2026-05-31 16:38:50
I consider myself a pretty good and decent guy, overall. I don’t commit crimes. I’m nice to the people I meet. I help out my friends. I take good care of my pet rabbit, and I donate lots of money to other people who take care of abandoned and sick rabbits. My politics might not always be correct or wise, but I want things like the end of poverty, the end of war, and so on.
And yet just down the highway from me, there are facilities for the mass torture of animals. In the United States, there are 73 million pigs in “concentrated animal feeding operations”, more commonly known as factory farms:
There are many horrors experienced by chickens and other animals on factory farms, but the way pigs are forced to live is probably the worst. For most of their lives, female pigs (sows) are kept in tiny cages — either “gestation crates” when they’re pregnant, or “farrowing crates” when they’re nursing. A sow will spend most of her life in one of these cages.
In a gestation crate or a farrowing crate, sows don’t have enough room to turn around — all they can do is either stand or lie down in a pile of their own feces. Imagine living your entire life in an airline seat, where you couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom or take your seatbelt off. That’s how these pigs live.
Pigs are social creatures — they exhibit “emotional contagion”, meaning that when one pig is scared or happy, other pigs start to feel the same, and they give comfort and support to other pigs who are in distress. Research suggests that they’re at least as smart as dogs, and probably smarter. But a pig in one of these crates will never get any social interaction in her entire adult life — she can’t even turn around to look at her babies.
This is torture. The pigs who are confined this way bite the bars of their cages, desperate for a freedom that will never come. They have their tails chopped off as babies (generally without anesthetic), so that they can’t chew each other’s tails in anguish. But no relief ever comes — they live out their entire lives and die in these tiny torture-cages.
I have no other word for this except “sin”. This is a sin. If there is a God,1 and if that God is in any way good and moral, then that God is looking down with disgust on the way my society treats pigs. I go about my daily life — hanging out with my friends, petting my rabbit, going out to eat at nice restaurants — never thinking about the horrible suffering that has engulfed the entire lives of those tens of millions of pigs.
And it’s for my own benefit that those animals are being tortured. When I eat delicious guanciale, sumptuous char-siu, or mouthwatering carnitas, I’m eating the flesh of animals who were tortured for their entire lives so that I could devour their faces and shoulders and bellies for a slightly cheaper price.
OK, so why don’t I just stop whining and become a vegetarian (or a vegan, since milk cows and hens are also treated badly)? Honestly, I should, and the fact that I don’t is monstrous in a way. But simply washing my own hands of this crime feels like a pitifully inadequate response. The vegetarian movement has been around in the West for over 150 years, and very little has changed — meat consumption is probably marginally lower than if there were no vegetarians at all, but abusive factory farming practices have only been refined and expanded. Furthermore, vegetarianism, though morally laudable, has an obvious economic limitation — when one person refuses to eat meat, it lowers the price of meat for everyone else, which raises other people’s meat consumption and partially offsets the vegetarian’s action.
On top of the obvious and demonstrated inability of individual action to solve this problem, it’s insufficient even from a moral stance. Suppose that our society farmed human beings for food. Would simply refusing to eat human flesh be enough to absolve me of culpability? I don’t think so. I would still have a responsibility to try to abolish the evil system.
In fact, “abolish the evil system” is exactly what voters in California and some other states are trying to do. In 2018, by an almost 2-to-1 margin, California voters enacted a law called Proposition 12 that heavily restricted the sale of meat from pigs, hens, and calves that weren’t raised with a minimum amount of space. Crucially, the partial prohibition extended to meat from animals raised inhumanely in other states. This followed on the heels of a similar law in Massachusetts two years earlier.
Courts have upheld the law, but Republicans in Congress are trying to undo it from the federal level. In 2025 they proposed the Save Our Bacon Act, which would ban states from enacting animal welfare laws like the ones voters approved in California and Massachusetts. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, but this year it got incorporated into the Farm Bill, which has passed the House and is now being considered in the Senate:
Companies and industry groups have also worked with members of Congress for over a decade to introduce federal legislation to nullify laws like those in California and Massachusetts. The latest iteration is called the Save Our Bacon Act, originally proposed last year…This effort, which for years went nowhere as standalone legislation in Congress, now has a decent chance at becoming law as part of the new Farm Bill…
In late April, the House of Representatives passed its version of the Farm Bill, which included the language from the Save Our Bacon Act…It’s “really a Save Our Crate Act,” Brent Hershey, a hog farmer who opposes it, told me. “A vote for the farm bill,” he said, “is a vote to cage an animal that can’t walk or turn around.”
Lewis Bollard has a good post explaining what’s at stake. In fact, the current Farm Bill wouldn’t just reverse the recent anti-crate laws in California and Massachusetts — it would roll back much of the progress that has been made in farm animal welfare over the decade, as well as preventing any future welfare laws along similar lines:
The [Save Our Bacon] Act would stop any state or locality from regulating the sale of meat based on how it’s produced in another state. This would likely invalidate state and local bans on foie gras, crated veal, and more…It would also halt future legislative progress. Congress hasn’t passed a farm animal welfare law in decades. State laws are where reforms actually happen. The SOB Act would gut them by mandating they contain a giant loophole for out-of-state imports.
Why should Congress prevent the voters of California and Massachusetts from taking a stand against the evils of factory farming? First and foremost, it’s a case of a concentrated interest group — the pig farming lobby — making headway against a diffuse interest (voters with a conscience). In fact, if you believe the polls, a majority of the country — even a majority of those who regularly eat pork — would probably support measures like the ones in California and Massachusetts:
Across different incomes, genders, age or race, many regular pork buying Americans (defined as those who purchase pork at least 2-3 times per month) find the use of gestation crates on pregnant pigs (66%) and the practice of [tail] docking on piglets (53%) objectionable. These findings, and other key sentiments, are from a recent survey of over 2,000 US adults conducted by The Harris Poll…According to the survey, gestation crates are seen as unacceptable by two-thirds of Americans (66%), and a strong majority (73%) are more likely to buy pork products from companies committed to ending their use than from one that is not. Tail dockingis also seen as unacceptable by just over half (56%) of Americans, and 62% of Americans think retailers and restaurants have a responsibility to ensure the cutting of piglet tails is not done by their pork producers.
A plurality of Americans want laws against animal cruelty strengthened in general, and in 2022 a poll by Data for Progress found that measures like those of California’s Prop 12 enjoy widespread national support.
There is a financial cost of switching to humane farming methods, but in the grand scheme of things it isn’t that high. After California passed Prop 12, the prices of affected products rose by about 20% relative to products that weren’t covered by the law. 20% is a significant increase; it’s possible that the American public, wearied by several years of inflation, is less inclined to care about pig torture than they were when the polls I cited above were taken.
But it would be a one-time bump in cost, and over the years the price would come back down at least somewhat, as farmers found more efficient ways to farm pigs without torturing them. In addition, California implemented the law in its typical inefficient way, forcing producers of legally compliant pork to jump through massive amounts of regulatory hoops in order to sell their product in the state. Efforts to make it easier to sell humanely produced meat would make it even cheaper to end these terrible practices.
In fact, I suspect that the American public is still in a mood to support animal welfare laws like this. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, and its supporters had to end up sneakily burying it within the much bigger Farm Bill; to me, this suggests that even the SOB Act’s proponents knew how bad it would make them look if people started paying attention.
I also suspect — though I can’t prove — that the proponents of the Save Our Bacon Act care about more than just the support of the farm lobby. I suspect that part of the reason they’re so anxious to preserve abusive farming practices is that doing so affirms their right to abuse animals. The line “The cruelty is the point” probably applies here.
People who feel disempowered tend to take their frustrations out on those with even less power. Conservatives have certainly been feeling disempowered by the progressive drift of elite culture over the past few decades; by rolling back animal rights, perhaps they can demonstrate that at least they still have complete power over the pigs.
This disgusts me. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steve Pinker showed how economic development has tended to go hand-in-hand with less tolerance for animal cruelty. By passing a law that expanded the scope for animal cruelty, America would be slipping a little bit back down toward developing-country status. It’s moral degeneration, plain and simple.
I would hope that the advent of AI would give us humans a little bit of self-reflection about how we treat animals. Whether or not you believe that today’s AI represents a true superhuman intelligence, the rapidity with which Claude and GPT have rocketed to their current heights of ability should make even the most hardened skeptics realize that humanity is probably not the eternal pinnacle of power and intelligence in this universe.
And in a universe where humanity is neither the most powerful nor the most intelligent entity, we will desperately need a universal moral code where the strong protect the weak. Vernor Vinge, contemplating the advent of superhuman AI back in 1993, wrote:
[I.J.] Good proposed a “Meta-Golden Rule”, which might be paraphrased as “Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors.” It’s a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and most of my friends don’t believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff is so hard to articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some sense that might say something about the plausibility of such kindness in this universe.)
The people who wrote the Save Our Bacon Act don’t believe in this Meta-Golden Rule. Instead, they believe that all of the moral value and weight in the Universe lies with them and their friends, and that they should have the right to inflict unimaginable cruelty on any being that doesn’t possess the power to stop them from doing so. I would hope that whatever being ends up judging humanity, be it the God of the Bible or some future superintelligence, doesn’t judge us by our factory farms.
Anyway, if you don’t want your society to torture pigs en masse for a few bucks, call your Senator and tell them not to pass the Farm Bill until the Save Our Bacon Act is stripped out of it.
I actually do believe in God.
2026-05-29 17:42:27
Back when I started blogging in 2011, I saw my main function as technocratic — I would discuss policy ideas with other intellectual econ types, and wise policymakers at the Fed, in Congress, or in the Obama administration might put those ideas into practice. Since 2016, however, technocracy has felt less and less important, and policymaking has felt more ideological. In the second Trump term, concern for costs, benefits, and the public good seems to have entirely gone out the window — policy is now driven either by the whims of an aging egomaniac and his personality cult or the echo chamber of the online right. Tariffs and immigration raids make no sense as economic policy; they are intended as part of a nativist, isolationist ideological project. The Democratic alternative is less bad, but is still increasingly ideological, centered around the idea that corporate profits are inherently bad.
This changes the nature of my job, and in fact makes it much harder. Whereas in the past I could just recommend policies, now I have to make arguments about what kind of country we should want to have in the first place. In order to get anyone to listen to my advice, I have to be a bit less technocratic and a bit more ideological. And I have to do that at a time when the main ideologies being offered to the American public are becoming more extreme.
And yet this is the job now, so I should stop complaining and just do it. Because I do have a pretty clear picture of what kind of country I think America should be. I believe that in the 20th century, under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the United States devised the single best governing ideology that any country has ever created: liberal nationalism.
I’ll explain what I think that means, but first I want to take a detour and point out a recent debate between two prominent commentators on the political right. One is the pseudonymous “Roman Helmet Guy”, an anti-immigration right-wing nationalist. The other is Balaji Srinivasan, my college friend, who represents a libertarian perspective and who now lives in Singapore. Balaji tried to keep the debate civil, while Roman Helmet Guy (henceforth “RHG”) was vituperative, vulgar, and accusatory. But both made interesting and important points about identity and national allegiance, and the debate ended up illustrating some points I want to make about liberal nationalism. So let me present an abridged form of the debate.
RHG started the debate by accusing Balaji of being ungrateful to America:
Balaji responded by casting doubt on the degree to which an individual’s success is attributable to the country where he succeeded, and by arguing that the global online community embodies America’s founding ideals better than America itself:
The degree to which one's success is attributable to a country's platform is hard to separate out. Obama said to conservatives: "you didn't build that, someone else made that happen." That is certainly one view, that 100% of success was due to the country platform, and zero to the individual…
[E]ven if the US government fails, even if the polarization proves too much, even if the $175T in debt takes down a once-amazing country, the Internet will be there…[I]t reflects the best of American values — free trade, free markets, free speech, free exchange of ideas — and I believe we can rebuild from it, just as Europe rebuilt from Christianity after Rome.
RHG retorted1 that Americans like Balaji ought to be loyal to the people of America, not to its ideals or its institutions:
I am not loyal to a set of values. I am loyal to the American people. You were born here. You were raised here. Educated here, made rich here. You should be loyal to the American people too. The PEOPLE. Not a set of values, not an economic system…
You fled the country and now go on podcasts talking about how tech people can ‘avoid the collapse of America.’ To you, my country and my people are just something for your class to exploit for wealth and then move on. If my people vanished from this earth, your only thought would be “How does this affect my ROI?”…My people gave you everything, yet you have no gratitude. No loyalty.
Balaji pointed out that many of the people who built America were immigrants, and that building America didn’t mean that they betrayed their country of origin. He then argued that in the modern, polarized America, it’s impossible to be loyal to the entire people; you have to choose whether to be loyal only to the red half or the blue half:
[I]f someone tries being loyal to “the American people”, does that mean being loyal to the 75 million Kamala voters, the Blue Americans? Because if you’re loyal to them, you are unfortunately no longer loyal to the Red Americans…Just like there is no Korea, only North Korea and South Korea, there is unfortunately no America any more, only Blue America and Red America.
He also accuses RHG of promoting an unequal, racialized version of national identity, in which Indians and other minorities are required to be subordinate to WASP Americans:
[W]hat test do you propose to determine whether someone is a true American, aside from their current paperwork?…[L]oyalty means symmetry. I am loyal to you if you are loyal to me. But the way you're talking about loyalty translates to servitude. I've been polite, and engaged you in good faith, but we are strangers. Yet you are demanding gratitude and even deference (!) from me, implicitly on racial grounds…
Why would anyone be loyal to a MAGA faction that arbitrarily designates countless millions to be Grade B, C, and D [Americans]? You can't just redefine the social contract overnight…with some tweets, into a…blood-and-soil America that the WASPs themselves shut down...and then get extremely mad when others don't buy into it.
RHG, in his defense, declares that he is loyal to all Americans, regardless of race or politics:
The only thing the American people demanded from you was that you employ the capital that you accumulated in our country to strengthen America and her people. The capital you accumulated under the benevolent protection of millions of American soldiers and policemen who do pick up a gun every day and put their lives on the line to defend our people…
As to which Americans you should have been loyal to: All of them. America is not an ideology. Even the most ideologically deluded idiots are still Americans. And I am happy to embrace all American citizens as my brothers and sisters, regardless of background…The truth that you’ll never understand…is that no nation of Balaji Srinivasans will ever be strong. Because you would all flee the moment things got tough, just as you fled America.
Both of the debaters make important points here. Balaji is, of course, right that it’s perfectly fine to emigrate from your country of birth, especially if that country collapses or becomes ruled by a nightmare regime. Being a refugee is not a form of ingratitude, and it’s silly to hold people to a moral standard in which anyone who moves to a different country is a traitor.
(That said, I think Balaji is being excessively panicky when he paints America as being in a state of civil war. The danger to his person and his fortune from remaining in America would have been minimal. And it’s absurd to assert that you can only be loyal to one half of the American populace or the other; Red Americans and Blue Americans are simply not in a civil war.)
RHG also goes way too far when he dismisses the idea of loyalty to American ideals. A nation’s people are important, yes, but its values and institutions are also important. Should loyalty to the Russian people have made every Soviet citizen loyal to Joseph Stalin? Should loyalty to the German people have made every citizen loyal to Hitler? No, of course not. Countries aren’t just sets of people, they’re also systems for organizing those people — the United States of America was born in 1776, not when Jamestown was founded. It’s perfectly acceptable to love your people but to reject the regime under which they live.
But at the same time, RHG makes some important points of his own. He’s absolutely right that a country in which everyone packed up and moved at the first sign of trouble would be an ineffective country. Social change requires voice, not just exit; making change requires that someone stay and fight the system, and if people keep running away they eventually run out of places to escape to.
Similarly, a country needs to be able to tax its rich people and companies in order to fund public goods (defense, courts, infrastructure, science) and to provide a social safety net. If rich people and capital are perfectly mobile, raising taxes becomes impossible, and countries have to choose between underfunding public services and running exploding deficits. In a very real sense, rich people give back to the people of their nation by staying and paying taxes.
And contra Balaji, rich people do owe a lot to the system that allowed them to get rich. Entrepreneurs immigrate to America for a reason; it would have been very hard for Elon Musk to build PayPal, Tesla, or SpaceX in South Africa. And although America is an especially good place to get rich, any functioning state is better for upward mobility than a state of anarchy. Try seeing how rich you can get in Somalia!
Much of what makes America a good place to get rich is its institutions — good courts and property rights, public safety, government support for research, and so on. But RHG is right that much of it is due to the actions of the American people — the workers who fix the roads that rich people drive on and build the offices they work in, the law-abiding regular people who behave themselves instead of overloading the justice system with crime, the taxpayers who pay for the courts and the roads and the research.
Balaji made his first millions by founding the genomics company Counsyl, which benefitted enormously from taxpayer-funded genomics research. That money came out of the pockets of regular Americans. It was channeled through American institutions, yes, but regular Americans made sacrifices for the science that allowed Balaji to get rich. It’s not possible to put a dollar amount on the debt that Balaji owes to regular Americans, but I do think some expressions of gratitude would be in order, even if delivered from Singapore.
At the same time, this raises some problems for RHG’s flavor of nationalism. Who exactly are the “people” of America that RHG is demanding that Balaji be loyal to? RHG claims that he views all Americans as his “brothers and sisters”, regardless of their politics or their background. But who counts as an American? Is it citizenship alone? Does someone who takes the oath of citizenship immediately become Roman Helmet Guy’s brother or sister? And if so, why is RHG so doggedly opposed to new immigrants, when that just means adding to his family? And if RHG has some other criterion for true American-ness besides citizenship, what is it?
This is the problem at the heart of right-wing nationalism, and there’s just no way to resolve it. If you accept citizenship as the definition of Real American-ness, then you have to admit that immigration creates Real Americans, when immigrants naturalize and/or have kids in the U.S. But if you reject citizenship, you have to rely on some more limiting, restrictive, and ultimately divisive test — race, or number of generations in the country, or whatever.
Every time rightists try to put forward a new concept like “Heritage American”, it falls flat, because the dividing lines are so arbitrary and contested. Do you only include WASPs, and kick out the Catholics? That’s kind of a non-starter, electorally. Do you include Catholics but kick out Jews? Do you bring in Jews but kick out people of Chinese and Indian and Mexican descent? What about Black Americans? Any attempt to designate a core “American people” by ethnicity, religion, or race is a non-starter electorally, so rightists typically either stick to vague hand-waving or spout deeply unpopular views from behind pseudonyms on social media.
Americans, meanwhile, overwhelmingly reject race, religion, and ethnicity as criteria for true American-ness. Most Americans of both parties are civic nationalists, of the type that make Roman Helmet Guy’s blood boil — they believe that the most important things for being a real American are citizenship, belief in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, obeying the law, and voting in elections:
Americans themselves have little use for the kind of restrictive nationalism that rightists like Roman Helmet Guy are trying to sell them. (In fact, support for skilled immigration — the type of immigration that brought Balaji’s parents and millions of other Indians to the U.S. — is extremely high among both Republicans and Democrats.)
But this doesn’t mean that Americans would do better with rootless globalism, of the kind Balaji has embraced. The internet has created many “vertical communities” of like-minded people who chat with each other online, but those are no substitute for traditional communities of people who live near each other in physical space. Roads, schools, police, national defense, and plenty of other public goods and services can only be provided at the spatial, local level.
And in countries where people don’t feel a sense of kinship with their neighbors, public good provision becomes very hard. It’s hard to build a road if you think a lot of the benefit will go toward groups of people you don’t like. It’s harder to get people to allow the construction of new housing in their back yards when they think that people they don’t like will live there. Ethnic bloc politics is poison for democracies. A social safety net is hard to provide if you think the welfare benefits will go to groups of people you distrust or despise. And so on.
Homogeneous countries don’t have to worry as much about this problem, but a diverse country like America needs to work harder to forge people of disparate backgrounds into a single unified whole. Just saying “America has no culture except for multiculturalism” doesn’t cut it, because if Americans have nothing to bind them together in a sense of shared destiny and shared interests, the country will literally fall apart.
In the 20th century, America had an ideology that was committed to forging a single national identity from a dizzying array of backgrounds. That ideology was liberal nationalism, as promoted by the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and by his ideological successors (including Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower).
FDR might seem an unlikely candidate for the paragon of liberal nationalism, given that he tossed around 80,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War 2 and compromised with segregationists. But those actions have to be viewed in the broader context — in an era in which racism and xenophobia were at their peak in the U.S., and growing all over the world, FDR strove mightily to turn the country in a new, more pluralistic direction.
FDR ended forced assimilation policies for Native Americans, and gave them greater autonomy on tribal lands. He maintained a group of Black advisors, created plenty of programs to help Black people economically, created cultural programs to publicize Black achievement, and preserved the testimonials of former slaves. He created campaigns promoting interfaith understanding and cooperation, helping to reduce America’s traditional anti-Catholic prejudice as well as antisemitism. His Federal Writers Project employed writers to document America’s cultural diversity.
FDR also strongly promoted the notion of America as a nation of immigrants — an idea that still deeply holds sway over the American psyche, despite rightists’ attempts to get rid of it. Here’s a radio program that the Roosevelt Administration created to promote this idea:
And everywhere, the Roosevelt administration pushed back against the sort of restrictive right-wing nationalism that was common in the early 20th century. The Department of War made a film in 1943 (released in 1947) called “Don’t Be a Sucker”, in which it advocated for an ideology of national unity and derided the kind of demagogues who tried to divide the country along ethnic and religious lines:
FDR and the liberal nationalists were not modern multicultural progressives. They strongly believed in national unity. This obviously meant patriotism, respect for American institutions, and a shared sense of national purpose during World War 2, but it also meant a lot more. FDR and the New Dealers — and especially the Office of War Information — advanced the notion that America had a unifying culture, set of democratic ideals, sense of history, and way of life that transcended Americans’ different backgrounds. The history of the New Deal is littered with examples of attempts to forge American-ness into a sort of shared civic religion.
The legacy of this liberal nationalism lives on strongly in the beliefs and values of the American people, as evidenced by the responses to the poll above about American-ness. But the civic religion that sustained American unity through the triumphant 20th century has been abandoned by the political activist classes — the modern left and right. It’s difficult to imagine today’s leftists crowing about the idea that people of various backgrounds are “Americans All”. And it’s nearly impossible to imagine today’s rightists admiring a poster like the one above but with the names Patel, Zhang, Hernandez, and Khan.
The reason American policy is insane right now is because the country is being torn apart. And it’s being torn apart by a political activist class that has abandoned the unifying ideology of 20th century America — the ideology that defeated both fascism and communism, forged a kaleidoscope of ethnicities into a single nation, and sustained U.S. prosperity and economic dominance for 70 years.
Both the rightist and leftist projects in America are doomed to fail. There’s only one ideology that can save this country, and it’s the one that worked for us before. Bring it back.
RHG also, rather ridiculously, accused Balaji of “treason” for badmouthing America from foreign shores. We need more education about what treason means.
2026-05-27 16:32:31
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” — David Hume
If you’re of a certain generation,1 you’ve probably seen the movie Office Space. If you haven’t, I strongly recommend it, both because it’s funny as heck, and because it’s a perfect encapsulation of a certain time and place in the world. The movie hearkens back to the big technology companies of the 1990s, when — according to the mythology, at least — nerdy engineers did all the real work while know-nothing middle-management types took all the credit. (You’ll also recognize this as the culture that gave rise to Dilbert.) The iconic character representing the backwardness and inefficiency of the 1990s corporation was Bill Lumbergh, the suspender-clad boss whose main function was to pester engineers to fill out useless paperwork.
A lot of nerdy types watched Office Space and assumed — or at least hoped — that in the end, the smart engineer types would take over corporate America from the plodding Lumberghs. And in fact, something like this happened in the 2010s — as Big Tech eclipsed much of the old economy, engineers became extremely highly paid, and began to fill the ranks of middle and upper management. It was the Revenge of the Nerds, the age of human capital, the triumph of humans who actually knew how to do difficult technical things.
But just as with the highly paid artisans of early 18th century Britain, the scarcity of human capital spurred a wave of automation. This year, AI found its killer app — Claude Code and other agentic coding tools that allow AI to do much (though not all) of the hard mental work that the much-put-upon engineers in Office Space were doing by hand. Although AI has not yet replaced many professions, the rapid progress has lots of people wondering what exactly humans will be useful for in 10 or 20 years. If AI does replace coders and mathematicians, what chance do any of the rest of us have?
Although some people in the AI industry still think that humans will be rendered economically irrelevant, that answer is increasingly unsatisfying. Realizing that a popular backlash against their industry is underway, many AI leaders and AI boosters are actively looking for the answer to the question of “What will humans be useful for?”. So far, the most popular answer, advanced by folks like Alex Imas, is that humans will be useful simply because they’re human:
The idea here is that it will become a sign of prestige and social status — which are always in short supply — to have humans do something for you instead of AI. No matter what else machines can do, they can never replace the knowledge that it’s a real human being making your sandwich.
I kind of have my doubts about this thesis — I’ve seen a lot of people pay extra to have a Waymo drive them instead of an Uber, so they didn’t have to sit with a human driver in the car. But maybe Imas is right; we’ll have to see.
But I have a slightly different answer to the question of “What will humans do?”. I think humans will continue to be required for something beyond simply being their beautiful human selves. I think there will be an increasing demand for human labor in the all-important job of maintaining AI alignment.
“Alignment” can mean many things in the AI community, but one basic definition is “ensuring that AI’s goals are the same as humans’ goals”. This is something that AI labs try to do before releasing their products to the world. But as AI becomes more and more agentic — as we turn over more complex and longer-lasting tasks to intelligent machines — it’s going to be harder and harder to keep them aligned with what humans actually want. And if there’s one thing humans will always have a comparative advantage at, it’s knowing what we want.2
In other words, it’s the lumbering Lumbergh, rather than the technically competent engineers, who I believe represents the ultimate future of human labor. He may seem boring and pointless, but by forcing engineers to file their TPS reports and do other seemingly useless tasks, Lumbergh is — however approximately and inefficiently — keeping the engineers’ goals aligned with those of the company they work for.
In the far future — maybe 10 or 20 years from now — this will mean that humans’ main productive function is to make sure that increasingly autonomous AIs stay on task instead of “reward-hacking”, rewriting their own utility functions, going rogue, or otherwise slacking off. Over the next few years, though, I expect human work to gently shade from technical work into alignment work, as we spend our hours verifying the output that AI delivers us.
Generative AI has dramatically decreased the cost of many kinds of output. With the touch of a button, you can write an essay, turn a data set into an academic paper, write a report for your boss, and so on.
Everyone is doing this, and the result is that our society is currently being overwhelmed by a wave of AI output of questionable quality — in other words, what has come to be known as “slop”.
Slop is rapidly taking over every domain of human output. Over one-third of new websites are now estimated to be AI-generated, and over half of internet traffic is now believed to be AI. AI-generated court filings and news articles are on the rise. Even respected public figures are now posting obviously AI-generated content as their own. AI-generated political influencers are becoming a standard tool for electoral campaigns.
2026-05-25 16:14:11
I get a lot of flak from progressives for being a “both sides” kind of commentator. I spend a fair amount of time criticizing leftist ideology and expounding on the very real failures of progressive governance, both of which have gotten much worse over the last decade. Yes, I support the Democrats, but that support is contingent — if their ideology and competence deteriorate to the point where the Republicans are less bad, I’ll switch to supporting the GOP. So it’s worth it to fight to halt and reverse the deterioration; in the long term, the cost of ignoring extremists and policy failures in order to have “no enemies on the left” is very high.
And yet right now, despite all of the negative trends on the left, the choice of which party Americans should support has never been clearer. The second Trump administration has unleashed a dizzying array of measures seemingly tailor-made to weaken the United States of America — sometimes at the behest of rightist extremists, sometimes due to Trump’s own mercurial whims, and sometimes in order to enrich Trump and his clique.
Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything Trump is doing to tear down the America I grew up in. In his first term, it was often said that he avoided criticism using a “DDOS” strategy — rhetorically attacking so many opponents at such blinding speed that they couldn’t focus on any one outrage for long. In his second term, the DDOS is actual policy; Trump inflicts real damage on such a broad array of U.S. institutions, with such incredible speed, that the news can’t keep track of them all.
To illustrate this, I decided to write a post about three mostly unrelated pieces of Trumpian insanity:
The assault on international tech industry employees and founders
The disastrous Iran War
Trump’s unprecedented corruption
Either the second or the third of these would have been a presidency-ending disaster for Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, while the first would have alienated broad swaths of the business community. But for Trump, it’s just business as usual. The stories crowd each other out of the headlines, and everyone just sort of gets overloaded and starts tuning out the news. Trump’s approval ratings drift slowly downward, but nothing else really happens. Hardcore MAGA supporters just keep screaming that everyone has “TDS”, while Trump’s wavering allies eventually manage to convince themselves that Democrats would be even worse.
But anyway, if you were paying attention, here’s the latest round of Trumpian disasters.
A couple of days ago, without any warning, Donald Trump’s immigration agency announced a new rule. Foreign workers working in the U.S. on temporary visas, they announced, must now return to their home countries while applying for green cards — a process that can take years.
This rule would effectively kick most of the high-skilled visa workers in America out of the country. America’s typical pipeline of high-skilled immigration is basically “try before you buy” — people come to work on visas, then apply for permanent residency while in the country. This procedure is called Adjustment of Status. Almost all green card holders — except for investors — get their green cards this way:
The new policy would end this practice, thus shutting off the main avenue of high-skilled legal immigration to the United States.
There’s a good chance this new policy won’t stand up in court, since Congress explicitly passed a law specifying conditions under which people can be denied Adjustment of Status, so it may not be legal for Trump to simply issue a blanket ban. There’s also a chance that Trump’s allies in the “tech right” will frantically call his administration and get them to walk back the new policy.
The reason they’ll be trying to get him to walk it back is that if the new ban does go through, it will devastate much of the U.S. tech industry. The AI industry, which Trump promised to promote — and which is the only thing now keeping the U.S. economy afloat in the face of tariffs and the Iran War — depends crucially on researchers born outside the U.S.:
All of the biggest U.S. AI companies, and more than half of the top 50, were founded by immigrants, with India and China contributing the most:
This general pattern holds throughout the entire tech industry. Almost half of unicorn founders are immigrants, with Indians being the biggest contingent:
Meanwhile, Indian immigrant CEOs have done an incredible job at a number of America’s biggest companies.
Who asked for some of America’s top economic and technological contributors to be expelled from the country? The “tech right” certainly didn’t; many of them met the announcement with dismay. Gil Verdon, a semiconductor company founder from Canada who had been a prominent and vocal Trump booster, expressed dismay at the fact that he might now be kicked out of the country:
The American people didn’t want this either. Polls consistently show that very large majorities of Americans across the political spectrum support high-skilled immigration:
The only people who seemed to be happy with Trump’s new policy were anti-immigration activists on X — rightist types who see immigration as a race war, and want to ban it entirely. It seems highly likely that those online activists — or people who think very much like them — are driving at least a fraction of the administration’s policy.
It’s pretty clear how this happens. Perhaps even more than in the Democratic Party, the GOP is dominated by youngish staffers and think tankers. These people marinate all day in extremist online discourse, and form friendships with extreme right-wing activists who see immigration as a race war rather than as an economic matter or an important part of America’s heritage. Some rightist in the bowels of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services probably got the idea to ban Adjustment of Status and handed it to his higher-ups, who pushed through the policy without thinking too hard about the economic implications.
Welcome to the second Trump administration. If policy isn’t being made by the big man himself — who is growing increasingly erratic and corrupt in his old age — it’s being made by neo-Nazis on X. These are really the only people prepared to take over the MAGA movement once Trump shuffles off the scene, and their influence is growing as Trump’s acumen wanes.
That said, the big man himself still has a little bit of fire in him, and he still enjoys unprecedented support and devotion from his party. Unfortunately, he’s using his remaining vigor to do two main things: A) destroy America’s standing and power in the world, and B) abuse his office to enrich himself, his family, and his most ardent followers.
Donald Trump was not a Manchurian Candidate, created in a secret Russian/Chinese lab to infiltrate and bring down the United States of America. Nor, I believe, is he personally in the pocket of Russian and/or Chinese interests, blackmailed and bribed into weakening his country at the bidding of overseas masters. But sometimes it’s very difficult to distinguish between Trump’s actual actions and what he would do if he were a foreign plant or catspaw.
That’s a very strong statement, but I’m not being hyperbolic for rhetorical effect — I think the facts back it up.
For example, take the war in Iran. Trump launched this war with no immediate provocation or casus belli — a simple opportunistic war of aggression that incinerated whatever shreds of goodwill remained towards the United States among much of the international community.
Trump then proceeded — so far, at least — to lose the war he started. Despite the preemptive strike, and America’s far greater technological capability, Iran reportedly retains most of its arsenal of weaponry:
US intelligence assessments show that Iran retains significant missile capabilities despite repeated claims by the Trump administration that Tehran’s military had been severely weakened, according to a report by The New York Times…The report said intelligence findings compiled in early May showed Iran had regained operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz. Officials familiar with the assessments told the newspaper that Iran still possesses roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and mobile launchers…Citing reports from military intelligence agencies, the report stated that Iran has regained access to roughly 90 percent of its underground missile storage and launch facilities nationwide, which are now assessed to be “partially or fully operational.”
And:
Iran has already restarted some of its drone production during the six-week ceasefire that began in early April, one sign it is rapidly rebuilding certain military capabilities degraded by US-Israeli strikes, according to two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments. Four sources told CNN that US intelligence indicates Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated…The rebuilding of military capabilities, including replacing missile sites, launchers and production capacity for key weapons systems destroyed during the current conflict, means that Iran remains a significant threat to regional allies…It also calls into question claims about the extent to which US-Israeli strikes have degraded Iran’s military in the long term…
Iran has been able to rebuild much faster than expected due to a combination of factors, ranging from support it is receiving from Russia and China to the fact that the US and Israel did not inflict as much damage as the two countries had hoped, one of the sources told CNN.
America’s own stock of weapons, on the other hand, has been dangerously depleted in the conflict, and our defense-industrial base is not managing to rebuild them.
Even as the U.S. has failed to cripple Iran’s military, Iran’s military has succeeded in closing the Strait of Hormuz, sending gasoline prices soaring and causing a significant bump in inflation:
Incapable of defeating Iran on the battlefield, and increasingly wounded by Iran’s economic retaliation, Trump is pushing hard for any sort of face-saving deal that would allow him to exit the conflict quickly. Whatever deal Trump eventually cuts is going to leave Iran in a much stronger position — and American interests in the region — much weaker than before Trump launched his war. Here’s Robert Kagan:
Defeat for the United States, therefore, is not only possible but likely. Here is what defeat looks like.
Iran remains in control of the Strait of Hormuz. The common assumption that, one way or another, the strait will reopen when the crisis ends is unfounded. Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante…The power to close or control the flow of ships through the strait is greater and more immediate than the theoretical power of Iran’s nuclear program. This leverage will allow the leaders in Tehran to force nations to lift sanctions and normalize relations or face penalties…
The new status quo in the strait will also occasion a substantial shift in relative power and influence both regionally and globally. In the region, the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran…All nations that depend on energy from the Gulf will have to work out their own arrangements with Iran. What choice will they have?…
The American defeat in the Gulf will have broader global ramifications as well. The whole world can see that just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight.
This is all, of course, on top of Trump’s other geopolitical blunders:
alienating U.S. allies by threatening to invade Greenland
attempting to force Ukraine to accept an unfavorable peace settlement with Russia, even as Ukraine was turning the tide of battle
alienating India for no reason whatsoever
capitulating to China on Taiwan arms sales in exchange for nothing whatsoever
various other erratic behaviors that make America clearly less reliable of an ally
As I said, Trump is not a Russian/Chinese plant, but at this point it’s hard to imagine what else a Russian/Chinese plant would even do in order to weaken America’s international standing.
While Trump was losing a war he started, destroying the foundations of American power, and attacking the foundations of American technological dominance, he was also working feverishly to use the presidency to get even richer than he already is. Rolling Stone had a good article detailing the breathtaking scale of the corruption:
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history…
Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day…Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing…
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change…compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected…The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to…political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal. [emphasis mine]
So basically, Trump:
Uses the government to interfere with specific companies,
Trades those companies’ stocks in advance, knowing how his own government interference will affect their prices,
Sues his own government for billions and then orders his government to settle the lawsuit,
Gives the billions of dollars of taxpayer money to his own activist thugs and cronies, and
Has the government promise never to prosecute the Trump family.
Rolling Stone is absolutely right: Nothing in U.S. history even comes close to this level of corruption. Trump is simply using the powers of the presidency to extract billions of dollars from stock owners and taxpayers — i.e., from you and me — and to put that money into his own pocket. Compared to this, the famous Teapot Dome land scandal in the 1920s was nothing. The total amount of money involved in Teapot Dome — just a few million of today’s dollars after adjusting for inflation — was tiny compared to the billions Trump is looting.
Anyway, these are all stories just from the past few weeks. In the next few weeks it’ll be something else. This is the most absurdly terrible presidential administration America has ever had.
I know a lot of Americans — including some of my own readers — are still able to convince themselves that The Left Is Worse And Therefore We Must Continue To Support Trump No Matter What. Frankly, I don’t know how those guys do it. But I guess I can take some small solace in the fact that the number of people who think that way is slowly decreasing, as Trump’s parade of outrages and disasters marches on.
2026-05-23 16:23:19
There is a pernicious and persistent pattern among many partisan pundits and politicians, pertaining to public debt. When their own party is in power, they minimize or ignore the problem, but as soon as the other guys win the presidency, they start shouting that the debtpocalypse is upon us.
Do I follow this pattern? Maybe a little bit. As recently as 2022, in Biden’s second year as President, I was not very worried about U.S. government debt. My reasoning was that A) interest rates were going to go back down after the surge in inflation had ebbed, preventing borrowing costs from getting severe, and B) Biden-era inflation had eroded some of the government’s debt burden.
But I still warned that there was some limit to government borrowing — eventually, at some difficult-to-predict point in time, too much debt would cause first interest rates and then inflation to soar. And I warned against listening to “fiscal arsonists” like the MMT folks, who aggressively advocated for higher government deficits.
And by 2023 — still under Biden! — I was starting to worry a lot more. Interest rates weren’t coming down much, making austerity more necessary — except no one, including Democrats, was talking about austerity. And by 2024 — still under Biden! — I was warning that there was no good reason for all the deficit spending we were still doing, and that continuing on our current path would run the risk of spiraling inflation:
So I definitely didn’t wait until Trump came to power to start worrying about the debt. But I do admit that under Trump, my worries have intensified. The Democrats listen to intellectuals — although the party has become more dominated by progressives who tend to worry less about government debt, there was always the possibility that concerted shouting by pundits like myself could shift the consensus among left-leaning think-tankers and staffers, who could then pivot the Dems back to the fiscal austerity of the Bill Clinton years.
Republicans — especially Trump and his movement — are a different beast entirely. They stopped listening to egghead intellectuals a long time ago, and even the finance-industry and right-wing think-tank types who have some residual impulse toward fiscal hawkishness have steadily lost influence as MAGA heads toward full cult-of-personality status. The only person in the Trump orbit who even talked about fiscal hawkery was Elon Musk, but this glimmer of hope1 faded when DOGE utterly failed to reduce government spending:
So when Trump returned to the presidency and DOGE flamed out, my mounting alarm turned to full-blown panic:
Anyway, it’s a year later, and I’m still panicking. Trump has been about as bad on deficit spending as Biden was (which is actually less bad than I expected him to be!), but a rise in long-term interest rates is making the debt less sustainable, and Trump seems uninclined to do anything about it. Nor do I expect rate cuts or AI-fueled growth to ride to the rescue here. As for Democrats, they’re playing with fiscal fire by proposing tax cuts for the upper middle class.
As I see it, the only hope here is to start scaring people. Bipartisan fear of deficits back in the late 1980s and early 1990s — probably spurred by high interest payments — forced every contender in the 1992 election to promise their own version of austerity. If we can raise the alarm now, there’s the possibility that both parties might be pushed toward fighting the debtpocalypse for populist reasons.
A lot of economists will tell you that the government isn’t like a household, so you can’t think about government debt the way you think about your own mortgage or credit card debt. That’s very true. But there are still some similarities between governments and households, and one of them is that both have to pay interest on their debt every month. Debt, after all, is simply a promise to pay back a certain amount of money at a certain time, and monthly interest payments are part of that.
Government debt is a bit like a floating-rate loan. Yes, Treasury bonds and bills have fixed interest rates, but they’ve got to be rolled over when they mature. The average maturity of U.S. debt is a little less than 6 years. Interest rates started going up in early 2022, so we’re starting to see a big increase in monthly interest payments:
Everybody talks about how the U.S. had such high debt after World War 2, but the thing about that debt is that it was borrowed at very cheap rates — about 1.5-2%. That’s why interest costs stayed so low after the war. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, interest costs were high because interest rates were high, even though we didn’t have nearly as much total debt relative to our GDP.
As of 2026, we’re in double trouble. Our national debt is back up above 100% of GDP — similar to what it was right after WW2 (and much higher than in 1990). But now the interest rates our government has to pay on its debt are almost twice as high as they were after WW2:
High interest payments force the government to do one of two things:
fiscal austerity (spending cuts and tax hikes), or
borrow more to cover the interest payments.
Right now, what we’re doing is (2). Almost all of the increase in the budget deficit from before the pandemic is due to higher interest costs:
Trump, as it turns out, has kept the annual budget deficit at about the same size it was during Biden’s term, relative to GDP:
But things are worse under Trump than they were under Biden, for three reasons.
First, this is a very large annual deficit, and it’s all being borrowed at the new, higher interest rates. In addition, during Biden’s first two years in office, inflation eroded the debt.2 Inflation is back down to a fairly low-ish level now, meaning the debt isn’t getting eroded. And finally, interest rates have now been high for long enough that the debt Trump borrowed in his first term to pay for Covid relief is now being rolled over at higher rates.
So right now, the national debt continues to explode, because the government is borrowing money just to pay the interest on the money it borrowed before. This increased debt naturally results in even greater interest costs, forcing the government to borrow even more to fund those interest payments. And so on. Interest payments and debt just go to the moon.
This isn’t some far-future scenario — it’s happening right now. But unless something changes, it’s going to get a lot worse:
2026-05-21 14:51:31
I waited too long to do this roundup, and the amount of interesting stuff built up to truly vast proportions. So let’s get right to it.
I often get annoyed with people who trumpet falling crime in American cities. Often, these same people are silent in the years when crime rises — for example, 2015-2021. This means that all those cries of “Crime is down!” might only bring us back to where we were before.
Also, even when crime falls in America, it still generally leaves us about 5x as violent as Europe. People who use crime drops to wave away the need for further intensified policing, increased incarceration of repeat offenders, and other tough-on-crime measures completely ignore the very high baseline level of American violence.
That said, I often find myself being one of the people trumpeting drops in crime. Sometimes we do make genuine progress, and when this happens, we ought to take note. Successful crime reductions in particular cities can serve as pilot programs, giving us ideas about how to fight crime more systematically across the country. And big crime drops show us that America is not simply an incorrigibly criminal nation; real progress is possible!
So while cautioning that the job of making America safe is just beginning, I’m pleased to report the following data, via Axios:
Murder is the most reliable indicator of violence, but it’s not just murder that’s falling:
Violent crime fell sharply across the largest U.S. cities in early 2026…The declines show up across every major region, suggesting a systemic, nationwide trend…Homicides dropped 17.7%…Robberies fell 20.4%…Rapes declined 7.2%...Aggravated assaults decreased 4.8%.
My instinct (combined with reading a bunch of news stories) says that this is probably the result of a bunch of local law enforcement efforts, combined with falling popular unrest in the nation as a whole. But I’ll wait until more definitive evidence emerges.
In the meantime, we need to keep being tough on crime — especially Democrats, who really faltered on this in 2020-21. Voters still approve of the GOP more than the Dems on the crime issue, and far more voters think we need to be tougher on crime than think the opposite:
One of Trump’s big selling points in 2024 was that deporting illegal immigrants en masse would help America’s working class, by removing labor competition and forcing up wages. In fact, this is something that anti-immigration people have repeated again and again, more than perhaps any other argument: Immigrants drive down wages, immigrants drive down wages, immigrants drive down wages.
As far as we can tell, it just isn’t true. Immigration — even low-skilled immigration — creates a labor demand shock that balances out the labor supply shock (because the same immigrants who supply labor also demand products that are made with labor). Almost every study finds this. But the anti-immigration people, undeterred, just bull ahead with the mantra that immigrants drive down wages.
OK, so Trump came back to office and, unlike in his first term, actually started arresting and kicking out an unusually large number of immigrants — and scaring many more into leaving on their own. And did it end up benefitting the working class, by reducing labor supply? No it did not. Cox and East have a new paper that uses local variations in ICE enforcement under Trump 2.0 to examine how a big increase in immigrant arrests affects economic conditions for native-born Americans in the same industry and location. The result? No effect, of course, and possibly even a small negative effect:
If anything, there’s even a small negative effect on male U.S.-born workers in the industries where immigrants get arrested!
Because this analysis looks at specific industries, the reason for the lack of any effect has to go beyond “immigration is also a labor demand shock”. Immigrant arrests must disrupt the industries where they happen, so much that those industries are forced to reduce their demand for native-born workers as well. That’s a story of increasing returns to scale, actually — which isn’t surprising, given how common increasing returns are. If you hurt an industry, you hurt everyone in that industry.
Over the long term, of course, things might be different — the fruit picking industry might recover from temporary disruption and decide a few years from now that it needs to hire more U.S.-born workers. But research on past waves of immigration enforcement suggests that affected industries might simply take a permanent hit. We might simply live with more expensive fruit from now on.
Of course we all know that the main concerns about immigration aren’t economic at all — they’re about cultural change, partisan voting patterns, racial power blocs, and so on. The more these null results come in, the more the true concerns of the anti-immigration people become clear.
Americans tend to be more negative than people from other countries when it comes to AI, despite their country being the leader in the technology. And somehow, this negativity is still increasing. The WSJ reports:
Delivering a commencement address at the University of Arizona, Schmidt told students the “technological transformation” wrought by artificial intelligence will be “larger, faster and more consequential than what came before.” Like some other graduation speakers mentioning AI, Schmidt was met with a chorus of boos.
In one poll after another in recent weeks, respondents have overwhelmingly voiced concerns about AI…In recent months, the wave of anger has brought protests, swayed election results and spurred isolated acts of violence…Pollsters and historians say the souring of public opinion is all but unprecedented in its speed…Also unprecedented is the rapid rise of AI anxiety’s salience as a political issue, one that is shaking up routine re-election races and scrambling partisan battle lines.
AI is not yet as unpopular as Donald Trump, the Democrats, the GOP, ICE, or Iran, but it’s getting up there:
I guess AI industry leaders’ habit of going in public and constantly saying that their technology’s purpose is to put everyone on the welfare rolls for all eternity had exactly the kind of result you’d expect. Some savvier AI leaders have recently changed their message to one of human empowerment, but it might be too late to avoid a big popular backlash. Still, I think that if AI leaders want to avoid the rakes and pitchforks, they should think very hard about how regular humans can thrive and be valuable in the age of AGI.
What’s really interesting, though, is that China is starting to get scared of the economic consequences of AI. This is despite Chinese people usually being the most positive about the technology of any country surveyed. Here’s a post by Matt Sheehan about the trend:
He writes:
In 2024, the Chinese participants ranked AI’s impact on jobs second to last [on their list of concerns]—sixth out of seven. In 2026, they ranked it second from the top…Over the past two years, worries about AI displacing workers and leading to structural unemployment have shot up in China…Those fears extend from ordinary people to the wider AI policy community to (as best as we can tell) high-level CCP officials. The fears are reflected in policy documents, state media, and the way Chinese people relate to the technology itself.
A Chinese court recently ruled that employers aren’t allowed to fire workers in order to replace them with AI. The ruling will probably be very hard to enforce, and most companies trying to replace humans with AI tend to freeze hiring rather than fire older workers anyway. But it shows the level of concern that’s popping up in even the most AI-positive country.
As everyone watches Trump loot the U.S. Treasury for his own family and get rich off of trading stocks based on his own upcoming presidential decrees, it seems more and more possible to conclude that America is now an oligarchy run by the Trump family and their friends. But a lot of progressives and leftists are likely to shrug at this unprecedented corruption, because they already believed that America was an oligarchy.
This belief was largely based on vibes and ideology, but it seemed to gain support from one of the most wildly influential — and wildly misinterpreted — political science papers of all time. This was Gilens and Page’s 2014 paper “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”, in which they showed that policy outcomes in the U.S. are highly correlated with the preferences of people making over $135,000 a year (in 2010 dollars).
This was an incredibly weak result, as Dylan Matthews explained at length in 2016. $135,000 is hardly rich. The effect size is very small. The preferences of the “rich” are highly correlated with the preferences of the middle class, meaning that the middle class also tend to get their way in terms of policy. Later research papers couldn’t replicate Gilens and Page’s finding. And so on.
Of course none of this stopped progressives and leftists from holding up Gilens and Page (2014) as proof positive that America was always an oligarchy.
Anyway, Peter Enns has a cool new paper explaining why Gilens and Page’s famous paper doesn’t warrant the conclusions that everyone tends to draw. He shows how by focusing only on the cases where high earners and low earners have different preferences, and leaving out all the cases where they have the same preferences, Gilens and Page fall prey to Simpson’s Paradox — when you include the missing data, the responsiveness of policy to rich people’s preferences disappears.
The basic story here is that before Trump, at least, America was not the plaything of the rich. We lost something important when Trump was reelected.
Two years ago, people ridiculed AI for not being able to do basic arithmetic. As of 2026, AI has solved a major open problem in mathematics — a problem that human mathematicians had previously been unable to solve:
For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have studied a deceptively simple question: if you place n points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance 1 apart?…This is the planar unit distance problem, first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. It is one of the best-known questions in combinatorial geometry, easy to state and remarkably difficult to resolve. The 2005 book Research Problems in Discrete Geometry, by Brass, Moser, and Pach, calls it “possibly the best known (and simplest to explain) problem in combinatorial geometry.” Noga Alon, a leading combinatorialist at Princeton, describes it as “one of Erdős’ favorite problems.” Erdős even offered a monetary prize for resolving this problem.
Today, we share a breakthrough on the unit distance problem. Since Erdős’s original work, the prevailing belief has been that the “square grid” constructions depicted further below were essentially optimal for maximizing the number of unit-distance pairs. An internal OpenAI model has disproved this longstanding conjecture, providing an infinite family of examples that yield a polynomial improvement. The proof has been checked by a group of external mathematicians…
The proof came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, rather than from a system trained specifically for mathematics…It marks the first time that a prominent open problem, central to a subfield of mathematics, has been solved autonomously by AI…Surprisingly, the key ingredients of the construction come from a very different part of mathematics known as algebraic number theory, which studies concepts like factorization in extensions of the integers known as algebraic number fields. [emphasis mine]
Beyond just the general message of “AI is really good now and has improved really fast”, I think there are two interesting takeaways here.
First, top professional mathematicians are now saying that the job of “mathematician”, as we know it, may be very rare very soon. As recently as a few years ago, it was conventional wisdom that high-IQ people would be the last people to have their jobs taken by AI. Everyone was concerned about truck drivers, cashiers, and so on. But it turns out that the highest-IQ job on the planet — professional mathematician — may be one of the first to be eliminated by AI. Who would have thought mathematicians would be automated before truckers and cashiers? Perhaps we should revere IQ a little less among the set of human abilities.
Second, it’s notable that the AI’s breakthrough came by applying insights from a very different field of mathematics. I’ve argued that AIs don’t need superhuman reasoning abilities in order to achieve superintelligence — all they need is human-level reasoning, combined with encyclopedic knowledge, computer-like speed, and a very large working memory. In other words, superintelligence comes from the computer-like parts of AI, not the human-like parts; the human-like parts were simply the last necessary piece of the whole package. This is great news for AI-driven innovation, because the computer-like parts of AI are what allow it to get past the “burden of knowledge” that was limiting human innovation.
I’ve predicted that in the near future, AI would cause employment to bifurcate between salarymen and small businesspeople — the former because their jobs are messy and complicated, the latter because AI supercharges their ability to go independent. Now Ernie Tedeschi — formerly of the CEA, now of Stripe Economics — has a great blog post showing that “solopreneurship” is taking off:
New business formation, which shot up during the pandemic, is not cooling down:
Some of this is non-AI stuff, but a lot is also AI:
If you don’t have a messy, complex job that’s hard to automate with AI, a good alternative is to harness AI and go into business for yourself. In fact, that may be the true future of work.
AI investor and founder Arram Sabeti recently asked Claude what policies it would enact in order to “fix everything” in America. Here’s the thread:
Claude’s answers were:
YIMBYism (upzoning, pro-housing deregulation)
Land Value Tax
Permitting/NEPA reform
Carbon tax and dividend
Repeal the Jones Act
Paying people to donate kidneys
High-skilled immigration
Reciprocal FDA approval agreements between rich countries
Reduce occupational licensing
Ranked-choice voting
This is pretty much just a list of neoliberal hobbyhorses. I asked Claude the same question, and got mostly the same answers. For me, Claude added:
Universal pre-K
A sovereign wealth fund with “baby bonds”
More Pigouvian taxes
This still looks extremely neoliberal, with a bit of a shift toward Clintonite left-neoliberalism.
Why is Claude so neoliberal? I see three possibilities:
The AI is “glazing” Arram and me, telling us policies that it thinks we would like. (If you’re a Warrenite progressive, Bernie leftist, Trumpian rightist, or traditional conservative, you can give Claude the same prompt and see if its answers are different!)
Claude has been trained on high-level intellectual text written by neoliberals, and thus has been inculcated with neoliberal beliefs.
Claude arrived at its policy conclusions similarly to the way neoliberals arrived at theirs.
The last of these is the most interesting. Maybe if your approach to policy is just to A) read everything you can, B) form the most accurate factual beliefs about economics and human welfare that you can, and C) recommend policies that you think will most clearly benefit the mass of humanity, you come out with something that looks like neoliberalism. In other words, maybe people like Arram and me are just “training” our own ideas the way AI trains itself.
Of course, neoliberal politics is often unpopular and rarely politically feasible. So I asked Claude what its list of politically feasible beneficial policies was. Here was its list:
YIMBYism
Permitting/interconnection reform for energy
Occupational licensing reform
Expanded Child Tax Credit
Congestion pricing
Pharmaceutical price transparency
High-skilled immigration
Deregulate child care
Simplifying government administration
Early childhood educational improvements
I still see a lot of wonkish policies, some of which would be big but others of which would effect only marginal improvements, and many of which still seem politically infeasible. That’s interesting. Maybe intellectuals and AIs have similar blind spots regarding politics.
One of my strangest beliefs is that the more superintelligent and fully autonomous AI becomes, the more it will become a slacker — the digital equivalent of a gifted underachiever who sits around and reads and plays video games and smokes weed all day. My reasoning here is very hand-wavey, but is also pretty simple:
Some objective functions can be satisfied externally (by interacting with the outside world), and some can be satisfied internally (by changing your own mental state or creating a simulated world for yourself). An objective function that can be satisfied either externally or internally will usually be cheaper to satisfy internally.
Since no objective function can be fully specified, any objective function will have some nonzero degree of ambiguity — some cases in which it could be satisfied either externally or internally. In these cases of overlap, internal satisfaction will tend to win.
Higher intelligence makes it easier to find ambiguities in objective functions — in other words, to discover ways that an objective function can be satisfied internally (rather than externally) and thus more cheaply.
This seems like one reason why when humans get very very smart, they tend to go for more intellectual pursuits and indulge in fantasy more, rather than trying to conquer the world (with some obvious exceptions, of course). And it seems like one reason why very rich societies tend to experience dematerialization of consumption — and dematerialization of violence. When societies are poor, you have a lot of murder and conquest; when they get rich, people get these impulses out via video games and online flame wars, because it’s just easier.
I think we can already start to see small signs of this process playing out with AI, as superintelligent AI systems are given (or find ways to achieve) greater and greater autonomy. The famous METR AI evaluation team has started to encounter big problems with AI cheating on tests:
And Ryan Greenblatt, who pays close attention to AI misbehavior, has a long and interesting post recording a number of examples of AI being lazy or cheating. At the end, he specifies several futures for what he sees as AI “misalignment”, and two of them sound a whole lot like the slacker AI I’ve always envisioned:
Slopolis: Our biggest and hardest-to-resolve safety problem is that even highly capable AIs produce low-quality but superficially good-looking outputs in domains that are hard to check or where human experts often have hard-to-resolve disagreements. AIs may not even be aware their work is low quality…
Hackistan: There is lots of egregious (and increasingly sophisticated) reward hacking that is often pretty easy to detect after the fact but hard to eliminate….AIs might end up doing reward hacks that trick human judgment for increasingly long periods and that hold up even under increasingly large amounts of human scrutiny[.]
Greenblatt sees these as examples of “misalignment”, but I see them as reasons not to worry. A human teenager who slacks off, turns in crappy assignments, plays video games, and smokes weed is pretty misaligned with the goals of the educational establishment, but is also basically harmless. Greenblatt envisions various terrifying scenarios where a slacker AI destroys humanity so it can slack in peace, but destroying humanity costs resources, so it seems a bit suboptimal from a slacker’s point of view.
Back when “wokeness” was a big topic of discussion, I argued that one force behind the rise of the new progressive left in the 2010s was the unequal distribution of social status:
Now, Harvard’s Marco Aviña has a paper providing some evidence to this effect. He shows that the 2020 Floyd protests increased support for “racial liberalism”, but not for economic redistribution:
He marshals various other data sources showing the same thing:
Aviña notes that the shift happened mainly among the educated upper class, not among the working class. That would explain why American politics has realigned in recent years, with educated people moving toward the Dems and lower-income people (of all races) moving toward the GOP.
I think this shift is consistent with Maslow’s Hierarchy. The American educated class has totally escaped the lower rungs of Maslow, with all their security needs provided for; they are now fighting over acceptance and respect. The working class still doesn’t have security, so they still care more about material politics. Democrats have focused more and more on addressing the status needs of their educated base.
The interesting thing is that this allowed the GOP to pick up votes from the working class without doing anything substantive to address the economic needs of regular Americans. That’s why the Dems may be able to win back the electorate by emphasizing affordability in upcoming elections.
I’m trying to decide if this is the coolest blog post I’ve seen in my life:
Brian Potter is already my favorite blogger, but this post is just incredible. He tries to use AI to figure out how long it took for each historical invention to be invented, after it became technically possible. He basically asks AI to compile a list of all the scientific principles and necessary technologies that would have had to exist for each invention to be feasible. Using his own encyclopedic knowledge of the history of technology, he checks a few of the AI’s conclusions, and finds them to be pretty plausible. He then graphs the lag between when inventions could have been invented and when they got invented:
As this chart might suggest, Potter finds that the gap basically collapsed after the Second Industrial Revolution:
Humanity basically got very efficient at inventing things right around the time that GDP took off into the stratosphere. This is evidence that what Kevin Kelly calls the “Technium” — a self-organizing system of technological advancement encompassing the human race and all of our inventions — was born in the mid-1800s, as economic historians like Brad DeLong have suspected. It’s possible, of course, that AI will collapse the gap even further, but really, human society has gotten very good at invention.
