways to security are disappearing, affecting how they think about their entire economic future — from employment to homeownership to marriage to having kids.
To understand what’s happening, we need to understand two things: the attention economy and the real economy. But let me start with a very surreal moment that crystallized everything for me.
Late Friday night, on January 17, 2025, Donald Trump launched a memecoin. By Sunday — a mere three days later! — Trump and his team had generated $60 billion in paper wealth from pure narrative value. By Monday, Inauguration Day, he was both president again and one of the world’s richest individuals, entirely through attention-based speculation. The coin officially “has nothing to do with any political campaign or office” (or so they say), but its success came precisely because it’s associated with him.
I believe this moment cemented our final step in the transition into the attention economy. The president of the United States bypassed every traditional wealth-creation mechanism and generated more money in 36 hours than most companies create in decades. All through attention and narrative.
Historically, value creation followed a clear progression:
Trumpcoin skipped the middle steps entirely:
Attention is truly all you need. Attention became the product, the business improvement, the way to compound wealth. It worked with immense speed, because Trump controls political positioning (executive power, regulatory influence); platforms (narrative shaping via Truth Social); and now token wealth (instant value creation through pure narrative).
This was the birth of the Attention Singularity, where power, narrative, and wealth merged into one self-reinforcing system. Attention became so dense that it warped reality itself. We’re watching a system where attention directly creates wealth, wealth instantly empowers, power captures more attention, and each cycle gets faster and stronger.
Many young people watched this and thought: Of course this is how the world works now. Of course attention is the ultimate currency. Of course the old rules don’t apply. I have to change everything.
Watching this unfold made me question everything I thought I knew about value creation. (Cue the meme of someone throwing away a copy of the Intelligent Investor.) But it also made me realize we needed to look at the broader ecosystem that made Trumpcoin possible in the first place, because this was the logical conclusion of the system we’ve built.
Four interconnected elements have reshaped our reality:
These four elements reinforce one another, forming a digital cage. When narrative production becomes more valuable than actual production, we risk creating a world where attention harvesting matters more than building things. Hence, Trumpcoin.
But young people aren’t just passive victims of this system. They’re responding to it, and their responses are reshaping politics.
When things are uncertain, people retreat to extremes but also vote for “new normals.” Trump won in 2024 partly by capturing young voters who believed traditional professional paths promising stability might cease to exist soon. Coupled with increased zero-sum thinking, institutional distrust, and attention economy dynamics, young people are trying to find footing in a fundamentally new world.The conservative shift among young voters is about more than politics. When OpenAI’s Sam Altman says AI will require the “whole structure of society to be up for debate and reconfiguration,” the entire nature of the self is being questioned.
The boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964, had a somewhat clearish wealth-building formula (broad generalization) and a (seemingly) clearer sense of self:
This shaped their worldview and understanding of success. Boomers are the wealthiest generation to have ever lived, thanks to affordable housing and strong equity markets.
The boomer formula worked for many despite disruptions like the stagflation of the 1970s and the mega-high interest rates of the 1980s. But many boomers who benefited from this system have participated in its dismantling through thousands of small decisions prioritizing short-term gains over systemic stability.
Today, boomers own 38% of homes nationwide, despite comprising just over 20% of the population. Millennials haven’t caught up to boomer life markers and homeownership rates. Homeownership rates are even lower for Gen Z than Millennials at the same ages, according to a UC Berkeley study. Meanwhile, 72.9% of wealth is held by people over 55. Millennials and Gen Z own 71% less wealth than their population representation would predict, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
These conditions create a situation that resembles Nassim Taleb’s Barbell Strategy. We increasingly have a world split between young people 1) forgoing college to pursue the trades or 2) gambling everything on digital moon shots.
Taleb writes that the barbell strategy is a “method that consists of taking both a defensive attitude and an excessively aggressive one at the same time.” Here, we see people doing maybe one or the other. The barbell economy creates its own culture:
To be clear, a middle path still exists and is evolving. I’m generalizing to make a point. Many people are still going down the traditional road — and rightly so! — albeit with more skepticism. For some, it’s working, especially for those entering healthcare and social services, the only sectors adding jobs currently. Others are trying to bridge the gap between the past and the present with mixed results.
But as my former professor Dr. Indudeep Chhachhi says, “The opposite of rationality isn’t irrationality — it’s being normal.” When the “safe path” might be eliminated by AI overnight, hypergambling becomes emotionally and economically sensible. Safety seekers are making calculated bets. Digital gamblers are responding to an economy that increasingly rewards exponential outcomes.
I see two possible paths, both requiring us to acknowledge how the game has changed:
There are policy choices here around technology regulation, wealth transfer mechanisms, platform governance. But spending this year talking to young people across America has convinced me that the deeper challenge isn’t just technical or policy-driven. It’s about something more important: our collective capacity to understand one another across the attention economy’s fault lines.
Young people aren’t broken. They’re adapting to a world that’s fundamentally different from the one their parents knew. But their parents aren’t wrong either for feeling like the ground has shifted beneath their feet. The attention economy has created new forms of value and new pathways to wealth. The old ways of understanding ourselves and one another are straining to keep up.
The attention economy isn’t going anywhere. It’s too powerful, too integrated into how value gets created now. It’s a system, though, and systems can be changed. As historian Howard Zinn wrote: “If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
_______
P.S. Kyla Scanlon is the author of In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work. After you buy her book, you should subscribe to her newsletter.
The post The Attention Economy and Young People appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.
