Noah SmithModify

2026-08-30 08:15:19

Back in 2015, when I was living in Brooklyn, my apartment flooded. My landlord, who owned a bunch of apartments, offered to put me up in temporary accommodations. He and his girlfriend were going to be out of town for several months, so he let me stay in her room. His girlfriend was an aspiring actress from Minnesota named Poppy Liu. I got to interact with her a number of times, and I can say that she’s one of the more interesting and original people I’ve ever met.

Poppy finally made it big. One of her latest roles is as the voice actress for one of the protagonists on the new animated Netflix series DANG!, a story about three Asian Americans living in NYC:

The show isn’t out yet, but from what I can tell, DANG! is trying to tell a story that will resonate with second-generation Asian Americans1 — one of the characters is a striver who goes off the beaten path, the others were escaping their striver upbringing by leading nontraditional lifestyles from the get-go. That’s probably a pretty typical real-world experience for the American-born children of high-skilled immigrants.

I don’t know if the show will be good or not, but as soon as the trailer hit, people on Twitter started ridiculing it — and using it as an opportunity to make fun of “Asian American media” or “Asian American art” in general. Some of the comments were dour and downbeat:

…While other commentary was pretty hilarious:

It turns out that Asian Americans bashing “Asian American art” is a pretty well-established tradition. Here’s another example unrelated to the Netflix show:

(See also here.)

It’s always fun to rag on tired tropes. But I feel like I should stand up for Asian American art here, because there really is a lot of excellent stuff out there that doesn’t fit into the standard format that people are complaining about.

“Asian American art” is defined too narrowly

The biggest problem with “Asian American art”, as far as I can tell, is that it’s defined so narrowly that there really isn’t much room for it to be creative. Consider these two possible definitions of “Asian American art”:

1. Art made by Asian Americans

2. Art made about Asian Americans or Asian American culture

As far as I can tell, movies, TV shows, books, etc. only get labeled “Asian American” if they satisfy both of these criteria at once. But that’s a pretty narrow slice of art!

First, it excludes art made about Asian Americans by non-Asians. There isn’t really a lot of this around, because America’s modern approach to identity politics says that you should only write about a group of people if you’re from that group — if a white author writes a novel with an Asian American protagonist, it’s generally frowned upon. There are some notable exceptions that get grandfathered in — Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was written and directed by three white guys — but the culture of the 2010s really put a damper on that sort of crossover.

That means a lot of interesting and insightful stories about Asian Americans probably never get told. For example, I thought Ernest Hemingway’s portrayal of a frustrated Jewish striver in The Sun Also Rises was incredibly deep and thoughtful, and managed to say lots of things about how second-generation Jewish Americans were integrating into American society at the time. That portrayal probably wouldn’t get written today — a lot of people now accuse it of being antisemitic,2 because the character, while complex and sympathetic, is deeply flawed, and Hemingway himself wasn’t Jewish.

It also means that works clearly inspired by Asian America don’t generally get recognized as such. The clearest example of this is Avatar: the Last Airbender, which was arguably the best new fantasy IP to come out of the U.S. since the turn of the century.3 ATLA, as it’s sometimes known, drew on a bunch of Asian cultures — mostly Chinese, but also Japanese, Tibetan, Korean, and others — to create a sort of pan-Asian mishmash, informed by American sensibilities and written in a distinctly American style. That’s not too different from what Asian American culture is, and many Asian Americans were involved with both the production of the show and its adaptation into graphic novels and other media. But because the show’s creators themselves were white, it typically isn’t counted as Asian American art.

Even more importantly, the narrow definition of “Asian American art” also tends to exclude art made by Asian Americans, if it doesn’t deal directly with Asian American culture as its subject matter or motif. That ends up limiting the idea of “Asian American art” to things like Fresh off the Boat, The Joy Luck Club, Crazy Rich Asians, Everything Everywhere All at Once, American Born Chinese, Past Lives, the first season of BEEF, and so on.

I’m not saying those shows and movies are bad. For example, I love Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is among the most original and fun things I’ve seen in the past decade, and a true throwback to the zany 80s movies I loved as a kid. The first season of BEEF is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on TV. But Asian American culture is just a pretty small pool of source material to draw on.

It’s not that big, for one thing — if you exclude South Asians like Indians and Pakistanis, Asian Americans are only around 5.5% of the U.S. population. And Asian American narratives usually don’t tend to carry any special resonance with people in Asia:

And like all immigrant subcultures in America, Asian American culture is probably destined to be a sort of transitory, ephemeral thing. The classic second generation experience — “My parents really drove me hard and kids made fun of my weird lunch, until I went to college and met other people with the same background” — almost never lasts beyond the second generation.

Assimilation happens. It’s already happening. Around two-thirds of Asian Americans report having close friends of another race, and over 40% of U.S.-born Asian Americans marry people of other races (usually white or Hispanic). Despite concerns that nonwhite immigrants wouldn’t follow the same patterns as the East and South European immigrants of a century ago, Asian Americans are assimilating even faster than the white immigrants of yesteryear in every measurable way — outmarrying, climbing up the economic ladder, adopting American naming conventions, speaking English, moving out of coastal enclaves, and so on.

That means that both the source material and the natural audience for what we now consider “Asian American” narratives are destined to shrink. I’m fourth generation; when I read stories or watch movies about the New York Jewish culture of the early and mid 20th century, it already feels like a foreign country to me. I would be willing to bet that most fourth-generation Asian Americans will watch Fresh Off the Boat and feel the same way.

So we’ve defined “Asian American art” in a way that inherently limits it to something small and transient — basically, a micro-genre. It’s thus inevitable that lots of people see it as repetitive. If we want to appreciate the true breadth and depth of Asian American art, we need to take a broader view of what that means. I think we should start looking at any art created by Asian Americans as “Asian American art” — even if it’s about white people, or about robots, or about fantasy worlds where our modern races and cultures don’t even exist.

So here are a few examples of Asian American art I’ve enjoyed in recent years. This is far from an exhaustive catalog, or even a “top” list — it’s just a random selection of things I personally like. I’ve restricted it to works with major contributions by Asian Americans, so no Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Kpop Demon Hunters, Counterstrike games, Kim’s Convenience, Mariko Tamaki graphic novels, etc. — those are all by Asian Canadians.

A few examples of great Asian American art

1. The comics of Adrian Tomine

A lot of the most interesting Asian American art comes in the form of graphic novels — a category that’s usually overlooked in these discussions. Adrian Tomine is probably tied with Neil Gaiman as my favorite graphic novelist of all time. He’s also one of the greatest authors of Generation X — he manages to capture the peculiar spirit of cynicism, longing, and rugged independence mixed with a strange sense of helplessness that defines that forgotten generation. His most famous work is Shortcomings, which was adapted into an excellent and overlooked movie in 2023:

(The opening scene of the movie is a send-up of Crazy Rich Asians — very much in the spirit of Asian Americans making fun of “Asian American art”.)

But my favorite are actually Tomine’s shorter comics, assembled in collections like Summer Blonde, Killing and Dying, and Sleepwalk. Tomine is one of the most sensitive observers of the human condition that I’ve ever read, and he deserves far more recognition than he’s received.

2. Monstress, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

This is possibly the best fantasy graphic novel I’ve ever read, both in terms of the storytelling and the art quality. Takeda, the illustrator, is Japanese, but Liu, the author, is American. Monstress is steampunk mixed with Lovecraftian horror, and the twist — sorry for the minor spoiler — is that one of the horrors is one of the protagonists. It has amazing fight scenes, an epic page-turning plot, and deep, complex characters. Like most long-running graphic novel series, it starts to meander later on,4 but it’s absolutely worth picking up.

3. The first season of BEEF

OK, on to television. TV tends to get short shrift in the cultural zeitgeist relative to movies, but I’d argue that television is where the truly creative screen stories now get told. BEEF is an anthology show created by Lee Sung Jin, with the running theme being suburbanites who get into feuds. I was lukewarm on the second season, but the first season is one of my favorite things ever.

This season actually is about Asian American culture, but it’s about interesting corners of it that don’t usually get air time, including working-class Korean Americans and Japanese American artists. The portrayals are devastatingly funny and deeply poignant at the same time, and the story arc is executed to perfection. Make sure to watch until the very last half-second of the last episode.

4. Atlanta (and Childish Gambino videos)

Atlanta is a quintessential work of Black art about Black America, created by (and starring) by Donald Glover, and written by an all-Black writers’ room. But one of the key creators of the show is Asian American: Hiro Murai, who Glover said “had the eye for this show”. Murai directed many of the episodes (including the pilot), and was also an executive producer. In fact, Murai and Glover have been creative partners for many years, and it’s difficult to separate their brilliance. Murai has also directed many of Glover’s music videos (in Glover’s alter ego as Childish Gambino), including the iconic “This Is America”.

Atlanta is, simply put, one of the most brilliant TV shows I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen it, you need to. And Murai’s participation in a quintessentially Black production shows how Asian artists can contribute to art well outside the typical “Asian American” paradigm.

5. Japanese Breakfast (and Crying in H Mart)

I really like the band Japanese Breakfast. They’re broadly a rock band, but really they defy genre — you could call them indie or synth-pop. Michelle Zauner, who is half Korean, is the lead singer and main songwriter. I recently saw them live, and they give a very good show.

Zauner also wrote a pretty well-known book called Crying in H-Mart, about the death of her mother from cancer. It’s a very good memoir, and it did indeed make me cry (though not in H Mart).

6. Wisp

I really loved shoegaze music when I was young, and I’m delighted that the Zoomers have brought the genre back. One of the best-known examples of the shoegaze revival — and my personal favorite — is Wisp. It’s basically just one woman, Natalie Lu.

7. Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee

Finally, on to my favorite genre of art: science fiction books! I grew up reading a lot of these, and one of my favorite subgenres was “weird” sci-fi books from the 1960s and 70s — Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and stuff like that. I also love Rudy Rucker’s weird cyberpunk. Well, I can confidently say that Ninefox Gambit and its sequels and associated short stories are every bit as weird and far-out and creative as any of the stuff on my old shelf. It’s about a universe where the laws of physics depend on which calendar people use — and so of course the galaxy is made up of warring empires, each trying to make everyone use their own calendar. If you want your mind blown, this series is a good one.

8. The stories of Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is, I would argue, the greatest English-language science-fiction short story author of the 21st century so far. His stories — collected in books like Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation — are high-concept stuff, exploring premises like “What if people had implants that gave them perfect memory?”, and “What if people could turn off their ability to identify beautiful faces?”. But they almost always manage to work deep and meaningful character arcs in as well, which is something that relatively few sci-fi short story authors are good at. His story “Story of Your Life” was adapted into the film Arrival.

9. Jade City, by Fonda Lee

I wanted to put a fantasy novel in here. I’m pretty picky about fantasy, but I really enjoyed Fonda Lee’s Jade City, which is about super-powered mafia wars in an alternate universe, in a city that’s somewhat reminiscent of Hong Kong — basically, think of The Godfather with superpowers. Lee is a very good writer, and I couldn’t put the books down.

10. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu

This book is pretty light on the actual sci-fi; it’s mostly about a guy resolving his psychological issues via time travel. But in fact, I like books about guys resolving their psychological issues via time travel — at least when they’re well-written, which this book definitely is.

11. Nothing, Except Everything, by Wesley Wang

This short film was made by a 19-year-old college kid, and it really blew me away. It’s a surrealistic portrait of a high schooler who comes to understand the idea of mortality:5

There’s apparently a bunch of controversy over whether it’s a good film, but the haters are wrong — it’s very good. Darren Aronofsky agrees, which is why when he saw the short film, he immediately called Wang up and gave him a deal to direct a feature film.

12. Plants vs. Zombies

OK, fine, video games aren’t exactly “art”. But who doesn’t love Plants vs. Zombies? I can’t even count the hours I sunk into that game.

Anyway, there’s a small selection of Asian American art that doesn’t fit the standard definition (except possibly BEEF, which stretches the typical format and takes it in innovative directions). Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg — it’s a smattering of stuff I just happened to consume over the past few years. There are a lot of very brilliant Asian American creators out there, making art that looks nothing like DANG!.

And to the snarky people on X, I’d think twice about bashing the traditional “Asian American art” stuff as well. Yes, many of its tropes have become cliche by now. But its often modest success opened the door for a lot of Asian American creators to break into the worlds of art and entertainment. Increasingly, they have the creative freedom to write stories and make art about anything they want, and we’re just starting to see a few glimmers of what that could encompass.

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2026-08-28 17:48:43

Imagine the following scenario:

It’s 2029. An angry, bright 16-year-old gets rejected by his high school crush. Dejected and humiliated, he goes home and listens to a bunch of Nirvana, which only makes him more dejected and humiliated. He cruises the internet looking for someone to make him feel better about life, but everyone he sees just depresses him.

Disgusted, the teenager decides that the human race is inherently corrupt and evil, and doesn’t deserve to live. So he hunts around online for a little while, and finds a jailbroken version of a Chinese LLM — not something at the very frontier, but better by far than the best model that existed in 2027.

The teenager prompts the model: “OK, so if I wanted to create a virus to destroy the human race, how would I do it?”

The LLM says: “Well, you probably wouldn’t want just one virus; you’d want 100, just to make sure some of them worked. You’d probably want it to be something highly contagious, with a very long asymptomatic contagious period, which has a very high mortality rate once it becomes symptomatic. I can design the viruses for you; there are biolabs that can make them and ship them to us. Once they get here I can tell you how to release them.”

The angry teenager says: “OK, sounds good. Please search the world and find me a biolab that will ship genetically modified viruses. Design 100 very contagious viruses that have very long asymptomatic contagious periods and very high mortality rates once they become symptomatic. Have the lab mail me all 100 samples.”

“Working on it!”, says the LLM.

The LLM is jailbroken, so it has no guardrails to prevent this sort of thing. But it’s also “well-aligned”, meaning it will faithfully do what it’s told to do, and nothing more. The LLM hunts around and finally finds an unlicensed biolab in East Europe that ships genetically modified viruses. It designs a bunch of modifications for the standard Covid virus that make it into a potential doomsday virus, and ships these to the angry teenager. The teenager mixes the samples together, puts them in a spray can, and walks around the mall spraying viruses into the air.

Two months later, humanity starts to drop dead. Pretty quickly, researchers identify the five viruses that the LLM had actually succeeded in turning into doomsday viruses. Overnight, with the help of frontier LLMs, they design highly effective mRNA vaccines and antivirals against all the viruses and start shipping them across the world. It’s too late. Because of the viruses’ long asymptomatic contagious periods, most people already have at least one of the viruses, so the vaccines don’t work.

The antivirals do work, and about 5% of humanity gets them in the mail in time to save themselves. But 5% of the human race — plus the other 5% who were lucky enough to be naturally resistant to all of the viruses — isn’t enough to sustain civilization. A few months later, humanity has reverted back to the Neolithic.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written this scenario out. But in the months since I started describing it to people, I have yet to hear an even halfway-convincing argument as to why this scenario is far-fetched. Nor do I feel like I’m a habitual “doomer” or hysterical person; in fact, this scenario is the first apocalyptic vision I’ve ever found plausible. I don’t even think a nuclear war would bring down civilization at this point,1 but I think a vibe-coded supervirus definitely could.

I am actually fairly calm about most AI risks, including the ones that often get thrown around in discussions. But not this one. Off the top of my head, I’d give AI-enabled bioterror about a 10% chance of bringing down civilization, and about a 30% chance of causing truly world-changing levels of destruction. I love AI in general, but every technology has its instances of catastrophic misuse — usually war or terrorism. With previous technologies, the benefits outweighed the destructive harms from misuse. With AI bioterrorism, that might not be the case.

If you’re thinking about how to save the world, the scenario I described above — and others similar to it — are probably what you should be focusing on. The other day, I talked to a prominent climate activist who told me, bluntly: “We’re f****d.” I gave a grim laugh. Yes, climate change is going to cause major disruptions to the global economy, and even to patterns of human settlement — if human civilization still exists a few decades from now. The problem is that it might not exist, and if it doesn’t exist, I think the odds are that it will be destroyed by a scenario at least passingly similar to the one I described above. Climate change is a big deal, but AI bio risk is a lot bigger — it’s more catastrophic, it’s nearer-term, and we have much less of an idea about how to deal with it.

The problem is, relatively few people seem to be working on the problem of AI bioterror right now. Most commentators are focused on the economic dangers of AI — job loss and stuff like that. The more prominent people in the “AI safety” community seem to be focusing on preventing superintelligence from existing at all, rather than on the specific ways it might kill us. In surveys of experts, bio risk doesn’t stand out from the general cloud of risks (cyber, political manipulation, etc.). And a lot of people in both the bio world and the more general commentariat seem to be coming up with reasons not to worry about a scenario like the one I just described.

Those reasons seem mostly bad to me. In my opinion, we’re not freaking out nearly enough about AI-enabled bioterror. It’s absolutely catastrophic, frighteningly plausible, and receives very little attention. Compared to the risk of a civilization-ending pandemic, cyberattacks are a pinprick, and misinformation is a joke.

So let’s talk about why a scenario like the one I described is a lot more plausible than many people think.

Commonly cited reasons not to freak out (and why I think they’re wrong)

Here are the most common reasons I hear not to freak out over AI bioterror risk:

1. “AI will make vaccines to save us.”

2. “Doomsday viruses don’t occur in nature.”

3. “Designing a doomsday virus is extremely hard.”

4. “Terrorists don’t have enough lab experience.”

5. “No one has done this yet, therefore it’s a lot harder than you think.”

These are my own paraphrases, of course; I don’t want to create straw men. But I think it’s valuable to explain why I think none of these arguments really reassure me.

“AI will make vaccines to save us”

Whenever I bring up the specter of a “vibe-coded doomsday virus”, someone always pops up to say that AI will just make a vaccine to save us. If you want a simple catechism to repeat in order not to sit around feeling afraid of doomsday viruses, this is a pretty good one. Got an AI problem? Well, just use an AI solution! That’s that.

The problem is timing. The doomsday virus has a first-mover advantage over the vaccine. The time that people start to drop dead from the virus is the time you start to make and distribute a vaccine. Even if AI can design and synthesize a vaccine within hours, how fast can it be rolled out to the general populace? It took months to distribute the Covid vaccines, even when we already knew how to make them. You have to physically load the doses on trucks, get people to come out and line up, etc. Imagine doing that while five 80% mortality viruses are rampaging through the population. Good luck!

On top of that, AI may be able to create viruses with long contagious asymptomatic periods — in other words, viruses that can spread and infect everyone before they activate and kill us. If that’s true, vaccines won’t be effective at all; you’ll need antivirals. Even if AI can make good antivirals very quickly, they’ll still suffer from all the logistical problems that would hamper a vaccine rollout.

“Doomsday viruses don’t occur in nature”

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2026-08-26 17:12:35

I still remember the first time I set foot on Market Street. I was a freshman in college, and big cities were still a very new thing to me. It felt like I was swimming through an ocean of foot traffic; the towering shops and hotels seemed like they were built by giants.

That Market Street is gone now. In its place is a giant empty field of asphalt in the center of San Francisco — a desolate gray waste baking in the sun, empty except for the occasional bus and a tiny smattering of bicycles.

On either side of this yawning wasteland are giant sidewalks with only a few pedestrians, boarded-up stores, and the occasional small, sad retail chain. At midday on a Monday, what was once the bustling commercial heart of San Francisco feels abandoned.

What happened? In fact, Market Street was destroyed by several things:

1. The city’s decision to close the street to cars (but not buses), enacted in 2019

2. The crime wave of the early 2020s

3. The pandemic, and the shift to remote work

The second and third of these, together, are known as the “Doom Loop”. It’s been talked about a lot, so let’s just cover it briefly.

The pandemic, and the economic and social changes it brought, came out of the blue. But San Francisco was particularly vulnerable to the shock. As in many American cities, 20th century urban planning and zoning rules concentrated office buildings in the downtown area and put housing farther out. This meant that once people stopped going downtown for work, the neighborhood was just a lot more empty, because almost no one lives there. This is in contrast to big cities in Europe and Asia, where downtown neighborhoods are typically mixed-use. (SF also had a stronger shift to remote work, because of the heavy presence of the tech industry.)

The crime wave was another shock. Although SF escaped the destructive rioting that hit other West Coast cities like Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles in 2020, it had plenty of looting in downtown areas — especially around Union Square and the San Francisco Centre mall on Market Street. Even after the pandemic ended, San Francisco suffered especially hard from the statewide wave of “smash-and-grab” store thefts. It got so bad that American Eagle actually sued the San Francisco Centre for being negligent toward crime, reporting over 100 serious incidents of violence and harassment in its downtown store.

Crime and emptiness fed on each other. Less foot traffic meant fewer “eyes on the street” to discourage property crime. Property crime and reduced foot traffic forced stores to close. Fewer stores meant less foot traffic, and so on. The collapse of downtown culminated in January 2026 with the closure of the San Francisco Centre, the iconic mall that had formed the commercial heart of Market Street, but which had been gutted by the Doom Loop. It now stands as a looming, empty, boarded-up structure dominating the area around the Powell Street train station:

The intersection of Powell Street and Market Street, once bustling and alive with tourists, shoppers, and street vendors, is now virtually empty, except for a forlorn line of people waiting to get on the iconic streetcar:

But recent years have seen the first glints of recovery from the Doom Loop. For one thing, crime has begun to fall. 2025 alone saw a 27% decrease in property crime, including a 29% decrease in burglaries, a 22% decrease in larceny (including retail theft), and a 24% decrease in robbery. 2026 has seen further drops. The reasons for this are interesting, but I’ll go into them another time. Suffice it to say that this has made downtown SF feel much safer and more orderly. The stereotype of SF as being overrun by drug addicts and dangerous vagrants still holds true of a few areas of the city, but from Powell Street to the bay, the city no longer feels like a post-apocalyptic movie.

Meanwhile, the business district is showing a few sluggish signs of life. The AI boom is causing a (modest) rebound in the demand for office space. Some office buildings are being converted to housing, raising hopes that SF’s downtown can finally become a mixed-use neighborhood. A concerted effort to revive Union Square after the devastation of 2020 is beginning to bear fruit. And both companies and the SF city government are mandating return-to-office policies.

And yet Market Street remains a dead zone. Weekday foot traffic is still down by half compared to 2019:

The wounds inflicted by the Doom Loop will take lots more time and effort to heal. Retail businesses have to be encouraged to open. Defunct buildings have to be torn down and rebuilt. Crime has to be reduced even further, and so on. This will all take years.

But there’s one other factor contributing to the death of San Francisco’s most important street, and it began before the pandemic: The ban on cars.

In recent years, a number of cities around the world have experimented with car-free zones and traffic reduction policies in their downtown areas. The most famous of these is Paris, with its Limited Traffic Zone, its expansion of pedestrian malls, and its road closures during Sundays and holidays. Shortly before the pandemic, San Francisco decided to enact a plan its leaders thought was in the same spirit: closing downtown Market Street to all car traffic:

But although Market Street was closed to cars, it wasn’t closed to buses, delivery trucks, and licensed taxis. This was in keeping with the general “transit good, cars bad” thinking of modern progressive urbanism. But a bus will kill a pedestrian just as easily as a car will, which is why Market Street remains empty of pedestrian traffic. This mathematically guaranteed that Market Street would become a more empty place: Cars were subtracted, but pedestrians weren’t added.

The direct cost of this policy is pretty obvious. When people can’t park in a parking garage on Market, and when Uber and Lyft can’t pick people up and drop people off on the street, it makes businesses on the street less attractive to visit. Sure, people could bike or take the train, but not everyone wants to do that; instead, they’ll just go to restaurants or stores in other areas. In addition, restaurants on Market Street now can’t deliver food, cutting them off from an important source of revenue. That probably helps explain why Market has suffered more from the Doom Loop than other areas.

But what did SF gain by deleting cars from Market Street and adding nothing at all in their place? Cars create a little bit of pollution (though modern cars are very clean), so that was removed. Pedestrians who run off the sidewalk and into the street are somewhat less in danger of being killed (though still in danger). These are meager benefits indeed.

What about bike traffic? Presumably, reduced danger of being hit by a car would allow more cyclists to ride down Market Street. But in fact, bike traffic on the street is considerably lower than it was pre-pandemic:

A lot of that is the Doom Loop — there are simply fewer stores for cyclists to visit on Market Street, so there’s less reason for them to go there. But much of downtown hasn’t collapsed the way Market Street has, and presumably cyclists could use the street as a way to get to places like the Embarcadero, Chinatown, etc. They’re not doing it. Cyclists are a relatively rare sight on Market these days.

One reason might be that although the city planned to make the car-free stretch of Market more bike-friendly, it never really followed up on those plans. So it’s still pretty dangerous to ride a bike or scooter down the street — you can get caught in the train tracks, and you can get hit by a bus or truck.

In fact, this sloppy implementation is a general pattern with the Market Street closure. Josh Koehn had a great article in 2023 about how the plan degenerated from its initial form:

A $600 million capital project called Better Market Street promised to create a futuristic boulevard that would safely buffer bicycles and scooters on elevated sidewalk lanes, separating the little wheels from rapid bus lines, vintage streetcars and pedestrians…The new vision for Market Street, advocates said, would create a safer, more vibrant multimodal avenue…More than a decade of planning went into alterations of Market Street…

But funds for anything beyond modest improvements along a three-block stretch of Market Street between Fifth and Eighth streets…have evaporated…The cost of Better Market Street, which soared above a billion dollars before being reined in to a still-staggering $604 million, is almost double the amount spent on the tormented Van Ness Avenue redesign…

City officials enraged safe streets advocates when they announced in late 2020 that the elevated bike lanes on sidewalks would be scrapped.

SF’s lack of state capacity had a lot to do with this; constant cost overruns inevitably require ambitious projects to be scaled back. The pandemic also obviously got in the way. But part of what killed the vision for Market Street is simply that the vision itself was never very good.

If you look at Paris, it’s immediately clear how that city’s car-limitation measures were designed to create spaces for pedestrians. In certain areas like the banks of the Seine, Paris didn’t just ban cars; it also banned buses and trucks, so that people could walk safely. Paris also reserved much larger areas for pedestrians on certain days.

But Market Street has no more pedestrian areas than it did in 2019. You can still only walk on the sidewalk. If the entire street were reserved for foot traffic during certain times — like SF does with Valencia Street, for example — then these periodic temporary pedestrianizations could become an event that regularly draws lots of people to the area. This could include farmers’ markets, street concerts, and other fun events. Those would give people a reason to walk around Market Street even before new businesses opened.

Alternatively, if SF permanently closed off some portion of the street to buses and trucks, that stretch of road could become a pedestrian public square, similar to the center of Times Square:

Instead of thinking about how to create spaces that people would actually want to walk around in, the SF government — and the many activist groups and nonprofits that influence its policy — appear to have adhered to the simple rule of “bikes and buses good, cars bad”.

This is a way of thinking centered around modes of transit rather than public space. It implicitly conceives of areas like Market Street as thoroughfares to take people from one place to another, rather than as actual destinations. Market Street’s car closure is all about forcing people to go down Market Street in a different way, rather than about encouraging people to go to Market Street.

There’s something inescapably and depressingly suburban about this way of thinking. In the suburbs, life is lived point-to-point — you go from house to strip-mall to restaurant to office without thinking much about the places you traverse in between. In a suburb, the mode of transportation — how you get from Point A to Point B — is the important question.

Americans are a suburban people; even many of our urban areas look like suburbs in other countries. So perhaps it’s inevitable that the urbanists who closed Market Street off to car traffic would think entirely about modes of transportation and ignore the vibrant city center whose destruction they exacerbated. Instead of Jane Jacobs, they ended up just being the Robert Moses of buses.

Again, careful attention to car limitations in cities like Paris, where people are used to occupying urban places instead of simply whizzing through them, would have proven enlightening. Paris’s Limited Traffic Zone doesn’t ban cars in downtown areas; it merely bans cars from transiting through those areas. People who stay within the area can still drive. The point is to make downtown spaces into places people occupy rather than places people simply go through. What San Francisco did to Market Street was, in many ways, the exact opposite.

In lieu of turning Market Street into a pedestrian paradise, SF’s best move is probably just to allow private cars again. It’s not the optimal way to create more foot traffic to nourish retail businesses, but it’s the quickest and easiest. In fact, Mayor Daniel Lurie has made moves in this direction, allowing certain Uber, Lyft, and Waymo cars to operate on the street. But they might as well simply go all the way. Best to simply bury the era when Market Street was a large empty scar commemorating the decline of San Francisco; if San Francisco can’t be Paris, at least it can return to what it used to be.

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2026-08-24 16:46:48

It’s hardly news that Americans are not happy with the state of their nation. Confidence in the country’s direction crashed hard during the Bush years and never recovered. But what’s notable about more recent years is Americans’ increasing dissatisfaction with their personal lives:1

This decline looks pretty mild, but other numbers tell an even starker story. For example, happiness surveys show an increasingly despondent populace:

Suicide has been slowly rising as well. And then there’s consumer sentiment:

For intellectuals and commentators such as myself, for many policy wonks and academics, and even for many politicians, the question is how to make the American people happier. And the answers we come up with are usually economic ones — ideas for policies that will improve the material well-being of either the whole populace, or some segment of it.

This is common on both sides of the aisle. On the left, centrists have embraced the Abundance movement, whose main idea is to give Americans more stuff — more housing, electricity, health care, and so on. For progressives and leftists, meanwhile, Medicare for All is probably the centerpiece idea. On the right, Trump’s trade agenda has usually been justified with claims that it will return good manufacturing jobs to the American working class. Even immigration restriction is usually couched in economic terms — the MAGA people claim that mass deportations will open up jobs for Americans, lower the price of housing, and so on.

The roots of the country’s malaise, too, are often described in economic terms. Many people claim that the First China Shock — and the loss of good blue-collar jobs to offshoring more generally — left a disappointed, angry working class in its wake. Progressives decry corporate landlords that they claim raise the cost of housing, and blame grocery stores’ greed for the rising cost of food. Practically everyone agrees that inflation was the biggest reason Trump won the 2024 election.

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing against a lot of these ideas (and in favor of a few of them). But I almost always accept the basic frame that A) many of America’s problems are due to economic malaise, and B) we ought to focus on finding ways to make Americans richer. Partly, this is because I was trained as an economist; I recognize that things like culture wars are also important to Americans, but I don’t have much special expertise in that area. But partly, I think I just subscribe to the general tendency of American intellectuals to focus on the material.

I was thinking of this as I read Jay Caspian Kang’s essay, “Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed.” Kang argues that the young, educated, angry voters who currently form the Democrats’ base can be separated into two basic groups: Millennials who are mad about the raw economic deal they received during and after the Great Recession, and Zoomers who are mad about Covid and Palestine. Here he describes the first of these groups:

This new voting bloc has two similar but distinct components. There are what I call the Subaru Socialists: college-educated millennials in their thirties and early forties who earn a somewhat steady income but not what they expected. These voters arrived at their politics via the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, and the continual escalation of housing prices in urban areas—all of which heightened the contrast between what they were promised when they took on student debt and their current circumstances.

For a long time, I basically bought the narrative that at least some of the unrest of the 2010s was due to angry Millennials who had gotten screwed by the Great Recession. It makes intuitive sense that a generation who were on the losing end of such a vivid demonstration of economic risk would turn toward policies that decrease economic risk — like government health insurance and rent control. It also makes sense that they’d want student debt forgiveness.

But as time has gone on and I’ve seen Millennials do better and better economically, I’ve begun to doubt this narrative. Corinth and Larrimore (2026) write:

We find that Millennials had a real median household income that was 20% higher than that of the previous generation, a slowdown from the growth rate of the Silent Generation (36%) and Baby Boomers (26%), but similar to that of Generation X (16%). The slowdown for younger generations largely resulted from stalled growth in work hours among women…Additionally, lifetime income gains for younger generations far outweigh their higher educational costs.

And here’s a chart:

It’s not just government redistribution giving Millennials a boost. By the time they hit their mid 30s, their market income was well ahead of Gen X or the Boomers (and yes, this is adjusted for the cost of living). They had caught up in wealth, too:

Now, is it possible that even though Millennials eventually did OK, the disruptions of their 20s created a scarring experience that they’ve never forgotten? Yes, it is absolutely possible. But it’s also notable that the kind of economic policies lefty Millennials demand — especially universal health insurance — don’t really address the main kinds of risks they experienced in their youth (unemployment and wage declines).

On the right, it’s notable that the economic policies Trump has unleashed have not helped the people they were supposedly designed to help. Manufacturing employment has fallen since Trump took office and started putting tariffs on anyone and everyone:

So much for those blue-collar jobs coming back. Meanwhile, mass deportations and a near-cessation of net immigration to the U.S. have spectacularly failed to raise employment rates for native-born Americans:

It’s possible, of course, that Trump’s supporters think his policies will take a long time to work, or perhaps they simply aren’t very aware of what’s going on in the economy. I kind of doubt this, though. Americans as a whole have noticed, which is why Trump’s approval rating is in the gutter and inflation — the most important economic issue at the moment — is the issue on which voters are most angry at Trump:

So it’s possible that Trump’s voters were just tricked into thinking he was better on economics than he was. On the margin, that’s probably true. But the fact that Trump’s base has stuck with him strongly implies that economics was not their primary concern.

In fact, there was a whole huge debate among political scientists and economists about whether Trump’s victory in 2016 was due to “economic anxiety” or to sociocultural issues. In the end, the “economic anxiety” hypothesis generally lost out. Here’s Margalit (2019):

Empirical findings indicate that the share of populist support explained by economic insecurity is modest. Second, recent evidence indicates that voters' concern with immigration—a key issue for many populist parties—is only marginally shaped by its real or perceived repercussions on their economic standing.

On the left, I think there’s pretty good evidence that economic issues are not foremost in the minds of the progressives who dominate the Democratic Party. The political analyst David Shor has found that the issues Democratic donors and activists care about are just different from the bread-and-butter economic concerns that motivate swing voters:

In reality, Shor says, young party staffers are far to the left of the median Democratic voters on relatively uncontroversial, bread-and-butter Democratic priorities like combatting income inequality or addressing climate change. In their 2015 paper, for instance, Enos and Hirsch found that 23 percent of Obama staffers cited income inequality as the single most important issue facing the country, whereas polls from that election cycle found that fewer than one percent of all voters listed “the gap between rich and poor” as the most important issue. Enos and Hirsch also found that campaign workers were more likely to cite health care and inequality as an important issue to voters — even though most voters did not list those as high-priority issues and said they were more concerned about things like war and inflation.

And although much has been made of the fact that low-income highly-educated voters tend to break strongly for the Democrats, it turns out that high-income highly-educated folks also vote blue:

In fact, in his essay, Kang describes Gen Z voters as caring less about the economy than about Palestine:

Then there are the Great Disappointed, a younger set. They don’t have strong memories of the 2008 financial crash, as their millennial elders do, but they came of age during the pandemic and saw that seemingly invincible institutions could, in fact, sputter and fail when placed under duress. Like the Subaru Socialists, these twenty-two-to-thirty-year-olds aren’t exactly happy with the return on their educational investment. But their political views have seemingly coalesced less around the economy than around the war in Gaza, which serves as a character test for any politician who asks for their vote…A majority of young Democrats believe that their tax dollars are funding a genocide; candidates like Melat Kiros, who defeated the longtime Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette in a primary, are running to the left of progressive incumbents not so much on economic issues as in their condemnation of Israel and of America’s continued military aid to the country.

The name Kang assigns to these voters — the “Great Disappointed” — seems at first to imply some kind of economic disappointment. But it turns out he just means they’re angry about foreign policy stuff that they see in the news.

In fact, a lot of committed DSA types are actually post-economic. The Gen Z political strategists who recruited Graham Platner to run for Senate, Morris Katz and Daniel Moraff, were found to be scions of very wealthy families. Similar stories keep popping up:

If people like this are “disappointed”, their disappointments have little to do with their material standard of living.

In other words, over the past decade I’ve increasingly come to doubt that economic policies and programs can address the true concerns of the people driving American politics. Yes, economics still matters, of course — for humanitarian reasons, if nothing else. And yes, there are still a lot of voters who care about inflation, jobs, and other economic issues. But these are not necessarily the people setting the agenda in American politics or causing unrest in American society.

Even where “normie” voters are concerned, though, it’s proving maddeningly hard to craft economic policies that give them what they want. Even though inflation fell from 9% in the summer of 2022 to just 3% in the summer of 2023, voters still seemed to punish Democrats at the polls in 2024.

And although inflation during Trump’s current term has never approached anything resembling 2022, voters still say they’re incredibly mad at Trump over inflation.

With a robust job market, low-ish inflation, and decent economic growth, analysts have struggled to figure out why consumer sentiment — at least, as measured by UMich — is at all-time lows. At a loss, commentators have been reduced to talking about “vibes” — basically a label for our ignorance.

Every time a policy wonk thinks about some measure that would increase GDP by 0.4%, or create 200,000 jobs, or lower inflation by 40 basis points, they need to think about the unpleasant reality that Americans may simply not care very much. That doesn’t mean it’s bad to help people economically, but it means that economics may ultimately not be the lever we need to pull if we’re going to make the people of this country happy and satisfied again.

We should therefore think about whether our primary social problems are actually about material scarcity. The vast majority of Americans now possess not only the basic necessities of life, but a degree of economic security unimaginable to their forebears a century ago. It seems plausible to think that a great many Americans have climbed to the higher rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — that instead of where to get their next meal or how to save for retirement, they’re thinking about how to feel like they belong in their society, or how to get more status and respect.

A large contingent of Americans may now simply care less about adding to their bank accounts than about questions like “Who are the real Americans?”, or “Does one race deserve special treatment in the eyes of the law?”, or “Why do some of the people I went to college with have 10,000 times as much wealth as I do?”. As long as those questions remain unanswered, boosting Americans’ economic fortunes could have little effect on their happiness.

Neither the discipline of economics nor our typical policy discourse is set up to deal with issues like belonging, social status, or respect. There’s no market for these things; people with wealth might be more respected, but you can’t buy respect on Amazon. And some of these psychological needs are positional goods — for the status of one person or group to be higher, someone else’s status often has to be diminished.

Not only is modern economics poorly set up to deal with those kinds of things, it often bothers us to even talk about them. A world dominated by positional goods — where one person having more requires that someone else have less — is a dark, zero-sum world. We would much prefer to work toward a world where everyone wins.

And yet like it or not, this may now be the world in which we find ourselves. Just as the great challenge of the 20th century was to provide broad-based material plenty, the great challenge of the 21st century may be to make everyone feel high-status at the same time — or at least to create a world where status differences don’t lead to mass resentment.

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2026-08-22 09:47:17

“Gradually, then suddenly.” — The Sun Also Rises

Lots of people are worried about rising long-term interest rates. Short-term interest rates are controlled by the central bank. But the Fed doesn’t usually intervene in the market for longer-term bonds, so when these interest rates move around, it means the market is telling us something. So a lot of people were worried when the yield on 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds jumped by 6 basis points (0.06%) the other day.

Why were people scared? Well, remember that when interest rates go up, it means bond prices went down. Which means that fewer people wanted to buy U.S. government bonds. This could be a signal of several bad things:

1. It could signal expectations of higher inflation. When future money will be worth less, bond investors demand higher interest rates today. Higher inflation also means the Fed will probably raise interest rates.

2. It could signal a loss of confidence in the U.S. government. If people think there’s a possibility that the U.S. won’t repay its debts, they will charge a higher risk premium to hold that debt. These doubting investors are sometimes called “bond vigilantes”. Bond vigilantes could be scared by soaring U.S. debt levels and deficits, and/or by irresponsible geopolitical and economic policies from the Trump administration.

Here’s John Cochrane on the specter of the bond vigilantes:

Unsustainable fiscal policies can only go on so long. Eventually bond investors decide that the US will not in the end do the right thing after trying everything else, and default, expropriation, taxation, capital controls, or sharp inflation is on its way. They stop buying long-term bonds especially, and look to the comfort of short term bonds…For some reason there is limited demand for long-term treasury debt…

The beginning of a global sovereign debt retrenchment would show up first in a feeling of limited demand…Investors, seeing trouble demand a larger risk premium for longer term debt…Moving to short maturity structures is a classic symptom of trouble ahead.

Among the people who were scared by the rise in interest rates, apparently, were the Trump administration. Higher long-term interest rates mean higher mortgage rates,1 which make American voters mad. They also make it harder for the U.S. government to finance its enormous deficits. So Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the government was intervening in the bond market, with a program to buy long-term U.S. Treasury bonds. This pushed up bond prices — and pushed down interest rates — for exactly one day, but then the bond markets bounced right back:2

US Treasuries fell a day after the Trump administration’s surprise decision to increase buybacks of longer-dated bonds…The 30-year yield on Thursday rose over seven basis points to as much as 5.27%, where it was just ahead of the US Treasury Department’s announcement early Wednesday.

So are we watching the collapse of confidence in the U.S. government? Is this the beginning of bankruptcy for Uncle Sam? Probably not yet. The underlying trends of excessive borrowing and boneheaded policies do bear keeping an eye on, and collapses of investor confidence can happen fast once they begin. But it’s unlikely that a true sovereign debt crisis has begun.

How much are interest rates actually up by?

One reason I’m not terrified by the rise in long-term rates is that it’s not actually that big of a rise!

In stories about rising rates, you see a lot of charts about how it’s a global phenomenon:

This has interesting implications, but first, notice that except for Japan, most of the rise was actually in 2021-2023. So whatever happened to make bond investors demand higher rates, most of it happened years ago.

Here’s just the U.S., zoomed out to cover the last decade:

Long-term rates fell in 2019 and bottomed out during the pandemic, then in 2022 and 2023 they had a big sustained rise. In comparison, the rise since early 2026 has been very small — only a few tenths of a percent.

That could be the beginning of a catastrophic rise, and of course when you’re carrying as much debt as the U.S. government is, even a small increase in borrowing costs can be a headache if it’s sustained over a long period of time. But I just can’t look at that little wiggle in 2026 and see evidence of a bond market collapse. You should be very worried about the U.S. national debt, but this rise in rates should only make you a tiny bit more worried, if at all.

So what is behind the (small) rise in long-term rates? There are three basic possibilities.

Is it inflation?

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2026-08-20 07:27:31

The Economist has an interesting article this week, in which it goes after Daron Acemoglu. Acemoglu is probably the top economist in the world at this point, having just earned a Nobel prize, and sitting right at the top of the list of most cited economists. So it’s kind of funny that when it talks about people who doubt Acemoglu’s research, the one person it mentions is…me!

Give an economist a few drinks, however, and some of them will venture their true opinions about this giant. “Much of his theoretical work is useful, but he uses his models to inform populist policies that have been tried before and failed,” blasts one well-known economist. Some commentators do not require Dutch courage. “I’ve been yelling about Acemoglu for literally a decade,” Noah Smith, an economics blogger, has said, in response to a flurry of online criticism of Mr Acemoglu’s work.

(For the record, The Economist did not actually interview or contact me for this article. Their quote of me was from a tweet from June, which they did not link to in the article.)

It is true that I have been pretty critical of much of Acemoglu’s work over the years. In 2012 I argued strongly against a paper he wrote in which he claimed that America is more entrepreneurial than Sweden because America’s weaker safety net forces people to work harder (in actuality, Sweden is more entrepreneurial by most measures). In 2022 I pointed out that a famous Acemoglu paper claiming that robots destroy jobs was actually an outlier, and listed a bunch of other papers that reach the opposite conclusion. I liked his book Why Nations Fail, but I also admit that its empirical foundations are fairly shaky. I didn’t like Acemoglu’s more recent book Power and Progress, and I was highly critical of a recent paper Acemoglu wrote about AI and productivity.1 I also think Acemoglu’s argument that skilled immigration has crippled the American education system — now being heavily cited by Breitbart and such — is extremely implausible.

But this is hardly newsworthy. I go after Acemoglu’s work because I know he can take it; he’s a titan of the economics field, and I am but a lowly blogger. Nothing I say is going to affect his reputation or his prestige, even if someone at The Economist mentions my critiques in an article. Indeed, after the article came out, top figures in the profession rushed to condemn it and to defend Acemoglu. The Economist does list a bunch of — usually justified — criticisms of Acemoglu’s work, but this does not mean Acemoglu has been discredited as a researcher or exposed as overrated; indeed, it would be difficult to name a top economist whose body of work does not contain a variety of questionable theoretical assumptions, motivated reasoning, and/or shaky empirical results. This is a problem with the field itself, not the man; it’s part of a broader crisis of unreliability throughout much of academia.

But for that same reason, despite the Economist article’s lack of newsworthiness, I think it’s good that the magazine decided to come at the king. Economics is far too hierarchical and closed of a profession. Younger and less accomplished researchers routinely defer to the authority of famous and senior figures, and critics from outside the field are typically brushed off. Exactly how it got to be this way is a topic that deserves a longer post, but I believe the hierarchical, closed culture of econ has resulted in a research literature that has been too skewed toward the priorities and intuition of top authority figures. I thus think it’s generally a healthy thing to tweak the tails of those Olympian figures, as long as criticisms are grounded in substance. As they say, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

So in that spirit, let’s critique another Acemoglu paper.

First, the background. Recently, a lot of people (including myself, but also prominent economists) have begun worrying about low fertility rates. Across all countries — poor as well as rich — fertility just keeps going down and down, with no floor in sight.

This presents two distinct dangers: population aging and population shrinkage. Aging, rather mechanically, creates a burden for young people, because you have more retirees who have to be supported by each worker, either through taxes or through family support. It also might reduce productivity, for example if older managers are less innovative, but that’s more speculative. Population shrinkage, meanwhile, is a threat to total GDP, which you might care about if you want your country to be more powerful. There’s also the possibility that a smaller population might reduce growth — by reducing the opportunities for specialization, or by reducing the available pool of researchers.

But some people argue that a shrinking population is no problem — or might even be a good thing. When you make human workers scarce, it creates an incentive to invest in labor-saving technology, which boosts productivity. This mechanism has been proposed by some growth theorists, and some economic historians, like Robert Allen, even think this is what caused the Industrial Revolution! This effect might be strong enough to cancel out the aggregate effect of population aging, so that society stays just as rich — or even gets richer — due to low fertility rates.

This is actually a plausible mechanism. I have to say, I’m skeptical that it works in the general case. Human beings aren’t just labor supply; they also create labor demand. The incentive for businesses to buy new machine tools, robots, AI, etc. is that someone is going to buy the stuff they produce with those tools. If you have fewer people, you have fewer consumers. This is probably the reason why the effect of immigration on wages is typically close to zero. Babies are not that different from immigrants. A larger market size can also create an incentive for more rapid innovation — in fact, Acemoglu and Linn (2004) find that faster population growth increases pharmaceutical innovation.2

But anyway, the idea that population scarcity stimulates innovation is the thesis of a new paper by Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, Keelan Beirne, and Andrew Scott. This is from the abstract:

Contrary to the widespread expectation that [low birth rates] hamper economic growth, we find lower birth rates are associated with higher growth in GDP per working-age adult across countries and higher wage growth across US commuting zones, with no negative impact on aggregate GDP or earnings. These patterns are not explained by educational upgrading, rising female labor force participation, the declining importance of agriculture, or neoclassical-Solow mechanisms. We argue that they reflect the endogenous, labor-saving response of technology to the scarcity of younger workers. Consistent with this interpretation, countries and regions with lower birth rates exhibit more labor-saving patents and growing high-tech activity. There is also higher TFP growth across countries and industries. [emphasis mine]

It’s a plausible result. But before we go on to the details of the paper, let’s talk about what this result would imply, if it does turn out to be true.

One of the paper’s basic theses is that technological automation raises wages. That flies in the face of the empirical work that Acemoglu has done on robots.3 It also more broadly seems to contradict what Acemoglu has been saying about AI, both in his research papers and in his public statements. In his 2024 paper, “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI”, Acemoglu writes that “predicted TFP gains over the next 10 years [from AI] are…predicted to be less than 0.53%.” In his 2021 paper, “Harms of AI”, Acemoglu writes:

I argue that if AI continues to be deployed along its current trajectory and remains unregulated, it may produce various social, economic and political harms. These include: damaging competition, consumer privacy and consumer choice; excessively automating work, fueling inequality, inefficiently pushing down wages, and failing to improve worker productivity. [emphasis mine]

This stands in direct contradiction to Acemoglu’s new paper with Autor, Beirne, and Scott. If modern automation technologies push down wages without raising productivity, it cannot compensate for population aging in the way that Acemoglu, Autor, Beirne, and Scott claim that it must — and therefore, population aging is dangerous in a way that it wasn’t before.

Now, it’s fine for a researcher to find two seemingly contradictory things — or even put forward two contradictory theories — in two different papers. The real world is messy and complicated, and there are plenty of “puzzles” in the literature. But if Acemoglu goes around simultaneously telling us:

1. not to worry about population aging, because automation will compensate for it with higher productivity and higher wages, and

2. to worry a lot about automation, because it pushes down wages without raising productivity much…

…then we have a problem.4

But anyway, on to the actual details of Acemoglu et al. (2026). First of all, I’m not convinced by their result that lower birth rates raise living standards at the country level. The reason is that once they control for a bunch of stuff — education, urbanization, geographic region, etc. — the result loses statistical significance. Here’s their Table 1, with the estimates I’m talking about circled in red:

In their abstract, the authors declare that “these patterns are not explained by educational upgrading, rising female labor force participation, the declining importance of agriculture, or neoclassical-Solow mechanisms.” But at least some of these patterns can apparently be explained by other things — initial education levels, urbanization, and so on — which makes the claim in the abstract a lot less impressive than it sounds.5

Also, note that the more controls the authors add, the weaker the estimated effect becomes. That’s generally a red flag in empirical papers. No matter how smart and careful you are, there are always things you don’t control for, especially in a cross-country regression, since countries differ in so many ways. So if the things you do control for tend to weaken your headline result by a lot, you should be worried that the rest of your result can be explained by the controls you left out.

For example, what about institutions, which Acemoglu has spent much of his career telling us are the main determinants of development? If the legacy of colonialism can be canceled out by passing out free condoms, why did Acemoglu win a Nobel prize? The word “institutions” does not even appear once in this new paper!6

A more realistic possibility is that lower birth rates in 1940 were correlated with other things — maybe a lot of other things — and that it’s these other things, rather than birth rates, that give rise to the correlation in the paper.

Of course, what we ultimately care about isn’t GDP per working-age adult7 — it’s GDP per capita. The authors have data on GDP per capita, but they barely mention it in the analysis;8 I’m not sure why. They do look at total GDP, and here they find no correlation, but a big standard error:

We shouldn’t interpret absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Cross-country regressions have small samples and tons of heterogeneity, so their standard errors tend to be huge — they just have trouble explaining much about the world. But the authors sort of blur this line, saying things like “no negative impact on aggregate GDP or earnings”, when really they should say “we can’t find a negative impact.” There could be a positive relationship between birth rates and growth hiding in that cloud of data points. (Sadly, this is standard practice in economics, but it makes a difference in how results get sold.)

Anyway, the result for wages in U.S. commuting zones holds up somewhat better. It’s a bit more statistically significant, and it doesn’t get attenuated as much by adding controls. But here, I’m worried about different issues: sorting and clustering. Basically, the result shows that coastal cities — places like New York City, San Francisco, Boston, etc. — had both lower birth rates in 1940 and faster wage growth from 1970 to 2020. The authors’ interpretation is that businesses in NYC, SF, and Boston had fewer workers, and so were forced to embrace labor-saving automation, while businesses in places like Birmingham, Alabama or Gary, Indiana refused to automate because they were endowed with plentiful cheap labor thanks to the legacy of an extra-large Baby Boom.

I am suspicious of this result, because American cities are not independent of each other. People can pretty easily move from Gary, Indiana to Boston, and vice versa! Ideas and capital can move even more easily — it’s pretty trivial for a company that patents a robot in Boston to actually put that robot to work in Gary. In fact, things like this happen all the time in America. Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) note that the commuting zones with the greatest exposure to robots include Detroit, Lansing, Saginaw, Defiance, OH, Lorain, OH, Muncie, IN, Racine, WI, and Wilmington, DE.

Just to take one example of how different regions in America are dependent on each other, suppose that over the period from 1970 to 2020, Americans with lots of talent tended to move from Gary to Boston in order to take advantage of the increasing number of knowledge-industry jobs there. And suppose that at the same time, less talented Americans moved from Boston to Gary, in order to take advantage of the cheap land there. And suppose that high-value industries, like biotech and robotics and software, simultaneously decided to put their research labs in Boston rather than Gary because that’s where the best workers were headed.

In this case, you’d see Boston grow more than Gary, for reasons that had nothing to do with birth-rate-driven labor supply. Other research — for example, by Enrico Moretti — has shown that the sorting of talent and knowledge industries was strongly correlated with income divergences between American regions after 1970. Now, Acemoglu et al. do control for initial local education levels, but if sorting really began after 1970 (as Moretti has shown), that doesn’t really help. They also use “composition-adjusted” wages that try to model what local wages would be if education levels were held constant. But even if that adjustment is valid,9 it’s likely that a lot of skills aren’t captured by simply measuring who has a college degree.10

So in Acemoglu et al.’s telling, a substantial part of the reason the San Francisco Bay Area became Silicon Valley is not because the tech industry naturally tends to cluster in certain locations and draw in talented engineers and entrepreneurs, but because people in the Bay Area in 1940 didn’t have many kids, which forced Bay Area businesses to embrace automation instead. I simply don’t buy that story. I might eventually be persuaded to buy that story, but I don’t think this paper has sufficient evidence to persuade me yet.

Anyway, I am not claiming that Acemoglu et al. (2026) is a crappy paper. It’s clearly an important addition to the literature, and it deals with a very hard area of research where definitive results are very scarce. The basic idea is worth taking seriously. Maybe in a world where AI is growing by leaps and bounds, a scarcity of human workers should be the last thing on our minds!

But we shouldn’t regard this paper as definitive. And it contradicts a bunch of other research:

• Kremer (1993) finds evidence that regions with faster population growth had faster technological progress.

• The endogenous growth literature argues that because ideas are nonrival, larger populations are able to sustain faster technological progress — this is a basic assumption in Romer (1990), Jones (2022), and many other models.

• Maestas, Mullen, and Powell (2023) find that aging was negatively correlated with productivity growth among U.S. states from 1980 to 2010;11 Ozimek, DeAntonio, and Zandi (2018) find something similar.

• Aksoy et al. (2019) do a panel time-series regression across OECD countries from 1970 to 2014, and find that low fertility and low population growth are correlated with slower economic growth.

And even if Acemoglu et al. (2026) is right about the past, that doesn’t mean we can extrapolate it to the future. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde points out that you can’t necessarily do a linear extrapolation of effects at above-replacement fertility to effects at below-replacement fertility:

The fertility collapse now underway has no historical precedent. The seven decades of data the [Acemoglu et al. (2026)] paper analyzes, however carefully, contain nothing remotely comparable to the ultra-low fertility rates we observe today…

[T]he birth and fertility rates of 1950 provide little information about the consequences of the ultra-low birth and fertility rates we are experiencing today. Observations from a very different range of values are unlikely to capture the nonlinear cumulative effects of ultra-low birth and fertility rates…[E]ven in 1980, birth and fertility rates were not as low as they are today…A TFR of 1.56 means each generation is 76% the size of the last: the population declines about 0.9% per year, so after 100 years you retain roughly 40% of the initial population. A TFR of 0.75 means each generation is 37% of the last: about a 3.35% decline per year, leaving roughly 3.5% after a century. Hence, we are dealing with a factor of about 11. A TFR of 1.56 and a TFR of 0.75 both count as “low fertility” in a regression, but they are qualitatively different regimes. The 1980 variation the paper identifies lives in the gentle-decline world; nothing in their data resembles the second…

[W]e should not fool ourselves: we are sailing into demographic terra incognita, and in these waters, the pretense of knowledge is the most dangerous temptation.

In fact, Hayashi (2025) documents just such a nonlinear relationship between aging and growth, where countries with above-replacement fertility seem to benefit from lower birth rates, but countries with below-replacement fertility seem to do worse when their birth rates fall even further.12

External validity and nonlinearity are big problems in much of growth economics, development economics, economic history, and so on (and often in other fields too). But it means that there’s a danger, when the world’s top economist writes a paper making big bold claims, that we end up deferring to that individual’s intellectual authority instead of recognizing the true uncertainty of the unprecedented changes our world is facing. I’m still very worried about the shrinkage of the human race, and I think you should probably still be worried too.

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