• An IRS audit of Donald Trump’s tax returns, which could have cost him more than $100 million, was curiously wiped away in an agreement between the president’s own Justice and Treasury Departments.

• The Justice Department created a $1.8 billion slush fund that the president can use to pay out to his friends, including lawbreaking January 6 rioters.

• The president used his influence over the IRS to guarantee “immunity” from all ongoing tax investigations into his family.

• The Wall Street Journal reported on nearly $1 billion worth of suspicious commodity trades made just minutes before Trump’s social-media posts about the Iran War caused oil prices to plummet, signaling a possible apperance of insider trading tied to the president’s posts.

Again and again, the president has taken the federal government in his hands, turned it upside down like a child’s piggy bank, and smacked it on the side until billions of dollars poured out of the hole in its back. As Republicans excuse his behavior by alleging misdeeds by the other side, I fear that a warped philosophy of amorality is settling over American politics, where fewer people are arguing for universal principles of decency and more people are perfectly comfortable justifying their own side’s uninterrupted immorality by insisting on the enduring presence of a greater evil on the other side.

This is no way to build a world.

After years of conservatives criticizing the left for “virtue signaling”—that is, cravenly performing a version of virtue for public approval—we now have something even worse than its opposite. The president and his allies are not merely vice-signaling. By empowering a figure who is oblivious to virtue and choosing to ignore his crescendoing depravity, we are creating a mode of politics that openly celebrates the death of morality.

This is the age of vicemaxxing. The question is whether this is our new normal—or, I hope, the sort of cultural overreach that shocks our collective conscience and sets the stage for a more decent politics.

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America in the Age of Vicemaxxing

1. People are good

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes that we can discern “the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” by listening to the funny things people say when they argue with one another.

They say things like “that’s my seat, I was here first.” They say “come on, you promised.” They appeal to a moral principle.

What most interests Lewis about these quarrels is that—unless the fight is happening on a playground among cruel children, or in a prison yard among psychopaths—the other person in the fight usually accepts the principle. He rarely says, “I stole this seat because I’m stronger than you,” or “I promised, but promises are for losers.” Rather, the misbehaving person defends his behavior, not by arguing against the standard, but rather by arguing for a “special reason” or excuse to depart from the standard. They say, “I thought you’d gotten up from your seat, and now I’m all settled,” or they claim something has changed since the promise was made.

People behaving badly rarely argue that badness is defensible on its own terms. More often, they argue that the moral standard of goodness broadly applies—just not in this case. To Lewis, the basis of faith and goodness balances on the tip of one idea: Deep down, the soul of humanity is endowed with a glowing kernel of decency, a shared understanding of basic right and wrong.

Some might call this thing herd psychology, or culture. Some might call it evolutionary eusociality, or biology. In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis calls it god. I don’t know what to call it. But what we call it is not so important as the fact that it exists. Morality presses on us, even when we pretend it cannot touch us. It’s there, even when people pretend that they are too special to hear it. Morality feels real, because it is. Goodness exists.

2. Trump is bad

Donald Trump is not immoral. The adjective is close but several letters off. The better word is amoral, and the difference matters. His calamitous sense of narcissistic victimhood means he cannot see principles in the first place, and he encourages those around him to imagine that the principles are fake. Ethics whizz past Trump the way sonar waves and high-pitched dog whistles evade the umwelts of ordinary people. The left-wing writer John Ganz put it this way:

His entire notion of the world comes down to personal relationships and he personalizes every concept and event. If the market goes down, someone is trying to screw you, personally. If it goes up, and you benefit, it’s because you’re smart.

Or consider the testimony of a very different source who came to the exact same conclusion. Here’s Steve Bannon from Michael Wolff’s 2017 bestseller Fire and Fury:

Bannon saw again the essential Trump problem. He hopelessly personalized everything. He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was always trying to one-up you, someone else was always trying to take the limelight. The battle was between you and someone else who wanted what you had.

Fortified within the armor of his amorality, Trump kicked off his second presidency with an astonishing run of ethically indefensible nonsense:

• Taking crypto money from desperate followers, then taking medicine from dying children: In January 2025, Donald Trump launched $TRUMP, a cryptocurrency meme coin, which allowed his family to earn more than $100 million from trading fees even as more than 800,000 investors lost more than $2 billion, making it one of the most nakedly extractive presidential self-enrichment schemes in history. Three days later, the president signed an executive order freezing all U.S. foreign assistance, resulting in the estimated death of more than 500,000 people around the world, most of them children.

• Soliciting billionaire donations in exchange for pardons and tax cuts, while cutting health care for the poor: In March, the Trump family sought an investment from the crypto firm Binance; six months later, the president pardoned the company’s founder Changpeng Zhao, whose conviction of money laundering included one of the largest corporate penalties in history. Two weeks later, Trump pardoned the businessman Trevor Milton, who had been convicted of securities and wire fraud, several months after the Miltons donated millions of dollars to his campaign. Four weeks after that, in April, Trump pardoned the Florida tax offender Paul Walczak soon after his wife attended a $1 million fundraising dinner for the president. In July, Trump signed into law a tax cut that will save the top 0.1 percent of Americans about $300,000 a year. The law includes the largest reduction in health care spending on the poor in American history.

• Gutting government oversight while engaging in blatant corruption: In May, Trump thanked the largest buyers of $TRUMP meme coin with a private dinner at a Virginia golf club without lobbying registrations or an ethics review. Trump has fired the head of the US Office of Special Counsel, the director of the Office of Government Ethics, and more than a dozen inspectors general across federal agencies, after handing the FBI over to a conspiracy theorist and personal friend with no record in law enforcement.

In these paragraphs and juxtapositions, one can see Trumpism for what it is—not so much an ideology, or theory of a political economy, or even a political cause, but rather a pure machine of self-enrichment, one that seeks to maximize glory and income for the president, with a casual indifference or outright hostility toward any life form that doesn’t present itself as a supine resource for the extraction of wealth and power.

To point out that Trump’s lurid corruption has been bad sounds almost pathetic in its understatement. But I am trying to make a more solid point: I believe that the above paragraphs represent the kind of bad and wrong that everybody knows is bad and wrong. And by everybody, I mean not only progressive Boomers neurally tethered to primetime MSNBC but also the entire MAGA electorate. Everybody knows, in some part of their heart, soul, prefrontal cortex, or whatever, that there is no moral explanation possible for the stories I have just offered you.

How does Trump get away with it?

As Lewis writes, extraordinary efforts to bend morality require extraordinary excuses. While Trump himself may be uniquely amoral—Lewis’s frame doesn’t seem to quite touch him—the work of excuse-making falls to his followers. To justify the rise of a kleptocratic king, conservatives have to convince themselves that the threat from Trump’s enemies is so existential that it justifies their own side’s actions.

And so, they do.

In his new book The Political Vise, the Republican operative John Tillman argues that the “radical left” has commandeered America’s leading institutions in a despotic attempt remake the country as a radical woke-socialist dystopia. Like similar conceits—c.f., the Cathedral, “the Flight 93 election”—the construct of The Vise serves the purpose of “imagining the Democrats, not as a rival coalition with opposing policies, but as a unified, impersonal force that is always on the precipice of totalitarian control,” the Atlantic staff writer Jonathan Chait wrote. The imminence of this threat leaves Republicans with no choice: They must “destroy that which threatens to destroy them”—and at all costs.

Any time I raise the issue of Trump’s corruption online, the first response is invariably something along the lines of “but Biden was also bad.” This is not a tendency limited to online posting. It’s the standard response among Republican defenders of the administration:

• Asked about the president pardoning January 6 rioters, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) said: “Look at Biden and his pardons. Are you kidding me?”

• Asked about Trump using his presidency to become a cryptocurrency scion, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters, “I’ll talk to you only about [Biden’s] pardons.”

• Asked on CNBC about conflicts of interest in the family business, Eric Trump said, “Wwe’re far from Hunter Biden.”

The reasoning “…but Biden was also bad” does not make contact with an ethical principle. It is a moral blank check made out to the administration that promises to cover the cost of any transgression. The presumption that the evils of our enemies can justify any indecency is the opposite of a moral principle. “I think anyone who follows politics can tell there are no principles left in my party,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said. “Even for people who agree with some of the stuff the president is doing, if you are honest with yourself, you know it is not based on principle.”

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3. The post-virtue style of politics

In his book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that the modern world had lost the shared moral language once provided by virtue systems, such as religion. Several months ago, I sat with a reading group to discuss the opening chapters of the book and admitted that I didn’t quite get it. “Were our ancestors really so virtuous?” I said. “If past generations of institutionalized racism, misogyny, bigotry, and violence possessed a language of virtue, of what use is that language?” I still think I was right about the egregious sins of our parents and grandparents. But I now think that MacIntyre was right, too, and it took a dash of C. S. Lewis to see just how right. In this distrustful, anti-establishment, post-institutional age, too many public conversations about right and wrong excuse the behavior of preferred groups rather than articulate a theory of virtue that extends across all groups.

Several weeks ago, the New York Times rocked the Internet with a controversial interview with the commentator Hasan Piker and the journalist Jia Tolentino, in which they described and tacitly defended the practice of stealing small things from big corporations. Tolentino admitted to pocketing a few lemons from Whole Foods, and Piker approved.

It would be absurd to equate the substance of these comments with Trump’s corruption; a snagged Whole Foods lemon is not a $1.8 billion pot of public funds to dole out to lawbreaking rioters. I am not interested in piling onto the personal attacks that followed this conversation so much as I want us to listen closely to the precise way they talked about virtue. “The rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I?” the interviewer Nadja Spiegelman said. “I’m pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers,” Piker said.

Do you hear it? Surely, C. S. Lewis’s ears would have perked up. It’s special excuses all the way down. Rather than begin with a universal imperative (“Stealing is bad, and it would be bad if everyone stole all the time”), followed by a personal decision (“therefore, I don’t steal”), joined by a public policy recommendation (“therefore, I expect others in society to do the same”), you have a series of private justifications for bad behavior, each excused by the fact that some larger societal force is also bad. Instead of “I Play By the Rules, So I Expect the Rich to Do the Same,” the article’s headline offered the perfect inversion: “The Rich Don’t Play By the Rules, So Why Should I?” Out with universalist ethics, and in with individualist excuses for doing what you want.

I am not lumping Tolentino, Piker, and Spiegelman into the same bucket as the spineless corruption-excusers who sit in Congress. I am rather asking that we hear the similarities in the formal logic of their statements: the in-group’s bad behavior is justified so long as the out-group’s behavior is appropriately condemned.

My fear is that the post-virtue style of politics is here to stay. The moral blank check of “we don’t have to argue for our cause, so long as we can argue that our counterparty is worse” might prove too tantalizing for the next generation of conservatives, centrists, liberals, and leftists to resist when they hold the reins of power.

Another way is possible. In April, the political writer Isaac Saul, who has exhaustively documented Trump’s corruption, published an essay entitled “Decency is about to make a comeback.” “Obscenity feels like it has become the norm,” Saul wrote. But just as culture is the continual handoff between trend and countertrend—he notes that the death of malls seems to be reversing itself—perhaps the lurid corruption of our age will inspire a countermovement that successfully returns government to the rule of law. Like a rubber band pulled all the way back, maybe the tensions within vicemaxxing politics will spring us forward in the opposite direction.

What would a revolution of decency look like? I don’t know. I am not ready to predict the imminence of a new social gospel that extends itself across American life. I am only ready to hope for it.

Like Lewis, I think that people know good and bad. A right society cannot build itself on a pile of wrongs, and a country cannot stand on a heap of special excuses that reserve for every insider the right to misbehave on account of some external sin. Maybe one day, when enough people get tired of making excuses for the inexcusable, some leader or group will say the thing that nobody currently wants to say: “We are better than this.” And maybe it will feel good to hear it, too, because it is the rarest thing: the truth.

Why has the number of births declined everywhere, all at once?

This was the subject of last week’s Plain English episode and a new blockbuster report from the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch. In fact it feels like just about everybody has been taking a crack at this question recently.

Some blame it on technology. One week ago, my feed was flooded with a viral video of Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, speaking about the sterilizing effects of modern technology. Among his friends, “no one’s having kids,” said Leahy, who was 30 at the time. “Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?” If you asked Leahy what the explanation was, “my answer is technology,” he said. “My answer is social media. My answer is AI.”

Others blame a kind of 21st century weltschmerz—a world sadness about the state of the world and our uncertain future in it. A long essay in the New York Times by Anna Louie Sussman, entitled “Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All,” an excerpt from her forthcoming book Inconceivable, argued that we have “overlooked” the pervasive sense of existential uncertainty among young adults. Between climate change, rising housing costs, political instability, AI, inflation chaos, doomscrolling, and declining social trust, today’s generation is too anxious about the future to make the irreversible commitment of having a child.

So who is right? Is this about phones and technology, or is it a reflection of modern anxiety about the world? Or, perhaps, both?

I always like to begin my analysis of the subject here: Any complete and responsible explanation of this phenomenon cannot begin in the 21st century and should never pretend that this is some tragedy brought about by exclusively terrible things. Birthrates have been declining in developed countries for a long time, as child mortality has declined; as women’s education has increased; as female labor force participation has soared; as modern contraception has proliferated; and as modern notions of feminism have empowered women to take more control over their bodies and their economic futures. And birthrates have continued to decline around, or even accelerated in their downturn in developed countries, as smartphone usage has surged; as housing prices of increased; as time spent at home on the Internet has grown; and as socialization and coupling have declined.

The decline is accelerating faster than almost anybody predicted. As Burn-Murdoch reported, UN demographers predicted that there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023; the real figure came in at 230,000—a whopping 50 percent miss. The total fertility rate has fallen below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman in almost every country in North America, South America, Europe, and Southern and Eastern Asia. It’s falling swiftly in most African countries. And birthrates might be set to crash in China. In the 2026 paper “The Rise of Zero Fertility Desire in China,” a Brown University researcher reported that according to the China General Social Survey, the share of young women with “no desire for children” increased from approximately 5 percent in 2012 to 47 percent in 2023.

The epicenters of the baby bust will surprise many people. Europe has a higher fertility rate than Thailand. Tokyo has a higher fertility than Mexico City, Bogotá, or Santiago. China may already a lower fertility rate than Japan.

“Only two things are important right now in life: fertility and deep learning,” the University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde said at the conclusion of a recent lecture. “Everything else is noise. Once you start thinking about these, it’s hard to start thinking about anything else.”

In today’s interview, Fernández-Villaverde explains:

• Demographics 101: Defining total fertility rate, replacement rate, and momentum

• Why the world has probably already passed “peak child”

• Why 2023 was the first year in human history that the global fertility rate likely fell below the replacement rate

• Why the question “why is the birthrate declining?” is so hard to answer quickly

• Why most people underrate the long-term effects of low birthrates on world affairs

• The compounding effects of sub-replacement level fertility: “If Thailand keeps its current fertility rate of 0.8 for the next 200 years without immigration, its population will decline from 63 million to 2 million.”

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WHY DOES FERTILITY MATTER, AT ALL?

Derek Thompson: Why is fertility important?

Fernández-Villaverde: Because demographics is destiny. The number of children born today will determine how our society will look in 30 to 40 years. The year 2023 was a unique year in the history of humanity, because it’s the first time our total fertility rate as a planet fell below replacement rate. That has never happened before in 200,000 years. That means the world population will peak in another 30 years or so if the trend continues. Some things will be good, some will not be so good.

Thompson: Tell me what replacement level means and what total fertility rate means.

Fernández-Villaverde: Let’s start with replacement, which is the easiest. Imagine you have a population of one million people. How many children need to be born for that population to be constant at one million in the long run? It turns out that for every woman in that population, you need 2.1 kids.

Why 2.1 and not 2.0? Two reasons. First, there are a little more boys born than girls, around 105 boys for every 100 girls, if you don’t do anything like selective abortions. Second, not all girls who are born will move on to become mothers themselves. They will die of accidents or other reasons before they enter their fertile ages. So you need every woman to have 2.1 kids on average to keep population constant. That’s the replacement rate.

The total fertility rate is an estimate of how many children women will have in a given population. When we look at the U.S. right now, the fertility rate is around 1.57. That means the average American woman is having 1.57 kids. Because the replacement rate is 2.1, a way to think about it is that we have a shortfall of slightly over 0.5 kids. There is a subtlety I want the audience to understand. The total fertility rate is an estimate. It’s slightly different from what we call completed fertility. Completed fertility is when I go back to women who are already 50 years old and see how many kids they actually had. The problem with completed fertility, which is what we really care about in the very long run, is that by definition it takes decades before we can compute it. So if we are going to make any forecast about the future, we cannot rely on completed fertility.

Thompson: In your Miami speech, you said “peak child” might already be behind us. I want you to explain what that means and why, if peak child is already behind us, the global population isn’t already falling.

Fernández-Villaverde: Let me start with the second and come back to the first. In demography there is something called momentum.

Momentum means the population will keep growing for 15 to 30 years after you fall below the replacement rate. Let me give a simple example. Imagine you have a spouse and only one kid. You are below replacement rate, but you are two. You have two parents, your spouse has two parents. You are not replacing yourselves, but your parents have not died yet. The fact that you have one kid still increases the population. The problem is when your parents die, we have not replaced them.

During the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of women were born on the planet. They had their kids in the 2010s, and that’s why the population is still growing. The grandparents of these girls have not died yet. What will happen is that when these grandparents, the generation born in the 1950s and 1960s, start dying, that’s when the population goes down. The analogy I love to use: think about a gigantic oil tanker. When you start changing the direction of the oil tanker, it has so much momentum that it takes time before it turns, but it is already cooked in. The number of children on the planet has been going down since around 2012. It’s just that their grandparents have not died yet.

And then the first point: yes, as a planet we are below replacement rate. We are not producing enough kids to keep the population constant. There are countries like the U.S. and Western Europe for which we have very good data. There are countries in Sub-Saharan Africa where the data is not so good. So all of this is done with some degree of uncertainty. I’m pretty sure it was 2023, but it may be the case that in 10 years, where we have slightly better data, it may have been 2022 or 2024. The big picture doesn’t change if it is one year up or another. Everything we observe is that fertility on the planet is continuing to go down very fast. In 2024, fertility was below 2023, and in 2025 it was below 2024. My educated forecast is that we are going to continue seeing this drop in fertility for the next 20 to 30 years, nearly for sure.

Thompson: Given your educated estimate, what is the decade when the global population will start its structural decline?

Fernández-Villaverde: At this moment, I would say 2055. In 2055, the world population will start going down.

WHO WAS WRONG?

Thompson: If you go back to the 1960s and 1970s, it was common for public intellectuals to predict the global population would rise and rise until the environment buckled and we suffered ecological disaster and widespread famine that wiped out billions of human souls. That has not happened. Global fertility has declined significantly. It’s falling faster than practically anybody predicted, certainly folks like Paul Ehrlich, author of the infamous book The Population Bomb. Why do you think these so-called experts were both so confident and so wrong?

Fernández-Villaverde: The wording of your question already tells you a lot about the answer, because you used the word “public intellectual.” You didn’t use the word “demographers.”

I’m a professor at Penn, and we have—sorry to brag—what I think is one of the best demographics groups in the world. Had you gone to our population study center in 1968 or 1969 and asked professional demographers what they thought about Ehrlich’s book, they would have probably said, “Eh!” Ehrlich, who was not a demographer, was very good at tapping into a lot of the anxieties people had at the time. I reread the book two years ago, and what surprised me is that all this vocabulary we have introduced is not to be found there. He never wants to define carefully what replacement rate is. He never wants to define carefully what total fertility rate is. He uses the term “birth rate.” The birth rate is the number of children born per 1,000 population. Birth rates are seriously affected by the momentum effects I mentioned before. I would argue the book was not very good at the time, and what a lot of the public intellectuals were saying was not really what the best demographers were saying.

Thompson: I want to push back. It’s not that I want to defend Ehrlich, but rather I want to be clear that your research also seems to disagree strongly with expert demographers today. You’ve said that you think the United Nations is over-estimating the total fertility rate of many countries. Why are today’s experts wrong?

Fernández-Villaverde: You need to understand that the incentives you have when you are putting numbers on the table at a university and at a public policy institution are very different. I’m a professor. Short of me saying something absolutely outrageous and hateful, my dean is not going to complain. My dean is only going to say, “If you think this is what the data says, I’m happy with you.”

But when you’re at a public policy institution, you have to follow an institutional framework, and you need to stick with the party line. The Population Division of the United Nations was created because there was a serious concern that we were having a population bomb. It is true, and I want to hedge a little bit what I was saying about Ehrlich, that fertility was very high in the 1950s and 1960s. What demographers were saying then, which Ehrlich did not, is that fertility was likely to start going down, that it was not such an abysmal thing as Ehrlich was saying.

It’s very difficult for an institution that has spent 60 years saying we had a population bomb to wake up and say, “There is no population bomb.” It’s costly in terms of institutional prestige. It’s costly in terms of communication. It’s costly in terms of even the people working there, who were very committed to a narrative. If you actually look at the UN’s projections, they have been dialing down a lot of their statements about population over the last decade.

In fact, the UN has three scenarios: low fertility, middle fertility, high fertility. My scenario and their low fertility scenario are on top of each other. It’s not that I’m very far away from the UN. We are already fighting about the second decimal. The problem is that these things, even at the second decimal, accumulate over half a century.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING IN SO MANY DIFFERENT COUNTRIES AT THE SAME TIME?

Thompson: I think a lot of people believe falling fertility is mostly a rich country phenomenon. But you point out that’s a misconception. Total fertility rate is lower than the U.S. in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Thailand. If we want to understand why this is happening at a global level, and global synchronized phenomena like this are rare, where do we begin?

Fernández-Villaverde: There are several hypotheses on the table, and I’m going to list them in what I think is their relative importance.

First, there’s been a huge change in social norms worldwide. This probably has a lot to do with social media and cell phones. People watch a TV show about how people live in California or New York, and they say, “Why not something like that for me?” TV changed a little bit of social norms, but Internet, TikTok, X is really a completely different ballgame. In particular, this has mattered a lot in countries where there is not a lot of gender balance in social norms. If you’re in a country like South Korea, or in many Latin American countries, where household work allocation is very unequal, suddenly a lot of younger women are looking at the world and saying, “Why am I going to be working for my husband 24 hours a day?” Social media has really changed that perception.

Second, we have moved to an economy that is much more service-based. Service-based economies, even in India and Africa, mean people don’t work in factories that much anymore, or even in agriculture. They work in shops, they work in offices. Those are jobs much easier for women to have because they don’t depend on physical strength. In Mexico, Brazil, or Colombia, if you are a woman 22 or 23 years old with a decent job in the service sector, and a guy comes to you and tells you, “If we get married, I’m going to be the macho in the home, ruling everything, you are going to work for me all the time, and we are going to have three kids,” you tell the guy, “No.”

Third is what I have called the educational arms race. It used to be the case that a high school degree was the pathway to middle-class life. Those times are gone. Now sometimes not even a college degree is enough for a middle-class life. You need a master’s degree or some postgraduate education. People are staying much longer in school. They are marrying or forming partnerships much later in life. When they are thinking about their kids, they understand they will need to maintain their kids and educate their kids for many, many years. This is particularly true in Asia, in China, Korea, and Japan, where [there is pressure for] your kid to excel in high school and college. Those are the countries with the lowest fertility rates.

The last is housing. In many countries, not in all, housing is at historical heights in relative price. That also limits the ability of families to have more children.

Thompson: Let me summarize what I’m hearing and offer my own framework.

You’re saying that media—phones, the internet, television—have globalized Western values and in particular globalized Western feminism, which has empowered women to determine their own fertility. The ability, the freedom, and the power of women to determine their own fertility has, in country after country, pulled total fertility rate from seven, six, five to around two or one. That’s happened around the world. You also brought in economics: moving from an agrarian to a manufacturing to a services economy might have its own natural effect on lowering total fertility rate, and the cost of housing might also move total fertility rate at the margins.

Two other issues I want to put on the table. First, contraception. Second, socialization rates in the West and throughout East Asia have gone down. People socialize less, they couple up less.

When you put all of this together, having kids has gone from being a necessity or a predestination to a choice. Once having children feels like a social or cultural choice, that rules in other questions such as “can we afford more children?” People were having seven, eight kids when it was difficult for them to afford a house, when they had no money, when food and clothing and home costs were their entire budget, and there was no money left over for pet care and spa days. They were still having seven or eight kids. When economic and cultural norms required high fertility rates, having children wasn’t a choice in the first place. Now it is. In America, you can get married and not have children and still basically live a completely normal economic and social and cultural life.

So I wonder how you feel about this cultural argument that a series of technological and economic and social changes essentially flipped a switch where having children used to be a necessity and a predestination, and now it is a choice.

Fernández-Villaverde: At the very basic level, I fully agree. My PhD dissertation in 2001 was basically an exploration of this mechanism. That’s why I already forecasted back in 2001 that fertility was going to drop a lot. But if you stopped the Jesús of 2001 and told him Colombia’s fertility was 2.8 or 3 then, and asked me where I thought Colombia’s fertility would be in 2026, given all these mechanisms, I would have probably said 1.8, 1.7.

What the Jesús of 2001 would have been enormously surprised by is that it’s not 1.8 or 1.7. It’s 1.1.

Let me put it this way. A fertility of 1.9 basically means most people are having two kids, which is your idea of the perfect suburban family: a boy and a girl, a nice house, and a few people who don’t have kids. A total fertility rate of 1 is really a situation where many, many women only have one kid, and a lot of women have zero. That’s what has surprised me, that we have not gone from seven to two. We have gone down much, much further.

You were mentioning contraception. The US was around 1.9 in 2000. There was lots of contraception in the US in 2000. And in 2000, the U.S. was already a service-based economy. It was already a world where women were empowered, maybe not as much as today, but not very different from today. So why have we gone from the 1.9 of 2000 to the 1.57 of today? That is the mystery.

Thompson: I like that. I haven’t quite thought about it that way: there’s one set of explanations that can explain why total fertility rate in a country might go from five to two, but you might need a separate set of explanations that explain why fertility would go from two, roughly replacement level, to one, a situation where the population is halving itself every few decades.

THE MOST SURPRISING STATISTIC

Thompson: Where is the most surprising fertility collapse in the world?

Fernández-Villaverde: Latin America. If you ask which is the main continent right now undergoing an amazing demographic revolution in terms of fertility collapse that is not covered in the mainstream media, it’s Latin America.

Let me give my favorite example: Guatemala. I love Guatemala. I have many good friends from Guatemala. But Guatemala was not really a shining example of development in Central America. Around 2006 or 2007, I’m quoting from memory, Guatemala had a fertility rate of 3.9, basically the fertility rate of a Sub-Saharan African country. Last year, it was probably around 1.9, 1.8. The fact that in 20 years Guatemala has cut in half its total fertility rate is mind-blowing. At the current speed, Guatemala will have a lower fertility rate than non-Hispanic whites in five years.

Let me give another statistic, now coming to the U.S. The fertility rate of African Americans fell in 2024 below the fertility rate of non-Hispanic whites for the first time since the creation of the Republic. The fertility rate of African Americans was always quite higher, stayed high for quite a long time, and then started going down. The fertility rate of non-Hispanic whites also went down, but the fertility rate of African Americans went down much faster. At some moment in the first quarter of 2024, the lines crossed. If you are asking which are the groups with the lowest fertility rates in the US, my answer would be African Americans, which is completely different from what a lot of the discourse is. Who is having kids in the US? Rich white suburban families. Who is not having kids in the US? Poor African American urban families.

These are the fundamental changes that are hard to explain with a naive, “We went from agriculture where in my farm I needed seven kids to living in a city where I only have two.” That explanation is perfectly fine. That’s what my dissertation was about. Why suddenly in Colombia and Guatemala, in Chile, in Bolivia, in Brazil, have people decided to stop having kids so quickly?

The second region in the world where fertility is collapsing incredibly fast is North Africa and the Middle East. Morocco is already below replacement rate. Tunisia is very low. Egypt is falling incredibly fast. All across the Middle East, fertility is falling very, very fast. Those are the countries that will not come to mind. But coming back to the beginning of the answer, Latin America is really the poster child of, “I don’t have a very good explanation for this.”

HOW FERTILITY SHAPES THE FUTURE

Thompson: I want to move on to implications. Before I do, I want to say clearly that when we discuss the reasons for declining fertility around the world, we listed a set of reasons that combined negative motivators, like affordability and lack of housing, with things I think are objectively good. More education for women is good. More freedom for women is good. I’m very pro-contraception. I’m very pro-access to contraception. So the reasons for the decline of fertility are a mix of, I think, quite clearly good things and arguably bad things. Similarly, the implications of the decline of fertility combine both upsides and downsides. Let’s talk about the upsides first.

Fernández-Villaverde: First and foremost, we can ease the pressure on natural resources. In a world where population doesn’t grow or where population starts going down, we will consume less energy, or the growth of energy consumption will be smaller. We don’t need to build that many highways. We don’t need to build that many new dams. We don’t need to extract that many minerals. That’s good for the environment.

Second, it will help us redesign a lot of cities across the world. Cities, especially in emerging economies, grew very fast from the 1960s to today, and the result is not very pretty. You may go to a Latin American city and it has a pretty colonial center, which is where tourists go and take photographs and take a TikTok video. But when you go to the places where the average person lives, they are not great. If we have much lower population pressure, we don’t need to build as fast as we did in the 1960s and 1970s. I’m originally from Madrid in Spain. A lot of the residential neighborhoods in Madrid are ugly. People don’t see those when they come to visit Madrid, but they are really ugly, because in the 1960s and 1970s when population was growing very fast, you had to build these horrible high-rises just to put people under a roof. We are not going to need those ugly high-rises. We can demolish them. We can redesign our cities, have much more livable cities, medium density, places that are much more pleasant to live.

And then, if people are not having kids because they don’t think it’s in their best interest, who am I to complain? I’m an economist, and economists tend to have, by default, a slightly libertarian view of life. If this is what you want to do, that’s what you want to do.

Thompson: What are the downsides?

Fernández-Villaverde: We need to adapt, and adaptation can be costly. The obvious thing that comes to mind is Social Security. Everything related to retirement benefits, Social Security payments, the equivalent of Medicare and similar health programs for the elderly across the world, that’s going to impose a tremendous amount of cost on the planet. But also you are going to start being forced to close primary schools. The school district here in Philadelphia, where I live, was just forced to announce a couple of weeks ago that they are closing a lot of primary schools because there are no kids. That’s a serious disruption for a lot of local communities. Many parts of Philadelphia do not have such a nice environment as they could have, and the local school not only plays the role of an educational institution. It also plays the role of a social club. You use the gym for a lot of social events. Now that the school is closed, you are not going to have the gym to do social events. That causes a lot of disruption. You will be forced to close hospitals. You will be forced to close a lot of other public services.

Finally, if fertility really stays at 1 or 1.1 for a long time, I don’t think we appreciate how big a change this is. Now I’m going to make a crazy forecast, and I want everyone to understand this is a crazy forecast. Let’s suppose Thailand keeps its current fertility rate of 0.8 for 200 years. Thailand right now has 63 million people. At the end of 200 years, it will be around two million people.

Thompson: Sorry, two million?

Fernández-Villaverde: Two million. How do you wind down a society of 63 million people into two million? When population starts falling a lot, countries may do crazy subsidies for having kids, things can change. Maybe the people who are still having kids tend to have more kids and they grow as a share of the population. All those things can happen. I’m just highlighting that these things compound over time. You are going from a society that has 63 million people to a society that has two million. It means you need to close 98% of the hospitals of the country. It means you need to close 98% of the schools of the country.

Thompson: What’s the population of Philadelphia?

Fernández-Villaverde: Philadelphia is around one and a half million right now, maybe a little less.

Thompson: One and a half million is not so different from two million. You’re talking about the nation of Thailand having a population in 200 years that’s a little larger than the city of Philadelphia. It’s not even possible for me to comprehend.

Fernández-Villaverde: Exactly. People have the idea this is going to be about closing some hospitals. No, this is not about closing some hospitals. This is about closing 98% of the hospitals.

Thompson: Or it is about closing hospitals in the next five years. But you’re saying this is a phenomenon that’s like a tectonic plate.

Fernández-Villaverde: Exactly.

Thompson: It’s going to keep moving. History is going to play out on top of that tectonic plate. And if it doesn’t stop moving for 100, 200 years, you have a situation where Thailand becomes Philadelphia.

I want to keep pulling on this thread because this conversation reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend Rob Meyer, who’s the editor-in-chief of Heatmap. We were talking about climate change. He said, “Derek, the problem with climate change, the most interesting problem of climate change, the most significant problem of climate change, is not the fact that temperature goes up. It’s the second and third-order effects. Temperatures going up increase the likelihood of famines. A famine in Syria creates a population flow into the Mediterranean. That creates a refugee crisis at the borders of European countries. That creates an immigration influx into Germany under Angela Merkel. That creates a populist backlash across Central Europe.”

After just four easy steps, and this is not a hypothetical, this happened 10 or 15 years ago, a phenomenon that sounds like it’s about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is actually about the rise of populism in Europe. Taking that as inspiration, I wonder whether there are other knock-on effects that you and other demographers thinking in the span of decades and centuries worry about. One quick example to me would be a lot of modern liberalism is built on the presumption of positive-sum interactions. But a positive-sum philosophy requires growth. In a world without growth, my earning more income is not positive-sum. I’m taking income from somebody else because it’s a zero-sum environment. A world where population is declining and productivity is not increasing is a world where GDP growth on a year-to-year basis is something like zero to negative 0.5%. You’re talking about a permanent stagnation or recession. That’s a world of zero-sum growth, and that’s a world where a lot of values I consider positive liberalism are no longer feasible because in some cases they might not be true. So without necessarily endorsing that particular fear, what do you see as some of the more interesting or scary second-order effects?

Fernández-Villaverde: Let me give an example that is a very close analog. Let me take Spain because I know it very well. We have had very low fertility for a long time. That means our Social Security payments have ballooned, which means the younger population needs to pay a tremendous amount of taxes to sustain that elder population. People are not happy about it. People are saying, “I’m happy to pay 25% of my income in taxes to pay for Social Security, but I’m not happy to pay 50%.” It’s not that I want to pay zero, but I don’t want to work half of my day just to pay taxes. In Spain right now, there are two conservative parties. Europe is slightly different from the US because we have proportional representation, while the US has first past the vote. In political systems with proportional representation, political change happens by the appearance of new parties. We have a mainstream Conservative Party, which would be the Republican Party of the Mitt Romneys, George Bush father, your country-club Republican, who likes to talk about lowering taxes and breaking investment. And there is a radical right-wing party, and this radical right-wing party is, among other things, about these redistribution issues you are mentioning.

Look at all the electorate in Spain that votes right, and divide it between those under 50 and those above 50. Those under 50, the radical party is the larger party by a very long margin. Those above 50, the country-golf-club Conservative is the dominant party. It’s not just a little difference. If you go for those under 25, no one under 25 is voting for the mainstream Conservative Party, and no one over 65 is voting for the radical right-wing party. The demographic change and the pressure this has put on the Spanish government budget basically means the way right-wing votes in Spain have allocated has changed drastically, and that has completely changed the policy of Spain among tons of things.

Thompson: It also seems to me that the politics of immigration become a significant and unavoidable part of sustaining the welfare state, because what do you need to sustain a welfare state? You need taxable income. Where does the income come from? It comes from people. And if you’re running out of people, you need to import people, and that’s called immigration. But in my experience as someone who lives thousands of miles away from Europe, it seems to me like practically every country that allows immigrants to become a certain share of their population almost always has a populist backlash. I’m not rooting for that outcome. It’s just what I often see.

It means you’re stuck in this almost like a Chinese finger trap, where you need to increase taxable income on the one hand, but doing so in a low-fertility environment can only require either slashing Social Security or adding immigrants. But adding immigrants increases populism. Slashing Social Security creates another backlash. So you find yourself in an environment where there is no long-term popular solution to your political problems. That’s what I see as an outsider.

Fernández-Villaverde: Exactly. When I talk about these problems, someone always raises their hand and says, “Yeah, we will just bring in a few immigrants and that will fix the problem.” Let’s go back to the example of Japan. Japan right now is around 98% ethnically Japanese. If we wanted to keep the population of Japan constant in 200 years through immigration, in 200 years Japan will be 5% Japanese and 95% non-Japanese. This is not about bringing in a few immigrants. This is about changing your country. That country will not be Japan. You may say, “I’m perfectly fine. I’m not attached to the idea of Japan in the abstract.” But I can see a lot of Japanese say, “This is not about being a xenophobe. This is not about being anti-immigrant. This is about not having a country anymore.”

Let me give a concrete example. In Spain, in addition to Spanish, we have regional languages like Catalan. The problem is Catalonia is getting a lot of immigrants. The immigrants are not Catalan speakers. Their kids may learn Catalan in school, but they don’t speak Catalan. Given the current level of immigration, Catalan, I have forecast, is doomed as a language. It will not exist. Some people will always speak it in a small village in the mountains, but as a working language of day-to-day life, Catalan is doomed. You see it in all the statistics. Look at people under 25, look at people under 30, very clearly the language is dying. If you’re a native Catalan speaker, this is existential. So this is not about being anti-immigrant because I’m a nasty guy. This is not about being racist. This is just about saying, “Don’t I have a right to my language to still exist?” I’m an immigrant myself, so it’s not that I’m against immigration. But like everything, it needs to be within a reasonable degree.

Thompson: You’re making what seems to be an almost mathematical point. A population that does not replace itself with fertility will either die off or find itself replaced by people born in another country. There’s no other way for the math to work out. This is why over the centuries, low fertility becomes not just a numbers problem, not just an economic problem, not just a welfare-state taxation problem, but a political problem and a cultural problem.

You said only two things that matter in the world. We’ve spent 99% of this episode on one of them, fertility. The other one is deep learning, AI. If Korea’s total fertility rate is 1.0 or below in the 2020s, 2030s, and 2040s, its population is going to be shrinking fast by the 2050s and 2060s. But AI also benefits from this principle of scale. This technology that in 2022 often failed to do basic arithmetic is now identifying cybersecurity vulnerabilities better than the best coders in the world. How do these trends intersect?

Fernández-Villaverde: They intersect to some degree, but not as much as sometimes people think. Let me tell you where you are absolutely right. If thanks to artificial intelligence and robotics, a lot of jobs can be done by computers and robots, and that generates a lot of economic growth and that helps us to pay for Social Security, that will make the transition much easier. I’m a bit of a techno-optimist in that sense, and I’m glad this is happening. I think it’s going to give us more degrees of freedom to adapt our society.

But coming back to my point before, this is just not about GDP. My wife and I love to go to a small village in England to spend some time on vacation. It’s a lovely English village. They recently closed the local pub because of population decline. The problem is the local pub in an English village is not just the place you go for a beer. It’s the place where you meet your neighbors. It’s the social gathering place of the village. How are you going to substitute that with artificial intelligence?

That’s what worries me. A lot of the things that make us human are not about being able to produce a lot of widgets with robots. It’s about our social interactions. Thinking again about Thailand, if we are going to be two and a half million, we pretty much need to abandon most of the country and make it empty, because to run things like hospitals you need scale. So we are going to abandon 90% of the country and leave it to the wild side. Artificial intelligence is not going to be able to do much about that. Those are the challenges I don’t think people quite appreciate. I’m a techno-optimist. I love artificial intelligence. I do a lot of artificial intelligence in my own work. But we need to be careful about what it can and cannot deliver in terms of fertility.

In this edition, I’m trying something a bit more ambitious. I’ve organized the morsels of information under several themes—let’s call them: “megatrends”—that define the 2026 news cycle and that I think will continue to shape the world in the months, and years, to come.

Today’s megatrends span economics, health, artificial intelligence, culture, politics, and media. Free subscribers will get to read the first two megatrends, on economics and health—plus a “historical interlude” that was too interesting to leave out. Only paid subscribers will get to read more about the state of AI, a paradox in politics, and an eerie new trend in the media.

Megatrend #1: CULTURE
The Anti-Social Century

A little announcement that probably won’t be surprising to folks who’ve followed my work in the last year: I’ve signed a contract for my next book, and it will be about the ideas I’ve worked on for the last year that I’ve been calling “the anti-social century.” I see this as a natural follow-up to Abundance. If abundance is a critique of, and solution for, the problems of material flourishing—how do we build homes, reduce energy costs, power technology, and invent scientific breakthroughs, all of which can make people’s lives easier and better?—the anti-social century addresses the cultural, or “post-material,” problems that are often beyond the scope of political economy. The last few years have seen an astonishing decline in happiness and sociality in the U.S., which has coincided with a rise in alone time, anxiety, mental distress, and a toxic form of individualism that I described in “The Monks in the Casino.” I want to better understand how this happened and what “we”—at the level of individuals and institutions—can do to fix it.

1. Life as “time spent with.” One of my favorite graphs from the miraculous Our World in Data site is this breakdown of how the typical American spends their day between the ages of 15 and 80. One way to read this chart is that time spent with our parents peaks in our late teen years; time spent with friends peaks in our early 20s; time spent with coworkers peaks in our mid- to late-20s; time spent with our children peaks in our 30s and 40s; time spent with our partners peaks in our 60s and 70s, and time spent alone increases steadily as we get older. One way to think about the anti-social century is that it is a kind of society-wide conspiracy to increase alone time, due to a phalanx of forces that are reducing time spent with practically everybody who isn’t “just me.”

1. Time spent with partners, children, coworkers, and friends declines as Americans couple less, have fewer children, work alone, and spend less time with friends. Partner time declines as Americans are dating and marrying less. While parents are spending more time with their children, fewer Americans are having kids in the first place. Between 1976 and 2024, the share of women 40-44 years old without children increased by 80 percent and the share of “never married” women increased by more than 50 percent. With the rise of remote work and sole proprietor firms, or one-person startups, there is less time spent among coworkers. As for teenage friendship, the numbers are dire. The share of 12th graders who “ever go on dates” has declined by 47 percent since the 1980s; the share who “visit friends weekly” has declined 22 percent; and the share who “go to monthly parties” is down 40 percent, according to the Institute for Family Studies.

Put it all together and Americans are spending more time alone than in any period for which we have good data. This is especially true for young Americans, who have historically been the most social group.

3. There are many forces to blame, but just for now, let’s blame American parenting. According to the Institute for Family Studies, one in ten teenagers isn’t allowed to leave the house without an adult companion, and 80 percent aren’t allowed to leave the neighborhood without an adult. The latchkey generation of kids who came and went without supervision gave way to a helicopter model of intensive parenting and strictly guarded childhood. Homebound and phone-bound, today’s adolescents and teens spend more time in their rooms and less time playing with friends than any cohort ever studied.

3. There are some reasons to be optimistic. I see more people paying attention to the problem of solitude and thinking about socializing as social fitness—something that you “should” do not only because it’s fun but also because it’s physically and neurologically good for you. I’m also seeing more policies to increase socializing. If the last 20 years has been an uncontrolled experiment to roll out phones to children without much care for how it would affect their mental health, we might be in a new phase of controlled experiments to deprive young people of those same devices. A giant study of school phone bans published in April found that “lockable phone pouches” did not significantly improve school attendance or self-reported classroom attention, while average effects on test scores were “consistently close to zero,” with high schools seeing modest positive effects. That all sounds rather dispiriting. But the lasting effects on happiness seemed real: phone bans seem to cause first-year disruptions followed by real increases in subjective well-being.

The philosopher Jacques Ellul wrote in The Technological Society that new technologies shape us as much as we shape them; what they make efficient becomes what we value. A child, or an adult, or an entire civilization might think that they are using a new technology neutrally or instrumentally, but over time institutions reorganize themselves around what technology makes expedient. I think this is essentially what phones have done to the modern world. College students and study participants consistently claim that they regret much of their phone use, but the technological capability of the phone to command and hold attention consistently overrides the traditional communal value to spend more time with books, in nature, or around other people.

There is another way. Toward the end of my reporting for the anti-social century cover story for The Atlantic, I came across a reference to the novel Seveneves, in which Neal Stephenson coined the term “Amistics.” Derived from the notoriously anti-tech Amish, the word refers to the practice of carefully selecting which technologies to accept or reject. Far from dispensing with all new technology, the Amish take pains to adopt only those new products that uphold their existing values. So, solar and wind energy is allowed, because it enables useful work, but television is out, because it interferes with family time. As I wrote:

If the Amish approach to technology is radical in its application, it recognizes something plain and true: Although technology does not have values of its own, its adoption can create values, even in the absence of a coordinated effort. For decades, we’ve adopted whatever technologies removed friction or increased dopamine, embracing what makes life feel easy and good in the moment…

We should ask ourselves: What would it mean to select technology based on long-term health rather than instant gratification?

MEGATREND #2: HEALTH
Building the Do-It-All Drug

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic (semaglutide), made by Novo Nordisk, and Zepbound (tirzepatide), made by Eli Lilly, have demonstrated extraordinary effects beyond the treatment of type-2 diabetes and obesity. In the last few months, randomized studies have shown GLP-1s can reduce psoriasis severity by up to 80%, treat addiction disorders, ameliorate several kinds of mental distress, and melt fatty liver disease. New and better GLP-1 drugs are waiting in the wings. Let’s review what these drugs can and can’t yet do—and what’s coming next.

1. Help with addiction disorders? Yes. A placebo-controlled, double-blind trial of Ozempic found that the drug reduced both heavy drinking days and overall alcohol consumption among people seeking treatment for addiction.

2. Help with mental distress and anxiety? Yup. An April study of more than 100,000 people in Swedish electronic health registers found that semaglutide use was associated with lower risk of worsening mental illness, self-harm, depression, anxiety, and worsening substance use disorder.

3. Crush fatty liver disease? 100%. (Er, well, 80%.) The next big GLP-1 drug coming down the pike is retatrutide. While the first generation of GLP-1 drugs targets the GLP-1 hormone exclusively, Lilly’s popular Mounjaro drug (a.k.a., tirzepatide) targets two hormones: GLP-1 and GIP. Retatrutide is a triple agonist that targets three gut hormones: GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon. Reta is most celebrated for its historic weight-loss effects, which seem even more dramatic than tirzepatide or semaglutide. But in a recent study, patients on retatrutide saw an 80 percent reduction in liver fat. Fatty liver disease affects millions of Americans, and there is no FDA-approved treatment for it other than admonitions to lose weight. But retatrutide’s targeting of glucagon seems to melt liver fat even more effectively than it causes weight loss.

4. Stop Alzheimer’s? Not yet. A Novo Nordisk-funded trial of oral semaglutide among elderly Americans found that the drug did not seem to slow worsening Alzheimer’s symptoms. In the charts below, you’ll see two groups—BLUE on semaglutide vs. RED on a placebo. The nearly identical declines on a cognitive test over 156 weeks indicate that GLP-1s failed to make much of a difference in the progression of the disease. (It’s still possible that the use of GLP-1s earlier in life reduces the likelihood of ever developing Alzheimer’s, but this hasn’t been studied yet, and a high-quality study could take many years, or even decades.)

5. Fuck everything, we’re doing five agonists. The Onion once published an article entitled “Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades,” in which an imaginary Gillette executive proposes adding a fifth blade to the company’s new razor. (”I don’t care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!”) Well, somebody from pharma took that essay as inspiration. While semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retatrutide target one, two, and three hormones, respectively, scientists are now exploring a quintuple agonist “that combines the body weight-reducing and blood glucose-lowering effects of GLP-1R–GIPR co-agonism with the insulin-sensitizing and anti-inflammatory effects of lanifibranor via its targeted delivery into GLP-1R- and GIPR-expressing cells.” As scientists add targets, one could imagine a GLP-1 drug that both melts fat, fights inflammation, and even preserves muscle tone. In other words, I don’t care if they have to cram the fifth agonist in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!

Historical interlude: Creativity secrets of Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas could write. What the man couldn’t do was stop writing. By his death, Dumas had produced more than 100,000 pages of book text, which is the equivalent of writing a novel the length of War and Peace every seven months, for four straight decades. In his miracle years of 1844 to 1846, Dumas wrote both The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo—the latter of which is both incredibly long (more than 1,200 pages in most modern editions) and also considered by many one of the greatest novels of all time.

How did he do it? Dumas was “often accused of operating a fiction factory,” Michael Dirda writes. But the fact that none of his research assistants achieved anything of note on their own strongly suggests that Dumas was the final hand to put pen to paper. His workflow:

[Dumas’s] particular genius lay in transmuting dry historical records into vibrant page-turners through his mastery of dialogue, pacing, and dramatic confrontation. Dumas would first talk over a book with an assistant, perhaps ask him to do some research and prepare an outline, then follow up with further discussion of the action and plot, this time in more detail. Only when he had settled the whole are of the novel in his own mind did Dumas put pen to paper. As he once said, “As a rule I do not begin a book until it is finished.” He then wrote fast, a single draft on blue paper, never bothering about accents, commas, and punctuation, working long hours at a time.

“Do not begin a piece of writing until it is finished” is a fun idea. Personally, I think my best essays are similarly “finished” before they are “started.” That is, if I begin the writing process without really knowing what I want to say, I wind up not saying much of anything but rather circling, circling, circling a strong contention that would have been better developed if I had done more research or talked to more people. My best essays are sometimes the ones whose theses I can describe in detail before I write the first sentence of the final draft.

MEGATREND #3: THE STATE OF AI
Apocalypse Nope

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Pancreatic cancer kills nearly more than 50,000 Americans each year. By the end of the decade, it may be the single most lethal cancer in the country. Millions of people around the world have, like me, lost family and friends to the disease.

There are three reasons why pancreatic cancer has evaded modern science.

1. The first reason is genetic. Most pancreatic cancers are driven by a mutation in a gene called KRAS, and for forty years KRAS has been considered “undruggable” — a smooth, slippery target that no doctor’s molecule could grab onto.

2. The second reason is our immune system. Pancreatic cancers carry relatively few mutations, which means they don’t wave many red flags for our T cells to go out and kill. They grow quietly, in the dark, for years.

3. The third reason is that the signs of pancreatic cancer are so subtle that they’re practically invisible on normal scans. Even best radiologists literally cannot see it until it has metastasized, at which point it is often untreatable.

But in just the last few weeks, we’ve gotten remarkable news on all three front fronts.

1. In April, a company called Revolution Medicines reported “unprecedented” results from a small trial of a new drug that target genetic mutations directly. In patients with late-stage pancreatic cancer, the drug shrank tumors in nearly half of those treated. Last week, the FDA gave Revolution Medicines a green light to expand access to the medicine.

2. A team at Memorial Sloan Kettering and the German company BioNTech reported follow-up data on something even stranger and potentially more remarkable: a personalized mRNA vaccine, built using the same technology behind the COVID shots, that teaches the immune system to recognize a patient’s own cancer. These so-called “secondary vaccines” could be administered to patients after a surgery to prevent regrowth.

3. Last week, a team at the Mayo Clinic, led by Ajit Goenka, published a new paper in the journal Gut, proving that a new AI system called REDMOD could read and identify subtle signs of pancreatic cancer in years-old screenings that even the best radiologists had missed.

In the Mayo study, scientists went back through the records of roughly 5,000 patients who had already been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and pulled up old CT scans taken years before anyone knew their cancer was coming. To test the AI system, they added a control group of patients who never developed cancer, matched by age, sex, and scan date, at a ratio of about 6-to-1, to simulate the conditions of real-world screening.

The results were remarkable: On an independent test set of 493 scans, REDMOD detected the invisible signature of future pancreatic cancer with significant accuracy at a median lead time of 475 days before diagnosis. In other words, this AI program could detect cancer 40 months before the best doctors. Most importantly, REDMOD didn’t cheat. The team prevented the AI from cheating in several ways by making it impossible for the AI to use electronic records to identify scans where a mass was determined to be “present but overlooked.”

Put it all together: (1) A drug that targets the gene driving most pancreatic cancer; (2) a vaccine that teaches the immune system to recognize the disease after surgery; (3) an AI system that can find cancer in scans years before any human radiologist would catch it; and (4) add to that a new concept we discuss later in this interview called “preclinical interception” … and, for the first time, the deadliest cancer in America looks like it is on the way to becoming a treatable condition that is detected early, intercepted, managed, and even cured.

Dr. Ajit Goenka is a radiologist at the Mayo Clinic who studies AI imaging and was the lead author of the new AI radiology study. We talk about his research, why AI seems so good at finding cancer, whether this news is (as some AI stories turn out to be) too good to be true, and what medicine might look like in a world where artificial intelligence can read our bodies better than human doctors can. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity with additional annotations.

How AI Found Cancer That’s Invisible to Human Eyes

Derek Thompson: Your remarkable new study of AI, radiology, and pancreatic cancer was published in the journal Gut. Give me the headline.

Ajit Goenka: More than 80 percent of patients who develop pancreatic cancer hear the words “you have cancer” at a stage where it is too late for them to do anything about it. What we are trying to do is flip that equation. We are trying to find mathematical signals in images that can tell us well before a visible tumor appears whether or not we can cure a particular patient. AI is just a tool we are utilizing to solve that problem. Our goal is early detection. And what this study shows is that it is eminently possible.

Thompson: Why is it so hard for even expert human radiologists to see pancreatic cancer on a screening?

Goenka: A lot of people believe is that maybe those radiologists are not competent or not paying enough attention. I can tell you through data-driven evidence that both of those assumptions are wrong. The real answer is that pancreatic cancer at its earliest stages is too subtle to be detected by the human eye alone, when it matters most.

Thompson: What makes AI so good at seeing what expert radiologists cannot see on their own?

Goenka: You can think of a CT scan image as a mathematical signal. Every pixel has a number. What the AI does is detect patterns in those numbers that reveal cancer developing in tissue that looks completely normal to an experienced radiologist.

To see how Goenka’s lab used AI to catch pancreatic cancer more than two years early—and I mean, literally, to see it—this is the money shot from their paper:

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1. The Fundamental Question

In April 2025, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor published an essay entitled “AI as Normal Technology.” Narayanan and Kapoor, a professor and PH.D. candidate in computer science at Princeton, did not claim that artificial intelligence was boring or unimportant. Rather they argued that AI was a general-purpose technology in the lineage of electricity, the car, and the internet. To AI’s boosters and doomers—those who see AI as the end of work, the end of history, or the end of human life—they countered that AI will not be the end of anything. Its evolution and its effects are more likely to fit inside the grooves dug by previous generations of technology.

While many AI builders and commentators have argued that AI might displace millions of workers, or become a big economic bubble, or kickstart an arms race among governments to build a cyber Swiss Army Knife for hacking their enemies’ digital infrastructure, Narayanan and Kapoor calmly pointed out that, as a matter of technological history:

• … it is normal for a new technology to create bubbles, or winner-take-all markets, or powerful monopolies that require government intervention, or all three (e.g., railroads, Standard Oil, and AT&T).

• … it is normal for technology to displace some jobs and create others, producing short-run pain and long-run growth (e.g., the internal combustion engine and farm employment).

• … it is normal for technology to go through an early period of safety chaos before regulations eventually catch up and impose order (e.g., US meatpacking and coal mining).

• … and it is normal for technology to create an arms race between offense and defense—guns vs. armor, locks vs. lockpicks, viruses vs. antivirus software—that leads to a new equilibrium, without destroying the world.

The case for “AI as normal technology” seems to fit much of the evidence before us. Three and a half years after ChatGPT debuted, GDP growth is average, and unemployment is still under 5 percent. Even jobs that recently seemed vulnerable to automation, such as radiologists, are still seeing rising employment and wages. As François Chollet, a French AI researcher, has said, AI still “cannot operate without supervision,” which is why “there is still zero job from 2022 that can be performed end-to-end by AI, not even translator or customer support associate.”

The “normal” essay is simply one of the best and wisest pieces of writing I’ve seen about AI, which is high praise because that is an awfully crowded category.

But what if it’s wrong?

Taking the other side of the debate is a phalanx of technologists, philosophers, and writers who believe that AI is on a glide path toward superintelligence, a powerful system that will have unprecedented and transformative effects on society. As AI develops the ability to write its own code, this group believes, it will spark a cycle of recursive self-improvement, or RSI: a model that builds a better model, which builds a better model, whose capabilities and intelligence create a historically unique period of technological disruption. Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark has written that the RSI threshold has a 60 percent chance of arriving by 2028. (For comparison’s sake, that’s exactly the same odds that prediction markets give Democrats to win the next presidential election.)

If the superintelligence argument is correct, AI-by-AI could rapidly develop terrifying capabilities that strain our economy, our laws, and even our systems of governance. The geopolitical consequences would be enormous: Whatever country first crossed the self-improvement threshold might gain a durable advantage, not just in economic terms, but in global power. It would race ahead of their adversaries, powered by a force capable of improving itself in a way that has no precedent in history. Cars changed the world, after all. But they did not transform themselves into fighter jets and coronaviruses.

2. The Debate Behind the Debate

The debate over whether AI is “normal” is so much more than a war over a word.

I think that the most urgent discussions about AI policy happening today are fundamentally disagreements about how people think about the normality of AI. In fact, I think that understanding the debate over the concept of normal is essential to understanding why so many smart people bitterly disagree with each other about this topic.

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Today’s essay is an adaptation of David Epstein’s excellent new book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, which is about the downsides of too much freedom in life and work and the art of designing the right constraints.

In 1798, the economist and reverend Thomas Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” in which he claimed that population growth would inevitably outstrip the food supply and doom human civilization to cycles of poverty and mass death. This prediction was, to be kind, hogwash. When Malthus’s essay was published, the world held about 1 billion people, and many of them were frequently starving. Today’s global population is more than 8 billion, with the typical person alive today far better fed, clothed, and paid.

But Malthus’ essay was not merely wrong. It was usefully wrong. Decades later, it spurred a revelation in science that Malthus could never have foreseen.

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"In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population,” Charles Darwin wrote in his autobiography, published in 1876. As he explained, the economist’s grim view of mammalian competition partly inspired his theory of how species evolve:

“Being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work."

The most astonishing thing about Darwin’s breakthrough is that he was not even the only Englishman to read Malthus and apply his ideas to the origin of species. His fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace came up with a similar theory about species competing for survival in a competition that led to the survival of certain genes, and Wallace also credited his aha moment about evolution to none other than the morbid Malthus. In his own words:

Something led me to think of Malthus’ Essay on Population ... It then occurred to me that these checks must also act upon animals, and keep down their numbers ... While vaguely thinking how this would affect any species, there suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest.

The serendipity was so unbelievable that Darwin himself could scarcely believe it. In a letter to a mentor, he wrote: “I never saw a more striking coincidence.” Two Englishmen co-invented one of the most radical and significant theories in scientific history by adapting lessons from the exact same economic essay. How strange is that?

Not strange at all, as it turns out.

Most Good Ideas Are Born As Twins

The most remarkable thing about the simultaneous discovery of evolution is just how utterly unremarkable it is. In fact, you will be hard-pressed to find a groundbreaking creation that wasn’t simultaneously invented. Several people are credited with conceiving of the telegraph, the electric motor, the thermometer, photography, the telescope, the jet engine, the discovery of oxygen, the periodic table, and the theory of infection by microorganisms. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently invented calculus, while Newton and Robert Hooke independently arrived at the mathematical law describing gravity. The transistor was invented by teams in the United States and France within months of each other. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed with a patent office on the very same day.

What is true in science is also true for art. In his 1962 book The Shape of Time, the historian George Kubler argued that art history advances not through individual genius but through a kind of invisible hive mind of inspiration and influence. Artists work, often unknowingly and in parallel, on “linked solutions” to the same aesthetic problems. The early 20th century is one dramatic illustration of this in modern cultural history. Between roughly 1905 and 1925, abstraction in visual art, atonality in music, and fragmented interiority and “stream of consciousness” writing in fiction emerged largely independently and nearly simultaneously across the arts. In many cases, artists believed that they were inventing a style only to discover that somebody else was plugging away at the same invention. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that her 1922 experimental book Jacob’s Room represented “a new form for a new novel” with its fragmented approach to perception, only for her avant-garde work to be overshadowed by another modernist masterpiece published several months later: Ulysses by James Joyce.

The sociologist Robert Merton has called this phenomenon “multiple discovery.” Most breakthroughs in science and art are born as twins and triplets.1 As the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber summarized: “The whole history of inventions is one endless chain of parallel instances.”

The Frame Is More Important Than the Answer

You will sometimes see or hear critics criticize an idea for not being sufficiently original. But what would it mean for an idea to be valuable only if it were entirely new, with no rivalrous twin? We’d have to throw out evolution, ignore gravity, forget calculus, and discard, among other things, trains, electronics, airplanes, and the entire modernist art movement.

The world is built atop things that were discovered independently, often at almost precisely the same time by people working in widely disparate conditions. This is reality, whether we like it or not. What does it tell us about invention, creativity, and originality?

The popular concept of genius and breakthrough is wrong. We want to believe that great new ideas come from non-obvious leaps of creativity; that genius means one individual seeing what no one else can. But the true history of innovation suggests the opposite. Great ideas start to become a little bit obvious when the problem is framed in just the right way.

Darwin and Wallace are often seen as breaking completely with everything that had come before them. In fact, they were applying the ideas of Malthus to the obvious and pressing questions of their time. Why does breeding work so well? Why do we keep finding fossils of creatures that don’t currently exist on Earth? Why do the bones in the flipper of a whale, the wing of a bat, and the arm of a human have so much in common? Before Darwin and Wallace, breeders already recognized that random hereditary changes occasionally appeared. They even had a word for them: “sports.” Darwin and Wallace were mining and connecting the knowledge of their day, rather than dispensing with it. When they discovered Malthus’s theory of human existence as a grim competition between species and environment, what clicked into focus was the concept of evolution as a competition between rivalrous traits, selected for their environmental fit.

The figures we remember as geniuses are usually the ones who were standing closest when a well-framed question came due. The figures we forget are the ones who did the framing; people like Malthus, who don’t solve the problem but state it clearly enough that someone else does. Malthus was wrong about a lot. But he was wrong with such useful precision that two naturalists could each pick up his idea, turn it sideways, and see something he hadn’t.

This is what the history of multiple discovery is actually telling us. The great bottleneck of progress is question-framing. Once a problem is framed with sufficient clarity and precision, the answer almost wants to be found. Once Malthus articulated his grim theory of resource scarcity and competition precisely enough, two scientists on opposite sides of the world arrived at the same revolutionary solution within years of each other. The answer was, in some sense, already waiting.

Malthus being catastrophically wrong about almost everything is almost beside the point. You could even say it is the point. You don’t need the right answer to unlock a breakthrough. You need a frame precise enough that the right answer becomes findable. As Demis Hassabis, cofounder of Google DeepMind and a 2024 Nobel laureate, put it: “It’s harder to come up with a really good conjecture than it is to solve it.” The unsung heroes of intellectual history are the Malthuses, the ones who were wrong about the answer but right about the frame. Perhaps every brilliant idea is just that: an ordinary answer to an extraordinary question.

Adapted From INSIDE THE BOX: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein. Copyright © 2026 by David Epstein. Published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Today’s article was written with Aziz Sunderji, an economic analyst and data whiz who writes at Home Economics.

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American fatherhood has transformed in the last few generations. Compared to their Boomer parents, childcare time among Millennial dads has more than doubled. Compared to their Silent Generation grandparents, it’s nearly quadrupled. You will be hard-pressed to find any part of day-to-day modern life that has changed more in the last half-century than the way today’s parents—and fathers, in particular—spend their time.

In 1965, the typical married father barely spent half an hour each day actively engaged in childcare, according to the best time-use data we have1. Today, Millennial thirty-something dads typically spend more than 80 daily minutes changing diapers, reading and playing with their children, driving them to soccer practice, and going over homework. To make time for kids, modern fathers have reduced their daily office work by more than an hour—not to mention, cut down their TV time by 30 minutes—as they pour more of their waking life into being at home.

For those familiar with the parenting norms of the 20th century, the rise in childcare might seem like a violation of tradition, as if we are moving away from the natural state of fatherhood. But as the psychologist Darby Saxbe writes in her forthcoming book Dad Brain, the role of fathers has always varied significantly around the world, much more than the role of mothers. In African tribes that require men to do lots of hunting, dads often play a small role in the lives of their kids. But barely a few hours’ drive away from these tribes, one can find hunter-gatherer societies, like the Aka community in the Congo, where fathers are constantly around their children.

The working-husband-and-housewife norm is not a biological inscription in our genes. It is an invention of the Industrial Revolution. And it is disappearing around the world. In addition to the U.S., fathers’ childcare time is surging in Canada, across Europe, and in other rich countries, such as Japan.

WHERE DID MODERN FATHERHOOD COME FROM?

The simplest explanation for the global surge in fathering is that it’s largely about the mass entry of women into the workforce.

Since the 1960s, the female labor force participation rate has risen, which meant fewer moms stayed at home to take care of the kids. As households moved toward dual earners, someone had to cover the remaining childcare— and that someone, in most households, turned out to be the dad.

As pat as this theory seems, it has some interesting flaws. If caring for children required a fixed set of hours, then we’d expect to see dads taking parenting-time hours from moms. Except, mothers’ childcare time hasn’t gone down in the last half century. It’s gone way, way up, as well. What’s more, if the decline of the “male breadwinner” household were the primary reason for the increase in fathers’ childcare time, we would expect to see these two trends happen simultaneously in the 20th century. But they didn’t. The “male solo earner” household—that is, families where the dad works and the mom stays at home—declined fastest as a phenomenon between the 1950s and the mid-1980s. Meanwhile, the steepest sustained increase in male childcare happened decades later, between the 1990s and early 2000s, during a period when household structures were relatively stable.

Even if the rise of working mothers didn’t automatically and instantly transform fatherhood, it may have set in motion a slower-moving shift in norms. In the second half of the 20th century, men who expressed more egalitarian gender attitudes were among the first to shift their time toward direct childcare, as the sociologist Scott Coltrane wrote. As a result, the definition of a “good dad” morphed—or, perhaps we should say, expanded—from the strict and narrow norm of “just a breadwinner” to the broader, multi-part role of “earner and co-parent and diaper-changer and chaperone and baseball coach and, and and …” With the rise of women’s participation, the job of being a mom became more complex, and the role of being a dad got more complex, too.

But we think the rise of modern fatherhood is about more than the rise working moms. So, let’s consider three additional explanations.

1. Maybe childcare time went up because dads … enjoy parenthood?

This can’t be it, your cynical side is telling you. So cheesy. Too simplistic.

But let’s consider. In a 2008 paper, “Parental Education and Parental Time with Children,” Jonathan Guryan, Erik Hurst, and Melissa Kearney found that, in the U.S. and across the developed world, it has been the most educated parents who have most increased their time spent with children. Our own analysis shows that the increase in fathering time is significantly driven by changes among college-educated fathers under 45 years old. In the 1960s, fathers with a bachelor’s degree only spent about 9 additional minutes taking care of their kids, compared to dads without a high school degree. In the last 60 years, that education gap has quintupled to 46 minutes.

The most educated parents are typically the richest. They could do anything with their time. If one thinks of childcare as just another form of housework, like vacuuming or dusting shelves, it seems awfully strange for the most educated and wealthy to fill their lives with the drudgery of diapers if they don’t have to. The rise of dad time makes more sense if parents regard childcare as a form of leisure.

In fact, Guryan et al. found that “parents report that spending time with their children, especially in recreation or educational child care, is among their more enjoyable activities, especially when compared with other standard home production activities.” Our analysis of government data concurs. According to the American Time Use Survey well-being questionnaire, fathers say that little brings them more joy than being with their kids, other than hanging out with friends.

The fact that richer and better-educated parents are freely choosing to pour more of their valuable time into childcare makes raising children sound practically like a “luxury good,” akin to buying a Rolex watch or a fragile Fabergé egg.

Parents reading along might wonder if we’re overrating the unalloyed bliss that is fatherhood. Perhaps, a skeptic might think, it’s not mere love and joy that’s motivating all this extra time spent with kids. Rather, it’s anxiety—and status anxiety in particular.

2. The rise of intensive parenting isn’t just about love. It’s also about fear.

In their 2010 paper “The Rug Rat Race,” the economists Garey and Valerie Ramey tried to understand why childcare time soared among college-educated parents in the 1990s. One of their more controversial findings was that surging childcare was a rational response among anxious parents who were desperate for their kids to get into the best colleges.

The Millennial generation was the largest in American history. But the number of seats in prestigious undergraduate schools did not keep up with the population boom. The mad scramble for scarce college seats—and, by extension, for scarce entry-level jobs at prestigious companies and organizations—inspired an extracurricular arms race among college-educated parents, which cashed out in much more parenting time. In this interpretation, the increase in childcare isn’t just about love. It’s about fear—fear of our children disappointing us, and fear of us disappointing ourselves (not to mention our friends, family, neighbors, and online group chats)2.

As highly educated parents in the late 20th century and early 21st century have come to regard their children as adorable assets worthy of our precious investment, childcare has become a visible status signal. Dads who enthusiastically coach one kid’s basketball team and drive another child to ballet on the weekends aren’t just investing time and resources to enhance their kids’ likelihood of getting into the best schools and entry-level jobs when they grow up. These fathers are also demonstrating to other parents just how impressively involved they are in their children’s lives. As high-income parents compete to show who can be The Most Parenting Parent, it can create a logistical arms race of scheduling, transporting, and coordinating … until we all look up and see that this yuppie status competition has created more work for everybody.

In short, with the rise of this new “intensive” style of parenting, we replaced the old-fashioned breadwinner ideal with the lofty co-parent ideal, and then we raised the difficulty setting for everyone by turning childhood into an intensive investment project.

3. Modern fatherhood might have something to do with the decline of socialization, too.

Since the 1950s, Americans have spent less time socializing and more time alone. As the researcher Marc Dunkelman has pointed out, many families during this period have increased their closeness. Partners can text each other hundreds of times throughout the day and track their kids’ credit card spending on their phones. While many close ties are tighter than ever, weaker ties to community and the outside world have melted away. Phone time has topped off television time, and more of our lives have gone indoors. As adult leisure shifted from public life to home life, men are now physically present in the home more often, and childcare rose partly as a byproduct.

Saxbe, the psychologist, writes about how traditional hunter-gatherer societies defray the burden and joy of childcare across “alloparents”—that is, extended family, siblings, and community members who help raise kids. In America’s more atomistic and isolated society, we put more pressure on the nuclear family now that those networks have shrunk. That means dads are taking on some of the extra care burden that a grandparent, aunt, and older sibling might have shouldered in previous generations.

There’s probably a bit of truth to all of these explanations. Fathers’ childcare time increased fastest in the generation after women stormed into the workforce, as the dual-earner household model required that parents spread the labor of raising kids. Childcare time continued to increase when many fathers realized that it brought them deep satisfaction. At the same time, the surge in intensive parenting among educated moms and dads was also a stress response, with many parents fearing that anything but the most over-scheduled childhood would mark them with a scarlet letter—A for “apathetic parents.” And all of this is happening in a period when socialization is in decline, which means parents’ lives are more likely to revolve around their children than in the 1950s and 1960s, when parents were (sometimes infamously) more interested in their own lives than in the careful pruning of their children’s extracurricular calendar.

DON’T FORGET ABOUT MOM

Despite the large increase in dads’ childcare time, there is no question that mothers still spend much more time raising children. This is especially true when we look at solo parenting. According to the American Time Use Survey, mothers’ solo childcare time is still twice that of fathers.

It’s not just that moms spend more time with kids. They also pick up the most stressful responsibilities. While fathers spend more time playing sports with their children, mothers spend more than twice as much time providing medical care, planning appointments, and taking care of the so-called mental load of parenting (i.e., not just driving your kid to the birthday party, but also remembering that classmate’s birthday party existed in the first place and buying a present ahead of time). In fact, the more stressful the childcare activity is, the more likely mothers are to do it.

Perhaps relatedly, moms feel more stressed about parenting than dads do. Moms are more likely to say that parenting is harder than they anticipated; more likely to say they “often feel tired”; and more likely to say they feel frequently nervous about being a parent.

HOW FATHERHOOD CHANGES MEN’S LIVES

When a person becomes a dad, what does he lose? What does he gain?

American guys watch a lot of television. When you become a dad, it’s very hard to keep up with all the movies, TV shows, and sports that you followed before you had kids. The rise of childcare time most directly seems to replace TV and similar forms of leisure. What’s more, becoming a dad seems to turn many late-night owls into early birds, as dads spend much more time sleeping between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. to account for lost sleep in the early morning.

Does becoming a dad make people health and happy? It’s complicated. Saxbe, the psychologist, points out that new parents often have short-term loss of brain volume, but older parents tend to have larger and healthier brains than their childless retired friends. This might have something to do with the fact that caring for young children can be exhausting at first, but over time parenting is intensely social, and socialization tends to be neuroprotective in the long run. It is scientifically valid, therefore, to argue that becoming a father is both a brain-shrinking and brain-expanding life choice. Parenthood is anything but simple.

As our research shows, dads are less likely to say they’re well-rested than non-dads. They have less free time, are more overwhelmed, and are more likely to be exhausted while feeling like they didn’t finish everything they wanted to. But this burden of time pressure comes with significant joys. Dads in the same surveys are more likely to say that life is “close to ideal” and that they would “change almost nothing.”

Survey results do not always offer deep wisdom. But here at least, their findings are wise. The lost hours of sleep are easy to count. The joys are harder to quantify. But they are profound.

“The United States was a reasonably happy country for a long time,” the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman wrote in a 2026 paper. “It is not happy now.”

Crunching data from the General Social Survey, Peltzman documented “a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population” after COVID that “mainly persists” through 2024. He called it a “regime change” in national sentiment. After 50 years of mostly steady levels of self-reported well-being, American happiness plunged. And it’s hardly bounced back at all.

Peltzman’s analysis is not a lonely voice; there is a veritable chorus of gloomy sentiment. This week, the Federal Reserve’s measure of US worker satisfaction fell to its lowest level since the survey began in 2014. One week prior, consumer sentiment had fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in the 70-year history of the University of Michigan economic survey. Once again, the index plunged around 2020 and, like a hiker on the far side of a mountain, continues down step by step. Americans are telling pollsters that they are more depressed about this economy than they were during the depths of the Great Recession or the painful stagflationary years of the 1970s.

Finally, the U.S. has also fallen to its lowest ranking ever in the World Happiness Report, largely due to the astonishingly swift decline in well-being among young people in that international survey.

If you are looking for a sympathetic ear to explain this phenomenon, certainly do not seek counsel from your local economist. The American blues seem awfully curious to those who view the world through the keyhole of employment or income statistics. The unemployment rate has been below 5 percent for practically the entire decade, which is basically as good as you can ask for. For this entire decade, the US economy has significantly outgrown the Eurozone and other rich countries, such as Japan and the UK. Americans are rich and getting richer, by most conventional measures. More Americans are breaking into the upper middle class, and workers at the bottom of the income distribution have seen their wages grow faster than those at the top in the last few years.

So, those who privilege economic statistics over self-reports might be tempted to summarize the situation this way: America’s resilient economy is a fact, while Americans’ sad-sack survey results are mere irrational feelings. There is something to this; the gap between so-called “hard data” (e.g., the unemployment rate) and “soft data” (e.g., a survey) is certainly wide and widening. But a feeling is an important kind of fact. Feelings don’t just shape consumer behavior. They shape political attitudes; and attitudes influence voting; and voting determines policies; and policies shape the economy. To understand the future of the US economy and the United States writ large, one cannot afford a haughty indifference toward sentiment.

And on the sentiment front, what we’ve got are four survey results—four facts, you might even say, of American lugubriousness—all of which point to one unmistakable conclusoin. This decade has been the very opposite of “roaring.” We are mired instead in the Tragic Twenties.

2. Who Killed the Vibes?

One of the more remarkable discoveries in Peltzman’s paper is that the decline in self-reported well-being since 2020 has not been concentrated among young people, poor people, or unmarried people—three of the groups typically afflicted by higher levels of anxiety and sadness. Instead, the decline in happiness has been an across-the-board 10- to 15-point decimation experienced by practically every demographic. (In the graphs below, BLUE refers to happiness levels before 2020; PINK is happiness levels post-2020; and BLACK is the decline, which is remarkably uniform across groups.)

Something significant has bludgeoned Americans’ well-being in the last six years without discriminating much by age, ideology, education, or gender. What is it?

The culprit has to fit the crime. Most importantly, it has to fit the timing of the crime. What we’re looking for is something that happened around 2020 (uh, seems obvious) and then didn’t recover (ah, that’s the hard part). This timing rules out several otherwise plausible suspects.

• It’s probably not about cultural shifts, such as the decline of religion. Cultural conservatives might try to explain the Tragic Twenties by citing the rise of secular individualism among American liberals and pointing to the fact that religion seems to be a tonic for unhappiness. But the rise of religious non-affiliation in America has been a steady 30-year trend, whereas this falloff in well-being started in 2020, when secularism reached its recent peak. So, that explanation won’t do.

• It’s probably not about old-fashioned wage inequality. Someone on the left might be inclined to argue that American misery is the reasonable and automatic societal reaction to severe class inequality. But low-income wage growth has been unusually strong since the pandemic, as the economist Arin Dube has taken pains to point out. Median household incomes are higher now than they were 10 years ago. What’s more, Peltzman’s analysis finds that some of the largest declines in happiness seem concentrated among well-to-do demographics, like older people, white people, and college graduates. So, here’s another suspect that doesn’t fit the crime.

• It’s probably not just about phones and social media. When the subject is American anxiety and unhappiness, the most obvious suspect is smartphones, social media, and the surging negativity of the American news cycle. As I explained in a long essay last month, I am quite persuaded by the argument that phones and social media are associated with—and, probably, actively causing—a decline in well-being among young people in the U.S. But the rising misery of young people—often rightly associated with rising phone and social media use—has been going on for about 15 years. The more sudden collapse in general wellness that we see in the GSS and University of Michigan data points to an emotional break that happened around 2020. So, even if phones aren’t blameless here (I’ll return to them in a moment), they don’t make sense as the primary culprit.

If neither cultural decadence, nor material inequality, nor phones and social media seem to fit the shape of this particular phenomenon, we have to keep looking for what broke our brains in the 2020s. The simplest explanation I can offer is this: As a cultural-political force, the 2020 pandemic never ended.

3. The Permademic

The Pandemic Never Ended, Part I: The Sheer Shittiness of Inflation

One cannot even pretend to explain the happiness crash of 2020 without starting with the crisis that arrived in 2020 and never quite departed. The COVID pandemic unleashed more than a coronavirus upon the planet. The biological antagonist of the disease gave way to a cavalcade of economic disasters, from supply chain disruptions, to global inflation, to surging interest rates. We are still are living in the midst of an aftershock.

While the official rate of annual inflation has gone up, then down, and then up, again, the typical family does not experience price changes as a 12-month average with monthly updates. What they feel at the grocery store, or the restaurant, or the online checkout page, is something more like holy shit, this cost what?! And that holy shit moment is best understood as the accumulation of years of above-average inflation.

Think of it this way: Consumer prices, which had increased by 25 percent between the summer of 2007 and the summer of 2020, surged by the same amount between the summers of 2020 and 2025. In housing, the 50 percent increase in the Case-Shiller US national home price index between the summers of 2020 and 2025 was equal to the 50 percent increase in home prices between 2004 and 2020. In both cases, it is fair to say that Americans in the 21st century have experienced roughly triple the typical rate of inflation in the 2020s compared to what they’d grown accustomed to. Everything that people buy feels like it is constantly slipping out of the zone of affordability, and that is absolutely maddening to many people, no matter what the economic statistics suggest they should feel.

The economics writer Matt Darling has traced the relationship between actual consumer sentiment and “predicted” sentiment, based on unemployment, inflation, and interest rates. Around 2020, the relationship broke down and consumer sentiment nose-dived into what Kyla Scanlon famously dubbed a “vibecession.” In the graph below, the plunging dark purple line shows actual consumer sentiment while the light dotted line shows were consumer sentiment “should” be.

It is tempting to think: Well, this just shows how terrible inflation is for the poorest Americans. But the most interesting and confounding piece of Darling’s analysis is that it’s actually the richest third of households whose consumer sentiment has plunged most significantly relative to where we would expect it to be. Darling’s explanation is clever but depressing: Full employment, especially in an era of elevated inflation, has increased the cost of everything that involves other people, and it’s created a nation of grumps. Here’s Darling:

I think part of what happened is that many middle- and upper-income households were used to being able to afford low-wage labor on demand - for childcare, for food service, for home health care. Middle- and upper-income households found this frustrating and assumed it was part of the broad story throughout the economy; not realizing that much of this frustration was driven by low-wage workers finally earning a little more bargaining power.

Putting it all together: In the last 40 years, Americans have come to expect and prize affordability without even having to think about it. But in the last five years, prices for all sorts of things, including housing, have increased about three times faster than the rate Americans are used to; meanwhile, full employment has put upward pressure on the cost of services. The US public has responded by not only screaming at pollsters about their misery but also by rushing to the polls to vote out every incumbent who failed to do something about the “affordability” crisis of the 2020s. And Americans are not alone: The year 2024 was a bloodbath for incumbent parties around the world, as fury about high prices went as global as the pandemic itself.

Which raises a good question: If it’s been a Tragic Twenties for the United States, what about the rest of the world?

Interlude: Of Phones and Anglophones

According to the latest World Happiness Report, well-being has actually increased in the last few years in many countries, including China, India, and Vietnam. But well-being has fallen in much of the west, particularly in English-speaking nations, such as the U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.1 As John Helliwell, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the World Happiness Report, told me: “If you’re looking for something that’s special about the countries where youth unhappiness is rising, they’re mostly Western developed countries, and for the most part, they are countries that speak English.”

Change in Happiness Score: 2012 - 2025

There are several reasons why Anglophone countries might have larger declines in well-being in the last decade. Led by the U.S., these countries share several or all of the following features: (1) a culture of individualism that often correlates with less time spent around other people; (2) a high degree of diagnostic inflation, meaning expanded psychiatric guidelines for anxiety, ADHD, and other mental health disorders, which mechanically increases diagnosed anxiety and raises awareness about negative mental health; and (3) high levels of negativity in the news ecosystem and on social media.

The graph above shows the decline in happiness among Anglophone and other rich countries since 2012. But what happens when you narrow the time period to the subject of this essay—the change in happiness after in the 2020s? You get this:

Now that is interesting. In Portugal, Italy, and Spain, happiness increased in the 2020s. What do these countries have in common? They had some of the lowest average inflation rates throughout the 2020s in the west, while Germany and the UK had some of the worst inflation in central and western Europe.

I think this interlude strengthens two arguments: first, that there is something uniquely problematic about mental health in the Anglosphere; and second, that higher rates of inflation are a major contributor to the Tragic Twenties phenomenon, both in the U.S. and throughout the west.

The Pandemic Never Ended, Part II: Institutions Down, Individualism Up

The word pandemic comes from the Greek pan, meaning all, and demos, meaning people. But while the etymology hints at wholeness, the effect of pandemics has historically been to break apart social trust. In one recent analysis of the Spanish Flu, researchers found that the disease had “permanent consequences on individual behavior in terms of lower social trust.” So, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that, in his paper, the economist Peltzman found that confidence has fallen throughout the 2020s for just about every institution, including the federal government, the military, major companies, education, and organized religion. Other studies have found that trust has plummeted for the CDC, higher education, science, and medicine.

It’s not just that Americans have lost trust in august, faraway institutions. Their faith in one another has suffered even more dramatic declines. For decades, the General Social Survey has asked Americans the same basic question: “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?” In the 1970s and 1980s, Americans overwhelmingly agreed that other people are more or less trustworthy. That confidence in strangers has plummeted since 2020, according to Peltzman. The share of respondents who say other people are “fair” has declined by even more than overall happiness.

Just as Americans’ trust in institutions and strangers has declined, at least one measure of ecstatic individualism has ascended in its place. Americans now spend an unprecedented amount of time by themselves, along with an abnormal amount of time inside our homes. This means that their engagement with other people is disproportionately mediated, not by real-life experiences in the outside world, but rather by algorithmic media on their screens. As the NYU psychologist Jay Van Bavel has pointed out, online conversations prize and reward negativity and out-group animosity, which convert people who might otherwise enjoy (or tolerate) one another’s presence in a bar or office into antagonists.

It’s not that I think the decline of institutional trust and the rise of solitary individualism ought to produce unhappiness for all who experience it. But trust, companionship, and community are shock absorbers in times of personal and national crisis. And the final thing that must be said about the 2020s is that it really has been one damn crisis after another.

The Pandemic Never Ended, Part III: The Permacrisis Decade

In his 2023 column “The Economy Is Great. Why Are Americans in Such a Rotten Mood?” the Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip wrote that Americans’ economic pessimism was akin to the biological phenomenon of “referred pain.” He wrote:

Just as one part of your body can hurt because of injury to another, pessimism about the economy may reflect dissatisfaction with the country as a whole. Lately, there has been a lot to be dissatisfied about: intensifying political and cultural conflict and intolerance, the pandemic, the border, mass shootings, crime, war in Ukraine and now the war in the Middle East.

Indeed, the decade has pretty much been a dumpster fire, hasn’t it? A once-in-a-century pandemic yielded to a once-in-a-generation inflation crisis. Wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and the Persian Gulf followed one another in a steady martial drumbeat. Existential fears of climate change gave way to existential fears of artificial intelligence. And all of this took place during a period when Donald Trump hovered over the political realm like some kind of unearthly specter—representing the imminence of fascism to roughly half the country while, to the other half or so, signifying a secular savior come to save traditional values from the demonic scourge of leftism. That is all quite a lot.

In this decade of permacrisis, the news has become exceptionally dire, and we have data to show just how much. A 2024 Brookings analysis of news sentiment found that “news tone has been more negative than the fundamentals would predict during 2018 to 2020 and even more negative than predicted in 2021 to 2023.” Today’s news is more surprisingly negative than at any period of news on record.

The historic pessimism of the news cycle is both a reflection of the permacrisis decade and a driver of the impression that we are constantly on the verge of crisis. As a global health emergency, the COVID pandemic may have ended, but the state of crisis that Americans feel in their day-to-day lives when they make contact with the news has not gone away. The infection rate went down, but the feeling that the world is constantly pulsing with emergency didn’t go anywhere.

4. The Tragic Twenties: A Verdict

And so, this is as close as I can get to a unified theory of the Tragic Twenties. American sadness this decade has been forged by the fact of, and the feeling of, a permanent unrelenting economic crisis, amplified by a uniquely negative news and media environment, and exacerbated by the rise of solitude and the declining centrality of trusted institutions. Inflation has made today’s life harder to afford, while the ambient awareness of other people’s triumphs on social media had made tomorrow’s success feel harder to achieve. The ongoing collapse of confidence in the establishment has made Americans feel unusually adrift and dissatisfied with institutions outside of their control, while the chosen self-isolation of modern life has demolished communal trust, as we increasingly experience other people’s minds through the toxic surreality of our screens rather than through the embodied reality of strangers who are, for the most part, just as nice as we are.

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In the last few weeks, I have sensed a trembling in the air and a turning over of narratives in the realm of artificial intelligence. Think of it as a double vibe shift in AI.

The first shift has occurred at the level of AI models—from an emphasis on speed to an atmosphere of paranoid caution. For years since ChatGPT debuted in 2022, the frontier labs have raced to put their latest technology in the hands of consumers as fast as possible. But two weeks ago, Anthropic claimed that its newest AI model, Claud Mythos, is too powerful and dangerous to release to the broader public. Mythos appears to be so skilled at cyberhacking that the company’s current safety and monitoring methods do not seem sufficient to stop something catastrophic from happening if the software were to be released to hundreds of millions of people at once. Instead the company has made Mythos available to a handful of companies, including Microsoft and Apple, to “find and patch security vulnerabilities in critical software programs,” as Kevin Roose reported in the New York Times. OpenAI is also looking to restrict access to its most advanced models.

The second shift has occurred in the realm of AI supply and demand—from “AI is surely a bubble” to “for now, it surely is not.” For much of last year, the AI bubble case was easy to make. The AI capex buildout—that is, the cost of all those chips, data centers, and electricity—amounted to the largest private-sector infrastructure project in history. And since many of the similar-but-smaller projects turned out to be bubbles, it naturally followed that this, the mother of all capital expenditure projects, would become the mother of all capex bubbles.

But it now seems that the biggest problem facing AI is not a shortage of demand—that is, a shortage of customers—but rather a shortage of supply—that is, consumer demand is so white-hot that the hyperscalers cannot provide sufficient compute to keep up with customer needs.

This dual vibe shift is a seismic development. For years, skeptical analysts have analogized AI to the 19th century railroads—a transcontinental tech program that crashed the economy with popped bubbles over and over again, on its way to changing the world. But I now think it might be useful to study AI as akin to something more like the dawn of electricity in the early 20th century, when builders struggled to keep up with demand but nonetheless created a set of enormous financial and political headaches for the U.S.

THE BUBBLE THAT WASN’T (OR: WHY I CHANGED MY MIND)

In the last few months, three big things have pushed me toward thinking that AI might be the opposite of a bubble. Each of these developments has pushed me back into the history books to look for the right historical analogy for AI, which I’m particularly excited to tell you about.

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The late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was troubled by a paradox of progress. People alive today have more sophisticated machines, medicines, and systems for organizing the world. So why haven’t these advances made us happier? “The gods of the Greeks were like helpless children compared to humankind today and the powers we now wield,” he wrote. And yet “we do not understand what happiness is any better than Aristotle did, and as for learning how to attain that blessed condition, one could argue that we have made no progress at all.”

So, Csikszentmihalyi set out to bring progress to the field of happiness research. Starting in the 1960s and continuing for decades, he interviewed thousands of people about what defined the “optimal” experiences. He recorded interviews with just about every profession and walk of life—from men and women, young and old, “Navajo shepherds, farmers in the Italian Alps, and workers on the assembly line in Chicago.” He heared in these diverse testimonies a kind of singular melody—a description of how, in the best parts of life, a feeling of self, time, and anxiety melt away in the face of deep immersion in an activity. He named this phenomenon “flow.”

Today you might hear self-help gurus talk about flow so constantly that the monosyllable has become a cliché without a clear definition. Csikszentmihalyi summed it up this way:

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

That’s pretty good. But of all the passages in his 1990 book Flow, I think this one comes closest to capturing the nearly spiritual quality that he was trying to convey:

The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives

Flow suggests a waterway—something liquidly effortless, an unimpeded stream. But the wisdom of Csikszentmihalyi was to recognize that well-being is no lazy river. It is neither ease nor effortlessness that leads to the highest happiness. It is something close to their opposite. It is immersion in an activity that is hard, but just hard enough; it is the discovery of comfort at the outer realm of difficulty. Life feels best, not when it is smoothed with frictionlessness, but when it is filled with achievable challenges.

FLOW AND FAMILIARITY IN CULTURE

I found Flow when I was writing my first book Hit Makers, in which I was trying to understand the psychology of popularity in culture. I was curious why some things—movies, songs, TV shows, art, and even political figures—become so popular while similar ideas and products fail to find an audience. To boil that book down to a very long sentence, my thesis was what I called “the law of familiar surprises”: Most of the time, audiences want to discover new things, but they are deeply enamored by familiar things, and so the critical challenge for most cultural producers is to make something that is optimally new; familiar but not too familiar; seemingly surprising but quietly traditional; a window to a new world that paradoxically shows you home.1

I was thrilled by Flow because its conclusion seemed in harmony with my own. The similarities between Flow is an achievable challenge and Popularity is a familiar surprise seemed to suggest a Goldilocks zone in human experience2.

In the years since Hit Makers was published in 2017, I’ve watched these two ideas—familiarity and flow—evolve, interact, and merge in strange ways. Familiarity, for its part, has overtaken pop culture, and I would not say that this has been an altogether positive development. Hollywood’s hit machine notoriously specializes in sequels, adaptations, and reboots—or, it might be just as accurate to say that movie-going audiences have, in an age of abundant content, reserved their small handful of annual tickets for familiar IP that they trust to entertain them. Even HBO, once prized for its bounty of original content, has caught the bug. Today, its most popular series include several Games of Thrones spinoffs, a Stephen King prequel, a video game adaptation, and, emperor of all familiarities, a Harry Potter reboot.

Beyond film and TV, it’s the same story in video games (see headlines such as: “Why the Gaming Industry’s Reliance on Sequels Is Killing Innovation”) and music. As The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber reported, every year, a higher percentage of the albums streamed online is “catalog music,” meaning it is at least 18 months old. The triumph of familiarity in pop culture has itself become an overly familiar phenomenon. Everybody knows that everybody else knows that this is happening.

But something else is happening that deserves our attention—something that is simultaneously obvious and also almost too obvious in a way that makes it hard to see clearly. On our phones, the principle of familiarity is merging with flow to produce a new kind of high-tech passivity that resembles the experience of flow without fulfilling the meaning of it.

THE RISE OF ZOMBIE FLOW

The algorithmic newsfeed—from TikTok to Reels—is carefully engineered to organize compulsive short-term videos around the user’s revealed interests, for the purpose of maximizing the display of advertising squares. Scrolling has a funny way of immobilizing its user, numbing their mind, and producing a kind of disembodied timelessness.

The information systems researcher Shishi Wu coined an interesting term for the effect of short-form video platforms: “Passive Flow.” In her 2024 dissertation at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Wu wanted to understand why so many young users spend more time on social media platforms than they intend to. “This phenomenon cannot be fully explained by addiction or self-control failure,” she wrote. Instead, Wu proposed the theory of passive flow, which has three features. First, users engage without clear goals. The platform mindlessly pulls forward their attention, and they rarely pause to reflect on why they’re doing what they’re doing. Second, they lose self-awareness. They notice their body less, and disconnect with the world around them. Third, they experience “time transformation”—that is, they don’t just spend more time than they intended on the site, but also they lose track of time entirely.

“Csikszentmihalyi didn’t say that flow needs to be pointed towards something great,” the author Brad Stulberg told me on my podcast Plain English. “You can experience flow when you’re falling in love or when you’re writing a book. But you can also experience flow scrolling on Twitter, gambling at a slot machine.” In fact, the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, who studied Las Vegas casinos, found that gambling addiction is less about winning money than about achieving a “trancelike state” at the machines where the body’s sense of material reality melts away.

The psychologist Paul Bloom coined yet another term to describe the experience of being in the sort of weightless state of scrolling that you later come to regret: “shitty flow.” In shitty flow, time feels like it’s melting away, but upon reflection, it’s melting away from the direction that you want to live. “During these experiences, you may feel relief or calm and undergo some hallmarks of flow, such as losing a sense of time and perhaps even losing a sense of yourself,” Stulberg wrote in the new book The Way of Excellence. “But when you come out of them, you are left with the sobering reality that your time could have been better spent.”

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen once told me that games can have both a goal and a purpose. The goal of a game is a win; the purpose of a game is to have fun. In toxic games, the goals overwhelm the purpose. You can win a game by mastering its rules, but also feel miserable by failing to see that there is a larger game of well-being whose rules you have broken in order to feel like a winner.

I’ve come to believe that something similar has happened in pop culture. Entertainment and tech companies have gotten smarter about putting consumers into bastardized flow states that leaves people feeling drained and sad rather than challenged and enlarged as selves. Modern leisure recapitulates the goal of flow while evacuating the purpose, which Csikszentmihalyi summarized as “to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful.” Algorithmic flow is flow without achievement, flow without challenge, flow without even volition. What Wu calls “passive flow” and Bloom calls “shitty flow” deserves a harsher and more specific label. To be lost in the lazy river of algorithmic media is to be lost the current of life without a mind. Zombie flow.

THE RIGHT KIND OF HARD

To talk about zombie flow as a failure of will—just put the phone down; just go outside—is to fixate on individual behavior. But one thing Csikszentmihalyi understood much better than the modern gurus who quote him is that individuals often rely on external structures to encourage them to seek out activities that make life more rich, intense, and meaningful. Without endorsing any particular theology, he respected world religions for giving people a sense of higher purpose that organized their lives. He also surveyed global cultures to understand how groups engineered healthy feedback loops in the absence of a specific belief in god.

Drawing from the Canadian ethnographer Richard Kool, he described the Shushwap tribes of British Columbia. Their habitat was rich in salmon, elk, and edible plants. But the tribal elders developed an unusual practice for encouraging their people to avoid the passive laziness that might be caused by this easy abundance of food.

The elders said, at times the world became too predictable and the challenge began to go out of life. Without challenge, life had no meaning. So the elders, in their wisdom, would decide that the entire village should move, those moves occurring every 25 to 30 years. The entire population would move to a different part of the Shushwap land and there, they found challenge. There were new streams to figure out, new game trails to learn, new areas where the balsamroot would be plentiful. Now life would regain its meaning and be worth living. Everyone would feel rejuvenated and healthy.

The British Columbian natives understood the difference between goals and purposes. The goal of life may be the achievement of ease. But the purpose of life is the overcoming of difficulty.

To end where we began: “If we’re so smart, why aren’t we happier?” Csikszentmihalyi asked. Zombie flow is a perfect answer. It is progress without pleasure. It offers the sensation of optimal experience while scooping out its meaning. The Shushwap had moral elders whose authority derived from their obligation to the community’s flourishing. Our entertainment elders specialize in the opposite aim, to remove every friction and keep us floating in the lazy river of the scroll. It is everybody’s job these days to bring the fish to the village. There is no one left whose job it is to move the village.

Ten years ago, when I stumbled on Csikszentmihalyi, I was convinced that the great challenge of living was the ability to get into flow. These days, I wonder if a crucial skill to maintaining sanity and self-awareness is rather the ability to get out of zombie flow. “Without challenge, life had no meaning,” Csikszentmihalyi wrote. The elders knew it, too. Life is supposed to be the right kind of hard.

Perhaps you’ve heard the news: America is experiencing a religious revival and it’s concentrated among young people who are flocking back to the fold.

The Economist declared that “The West has stopped losing its religion.” The Washington Post noted that “Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men.” The Wall Street Journal chronicled “A Church’s Campaign to Teach Lost Boys How to Be Men.”

If true, this would mean the abrupt end to the largest wand fastest period of secularization in American history. But Ryan Burge, the author of the Graphs About Religion Substack, says something weirder is going on. Yes, the share of Americans who say they have “no religious affiliation” has stopped rising—for now. But the religious revival among young people is more mirage than divine miracle.

Graphs about Religion

Tons of data analysis about religion and politics. Mostly in the United States but a little bit of international stuff, too.

By Ryan Burge

There is a story that I thought I knew about the state of religion in America. On one side of the god divide, you had secular Americans who were anti-institutional, skeptical of traditional authorities, and struggling to build new systems of belief to organize their lives. On the other side, you had religious Americans who were fond of tradition and proud of centuries-old institutions of faith. But Burge told me that the fastest growing phenomena in American religion—the rise of the non-believers and the rise of new “non-denominational” Christian churches—are being powered by the same phenomenon, which he calls the “Substack-ification” of religion.

In today’s interview, which is luxuriously adorned with Burge’s graphs—we discuss the history of religion in America, the rise and pause of modern secularism, how America’s fastest growing churches are often personality cults, and why religious people seem to be happier, according to practically every measure.

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Derek Thompson: Throughout the 20th century, America was, by all accounts, the most religious, rich country in the world by far. Four hundred years after the Scientific Revolution, 100 years after Nietzsche declared, “God is dead,” in America, God was not dead. What’s the deal with America and religion?

Ryan Burge: We are an insanely religious country and it becomes even more prominent when you do a scatterplot of GDP on one axis and religiosity on the other axis. All the other wealthy countries on earth—especially our Eastern and Western European neighbors, Scandinavian neighbors—are significantly less religious than we are. Our closest comparison is Switzerland in terms of GDP. But only 17% of the Swiss say religion is very important. In America, it’s about 50%. So we are three times more religious than we should be compared to our European neighbors. We’re more religious than basically any industrialized country on earth at this point.

Thompson: Why?

Burge: The Christian nationalists are going to hate this answer, but it’s because we did not have a state church at the founding. Really you can thank Thomas Jefferson for this. There’s a theory in religious economy—Finke and Stark wrote a book about it, called The Churching of America—that argues that, without a state church monopoly, competition between religious groups forces religions to compete to be the best, the most interesting, the most charismatic, the most attractive. We had the most robust religious market of any country in the Western part of the world. Add to that the fact that America was founded by deeply religious people. Religiosity is woven into the DNA of American culture. So I think that created the fertile soil, and then the fact that we had this marketplace just allowed that soil to be even more productive.

THE RISE—AND PAUSE—OF AMERICAN SECULARISM

Thompson: Between the 1940s and 1980s, the share of Americans saying, “I have no religious affiliation” is a flat line. And then, suddenly, the flat savannah becomes Mount Kilimanjaro. The lines starts going up linearly. What happened in 1990?

Burge: I call it the venture capitalist graph. Every VC wants to see that hockey stick. The nones were hanging around for a very long time. There was a paper written in 1968 by a sociologist called “The Nones: The Neglected Category of Analysis.” No one was even thinking about it.

The one factor that a lot of people in this field point to is the fall of the Berlin Wall. If you grew up in America in the 1950s, ‘60s, or ‘70s, you could not say you were an atheist because it meant you were a communist. When the Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War was over and atheism was no longer so toxic.

Second, the rise of the internet allowed people to say what they really believed online and find others who agreed with them. The example I give: Imagine you were a kid raised in Mississippi in the 1950s and you did not believe in God. You’re probably never going to tell another human being. But now you can go online and find the Atheists of Mississippi Facebook group or sub-reddit, and that emboldens you to say what you really are.

The last thing I’ll say is that it has to do with politics. I really do think Newt Gingrich is one of the worst politicians we’ve had in terms of the trajectory of America. He decided he’d rather win than be a good person, and dragging the Democrats through the mud was how he’d do it. Republicans won the House majority in 1994 for the first time in years. Then both sides started going in the mud. The Republican Party started calling Democrats evil because they’re not the party of evangelicals, and began courting evangelicals and conservative Catholics. That set off what we call the God gap — the idea that the Republican Party is the party of people of faith and the Democratic Party is largely becoming the party of the non-faithful. I think that might be the most important political-religious phenomenon in America right now.

Thompson: So it was this dual connotation shift. Atheism went from a negative reputation during the Cold War to no reputation, or even a positive reputation, and Christianity became fused with Republican politics in a way that alienated liberal young people.You have a really compelling chart in one of your essays on the religion gap, looking at who watches Fox News versus MSNBC. According to your analysis, atheists are more liberal and more likely to watch MSNBC than white Catholics or Mormons are to be fviconservative.

I want to continue telling this story. We’ve explained why America is so religious and why the inflection point happened in the early 1990s. But at some point between 2019 and 2022, the share of Americans who said they have no religious affiliation, which had been rising for 30 years, just stopped. What happened in 2020?

Burge: If you’ve watched Fox News, you’d know about what they call a massive religious revival. But no — it’s not a revival, it’s just a pause. What we’re seeing is that older Americans are more likely to say they’re religious today than they were even five years ago, and you’re seeing that with Gen X too. A slight return to religion among middle-aged and older Americans is driving the aggregate number to stay flat or maybe even tick down a little.

Thompson: Why?

Burge: We don’t know exactly why. I do think at some level it’s politics. A lot of older Americans are Republicans, especially white older Americans. Part of the return of religion is: “I’m a Republican, I’m a conservative, and that’s why I say I’m religious.” But they’re not actually going to church. They just say they’re religious because that’s what their tribe does.

The crucial point is that the share of Americans who are non-religious will go up in the future unless something dramatic changes—something we've never seen before in the history of modern polling. Millennials are about 40% non-religious. Among Gen Z, it's around 45%. Boomers are going to die eventually. For every boomer who dies and is replaced by a Gen Z, the aggregate number of nones rises through generational replacement.

Thompson: There’s one interpretation of what’s happening right now that says young Americans — and in particular young men with no clear political affiliation — are swarming back into the churches. Is that happening?

Burge: To parse out young people from a polling standpoint is really hard. They’re a hard group to poll, because they’re hard to contact and they don’t want to answer surveys. People don’t realize that even the gender gap thing among Gen Z is mathematically hard to parse. You’re cutting a sample from everyone down to just Gen Z, then cutting it in half again between men and women. You’re talking about a subgroup of a subgroup. Seeing a change there that’s statistically significant would take a sample size so large we can’t collect it.

All these anecdotes are interesting, but the idea that young people are coming back to church en masse is just not supported by any data I’ve ever looked at.

THE SUBSTACK-IFICATION OF AMERICAN RELIGION

Thompson: What religions and denominations are growing the fastest right now?

Burge: There’s a thing in American evangelicalism called non-denominationalism. For those who don’t live in that world, these are the churches you drive by that look like factories or office buildings. They’re called things like The Journey, The Ramp, The Bridge, Life Church. There’s one called I Heart Church; that’s literally their legal name. There’s one called Enjoy Church in St. Louis. Those non-denominationals were a rounding error in American Christianity 50 years ago: 3% of Americans were non-denominational then, and now it’s 14% of all Americans. That’s 35 to 40 million people.

For comparison, the largest denomination is the Southern Baptist Convention at 12.5 million. Non-denoms are probably three times that size. One-third of all Protestants are now non-denominational. The reason Evangelicalism is still 20% of America — the same size it was 50 years ago — is because of the rise of non-denominationalism.

Thompson: Talk to me like I’m a Reform Jew who knows nothing about non-denominational Evangelicalism — in part because that’s exactly who I am. What’s special about these non-denominational churches that explains their unique growth at a moment when so many other, more traditional faiths are declining?

Burge: It’s what I call the great reversal in American society. We used to be very top-down, very hierarchical. If you wanted to be a pastor, you had to go through an ordination process, get approval from a denomination, and then they would place you in a congregation. This is the absolute opposite of that. They don’t ask permission to start a church. A lot of them aren’t ordained. A lot have very little or no theological training. It’s almost like the social media internet model — you can build a following online and then that becomes the whole thing.

These churches are popping up by the thousands all across America. They’re the most grassroots form of religion you could possibly have. A lot of these churches were literally started by a guy in his basement having a Bible study with two or three couples. He might have been a real estate agent, an insurance broker, a construction company owner—and he just starts a Bible study. Then it grows from eight people to eighteen to eight hundred, and it just becomes this organic thing.

Some of those pastors are proud of the fact that they didn’t have to seek permission to start the church, that they had very little formal training. They say ”God did this.” And people like the accountability too. When you put $100 in the plate, that $100 is decided upon by people sitting in that room. The elders, the deacons, the pastor are all right in front of you and you can talk to them any Sunday. Whereas if you gave money to the Catholic Church, some of it goes to some diocese, to the Vatican, and it goes away and we don’t know where. Non-denoms have almost no bureaucracy. It feels renegade: “Screw what everyone else wants. We’re going to start a church because God wants us to.” And that has been incredibly successful and has really changed the trajectory of American religion.

Thompson: It’s interesting, because I would have thought that a resurgence of Christianity would be a counter-movement to the larger theme of declining institutions. I expected you to say, “Look, institutions are declining in media, but they’re strong in religion because of the religious revival.” And what you’re telling me is: No, the same thing that’s happening in media is happening in religion. You used to have to start as a beat reporter at a local paper, slowly work your way up to the New York Times; that has been demolished. Now you go online, start a Twitch, a YouTube, build an audience.

Some of these media startups are, if not personality cults, certainly personality businesses. Are these fast-growing non-denominational churches better understood as personality cults? Or are they better understood as tweaks of Protestantism that catch on because they feel grassroots rather than because they tapped into a 500-year-old tradition?

Burge: Many of them are personality-driven, without a doubt. And there’s an interesting problem coming in a couple of years, because a lot of these churches were started in the 1990s and 2000s, and those pastors are getting to the age where they don’t want to be pastor anymore. How do you hand that off to someone who is half as charismatic?

There are actually famous examples of this going wrong. There’s a church in Chicago called Willow Creek, which was one of the first non-denominational megachurches in America. Their pastor was Bill Hybels, and he had a five-year plan to retire and hand off to a new generation, including both a male and a female pastor. He had the whole thing planned out. Then it came out that he was involved in sexual harassment, and everything fell apart. Both new pastors resigned. Most of the elder board resigned, accused of covering it up. The church declined 30 to 40% in attendance. That is the weakness of this whole model.

Denominations will continue to endure because they have structure in place to carry you over the chasms of uncertainty. Non-denominationals have no structure. It’s all based on who the pastor is. It’s the Substackification of American religion. You start your own thing. You go outside the ecosystem, you don’t need all the structures. That’s almost exactly what these non-denominational churches are doing. You’re not here for Methodism or Lutheranism. You’re here for my flavor of American Christianity and the way I preach it. And people are drawn to that by the tens of thousands. It’s the only major segment of American religion that’s growing.

Thompson: You’ve really changed my mind in the last few minutes. I came into this conversation with the frame that the rise of secularism in America was all about the decline of institutions and the rise of individualism. But the story you’re telling is that many of the biggest success stories within Christianity right now are about anti-institutional individuals building a broadcast that is one-to-one-million audience. So the same underlying sociological phenomenon that one could use to describe the rise of the nones is the same thing powering the renaissance of Christianity in some parts of America. It just shows how unbelievably powerful some of these zeitgeists are — that they can explain and power movements that seem, in terms of their outcomes, to be entirely opposite. On one hand, people are becoming less religious. On the other, people are becoming more religious. But it’s the same anti-institutional zeitgeist powering both.

Burge: Think about Donald Trump too. He ran outside the party — “They don’t want me to be the candidate, they’re actively working against my candidacy.” He used that as a badge of honor, just like those pastors say, “Yeah, I don’t need to get ordained. I don’t need permission to start this church. God wants me to.” He was a bottom-up, grassroots president. That’s the great reversal.

All the power in society now comes from building a following on social media. If you build a big enough following, you can literally change the world, whether it be religion, politics, or culture. I don’t think we fully grasp what that means in terms of how we think about where power comes from. We destroyed all the gatekeepers. Is that necessarily a good thing? I would argue a little bit of gatekeeping is what kept us safe. Ivermectin is not the solution to all your problems, but when you destroy all the gatekeepers, it can seem like it. It’s almost like we’re living in a relativist world where no one has the truth. The destroying of hierarchy and leadership in all the structures we had are leading us into a new era, changing everything about what authority looks like, who we listen to, and what the truth is. And I think American religion, whether it realizes it or not, led that charge with the rise of these non-denominationals.

Thompson: The idea that anti-authority philosophy is powering the revitalization of Christianity as much as it’s powering the rise of secularism is a strange idea. I like it.

THE FOUR TYPES OF NON-BELIEVERS

Thompson: I want to talk a little bit about the “nones.” The same way that non-Christians see Christianity as one big monolith, people looking at non-believers think it’s just one big group of people who hate Christianity. But you’ve done a really good job explaining how there are four subcategories of non-believers. I’d love you to run through those four categories.

Burge: We got a Templeton grant and did a survey of 12,000 non-religious Americans. For a long time the nones were just one group. When you’re 5% of America, you can be a monolith. empirically speaking. But you can’t go from 5% to 30% and still call the whole group “the nones.” There have to be internal categories. So we did this 12,000-person survey and created a four-part typology, myself and my coauthor Tony Jones.

One is called SBNRs: spiritual but not religious. These are the woo-woos. They don’t believe in Jesus, Muhammad, or Buddha, but they want to know your astrological sign. They think believing in Jesus is absolute nonsense, but they believe the star sign you were born under changes your entire life trajectory. That makes more sense to them.

Thompson: To make fun of myself: In my 20s, I certainly wasn’t very religious. And when I was dating, I believed I had a lucky pair of socks. If I wore those socks, it would be a really good date. After months, maybe years, of believing quite fervently in the concept of lucky socks, I realized: My theology is that there is no God, except a god of socks. The Almighty has no control over anything in the world, except that after creating the heavens and the Earth and the animals and the humans, His only domain of care is the degree to which these striped socks lead to an enjoyable date. Individual theologies can sometimes make absolutely no sense when you look at them from 30,000 feet up. A lot of human belief comes from a place of instinct that isn’t exactly well-planned before it’s articulated.

So anyway — I interrupted your four-part breakdown. We’ve talked about the spiritual but not religious. Keep going. What are the other three subcategories?

Burge: The second is more methodological. I call them the NINOs, nones in name only. A quarter of the nones are NINOs. A lot of these people say they have no religious affiliation, but then you ask them questions about religious practices and they actually do a bunch of religious things. Those first two groups — SBNRs and NINOs — make up 60% of the nones. We think those groups are generally more open to religion based on our questions about religious openness.

The bottom two groups are not at all open to religion. One we call the “Dones,” because that’s exactly what they are. They’re as far from religion as you can be: 1% believe in God, less than 1% pray at all, 2% go to church once a year or more. And we asked them, “What happens when you die?”, 77% of them said say, “When I die, my existence ends.” They’re also the oldest of the four groups. The boomer atheists, in my mind, are the dones. They make up about a third of all nones.

And then the last category — only 10% — might be the most fascinating. We call them zealous atheists. If you go on Reddit’s r/Atheism subreddit, that’s who you’re seeing: people who are atheist and angry about it, and who want you to become an atheist too. We asked all the nones, “Have you tried to convince someone to leave religion in the last 12 months?” On average, 5% of nones have tried to de-convert someone. Among zealous atheists, it’s a majority.

So it’s much more nuanced than “all nones hate religion, all nones are atheists.” A significant number of nones do believe in God or a higher power at some level. A lot say they’re spiritual, a lot have quasi-religious practices whether they realize it or not. Very few people are completely aspiritual and areligious. It’s more of a gradient than an on-off switch.

Thompson: I want to circle back to the spiritual but not religious. You have a really good picture of how they differ from the rest of the none category. They’re more likely to do yoga, meditate, believe in astrology or horoscopes, use crystals or tarot cards, burn sage, use mind-altering substances. It’s interesting to me that there’s this category of Americans who have gone into religion as if it’s a foreign country, harvested certain souvenirs, and brought them back to the world of secularism. They practice yoga but have no interest in understanding its religious origins. They meditate but are not remotely interested in any Buddhist version of nirvana. Tell me about this group. Who are they? Are they growing? And what do we misunderstand about them?

Burge: People think that a lot of people who aren’t religious are still very spiritual. That’s a big misconception. Among all nones, 25% said spirituality was very important to them. Among the religious, 61% said spirituality was very important. So the idea that lots of non-religious people are replacing religion with spirituality is actually not true. Most people who are non-religious are also non-spiritual at the same time. SBNRs are one manifestation of non-religion, but they’re not the dominant one.

What you were describing, Derek, is a concept that Christian Smith pioneered about 20 years ago called moralistic therapeutic deism. This was the idea that “God wants me to feel good about things.” You take your lucky socks, or astrology, or you go to mass once a year at Christmas. You pick and choose the theology that makes sense to you and push away whatever doesn’t make you feel good. I think that’s what SBNRs have done. They pluck out certain practices from major religious traditions—”I’ll take the parts I like and leave the rest”—not realizing that one of the reasons religion has been so successful throughout human history is that it requires doing everything together.

There was a big media story 10 or 15 years ago about something called Sunday Assembly. It was “Church Without God.” A bunch of atheists got together on Sunday morning, had coffee and donuts, sang pop songs, heard a TED-style talk, and built community. It was a huge story. But most of those Sunday assemblies folded. They only wanted the parts of religion they liked and left the others behind. They were afraid to ask for money because it felt scammy, so a lot of them didn’t have the money to pay the musicians, or pay for the rental hall.

You can’t just pick and choose. It’s like a three-legged stool. You need all three legs. If you pull one out, it falls apart. A lot of people are doing that with religion right now. They’re walking down the buffet line, picking one piece, putting it on their plate, and calling it a spiritual life. That doesn’t endure.

RELIGION, HAPPINESS, AND THE ‘MOST CONCERNING TREND’

Thompson: Some people say: “If you knock God off the pedestal, it creates a vacuum for spirituality that has to be filled with something.” But what you see in the data is that in many cases, that vacuum is filled with more vacuum. People who are least likely to go to church are most likely to feel somewhat empty in their lives. Dropping out begets dropping out.

Burge: This might be the most worrisome trend I see in all the data. Twenty percent of Americans tell Pew that their religion is “nothing in particular.” This group is struggling economically. They have the lowest socioeconomic status of any religious group. They’re also the least likely group to participate in politics: putting up a yard sign, going to a political meeting. They are struggling in every possible way, because in many ways they’ve dropped out of the social fabric that holds American society up.

Here’s what people don’t understand about how religion works in America. The people most likely to attend a house of worship this weekend are those with graduate degrees. The people least likely are those with a high school diploma or less. I have never seen a single data source where that relationship is reversed. More education leads to more participation in everything in American life—not just religion, but politics, culture, society. And if you think about what religion does that’s invisible to the average person, it gives you the opportunity to move up in life by building a network of people who run businesses, who are managers, who can get your foot in the door at a new company. Whereas if you’re a nothing-in-particular who dropped out of everything, you’re putting your resume in a stack with a thousand others and no one knows who you are.

This dropping-out phenomenon makes their lives demonstrably worse in ways they don’t see or feel. Religious people are doing well because they’ve built a social network that is not fully visible to them, but is there to support them through their darkest times — when they lose a job, when they lose a spouse, when they’re going through depression or anxiety. Those social organizations carry them through.

This is creating a bifurcation in American society between the haves and the have-nots. What’s even scarier: among young people 18 to 22, the most popular response to “What is your present religion?” is nothing in particular. One-third of 18-to-22-year-olds say that. You’re setting yourself up for failure as you move into adulthood because you don’t have the social networks that your parents and grandparents had. What are you going to rely on? For many of them, the answer is Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok. They’re not going to get out into the world and try to make it better, because they have no social connection.

Thompson: You had a really striking graph that showed that the happiness gap between the religious and non-religious has roughly doubled between the boomer generation and this generation of young people. Why do you think that is?

Burge: I think it’s about divide between liberalism and conservatism. No one wants to have this conversation, but liberals are not as happy as conservatives. You can cut the data however you want, control for whatever you want, run whatever math you want. Conservatives are happier than liberals. Part of it is this idea I hear constantly online: We live in the worst timeline possible, and everything is catastrophized. The polar ice caps are melting, Social Security is going bankrupt. You and I both came of age during the Obama ascendance, and Obama was a hopeful politician. He was good at instilling the idea that democracy could be good, that America could be a beacon for the world. Think about the politicians who have run for election since. How many are truly inspirational? Not very many.

You know where I hear the most inspirational stuff? At church. That’s where I get inspired to feel positive about things. It helps reorient me toward the positive. Whenever I give a talk, the last question I always get is, “Ryan, where’s your hope?” And for me it always comes back to faith.

This also connects to the fertility gap and the marriage gap. Married people are happier than unmarried people. People with children are happier than people without children. That’s not a conservative talking point, that’s just what the data says. And at some point we’ve got to say the true thing in the data: being religious, having kids, getting married, having an education—all those things tend to make people happier. And they’re all correlated with each other in this causal matrix. Being more religious means you’re more likely to be married, more likely to have kids, more likely to have social trust. If you’re more likely to have social trust, you’re more likely to be religious, more likely to go to college. All of these things are tangled up in a web that generates positivity. And if you’re not in that web, it feels like you’re going to struggle on metrics like happiness.

Thompson: I want to add one more ingredient: People who have more money are happier.

The cycle flows two ways. People who are educated, and therefore on the higher end of the income bracket, are more likely to get married. So not only do they have financial security, they also have relationship security, and that confers happiness or acts as a kind of vaccine against misery. There’s also research from the sociologist Kathryn Edin suggesting that men who were religious or went to church and then get divorced often lose their association with church, because it was the woman in the relationship managing the social calendar, including church on Sunday. Which meant that divorce precipitated disengagement with religion, rather than religion being the thing that dictated the relationship in the first place.

So rather than a clean domino effect—believe in God, then get married, then make money, thus be happy—I think about it as a complex cycle that keeps touching back on social connection. What is marriage? A social connection. What is a religious congregation? Social connections. What is one of the key differences between people with money and without? People with means can afford the experiences that protect social connections, rather than staying inside doing cheap things on their phone. To me, it all comes back to the fact that people need people, and we have a handful of institutions—marriage and religion—that are very good at keeping people attached to people. Folks who disengage from both aren’t doomed to misery. But there’s a lot you have to build on your own without institutions that are really, really good at keeping you connected to community. If you don’t have them, you have to build it yourself, and that’s just really damn hard to do.

Burge: There was a tweet a couple of years ago where someone wrote, “I wish there was a place to hang out that wasn’t expensive, with no alcohol, where we just make friends.” And I thought: “Oh, you’re going to hate my answer, but there’s probably one less than a mile from you right now that would absolutely love to have you show up.” All the comments were like, “No, not like that.” That’s the problem. People are waiting for some perfect social organization to fulfill all their loneliness needs and maybe find a partner. Your grandparents knew how to do this inherently, and we’ve forgotten how to just go and be social.

I speak to secular groups all the time, and they ask me, somewhat awkwardly, “Do you think our way of living is defective or inferior to yours?” I tell them: “I don’t want to speak about philosophical or theological things. I have my own theology and you have yours, and I’m not going to convince you I’m right. What I can tell you is: unless and until you create the social organizations that religion has provided for American society for the last 250 years, I’m going to think your way of living is not as good.” And by the way, that’s not just Christianity. That’s Judaism, Islam, Latter-day Saints. The community of people meeting together regularly to share their lives, create a mutual aid society for each other, and serve people in the community—that is an objectively good thing.

Religion always has a vertical component — you and God, your understanding of higher things — but it has a very strong horizontal component too: just hanging out with other people. Rodney Stark talked about this in the context of the Black Plague. A third of Europe died. But the death rate in Christian communities was lower, not because God was protecting Christians, but because Christians did not leave other Christians behind when they got sick. They tried to take care of them, feed them, nourish them. And by doing that, they actually lowered their own death rate. So it’s not magic, it’s science. Just taking care of other people is in some ways a miraculous thing, and that is how religion operates. You don’t have to believe in any woo-woo, any resurrection, any miracles to understand the miracle of what it means to hang out in community with people for a long period of time who want to help you and you want to help them. We’ve forgotten that part. There is a value in just showing up and being part and building a community. If you believe in none of it, it won’t matter, because those other people believe in you and you believe in them. I really do believe that if the average person goes to an average house of worship on a regular basis for a year or two, their lives will be demonstrably better in multiple dimensions—in ways they won’t even understand—because of being part of that community.

Thompson: I like the idea that “the strength of the vertical predicts the strength of the horizontal.” Strong beliefs in a higher purpose lead to strong connections with other people. That seems true outside of religion. Why does everyone make their best friends from school, or work, or their children’s school? Because they are obligated by law to attend school. That’s a very thick connection.

It might also explain the difficulty of forming a church without God. If the vertical is going to be weak, the horizontal is going to be weak. If you have a book club with people who don’t really love the same novels, it doesn’t last long. Whereas with church—if you have people who at least somewhat believe in a higher power and believe in the structures of Catholicism, or Protestantism, or some non-denominational thing—it’s the strength of the vertical that explains the strength of the horizontal.

As I’m working on ideas about the antisocial century, I want to hold onto this: if you don’t have that central spine of purpose, the community won’t last. If your only purpose is “let’s get together,” that’s not enough. You need that higher purpose—that vertical spine—in order to build a truly strong horizontal community.

Americans spend more time alone—and less time socializing in-person—than any period in recorded history.

Some people think this is a story about technology. The post-war construction of the suburbs spread us out. Television keeps us in our living rooms. Phones keep teens in their bedrooms. Others think this is a story about values. Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, has pointed to the social gospel of the early 20th century as an example of how communitarian values can sweep the world. In the last 60 years, however, the cult of individualism has turned the ethic of “we” into an ethic of “me” across politics, sports clubs, and family habits.

These technology- and values-based narratives have merit. But they’re missing a big piece of the puzzle. They’re missing a fundamental law of modern economics.

Look across the U.S. economy. Cinemas are fighting to stay relevant, but Netflix is a growing juggernaut. Restaurants feel squeezed, but DoorDash has healthy profit margins.

This is a consistent pattern. Companies in the business of bringing people together for shared experiences are struggling. Meanwhile, products that increase the time we spend alone are doing great.

Alone time has surged in the last 60 years in large part because of changing economics that made it profitable to run businesses that keep people apart and expensive to run businesses that bring people together. If our social lives seem sick with solitude, that’s because they suffer from a disease with a name. It’s called Baumol’s cost disease.

YOU CAN’T ‘INNOVATE’ YOUR WAY TO A THREE-PERSON QUARTET

In the 1960s, the John F. Kennedy administration wanted to understand why so many theaters and artists were struggling financially. They turned to the economist William Baumol to investigate. An avid painter and sculptor, Baumol was the man for the job. With a colleague, he tracked down data by poking around backstages, sending questionnaires to theatergoers, and interviewing Broadway producers.

Baumol soon developed an elegant, data-­backed theory that explained much more than why artists were starving.

His insight was that agriculture can become more productive in a way that theater cannot. While a single farmer produces far more food today than a century ago by making use of machines and improved fertilizer, the business of putting on a play or an opera cannot benefit from similar labor-saving technology. “The output per man-­hour of the violinist playing a Schubert quartet in a standard concert hall is relatively fixed,” Baumol observed, “and it is fairly difficult to reduce the number of actors necessary for a performance of Henry IV, Part II.”

Baumol recognized that this principle extended across the entire economy, beyond farms and opera houses. Some sectors, such as growing corn and making electronics, have become more efficient and productive thanks to new technology, trade, and automation. But other sectors— especially services, such as haircuts, theater performances, and watching toddlers in daycare—still require as much labor as they did before the Industrial Revolution.

To be clear, this is mostly good news! This is the story of economic progress. In 1960, the average American family spent 17% of their disposable income on food. Over the next four decades, that fell below 10%, even as the average family dined out more often. People used to brag about the size of their flat-screen TVs. Now huge TVs are too affordable to be a status symbol.

The trouble is that productivity growth doesn’t just make goods cheaper. It made the economy richer. It raised the economy-wide price of human time—which is a fancy way of saying “wages.” As these industries became more productive, they could pay workers higher salaries. As wages rose, restaurants, operas, and childcare centers had to offer higher pay, as well, to keep their workers from leaving.

This created a sticky problem for businesses that didn’t benefit from new technology, or trade, or automation. Without productivity growth, they just got more expensive. After all, no one can finish five beard trims in the time it used to take to complete one. No ballet company can put on 10 Swan Lake performances in the time it used to do just one. Still, in order to keep their workers from switching careers, theaters and childcare centers had to offer higher salaries. And therefore increase their prices. (Sure, many teachers, cellists, and social workers accept lower salaries to do work they love. But if the salary gap gets too big, they will switch.)

When opera houses and theaters beg wealthy patrons for donations—even as the ticket prices are prohibitively expensive and many singers and actors can barely afford rent—you’re hearing Baumol’s cost disease at work. What they’re saying is: “The rest of the economy has technology, trade, and automation. We don’t. So please make up the difference with tax-deductible donations!”

THE CENTURY OF ANTI-SOCIAL BUSINESSES

If you read this newsletter, you’re probably familiar with Derek’s idea that we are living in an anti-social century. I think he’s right. But—and Derek allowed me to say this!—I don’t think he’s focused enough on the economics of the anti-social century. He’s been missing something big: In capitalism, it often pays to be anti-social.

TV and smartphone-based activities are, after all, very much part of the ever-more-productive economy. They benefit from technology gains: Actors once performed every night for a small local audience. Then TV networks aired one program at a time for national audiences. Now Netflix streams an ever-growing library of content for a global user base. The world of digital, solitude-inducing entertainment is scalable, so investors give founders millions to build the next short-form video app, delivery platform, or AI companion company.

But concerts, independent bookstores, and restaurants (with table service) are in the humans-only economy. They are labor intensive. When they get more efficient over time, it’s generally by becoming less social, like the fast-casual restaurant chains that have customers order by kiosk and sit on uncomfortable metal chairs that prod them to eat quickly and leave promptly. And definitely not linger over dessert or one more drink, the conversation reaching an emotional frontier in the warm glow of a long meal.

Cost disease doesn’t mean people have to be less social. Going on a hike with friends is still free. So is organizing a potluck. Meeting for coffee is a little pricey, but not prohibitively so.

But cost disease and the profit motive shape our choices. Free, social activities compete with cheap, engaging, and high-quality entertainment (like For All Mankind on Apple TV—why is no one talking about this show?!) and even cheaper doomscrolling. The profit margins for a restaurant or cafe whose owner aspires to create a “third space” are vanishingly thin. The marketing budget for Marvel movies is more than $100 million.

Because of cost disease, most of the world’s most powerful corporations and most driven entrepreneurs are well capitalized and incentivized to increase our solitude, while purveyors of long nights with friends are outliers who succeed despite strong headwinds.

Even Facebook’s evolution fits in with cost disease. In the Aughts, people used to ask, only half jokingly, why we were all working for free by creating content for Facebook. But like other labor-intensive services, our free labor did not get more efficient every year. Facebook could only wring so many more posts from each user’s social network. So, to achieve efficiency gains, Facebook had to design an algorithm that displayed the most engaging and relevant-to-you content created by anyone, anywhere in the world, including by more and more professionals. To become more productive, Facebook had to become more anti-social.

THE CURE FOR COST DISEASE

It may sound like Baumol’s cost disease dooms certain industries to get less affordable forever. But the malady he named has a dependable solution. Progressive taxes in a growing economy can be used to subsidize key services so that average Americans can afford them.

For example, there is a strong economic argument for subsidizing health care, education, and even child care.

But should we also subsidize sit-down restaurants? Bowling alleys and the local dive bar? Coachella!

Of course, I’m joking about Coachella. (Kind of.) But my serious point is that if solitude has a social cost, it’s not crazy to think that local, state, and federal governments should be thinking about creative ways to make it cheaper to hang out. Some policy solutions would be familiar, such as local governments providing more public pools and community spaces. Others might sound a little odd, like making pro-social businesses, such as restaurants, qualify for tax-deductible donations, the same way that Puccini fans can write checks to their favorite opera house.

Cost disease is real, and it has a known cure. Today we’re seeing that one price of a successful economy is the rise of anti-social businesses. But if we want our rising living standards to include friendships and shared experiences—and not just a nation of couch potatoes scrolling on their phones for 10 hours a day—then we’ll need to choose our social future. And pay for it.

Billions of people look at their phones and see the whole world. But some theorists look at the whole world and see only phones.

The rise of youth anxiety? It’s the phones. The rise of global populism? The phones, again. The surge in attention disorders in the U.S.? The global decline in literacy? The scourge of political polarization? Phones, phones, and more phones.

The NYU professor Arpit Gupta has called this the “Smartphone Theory of Everything.” It is the notion that an unholy nexus of smartphones, the Internet, and social media is uniquely to blame for practically every modern malady.

But which of these associations are backed by solid evidence, and which are backed by little more than confident assertion?

I have been reporting on this space for several years, and this article is my best attempt to separate the strongest claims from the weakest, according to the best science available. Rather than base my analysis on individual correlational studies, I leaned on randomized trials, meta-analyses that evaluated hundreds of studies, and a “consensus survey” that asked hundreds of academics what they thought about the effect of smartphone use on personal and mental health.

In my experience, the loudest voices can sometimes misrepresent the underlying evidence. The strongest proponents of the SToE often ignore the stubborn fact that phones are global but their worst effects are strangely concentrated in the richest, English-speaking countries. But the fiercest critics of the SToE often ignore the findings of randomized trials and real-world experiments, such as phone bans in schools, which have mostly shown that taking phones away from people makes them a little happier and better at focusing.

The subject of smartphones’ effect on the world is so vast, so complicated, and in some cases so uncertain that the remainder of this article is divided into two parts. First, I’m going to break out four big truths about the smartphone/social media/internet literature. Second, I’m going to do my best to take the most common claims about smartphones in the world—e.g., they make people sad, distracted, conspiratorial, unmarried, etc.—and place these claims into three buckets: (1) Strong evidence; (2) Mixed evidence; and (3) Weak evidence.

If I do my job well, this article can serve not only as a useful synthesis for scholars and ordinary readers but also as a living document that I can update every year, as we learn more about the 21st century’s most famous theory of everything.

I. FOUR BIG TRUTHS ABOUT SMARTPHONES

1. Smartphones and social media are hard to study well. This basic fact cuts two ways. It means SToE crtitics can overstate the evidence, but it also means the evidence can understate the real effect of phones.

“Getting clean causal evidence on the long-term impact of phones and social media is devilishly hard,” said Matthew Gentzkow, a Stanford economist. “Re-running history without iPhones or Facebook is not a feasible experiment. The randomized experiments we can do are generally short-term limited interventions, and observational data analysis over longer horizons faces big hurdles in inferring causality. The hard work of research is stitching together the data points we can muster to fill in the overall picture while remaining cognizant of how much we don’t know.”

People like to compare smartphones and cigarettes. Let me say something here that begs to be taken out of context: I wish smartphones were cigarettes. If the phone experience were a mass-manufactured bundle of chemicals that we could test in isolation against a control group, then the science of proving or disproving the harm of phones would be trivially easy. This whole essay could be one sentence long: We did some tests on phones, and they’re definitely giving people cancer.

Unfortunately— for research purposes, only—smartphones are not tobacco. Everybody’s online experience is unique, which means that everybody is effectively smoking a slightly different cigarette. No surprise, then, that observational analyses struggle to prove causality, and randomized experiments to prove causality are typically brief and limited. You can’t assign child participants to heavy social media use for a full year, and you certainly can’t randomly assign kids to use their smartphones in a specific way for a long time. (“Hi Madison, we need you to spend your entire junior year marinating in angry left-wing Reddit posts to measure the impact of online Marxism on the teenage mind” is not a plausible study design.) If you force participants to deactivate Facebook in a study, they might just download Twitter; in fact, that’s exactly what happened in a 2020 study. If you force them to give up their phones entirely, they’ll still need to maintain desktop web access; in fact, that’s exactly what happened in a 2025 study.1

Another reason that smartphones are hard to study is that, like alcohol, they might have small effects on the majority population and large effects on a minority population. In 2020, Instagram’s own analysis concluded that its product “made body image issues worse” for one third of teenage girls. That’s a big number! But it also implies that for the majority of teenage girls, Instagram had a small or negligible effect. And, of course, most people are not teenage girls.

Cellphone Cassandras can exaggerate the conclusions of careful research, which often show small overall effects. But critics of the SToE often ignore practical conclusions by fixating exclusively on small overall effect sizes, despite the evidence of significant long-tail effects. Maybe both sides should get comfortable thinking about social media as “attention alcohol”: fun if moderately problematic for most, and very dangerous for some.

2. There’s something weird about America—and, maybe, the entire English-speaking world.

One of the most interesting wrinkles in the smartphone theory of everything is that while phones are everywhere, the problems that they cause are often rising fastest and first in the richest countries—especially in the U.S.

Take the theory that smartphones make people sad. According to the latest World Happiness Report, happiness among young people has plummeted most severely in Western developed countries that speak English, such as the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. On the other hand, “happiness at every age has risen sharply in Central and Eastern Europe,” the report said. In East Asia, happiness is increasing “at every age.” The same is true for suicide. Emergency-room visits for suicide attempts among young women soared across the Anglosphere in the last few years. But as I’ve reported, the suicide rate among people ages 15 to 19 fell in most European countries in the last decade.

Or take attention deficit disorders. The surge in ADHD cases seems to be another US-heavy phenomenon, with American child diagnoses rising at roughly twice the rate of European countries. To understand rising anxiety and attention disorders in the U.S., we have to recognize the phenomenon of diagnostic inflation—i.e., medical providers expanding the definition of anxiety and ADHD to treat more cases.

Or take polarization. The U.S. also seems to be an outlier in some maladies that are associated with smartphones. A 2020 paper on polarization in the west found that “affective polarization”—the degree of hostility that people feel toward the party they oppose—rose fastest and first in the U.S., with most of the increase predating the smartphone age. The researchers wrote that polarization took off in the 1990s, right around the introduction of Fox News, which was 20 years before the smartphone revolution took off.

Or take populism and distrust. Again, the strongest effects seem concentrated in the U.S. A 2023 Nature Human Behaviour review of 496 articles found that digital media is most strongly associated with declining political trust and growing populism in developed democracies, such as the United States. In developing democracies, by contrast, the largest effect of digital media on politics seems to be that it increases political participation.

What do we make of all this? One interpretation might be that if smartphones are global and these effects are localized, then the smartphone theory of everything is just bunk. I don’t buy that. I think it’s more likely that smartphones are an active ingredient that’s interacting with other phenomena that are distinctly western or American, in order to create berserk local effects. It’s possible that in a few years, most academics will agree with some version of this thesis statement: Compulsive phone use along with under-regulated social media reliably produce widespread anxiety, attention issues, polarization, populism, and institutional distrust in highly individualistic societies with a culture of diagnostic inflation [i.e., expanded diagnostic guidelines for anxiety and ADHD], negative-affect prevalence [i.e., people online constantly talking about their anxiety and ADHD], and high levels of negativity in the news ecosystem … and post-2010 America was simply the first and most dramatic example of all these ingredients coming together.

3. People overrate phones’ effect on misinformation—and underrate their effect on information.

In 2018, Gentzkow and other researchers paid about 1,700 Americans to deactivate Facebook for four weeks before the midterm elections. Those who logged off were happier, less anxious, and less politically polarized.

Findings like these have trickled through academia into mainstream media and the public discourse, where parents, teachers, depressed youths, and politicians are well-primed to see smartphones and social media as The Problem^TM. But here’s what almost nobody talks about: The people who deactivated also knew less in general about the world. In a second, larger study of more than 35,000 Facebook and Instagram users, the same thing happened.

This finding is a Rosetta Stone for the smartphone debate, because it reveals something both sides keep getting wrong: Smartphones are above all an information-delivery system—a relentless, inescapable IV drip of news, connection, outrage, friendship, conspiracy, solidarity, and garbage—whose effect on any individual depends significantly on what’s in the drip2.

If smartphones are making Americans depressed, conspiratorial, and anxious, it might be because the news is structurally becoming more depressing, conspiratorial, and anxious. In 2023, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, and London Business School used AI to trace positive vs. negative words across tens of millions of newspaper articles from the 1850s to the 2020s. For more than a century, news positivity hovered around a stable average. But after the 1960s, negativity surged. “News coverage has just gotten more and more negative every decade in the last 50 years, especially when you adjust for economic recessions,” UPenn economist J. H. van Binsbergen, a co-author on the paper, told me. As I wrote in an essay for The Atlantic, I suspect that as the media industry got more competitive in the past few decades, publishers desperate to command reader attention doubled down on the old clichés that “if it bleeds, it leads” and “bad is better than good.” In this light, phones didn’t make the news more depressing so much as they made it easier to access depressing news.

4. The biggest problem with smartphones isn’t what’s on the phone, but rather what’s not on the phone.

My favorite Jonathan Haidt argument is that phones replace play-based adolescence with phone-based adolescence. That is, the most important thing about phones isn’t what’s on the screen, but rather everything that’s off the screen when you’re lost gazing into your pocket device.

While it’s hard for researchers to control what participants are doing with their phones, it’s not hard for researchers to see what people are doing when they’re not on their phones. They sleep more! They socialize more! They go outside more! (And, yes, they watch TV more.)

In 2025, researchers found that randomly removing internet access from smartphones produced a range of benefits, including improved mental health, subjective well-being, and the ability to sustain attention. More than 90 percent of the nearly 500 participants experienced at least one benefit. As best as the researchers could tell, the most significant reason for improved mental health and subjective well-being came from participants spending more time “socializing in person, exercising, and being in nature.”

Another randomized trial that paid people to deactivate Facebook before the 2018 midterm elections also found that people spent more time with friends and family. From that paper:

The 60 minutes freed up by not using Facebook … were allocated to both solitary and social activities offline. Solitary television watching increases by 0.17 points on our scale; other solitary offline activities increase by 0.23 points, and time devoted to spending time with friends and family increases by 0.14 points.

To summarize everything I’ve just said in a brief paragraph: Phones are global, but what’s on our phones is exquisitely individual. For this reason, overall phone effects are hard to study. They are best understood as a relentless information-delivery system whose utility or harm is exquisitely dependent on the type of information that people access. This might explain why cultures with more anxious or polarizing content—such as the U.S.—see higher and faster rates of anxiety and polarization. Rather than adopt an empirical nihilism about all this (ah, well, phones are complicated, let’s just do nothing!), we should pay close attention to the consistent finding that people tend to be a little happier and little more attentive when they un-hook from the information-IV drip of their personal devices.

That’s an awfully broad summary! So, let’s talk about some specific claims, such as:

• Are phones really so bad for sleep?

• How strong is the evidence that they cause population-wide anxiety?

• Are they turning us into conspiracy theorists?

• What does the research say about their role in explaining rising populism and declining marriage rates?

In this next section, I’ve done my best to place 10 popular claims into three buckets: Strong evidence, mixed evidence, and weak evidence.3

II. THE 10 MOST POPULAR CLAIMS ABOUT PHONES

STRONGEST EVIDENCE

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The landscape of AI is not merely filled with news. It is filled with teams. You have the doomers, the accelerationists, the skeptics, the it’s-a-bubble oracles, the anti-bubble counter oracles, and so on. It would be convenient for my sanity—and, perhaps, the sanity of my readers—if I simply joined one team and never removed the jersey. But I don’t think any aforementioned tribe has a monopoly on good arguments. I think the doomers are right about the risk of the technology, and the accelerationists are right about the promise of the technology, and the skeptics are right that the doomers and accelerationists can both overstate their cases.

So I’m trying to make sure that my coverage of AI cuts across silos and allows readers to hear from all of the teams. Last week, I published an interview with the investor and writer Paul Kedrosky on the case for AI being an economic bubble. But if any single data point pierces that narrative, it’s this: Between December 2025 and March 2026, the AI lab Anthropic more than doubled its annual recurring revenue from $9 billion to more than $20 billion. According to several analysts, there is no record of any company growing this fast at this scale … ever. It’s hard to imagine that artificial intelligence is both a bubble and the home to the industry witnessing the fastest-growing businesses in history.

Today’s conversation is with Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark. I don’t need Jack or anybody at Anthropic to read me a corporate statement about the company’s revenue growth. I can do that, myself. What I really wanted to hear from Jack were his answers to the deepest, thorniest philosophical questions about the meaning of AI. Questions like:

• If Anthropic’s executives believes that AI might be as dangerous as nuclear weapons, what right does any private business have to build this sort of thing for profit?

• If AI is really so good at making people more productive, why do Americans overall say they disapprove of AI more than just about every other institution and individual in the world?

• Does Anthropic really believe that AI will lead to imminent mass unemployment?

• Why—as Noah Smith recently put it—does this industry insist on “our product will make you economically useless, and possibly kill you!” as a marketing strategy?

• Why does AI still seem quite inept at coming up with truly original insights?

• How does Anthropic use its own autonomous agents to increase productivity within the company?

• If other companies learn to use agents effectively, is knowledge work “cooked”?

• How should we raise our children in an age of AI?

• And what values would super-intelligence make even more important than they are today?

IF AI IS LIKE A NUKE, WHY SHOULD PRIVATE COMPANIES BUILD IT, AT ALL?

Derek Thompson: Anthropic has compared artificial intelligence to nuclear weapons on several occasions. Most recently in January, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, said that the Trump administration’s decision to allow advanced NVIDIA chips to be exported to China was “a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”

The US does not allow private companies to build nuclear weapons. That is the law. If artificial intelligence is just like nuclear weapons, why should we allow private firms to build it for profit?

Jack Clark: AI is fundamentally like everything. It’s like a factory that produces cars, micro scooters, animals, and nuclear weapons all at the same time. And the main question we’re going to have to deal with as a society is how do you govern those factories and how do you decide what the appropriate uses are of the things that come out? I can’t talk about the specifics of our ongoing discussions with the Department of Defense. I can say that Anthropic was extremely committed to working on national security early because we recognize that AI is going to touch every single part of life, and every single part of life is going to have its own range of incredibly thorny, difficult issues. We’re going to need a much larger societal conversation about how we govern this technology in general, and we will need to reckon with the fact that the technology comes from the private sector and then flows into all of these other sectors. That’s going to be really challenging. It’s something we haven’t encountered before, because previously you didn’t have a technology that could become anything. You had specific technologies built by specific industries for specific purposes, and that was in many ways simpler.

Thompson: I want to hear a robust defense of why this is the private sector’s job. The nuclear analogy is invoked in so many different ways: for export controls, for arguments about government attention, for arguments about existential stakes, for arguments about the need for international cooperation. But one conclusion this analogy very clearly supports is that the private sector should not control this technology.

So why does the analogy apply almost everywhere except here, where private sectors are developing frontier AI for profit while the government attempts to regulate it from the outside?

Clark: We worked for many years with the National Nuclear Security Administration to actually test out how well AI could understand aspects of nuclear technology. And we used that to develop evals and ways of ensuring that we don’t proliferate things into the world that have an understanding of nuclear weapons. That’s almost a very positive example of how you would have the private sector work with government, where some things absolutely should only be the domain of government, like nuclear weapons. The job of a company producing a technology that can take on many different aspects is to work out the areas where it’s inappropriate to deploy that technology, like nuclear weapons, and then work with government to take that capability surface off. I think that describes some of the path we’re going to have to pursue here. And it’s one that most of the industry is going down, including for biological weapons.

Thompson: So you’re saying the right way to think about this is that AI is this is a multifarious factory technology, where you are creating super-powered Excel charts, which is a technology that has no precedent for government regulation, but you’re also creating technology that can be used by the Pentagon or by individuals to have militaristic or dangerous ends. And so the analogy with nuclear weapons is true insofar as it is contained to the parts of your technology that are like nuclear weapons, but you’re also doing a lot of other things that have no analogy in nuclear weapons, like making white collar workers a little bit more productive at their desk jobs. Is that a fair summary?

Clark: There are almost two problems here. One is that you have this factory that can produce anything, so you make sure that what comes out correlates to what we’ve decided society can have available in the free market. Not nuclear weapons. Yes, things that accelerate knowledge workers. And then you have this second question of, given the multifaceted nature of what can be produced, how do you work with government or academia or other parties on the things which you can’t push out to the world in general, but which have value in the rest of the world? An example here is biology. For [technology] that can massively accelerate the development of biological science, you need to work out: what is the path to bringing that technology about? So some of the conversation that society is going to have now is, what are the appropriate ways we want this technology to be used, and how do people decide what to do with different things in this factory, and how to proliferate them, so society gets the benefit?

ANTHROPIC’S UNUSUAL MARKETING PITCH: OUR PRODUCT MIGHT DESTROY YOUR JOB—OR THE WORLD

Thompson: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted on several occasions that AI will destroy half of all entry-level white collar positions and spike unemployment to as high as 20%, which would be the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. He said this could happen in as soon as five years. Do you agree with that forecast?

Clark: We’re talking about one of the potential things that can happen, and I think it’s worth noting that this is a choice. I don’t agree with this, because I think it’s a choice that we can make. Also, my personal view based on the data I look at is that big changes in employment take a long time to filter through to the economy. And even with the magnitude of what we’re talking about, you might expect it to take longer.

Let’s say there is the potential for massive employment changes. I think that this is accompanied by the fact that AI must also be growing the economy a lot and causing a lot of economic activity. If that is the case, then you would expect more freedom about [designing] policy and [deciding] what we do with this economy. If you end up in a situation where employment is negatively affected by AI in one part of the economy, but loads of money being generated by AI in another part of the economy, you could choose to create jobs, like teaching or nursing, where we have a preference for more people working. You could both increase the number of jobs and do things like cross-sector wage subsidies to improve the wages of those jobs, where today we severely under-compensate them.

Thompson: It is unusual in corporate history for a company to announce that if its product is successful, tens of millions of people will lose their jobs and there’s a non-zero chance that we end the human race entirely. I think the analogy I’ve used before is that Henry Ford would have been within the realm of reality if he said, “If this Model T thing takes off, hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to die every decade from car accidents.” In fact, that’s happened. But Ford and GM did not talk like that in the 1910s and 1920s. What is the strategy of communicating your technology to the American people as a means by which we might have 20 percent unemployment and a non-zero chance of human catastrophe?

Clark: These are not the outcomes we want or anyone in the industry wants. But I think the industry has also learned from the overly rosy predictions made by many in the technology industry before, about how the only effect they’d have on the world would be unalloyed positivity. And I think the world lost huge amounts of trust in the technology industry because of that, because they saw that it wasn’t only positive. Social media has caused a range of amazing positives in the world and a range of harms, which we’re now dealing with. The ethos here, and why I’m working on a new initiative called the Anthropic Institute, is to share a lot more data about what we see in front of us so that society is better prepared for any of the different changes which could come along.

We also don’t spend enough time talking about all of the really positive changes, which I think are a choice that we can make as a civilization. But it would be negligent of us to not call out that there are ways we as a species could get this technology wrong. If you look at scientists and people that have worked on transformational technologies before in biology or in the early days of nanotechnology, they’ve all talked about this combination of upsides and risks. It’s just that AI as a sector has matured and made a lot more impact on the markets than either of those classes of technology over the same time period, so everything’s accentuated.

WHY DO AMERICANS HATE AI?

Thompson: I hear the argument that you are reacting to the social media experience. But I also look at polling. Last week, NBC News published a national survey on attitudes toward a range of politicians and institutions. AI’s net favorability was negative 20. That’s below every politician surveyed in the poll and it’s below ICE. Why do you think people say they hate artificial intelligence?

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Here are three stories about the state of gambling in America.

1. Baseball

In November 2025, two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were charged in a conspiracy for “rigging pitches.” Frankly, I had never heard of rigged pitches before, but the federal indictment describes a scheme so simple that it’s a miracle that this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time. Three years ago, a few corrupt bettors approached the pitchers with a tantalizing deal: (1) We’ll bet that certain pitches will be balls; (2) you throw those pitches into the dirt; (3) we’ll win the bets and give you some money.

The plan worked. Why wouldn’t it? There are hundreds of pitches thrown in a baseball game, and nobody cares about one bad pitch. The bets were so deviously clever because they offered enormous rewards for bettors and only incidental inconvenience for players and viewers. Before their plan was snuffed out, the fraudsters won $450,000 from pitches that not even the most ardent Cleveland baseball fan would ever remember the next day. Nobody watching America’s pastime could have guessed that they were witnessing a six-figure fraud.

2. Bombs

On the morning of February 28th, someone logged onto the prediction market website Polymarket and made an unusually large bet. This bet wasn’t placed on a baseball game. It wasn’t placed on any sport. This was a bet that the United States would bomb Iran on a specific day, despite extremely low odds of such a thing happening.

A few hours later, bombs landed in Iran. This one bet was part of a $553,000 payday for a user named “Magamyman.” And it was just one of dozens of suspicious, perfectly-timed wagers, totaling millions of dollars, placed in the hours before a war began.

It is almost impossible to believe that, whoever Magamyman is, he didn’t have inside information from members of the administration. The term war profiteering typically refers to arms dealers who get rich from war. But we now live in a world not only where online bettors stand to profit from war, but also where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position.

3. Bombs, again

On March 10, several days into the Iran War, the journalist Emanuel Fabian reported that a warhead launched from Iran struck a site outside Jerusalem.

Meanwhile on Polymarket, users had placed bets on the precise location of missile strikes on March 10. Fabian’s article was therefore poised to determine payouts of $14 million in betting. As The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel reported, bettors encouraged him to rewrite his story to produce the outcome that they’d bet on. Others threatened to make his life “miserable.”

A clever dystopian novelist might conceive of a future where poorly paid journalists for news wires are offered six-figure deals to report fictions that cash out bets from online prediction markets. But just how fanciful is that scenario when we have good reason to believe that journalists are already being pressured, bullied, and threatened to publish specific stories that align with multi-thousand dollar bets about the future?

Put it all together: rigged pitches, rigged war bets, and attempts to rig wartime journalism. Without context, each story would sound like a wacky conspiracy theory. But these are not conspiracy theories. These are things that have happened. These are conspiracies—full stop.

“If you’re not paranoid, you’re not paying attention” has historically been one of those bumperstickers you find on the back of a car with so many other bumperstickers that you worry for the sanity of its occupants. But in this weird new reality where every event on the planet has a price, and behind every price is a shadowy counterparty, the jittery gambler’s paranoia—is what I’m watching happening because somebody more powerful than me bet on it?—is starting to seem, eerily, like a kind of perverse common sense.

FROM LAUNDROMATS TO AIRPLANES

What’s remarkable is not just the fact that online sports books have taken over sports, or that betting markets have metastasized in politics and culture, but the speed with which both have taken place.

For most of the last century, the major sports leagues were vehemently against gambling, as the Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins explained in his recent feature. In 1992, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue told Congress that “nothing has done more to despoil the games Americans play and watch than widespread gambling on them.” In 2012, NBA commissioner David Stern loudly threatened New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for signing a bill to legalize sports betting in the Garden State, reportedly screaming, “we’re going to come after you with everything we’ve got.”

So much for that. Following the 2018 Supreme Court decision Murphy vs. NCAA, sports gambling was unleashed into the world, and the leagues haven’t looked back. Last year, the NFL saw $30 billion gambled on football games, and the league itself made half a billion dollars in advertising, licensing, and data deals.

Nine years ago, Americans bet less than $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion. Big numbers mean nothing to me, so let me put that statistic another way: $5 billion is roughly the amount Americans spend annually at coin-operated laundromats and $160 billion is nearly what Americans spent last year on domestic airline tickets. So, in a decade, the online sports gambling industry will have risen from the level of coin laundromats to rival the entire airline industry.

And now here come the prediction markets, such as Polymarket and Kalshi, whose combined 2025 revenue came in around $50 billion. “These predictive markets are the logical endpoint of the online gambling boom,” Coppins told me on my podcast Plain English. “We have taught the entire American population how to gamble with sports. We’ve made it frictionless and easy and put it on everybody’s phone. Why not extend the logic and culture of gambling to other segments of American life?” He continued:

Why not let people gamble on who’s going to win the Oscar, when Taylor Swift’s wedding will be, how many people will be deported from the United States next year, when the Iranian regime will fall, whether a nuclear weapon will be detonated in the year 2026, or whether there will be a famine in Gaza? These are not things that I’m making up. These are all bets that you can make on these predictive markets.

Indeed, why not let people gamble on whether there will be a famine in Gaza? The market logic is cold and simple: More bets means more information, and more informational volume is more efficiency in the marketplace of all future happenings. But from another perspective—let’s call it, baseline morality?—the transformation of a famine into a windfall event for prescient bettors seems so grotesque as to require no elaboration. One imagines a young man sending his 1099 documents to a tax accountant the following spring: “right, so here are my dividends, these are the cap gains, and, oh yeah, here’s my $9,000 payout for totally nailing when all those kids would die.”

It is a comforting myth that dystopias happen when obviously bad ideas go too far. Comforting, because it plays to our naive hope that the world can be divided into static categories of good versus evil and that once we stigmatize all the bad people and ghettoize all the bad ideas, some utopia will spring into view. But I think dystopias more likely happen because seemingly good ideas go too far. “Pleasure is better than pain” is a sensible notion, and a society devoted to its implications created Brave New World. “Order is better than disorder” sounds alright to me, but a society devoted to the most grotesque vision of that principle takes us to 1984. Sports gambling is fun, and prediction markets can forecast future events. But extended without guardrails or limitations, those principles lead to a world where ubiquitous gambling leads to cheating, cheating leads to distrust, and distrust leads ultimately to cynicism or outright disengagement.

“The crisis of authority that has kind of already visited every other American institution in the last couple of decades has arrived at professional sports,” Coppins said. Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes. “Not to overstate it, but that’s a disaster,” he said. And not just for sports.

FOUR WAYS TO LOSE (OR: WHAT’S A ‘RIGGED PITCH’ IN A WAR?)

There are four reasons to worry about the effect of gambling in sports and culture.

The first is the risk to individual bettors. Every time we create 1,000 new gamblers, we create dozens of new addicts and a handful of new bankruptcies. As I’ve reported, there is evidence that about one in five men under 25 is on the spectrum of having a gambling problem, and calls to the National Problem Gambling Helpline have roughly tripled since sports gambling was broadly legalized in 2018. Research from UCLA and USC found that bankruptcies increased by 10 percent in states that legalized online sports betting between 2018 and 2023. People will sometimes ask me what business I have worrying about online gambling when people should be free to spend their money however they like. My response is that wise rules place guardrails around economic activity with a certain rate of personal harm. For alcohol, we have licensing requirements, minimum drinking ages, boundaries around hours of sale, and rules about public consumption. As alcohol consumption is declining among young people, gambling is surging; Gen Z has replaced one (often fun) vice with a meaningful chance of addiction with another (often fun) vice with a meaningful chance of addiction. But whereas we have centuries of experience curtailing excessive drinking with rules and customs, we are currently in a free-for-all era of gambling.

The second risk is to individual players and practitioners. One reason why sports commissioners might have wanted to keep gambling out of their business is that gamblers turns some people into complete psychopaths, and that’s not a very nice experience for folks on the receiving end of gambling-afflicted psychopaths. In his feature, McKay Coppins reports on the experience of Caroline Garcia, a top-ranked tennis player, who said she received torrents of abusive messages from gamblers both for losing games and for winning games. “This has become a very common experience for athletes at the professional level, even at the college level too,” Coppins said. As the experience of journalist Emanuel Fabian shows, gambling can turn ordinary people into mini mob bosses, who go around threatening players and practitioners who they believe are costing them thousands of dollars.

The third risk is to the integrity of sports—or any other institution. At the end of 2025, in addition to its indictment of the Cleveland Guardians pitchers, the FBI announced 30 arrests involving gambling schemes in the NBA. This cavalcade of arrests has dramatically reduced trust in sports. Two-thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes. It does not require extraordinary creativity to imagine how this principle could extend to other domains and institutions. If more people start to believe that things only happen in the world as a direct result of shadowy interests in vast betting markets, it’s going to be a permanent open season for conspiracy theories.

The ultimate risk is almost too dark to contemplate in much detail. As the logic and culture of casinos moves from sports to politics, the scandals that have visited baseball and basketball might soon arrive in politics. Is it really so unbelievable that a politician might tip off a friend, or assuage an enemy, by giving them inside information that would allow them to profit on betting markets? Is it really so incredible to believe that a government official would try to align policy with a betting position that stood to earn them, or an allied group, hundreds of thousands of dollars? That is what a “rigged pitch” in politics would look like. It’s not just wagering on a policy outcome that you suspect will happen. It’s changing policy outcomes based on what can be wagered.

THE FINAL VIRTUE

Gambling is flourishing because it meets the needs of our moment: a low-trust world, where lonely young people are seeking high-risk opportunities to launch them into wealth and comfort. In such an environment, financialization might seem to be the last form of civic participation that feels honest to a large portion of the country. Voting is compromised, and polling is manipulated, and news is algorithmically curated. But a bet settles. A game ends. There is comfort in that. In an uncertain and illegible world, it doesn’t get much more certain and legible than this: You won, or you lost.

A 2023 Wall Street Journal poll found that Americans are pulling away from practically every value that once defined national life—patriotism, religion, community, family. Young people care less than their parents about marriage, children, or faith. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, is filling the moral void left by retreating institutions with the market. Money has become our final virtue.

I often find myself thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued in the introduction of After Virtue that modernity had destroyed the shared moral language once supplied by traditions and religion, leaving us with only the language of individual preference. Virtue did not disappear, I think, so much as it died and was reincarnated as the market. It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.

As this moral vocabulary scales across culture, it also corrodes culture. In sports, when you have money on a game, you’re not rooting for a team. You’re rooting for a proposition. The social function of fandom—shared identity, inherited loyalty, something larger than yourself—dissolves into individual risk. In politics, I fear the consequences will be worse. Prediction markets can be useful for those who want to know the future, but their utility recruits participants into a relationship with the news cycle that is adversarial, and even misanthropic. A young man betting on a terrorist attack or a famine is not acting as a mere concerned citizen whose participation improves the efficiency of global prediction markets. He’s just a dude, on his phone, alone in a room, choosing to root for death.

If that doesn’t bother you, I don’t know how to make it bother you. Based on economic and market efficiency principles alone, this young man’s behavior is defensible. But there is morality outside of markets. There is more to life than the efficiency of information networks. But will we rediscover it, any time soon? Don’t bet on it.

The funny thing about unprecedented events is that they tend to evoke the strongest reactions, even though, by their very nature, unprecedented phenomena have no track record that clearly points us toward a likely outcome. So it is for artificial intelligence.

What you’re seeing in the remarkable chart above is that private sector spending on AI in 2026 is forecast to exceed $700 billion, which is not a number that is easy to think about. As a share of GDP, companies are currently devoting more resources to AI than the combined peak annual capital spending on key 1930s public works projects and the Manhattan Project and the 1940s electricity boom and the Apollo Project and Interstate highway construction. It’s important to note that AI spending is overwhelmingly financed by the private sector, whereas most of those infrastructure projects were financed by the largesse of the federal government. Once again, nothing like this has ever happened before, and if you feel extremely confident about how this is going to turn out, I think you might be crazy.

Alas, when one’s chosen profession is writing essays and making podcasts and generally presenting oneself as a pundit, comfy ambivalence gets you absolutely nowhere. So, rather than stick to one extremely boring yet honest message—I’m uncertain about the future—I’ve tried to stake out falsifiable predictions about AI, at the risk of changing my mind often. Six months ago, my strongest feelings about the future of AI hewed closely to a framework articulated by the economist Carlota Perez. In her book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Perez showed that general purpose technologies tend to produce economic bubbles before they produce technological revolutions. Whether it’s the canal mania of the first industrial revolution, the transcontinental railroad of the 19th century, or the dot-com bubble of the early 21th century, the beats of the story are as familiar and predictable as a Save the Cat story arc. Once upon a time, Shiny New Thing is born. Speculative capital pours in. Companies get so excited about the prospect of Shiny New Thing that, failing to coordinate their spending to perfectly match forthcoming demand, they overbuild. The Shiny New Thing bubble pops. Then productive capital takes over. Firms learn to use Shiny (Not So) New (Anymore) Thing. As the technology diffuses throughout the economy, a golden age of broad and steady growth follows. One of Perez’s core insights was that bubbles and golden ages are not a one-or-the-other kind of thing. They often arrive in sequence: one, then the other.

Riding the coattails of Perez, I was very certain that AI was a bubble, for the simple reason that I thought AI spending was rising faster than revenue could possibly match it. But in the last few weeks, I changed my mind. And I want to be very clear about what changed it.

In late 2025, the AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI released new agents—that is, AI that can work autonomously on complex projects that require multiple stages of reasoning. These agents became so popular, so quickly that Anthropic’s revenue doubled in two months, and OpenAI reportedly added one billion dollars in annualized revenue per week in the last few months. At this rate, these are two of the fastest growing companies of all time. And the AI revenue surge is not just at two frontier labs. The payments firm Stripe, which has a god’s-eye view of thousands of companies on its platform, has said that AI companies are growing revenue faster today than any other generation of companies they have ever seen.

The Perez bubble story suggested that general purpose technologies always build too fast while revenue comes along too slow. But the AI 2026 story seems like a rare exception: A historic rate of spending coinciding with a similarly historic surge of revenue.

As my confidence in the AI-bubble narrative weakened, I wanted a gut-check. Last year, I interviewed the investor and writer Paul Kedrosky, and it was hands-down one of the most popular interviews of the year. So, last week I called Paul and said: Try to convince me again. This interview is absolutely jam-packed. In an hour, we somehow cover:

• Why the biggest tech companies, after dominating the stock market in 2024 and 2025, have had such a rough start to 2026

• The omen of the “Saas-pocalypse”—the sharp decline in stock prices for several publicly traded software companies

• The growing private credit crisis, explained

• Why the enormous revenue boom from new agents like Claude Code might be a sugar high, in which explosive revenue growth today precedes much slower revenue growth after AI adoption among software engineers peaks

• If equity value is flowing if it’s leaving software

• Why productivity might seem to be rising (“The reason has nothing to do with AI,” Paul says.)

Below is a polished transcript of our conversation, organized by topic area.

‘WE’VE NEVER HAD A MOMENT LIKE THIS’

Derek Thompson: In a nutshell, what is the 2026 Paul Kedrosky thesis for why AI is a bubble?

Paul Kedrosky: AI is a bubble because it’s one of the probably five largest CapEx bubbles in history, meaning that at this moment where we’re building out infrastructure like canals, like railroads, like rural electrification, like fiber optics, where we’re building out this huge new substrate on top of which a lot of economic activity happens. And this is a particularly large example of that, to the point that it’s a material fraction of GDP growth, like 50 to 80% depending on the quarter and whose numbers you use. And these things inevitably lead to a series of rotating crashes as we overbuild and the assets become unable to pay their way with respect to the debt that’s used to finance them. And then there’s a big reset and then we maybe find another use for them. This happened with fiber, this happened with rural electricity, this happened with railroads, this happened with canals.

And if it didn’t happen this time, it would truly be the first time in modern economic history — which isn’t the same thing as saying that AI itself is somehow frivolous or useless. AI is an incredibly important technology. Saying that we’re in an infrastructure bubble is not the same thing as saying that these large language models don’t work, or they’re just autocomplete or whatever. These are two very different arguments.

And this particular moment is unique because it combines all of the things that we found in prior bubbles — loose credit, real estate, technology, government policy. We’ve never had a moment like this with a huge infrastructure buildout at the intersection of all four of the things that have caused the most consequential infrastructure bubbles in U.S. history. Every one of the actors feels like they’re acting in a rational way — “I don’t know what those guys are doing in technology, but we here in real estate, we know what we’re doing. And whenever we sign a lease contract to a hyperscaler, we know we’re looking at a prime credit.” So the consequence of all these rational actors is what finance theorists call a rational bubble — where the intersection of rational actors produces something that’s economically indefensible.

Thompson: The analogy you’ve given so often is the railroads. What was the lesson of the railroads?

Kedrosky: Railroads were a very good idea. They weren’t Beanie Babies. They were really important, and on top of them we did a lot of important economic activity, not least of which was settling the Western United States. But that didn’t prevent people from over-funding startup railroads such that roughly half of the track miles built at peak periods in the mid-19th century were eventually abandoned. Does that mean railroads were a bad idea? No. We just wildly overbuilt, because the impulse to build was so imperative that everyone building railroads felt like there’s an opportunity to be an oligopolist here — “When all of this shakes out, I’ll be the consolidator.” Which is a very similar impulse to what we hear today. Dario Amodei said this recently, that there will only be one or two, maybe three players at the end of all of this. And it leads to misaligned incentives — “I don’t mind that what I’m doing right now isn’t paying off, because over time I plan to be the consolidator.”

And the other lesson, which I think is particularly striking, is that people have forgotten not just that there was all this redundancy, but that the railroad buildup led to a series of financial crashes in the 1870s — the crash of ‘73, crash of ‘78, crash of ‘87 — each of which killed off a significant number of companies and financial institutions. Nevertheless, in 1900, railroads were roughly 62% of the index market capitalization in the United States. They were the technology company of their time. So building out that platform was rewarded, but was also consequential in terms of leading to various financial crises — and it played a secondary role in the Great Depression itself.

None of these things mean that railroads were a bad idea. But the carnage along the way was dramatic. The metaphor for me is that you can have a hugely valuable buildout that is really consequential for decades in terms of both productivity and economic and financial carnage.

Strikingly, technology writ large is around 60% of the all-U.S. index today. So you’re in a similar situation — this industry has grown to remarkable dominance of the broader equity indices, much like the railroads did. And much like the railroads, it’s become increasingly capital-intensive, which has consequences for how investors are looking at technology companies now versus the halcyon days of the 1970s.

Thompson: For folks interested in going a little deeper on the railroad analogy, we did a podcast with Richard White, the Stanford historian who wrote a wonderful book called Railroaded. His thesis is that the Transcontinental Railroad was a technology built by corrupt idiots working in concert with craven politicians, which led to one depression after another, panic after panic, inflation, deflation, crashes of the economy — and it was a good idea and it completely transformed the country. You can have yes, no, no, yes answers to the questions “Is it a bubble? Was it built by idiots? Is it important?” because they are profoundly different questions. Sometimes bad people in the process of crashing the U.S. economy over and over again nonetheless build technologies that in the long run we can’t imagine modern life without. It’s a strange, amoral feature of history.

Kedrosky: I completely agree.

WHY IT’S A BUBBLE, PART 1: THE HYPERSCALERS’ DILEMMA

Thompson: A lot’s changed since 2025 when we spoke, and I think some of those changes validate your prediction, and some complicate it. Do you still think that AI is an industrial bubble right now?

Kedrosky: Yes. AI is a bubble. There’s no question.

Thompson: Why?

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A brief explanation for the uninitiated, starting in the top right corner. “METR,” or Model Evaluation & Threat Research, is a non-profit organization that assesses the abilities and safety of cutting-edge AI. The X axis shows the dates that various AI models came out. The Y axis is … well, hoo boy, it’s complicated. For now let’s just say it estimates how good each model is at doing real human tasks, as measured by how long it takes people to do the same things. The line swooshing upward suggests something like: Holy shit, these silicon buggers are getting very good, very fast, at doing human work.

As if following the Moore’s Law of AI, these models seem to be doubling (at least) their ability to do complex and useful tasks every three to four months. When ChatGPT came out in November 2022, the best AI model could finish a 30-second task, like answering a multiple-choice test. This February, METR announced that the latest offering from Anthropic could complete computing tasks that take humans more than 14 hours.

METR’s analysis is load-bearing for AI advocates who predict that the technology is about to achieve escape velocity. To put things a bit more meme-ishly for the visual learners out there:

Many people are familiar with Goodhart’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. I think we need an update for 21st century discourse: When a measure becomes a meme, it gains in popularity what it forfeits in precision. That is, when a metric or chart becomes a totem of the discourse, it often takes on meanings and implications that are either false, misleading, or unintended by its original makers.

To get the throat-clearing done with: I think AI’s technical progress has been incredible, and I think the folks at METR are doing their earnest best to capture its rate of improvement. But even the organization’s employees are urging people to look more closely at what their research is and is not saying. “There are a bunch of ways that people are reading too much into the graph,” Sydney Von Arx, a member of METR’s technical staff, told Grace Huckins at MIT Technology Review.

After speaking to METR employees and reading their own explanations of the METR task measures, I’ve determined that there are several major misunderstandings about this chart. This isn’t a mere fact-checking exercise. I think a more realistic and nuanced understanding of this famous chart actually gives us the clearest possible understanding of where AI is headed and why it’s likely to be both more chaotic than AI skeptics believe and less economically impactful than most AI boosters predict.[Paid subscribers can read the full analysis below, plus the final takeaway.]

Myth #1: The METR chart measures AI’s ability to take over all human jobs.

Reality: Nope.

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Why do peoples often fight over a shared set of facts?

It’s hard to imagine a question that pops up more frequently in my professional and private life. When I’m covering the day’s news, I’m astonished that commentators on opposite sides of an issue can look at the same set of facts and determine that the Trump administration is either brilliant or bone-headed; that artificial intelligence is or isn’t replacing jobs today; or that abundance represents an faithful effort to jumpstart urban housing and clean-energy production or a corporatist conspiracy to destroy the left. I have my particular biases in each of the above debates, but for the purposes of this article I’m not interested in declaring who is right so much as I’m interested in asking why disagreement seems inevitable when all parties have access to the same information.

This gap between reality and interpretation isn’t contained to the news cycle. I’m sure you know friends, partners, colleagues, or lovers who have passionate fights because there is a disagreement over the meaning of something that was said, even if all parties involved can agree on the literal transcript of the conversation.

We do not live in the world as it exists, but rather we live in the world as we interpret it. Our interpretations are always fragments of the fuller picture. As the author Nir Eyal explains in his new book Beyond Belief, the full sensory input of every second of life is a gusher of information that we are neurologically incapable of ingesting with perfect fidelity:

Your conscious mind can handle around fifty bits of data every second. That’s the scope of your conscious attention. This is roughly equivalent to reading one short sentence every second, just enough information to process a simple thought or instruction.

It seems like a reasonable amount of information to hold in your head at any moment. But compare that to 11 million bits of total raw data collected by your senses in the same amount of time. That’s the equivalent of seeing every word of War and Peace flash before your eyes twice per second.

Put those two numbers together: 50 bits versus 11 million bits. The gap between those two numbers is why we’re aware of only a tiny fraction of what our brains actually perceive. In short, we live life through a keyhole. This extreme filtering is why two people can witness the exact same event and walk away with entirely different experiences.

By this calculation, the experience of life is 0.000045% of reality. Or, put differently, we are doomed to spend our lives fighting over interpretations because in any given moment, we are missing 99.999955% of what there is.

In the following conversation from my podcast Plain English, Eyal and I talk about the power of beliefs, the science of placebos, the contagion of negativity, and why action often precedes understanding.

REALITY IS A BOOK, EXPERIENCE IS A SENTENCE

DEREK THOMPSON: I want you to tell me two theses of your book—the explicit on-the-book-jacket thesis, and the subterranean thesis, the deeper idea the book is scratching at. What’s the above-ground thesis, and what’s the underground idea?

NIR EYAL: The big idea is: beliefs are tools, not truths. Practically speaking, I’m helping people consider the beliefs they hold, ask themselves whether they’re limiting or liberating, and then keep the beliefs that serve them and let go of the ones that hurt them.

The deeper idea—one people are very uncomfortable with when they encounter it in the research—is that we don’t see reality clearly. We all think we perceive reality as it is. And the truth is, that’s just not the case. The brain can’t see reality as it is; it predicts reality. Right now, your brain is absorbing 11 million bits of information—the light entering your eyes, the sound of my voice, the ambient temperature of the room. That’s the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second, twice. However, your conscious attention can only process 50 bits. That’s one sentence per second. You are only consciously aware of 0.000045% of reality entering your brain.

How does the brain make sense of all this? It predicts reality. We all live in a simulation inside our own minds. Our reality is filtered based on our beliefs. Study after study shows how people can observe the exact same event and see something completely different. If you’re on a diet, you see food as larger. If you’re afraid of heights, you see distances as further. Watch a football game: the ref makes a call, and fans of one team see it as absolutely correct, fans of the other team see it as ridiculous. Think about geopolitics—people committed to the belief that one side is right see every event through that lens. We do not see reality clearly. We do not see people clearly. We see others as we believe they are.

THOMPSON: That’s a beautiful idea—that reality is manifold and our lived experience is single-fold. Every moment presents a War and Peace worth of information for our eyes and ears and smell to behold, and every moment we are getting one sentence of the book that is reality. Taken seriously, it’s a case for extraordinary patience with other people—with our partners, our friends, our political enemies.

I want to propose another subterranean thesis. The Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has this concept of “liquid modernity”—the modern world is characterized by how ephemeral our beliefs and our identities are when we’re unmoored from ancient traditions. The single word for a brief negative belief might be anxiety—a brief negative belief about the future. We’ve got plenty of that. What we’re lacking, and this might be directly related to the decline of religion, is durable positive beliefs about ourselves and our future. Not just habits, not just hacks, but durable positive beliefs. How does that idea sit with you?

EYAL: This is exactly the intellectual habit that changed my life. So much of our suffering is self-perpetuated—we build these intellectual cages of suffering of our own device. Whether it’s personal problems, interpersonal problems, national geopolitical problems, they all have the same source: we are creating our suffering.

It doesn’t mean we need to accept things as they are or agree with everyone. It’s that we want to reduce our suffering and increase our motivation to continue to participate. Maybe it’s useful if I tell a quick story of how this changed my life.

REALITY VS. INTERPRETATION VS. TRUTH

My mom had her 74th birthday. She was in Central Florida, I was in Singapore. I went through a lot of trouble to get her flowers—found the florist with the best reviews, called to confirm delivery, made sure they wouldn’t wilt in the heat. I went to bed at 1 a.m. and said, “Nir, you put in some good effort, she’s going to love the flowers, you’re a good son.” That’s not what happened.

I called her the next day: “Mom, happy birthday—did you get the flowers?” She said, “Yes, thank you. But just so you know, the flowers were half dead, and I wouldn’t order from that florist again.” To which I blurted out, “Well, that’s the last time I buy you flowers.” That went over about as well as you’d expect.

My wife Julie was on the call and afterward said, “Nir, do you want to do a turnaround on this?” I said, “No, I do not want to do your touchy-feely hocus-pocus. I need to vent.” But I knew enough about what the research says about venting—that it does nothing but solidify this effigy of the person. We don’t see people; we see our beliefs about people. Venting only reinforces, “She always does that, that’s so like her.” I had enough sense not to vent, and instead I did what’s called a turnaround.

A turnaround comes from inquiry-based stress reduction, developed by Byron Katie, with roots going back to Aristotle. The technique uses a few questions to help us see things from a different belief perspective. We’re not trying to change our minds—the brain hates changing its mind; it always wants to retreat into what’s kept it safe. We’re collecting a portfolio of perspectives.

Question one: is your belief true? My belief was: my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Question two: is it absolutely true? 100% of the time, no exceptions, no other possible interpretation? Well, I didn’t have perfect certainty. Maybe there was another explanation. Question three: who am I when I hold onto that belief? Short-tempered. I become this 13-year-old version of myself. Question four: who would I be without that belief? More patient. I’d feel lighter. I’d be more myself.

Then the turnaround itself: consider whether the exact opposite of what you believe could also be true. My existing belief: my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. The opposite: my mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. How could that be true? She did thank me for the flowers. She was telling me a statement of fact—the flowers didn’t look so great. Does that necessarily mean it’s a judgment? Maybe not.

Here’s a third perspective: I am too judgmental and hard to please. Could that be true? I had rehearsed exactly the script of effusive praise I was expecting from my mother—

THOMPSON: “Oh my gosh, these flowers, they’re the greatest I’ve ever seen in my life.”

EYAL: Exactly. And when I didn’t get that, I lost it. So who was judging who? I was judging her response. Fourth perspective: I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. That one wasn’t fun to consider at all, but turned out to be the most true. When I had spent all this time and money doing something nice and it didn’t work out perfectly, I judged myself—I was incompetent, I couldn’t even get nice flowers for my mother for her birthday. This is called a misattribution of emotion. I felt crummy about myself, and so the first person I could take it out on was going to get it. That’s exactly what I did.

Now I have four beliefs—a portfolio of perspectives. Which one is true? It doesn’t matter. Which one serves me best? That first belief had only one way out: she had to change so I could be happy. With the other three, I had agency. Instead of a belief that hurt me, I picked a belief that served me.

THOMPSON: I think a lot of people with experience in clinical psychology are going to hear what you just said and recognize it as DBT—Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, from [Marsha] Linehan. That idea, particularly useful with borderline personality disorder but broadly used in clinical practice, is about being comfortable sitting with two interpretations of reality that are in conflict with each other. One classic example: you walk into a room and your wife and daughter look at you and laugh. Interpretation one: they’re laughing at me, I’m always judged in this family, even though I work so hard. You can imagine the self-talk spiral that follows. Interpretation two: my wife and daughter were watching something and laughed as they turned to look at me. I don’t need to know which interpretation is reality. I need to be emotionally secure enough to live with the fact that both are plausible, without having to drill down to one truth. That ability to sit with opposite truths is really important for making one’s way through an emotional life.

THE CASE FOR PRAYER, EVEN IF YOU’RE AN ATHEIST

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Today I wanted to pull back the lens and share a conversation I had with a geopolitical energy expert on the global economics of this war—why the near closure of the Strait of Hormuz is such an enormous deal for the entire world and why energy crises tend to have such wide ripple effects.

What do the following things have in common: the death of the Soviet Union, the rise of modern conservatism in America, and Nintendo? Answer: An energy crisis.

In October 1973, Arab members of OPEC launched an oil embargo against the United States and its allies. Within months, the price of a barrel of crude quadrupled. In the U.S., the immediate effects included gas lines and a national speed limit. A second shock followed during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and gas prices surged again. The combined effect was the toxic union of stagnation and inflation, two things that economists had previously said were practically incapable of coexisting. The immediate effects — gas lines and recession — were the least interesting consequences of this historical event. The arms of the crisis reached around the world:

• In the USSR: Oil shocks were a windfall for the Soviet petroleum economy, and oil money allowed Moscow to paper over the dysfunction of its planned economy for years. But in the 1980s, oil prices fell, and Gorbachev’s petro-economy collapsed, contributing significantly to the demise of the Soviet Empire.

• In Japan: Heavy industry, relying on cheap oil, had powered the economy in the 1960s. But expensive oil threatened that model of growth. In the 1970s, industrial policy was rerouted toward smaller manufactured goods that required less energy: computer chips, circuits, and robotics. The consumer electronics revolution of the 1980s in Japan—the Walkman, the VCR, Nintendo—was an echo of the oil crisis.

• In the United States, the historian Gary Gerstle has described how stagflation shattered the New Deal consensus. Americans lost faith in the sort of activist government associated with Roosevelt, Truman, and LBJ. The political order that emerged from this period prized individualism, celebrated markets, and outwardly mocked the idea of effective governance. The election of Ronald Reagan, and thus the rise of the modern conservative movement, is hard to imagine in a world where the economy of the 1970s is as copacetic as the economy of the 1950s.

So, there you go: perestroika, Nintendo, and Reagan. None of these things were entirely caused by the energy crises. But in each case, the oil shocks of the 1970s reshaped the political and economic environment in a way that increased the odds of the collapse of the USSR, Japan’s shift toward electronics, and the demise of the New Deal order.

The vast and sprawling tentacles of past energy crises have been on my mind recently during the Iran War, which has shut down most commerce passing through the thin Strait of Hormuz. It would be reckless to predict precisely where this conflict is headed. But it no longer seems reckless to say that this war is going to be a mess: if not just a military mess, or a diplomatic mess, then at least an economic mess. The vast majority of headlines in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are about the price of crude oil. But the deeper story is about everything crude becomes, everything that moves alongside it, and everything that depends on the narrow maritime chokepoint at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

The Strait of Hormuz is the global economy’s ACL: a small and vulnerable connective tendon that you don’t have to think about when it’s working perfectly and causes very loud anguish when normal function is ruptured. By some measures, the Iran War is already the largest sudden disruption of oil supply in modern history. If this conflict continues to disrupt traffic through that passage, the consequences will not stop at gasoline prices. They will spread into fertilizer, petrochemicals, plastics, jet fuel, shipping, power markets, and manufacturing supply chains that most people never think about until they seize up.

Before the war has reached its second birthday in weeks, the signs of disorder are everywhere. Energy facilities have come under direct attack. Production has been cut back in parts of the region. Qatar has declared force majeure on liquefied natural gas exports. Governments in Asia are already beginning to respond with emergency measures to conserve fuel and electricity. In just the last few days, Vietnam has reportedly urged people to work from home to save fuel; Myanmar’s junta reportedly launched a rationing system for cars; Thailand restricted fuel exports; and the Philippines prohibited air conditioning settings below 75 degrees in government buildings and instructed officials to turn off their computers when they go to lunch.

To understand what is happening, and why the fallout from this conflict could extend far beyond oil itself, I talked to Rachel Ziemba, one of the sharpest analysts of global energy markets and economic statecraft. We discussed:

• Why the Iran War economic fallout goes far beyond gas prices

• Which countries and regions will feel the most pain

• Whether a swift end to the war will swiftly end the economic crisis that the war triggered (probably not)

GASOLINE, JET FUEL, FERTILIZER, PLASTIC, CHIPS…

Derek Thompson: Tell me about the Strait of Hormuz.

Rachel Ziemba: The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow strip of water between the United Arab Emirates and Iran, through which more than 20 percent of global oil transits, 20 percent of seaborne liquefied natural gas, 30 percent of seaborne fertilizer, and a growing amount of global container traffic. I’ve been tracking energy markets and the Middle East for about 20 years. Even before that, as a grad student, we studied chokepoints and physical risks to energy markets. The Strait of Hormuz has always been number one. But this is the first time it has been effectively blocked, and there hasn’t yet been a way to reopen it.

Thompson: From news headlines, this sometimes seems to be only a story about oil. But I prefer the idea that this is a story of what oil becomes, and how it’s a universal input in the global economy. What does oil become?

Ziemba: As consumers, we don’t use oil. We use gasoline. We use diesel. We might get on a flight and hope that it has jet fuel. In the massive buildout of electricity, because of AI, we use copper. To process copper, we use sulfuric acid, which is a byproduct of oil refining. In our daily lives, we use plastics, which come from petrochemicals. Oil and natural gas can also be precursors to fertilizer, nitrogen-based fertilizer in particular, which can add to the costs we face in our food supplies.

Think about it this way: I placed an Amazon order this morning. The car that’s going to handle that last mile, the flight it’s on, all of those involve companies that are thinking and scrambling about whether their costs increase. Even the ships the oil is being carried on are themselves having to pay more for fuel. So it really has a number of ripple effects in the global economy.

Thompson: Since we hear so much about the price of a barrel of oil, I want to go deeper into some of the other affected products, especially fertilizer and computer chips. I’ve read that up to 40 percent of global urea shipments from the Middle East are essentially stranded right now outside the Strait of Hormuz. What’s the connection between the strait, oil, and fertilizer use throughout the world?

Ziemba: Urea is one of the formats in which [hydrocarbons] can be converted into fertilizer. It can be a byproduct from natural gas or oil that is then converted into nitrogen-based fertilizers. It’s one of several sources of fertilizer, along with phosphates and potash. Major suppliers of phosphates and urea are trapped in the strait, with the producers of Saudi Arabia and Qatar respectively.

We’re already seeing a price impact even here in the United States. I looked at prices out of the Port of New Orleans today, and they’re now, I think, $270 a ton. That’s up 77 percent since December. So if you’re a farmer who is thinking about the cost of fertilizer versus what you can sell corn for, that matters.

Here in the U.S., most of the fertilizer we import comes from Canada. About 40 to 45 percent is potash coming in from Canada. There are no supply shortages there. Another roughly 20 percent comes from Russia. At this point it is our only primary import from Russia in the context of sanctions, at least for now. We’ll see what happens later this week. But still, this is a case where fertilizer costs will be going up, and this also comes at a point when other inputs going into farm products may be affected by tariffs and uncertainty around tariffs.

Thompson: On computer chips: Taiwan makes about 90 to 95 percent of the world’s most advanced chips, and Qatar ships about 30 percent of [its liquefied] natural gas through the Strait of Hormuz. South Korea is making noises about fearing that helium shipments could be slowed, and helium is a major input for Korea’s memory chips. So: no gas, no helium, no power, no chips.

Ziemba: People are rightly worried about this shortage of helium. Some would point to the fact that the U.S. was among the countries that sold off its helium reserve, in part because we don’t do as much semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, though that is shifting.

Taiwan faces a triple whammy: concern about power supply, power being more expensive, and concern about other inputs [such as helium]. This is happening at a time when memory chip prices have already been going up sharply. That was partly a story of really strong demand, as AI-related inputs and imports have been going up in the United States and around the world.

It’s not only a data-center issue. Memory chips are used downstream in building cars. We saw in the pandemic that if auto manufacturers canceled their orders for chips, they might end up at the back of the line because they weren’t as large an orderer. So we could see this filtering through into a range of other manufactured products.

Ultimately, you’re also pointing to the question of which products are stockpiled and how easy it is to have stockpiles. Any time you have a stockpile, that means buying a product you’re not going to use immediately and having it ready in case there is a shortage. This is the opposite of just-in-time manufacturing. When we look around the world, some countries, like China and even the United States, have large oil stockpiles, but very few countries have large natural-gas stockpiles. That is something I anticipate will be rethought.

Thompson: So, with the shutdown of the strait, oil prices are going up, but really it’s about about the stuff we make from oil going up in price. Sulfuric acid is how we extract copper. Copper is what we use to make transformers and electric vehicles and all parts of the green-energy economy. We’ve got plastics. We’ve got helium that’s stuck behind this closure. We’ve got fertilizer. So, the agricultural economy, the chips economy, the plastics economy, the green-energy economy—all of these different sectors of the U.S. and global economy are being affected by this closure.

Ziemba: Spot on. In a political context, gas prices going up tend to be the trigger and warning sign. But if we look at it, the impact on the U.S. and global economy is much greater. If anything, it’s really going to drive differentiation between countries.

There may be countries like China, which has a very large crude oil stockpile it has been adding to when prices were low, that might be able to subsidize parts of its plastics or petrochemical production. That might make them even more competitive even as they hold off on exporting refined oil products. We’ll see how that plays out. But I think we could see differentiation on competitiveness that might further challenge onshoring and reshoring goals that are underway here in the United States and elsewhere.

HOW IT ALL ENDS

Thompson: How do you see the Iran War ending?

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In its war against Iran, the White House has already failed: to offer evidence that the country posed a direct threat to Americans; to provide a consistent justification for the attack; or to explain under what terms the conflict might end.

Now the evidence is piling up that this rather unjustified and thoroughly unexplained war could very likely lead to an energy crisis, just as the US economy is showing new signs of weakness.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that employment growth plunged last month, as the economy lost 92,000 jobs in February. Every major sector saw losses. Even health care, which has accounted for the majority of job growth in the last year, is so weak that a nurses strike in California was enough to push overall job growth into the red. The hiring market is frigid, and monthly job growth since last summer is averaging negative 10,000 per month.

Surely, one thing the US economy doesn’t need right now is a war of choice shutting down a major trade route, blowing up oil markets, and driving up the cost of energy for Americans, just as the labor market seizes up.

And yet, here we are: Oil prices have skyrocketed in the last few days, amid fears that this conflict will crush supply for weeks, or months. As recently as December, the WTI crude oil price was below $60 a barrel. On Friday, oil prices screamed toward $90. And experts are worried that every week the Iran war continues, the odds of a truly catastrophic disruption to energy production will continue to rise, with potentially devastating consequences for the economy.

WHY ENERGY EXPERTS SAY WE COULD BE IN ‘SCARY LAND’ BY APRIL

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