Noah - what are we doing here? What DOGE is doing when they "stop payments" to groups that Elon Musk personally dislikes, this isn't "a good idea" - it's *a crime*. DOGE is committing crimes. The crime is called impoundment, and it's in violation of Article I of the US Constitution. The executive branch has no authority to choose which parts of federal statues they want to follow. You can find plenty of scholarly articles by legal experts who can explain this.
If you want "singaporean style efficiency", great! Pass laws, amend the US Constitution most likely if you truly want the executive branch to have unilateral spending authority, and do it legally. I can't believe you're arguing for a lawless approach and in support of actual criminals.
This point cannot be made too strongly— a deal is a deal said Republican Governor Stitt. Failure to pay for services rendered is breach of contract plain and simple. No Supreme Court review needed. Likewise employment contracts that have termination clauses and notice clauses must be respected. And there is a process for negotiating tariffs, Trump 1.0 USMCA, for example. White House random daily tariff announcement is not a process, it is chaos or in technical terms a shitshow.
When some thug breaks into my house and steals my money, we don't say look at the bright side -- some of the stuff he was going to spend that money on was wasteful and stupid, maybe this will turn out better. We say he's an effing criminal and a menace to society and should be put in jail.
I don't know why, but arguments based on constitutional law seem so... irrelevant now. When an angry mob stormed the capital and attempted to overturn a democratic election, then the ringleaders were pardoned and the man orchestrating it was elected president a second time, I just realized that people don't care. They don't care about the constitution, they don't care about laws, they don't care about rules.
Saying "they can't do this, it's against the law" just feels like it's 5 years too late to be useful anymore.
Impoundment is not a crime. It is probably against the law, but it's against the law in the same way that a breach of contract is against the law. You go to court and get an order for the other side to do what they're supposed to, and that's the end of it. No one goes to jail.
‘DOGE is a political purge’ is spot on. Honestly I can sort-of see why it’s appealing; many political and cultural institutions are dominated by deeply ineffective Donkey Tribe people. I’m a European and our regulatory apparatus could also use some rough handling to align itself with our actual interests.
But I find the conspiratoritorial anti-‘deep state’ type thinking that’s seized the right to be even worse than the damage it does to state capacity. They really think Zelensky is a plant by the CIA deep state, who also somehow faked the Maidan revolution and probably several past elections. Literally going to Fort Knox to see if the gold’s still there, as if NGO libs’ main problem isn’t thr overbearing sincerity of their beliefs and an unwillingness to get their hands dirty. I know a lot of that discourse is just crazy people on Twitter but they’re close enough to Elon that it’s very worrisome, and I’m afraid it has already started to seep into foreign policy. It’s beyond owning the libs, veering into actual insanity.
Aren't you starting from the assumption that they're 'obviously' wrong about those things? There are so many beliefs about bad stuff in left-wing managerial governance that used to be considered totally beyond the pale, markers of clear insanity etc, yet which turned out to be true. All the "conspiracy theory" guff was just psychological manipulation to discourage people from asking the hard questions.
In my life, the following have gone from "crazy people belief" to "everyone knows that":
1. The government is spying on and recording every one of our conversations, even for unimportant people. Considered obviously mad until Snowden gave us the PowerPoints describing how the NSA does it.
2. Governments will force us to take a COVID vax against our will, issuing unforgeable tracking codes to prove whether you took it. Labelled as a wild conspiracy theory when people said it in 2020, government policy two years later.
3. Lab leak is plausible.
4. The US government manipulates foreign governments throughout the world, especially in Ukraine. Then we got the tapes of Nuland deciding who would be in charge there, the USAID receipts and so on.
5. The media is fake propaganda, bought and paid for by billionaires. Once crazy, now we know even institutions like the AP or the BBC are heavily reliant on huge sums from "charitable foundations" and the US government.
6. The POTUS's mind is gone and decisions are really being made by a hidden cabal. Considered mad until the debate.
And sometimes it's even gone backwards. Before 2020 the fact that there was real-life Nazis with swastika tatoos and the like in the Ukrainian army was reported on in the west and "everyone knew that", half a decade later and now only crazy people talk about that.
This happens so frequently and it's got so tiresome that anytime someone says "ugh look at these insane people who think there are government conspiracies", I want to just automatically believe the crazy people. Their batting average is insanely good. People who put their faith in these malign institutions are constantly being embarrassed and yet hardly ever seem to update their beliefs.
As someone who spent their whole career working on surveillance, cryptography and privacy (and was involved in the reporting on the Snowden leaks) I can assure you that none of your viewpoints were “left-wing”. Almost every bad thing the NSA did popped out of the post-9/11 “we must stop terrorists at all costs and damn those leftists and their foolish love of civil liberties.” That was project started under Bush and (shamefully) not stopped under the centrist Obama administration, because they were afraid of being vulnerable on their right flank. And it was crazy left-wing journalists who reported on it all while the right screamed “traitor.”
The rhetorical project you’re embarking on here is to take a bunch of stuff the right was dead wrong about, then just assert that “actually it was the left.” The best part about this “logic” is that you can be wrong forever without any consequences! Maybe you know this and you’re just another troll arguing in bad faith. Maybe you’ve just been fed a line of bullshit.
I don't consider the neocons to be great examples of small-state libertarian conservatism; weren't the Cheneys campaigning for the Democrats this time around? The rise of Trump was partly a reaction to the discrediting of the Bush-era "RINO" Republicans. But it's true, you're right that the press back then did report on it including places like the Guardian, so that particular example is a good example of out of control managerialism but a bad example of specifically left-wing managerialism, being as it was a bipartisan thing at the time. I wonder if they'd still do it these days.
Still, the NSA is a clear case of something that went from "take off the tinfoil hat" territory (the ur-cause for wearing tin foil!) to "oh ok i guess that's happening".
And a clock is always right twice a day? I don’t know how old you are, but in my lifetime most of the notions you claim to have shifted from “crazy” to “obvious” are reflections of changing technology, the ideology of those in power, and policy responses to specific events (many of which are out of anyone’s control). Your points #3 and #6 are especially nonsensical unless you were born in 2019, and it’s rhetorically disingenuous to use the term POTUS instead of Biden. These notions are obviously dynamic and depend on specific historical moments.
By "lab leak" do you mean "Covid was a naturally ocurring virus that somehow ended up in the Wuhan Institute, perhaps in a bat tissue sample, and then infected people," or "Covid was created by humans who deliberately modified a virus to be more dangerous?" Because the first of those two explanations is a whole lot more plausible than the second.
I'm not sure what you're basing your idea of "plausibility" on (perhaps you're an expert in this field with years of experience and have an informed opinion), but the FBI doesn't agree with you. They most recently concluded with "moderate confidence" that the virus was created in a laboratory. During the Biden admin, in case you're thinking it was politically motivated by the Trump crackpots.
Let’s start at the end: the republicans having 17% more babies than dems. This goes into the bin with “the gays will disappear because they don’t reproduce.”
No one has a solution to the fertility problem. In the modern world, it is a tremendous inconvenience to have children. If I didn’t have kids, I would have less stress, more education (I’m a lifelong learner), more meaningful adult social interaction, and been able to retire at 50. I don’t regret having kids, but people are able to appreciate what the costs are and are saying no.
Noah is a big enemy of de-growth advocates (and so am I), but I think our prosperity and ease have raised the relative cost of having children greatly.
It's surely much more convenient to have children now than it was 100 years ago. Everything is easier, safer, there are so many more options that come with wealth.
There are lots of ways to improve fertility but they would require repudiating and overcoming 100 years of social engineering in order to return to the old ways (socially, not technologically). That so far proves too difficult.
It is about opportunity cost. The opportunity cost in the past may have been relatively lower.
Children were farm labor, and your only means to have anyone take care of you when old. Parental investment was also lower.
At current income levels and technology, life is so easy and prosperous if you are only supporting yourself that having kids makes a big dent on your comfort level.
Well, children are still the only means to have anyone take care of you when old. Money doesn't do anything by itself. If you don't have them you're automatically relying on the effort of other people's children to take care of you in old age, and that might not be a great bet. Of course you might still end up in that position even if you do have children, but when it's an exception society can handle it. When it's the rule, not so much. Hence why social security systems and pension funds are all heading for bankruptcy (unless there's a truly massive spurt in growth).
I say this as someone without kids and who would like to have them. The difficulty is the attitude of Mrs Penbroke. She's been taught that earning money is the ultimate goal in life and anything that interferes with that goal is automatically a non-starter. That's sad, as we have more than enough money through me and I do worry about what happens when we get old.
I have long thought fully artificial incubators is one idea from science fiction that would mark a true revolution in family planning and fertility. It definitely could reduce the global decline in fertility.
However, even if these produced fully healthy babies, the societal consequences could be vast and totally unpredictable. Now that we know how to create embryos that are a generic clone of the mother, what if a lot of unpartnered women who wanted kids simply decided to incubate and raise their own clones? What if this then lead to a future gender imbalance?
Also, if a state used these incubators simply to increase population en masse, it might have to raise vast numbers of children in orphanages. This could have an effect on human capital, as kids raised in orphanages tend not to thrive as they would in regular families or foster homes.
Yes, we need a direct state intervention. Margaret Atwood already written a plan. Her plan had the Chads hard at work, with no need for the Incels, because they’re flawed goods. And we want future generations not be flawed like the current ones? And remind me, in this crisis, what are gay men good for?
This is not your plan? Then please describe your plan here.
If you truly believe this is the most important crisis, please recognize that once it’s firmly established in the public eye, you will not control the stretch and pull of the Overton Window framing it.
There’s a lot of rational and disgusting solutions currently hidden from sight.
Finally, I happy to discover that Noah and you are in agreement with that senator/philosopher Tommy Tupperville, and his insightful words, “Wes gots ta have more babies.”
After a moment’s thought, there are some concrete policies that could promote fertility, even if marginally.
- A huge expansion of the au pair program making it easy for many more people to afford to live-in nannies.
- Federally mandated paid maternity leave and subsidization of early childhood education programs.
- A higher dependent tax benefit or even a dependent/based earned income tax credit.
Current sentiments towards immigration might throw the first idea into oblivion. I believe conservatives are the main obstacle to the second. Maybe we can get behind the third but an EITC might reignite the welfare wars of the 80s.
You’re right. Having more babies doesn’t mean that they’ll all turn out to be conservatives. There was a time when people were very religious. Did their kids turn out to be equally religious?
DOGE basically bypasses the congress and, therefore, damages the constitution. In addition, it tries to ignore courts. I wonder how would Elon put that in GDP. What is the price a constitutional credibility?
Anything that can't go up forever, won't. That includes population growth.
Our planet is not getting any bigger.
Having ever more young people to care for ever more old ones is, like all Ponzi schemes, doomed to fail.
There will be offsetting behaviors in response to declining birth rates, like people having more babies, and it's not helpful to extrapolate our now falling birthrate to zero.
I have long held this opinion, although I don't know that I ever wanted or expected birth rates to crater this quickly. It could be quite painful, and additionally, as I look around at my friends and there's one only child for each six adults, it's a little sad - and I don't even particularly like kids! (And am part of the problem, of course).
With global warming making more land usable, an effect predicted to more than offset land lost to sea rises, the (livable for humans part of the ) planet is getting bigger.
As for if society responds to declining birth rates, we have a natural experiment ongoing in South Korea.
The “livable” space on the planet isn’t the barrier in most places. We could fit a billion people into the US. The real barrier is food production, and global warming is doing nothing good for that.
I agree that space is not the issue, we could fit a billion people in Texas. Growing areas are moving north as the climate warms, opening new growing and grazing areas in Canada and north Asia. CO₂ also promotes plant growth, and as hothouse farmers know it increases yields. This is true of some grain crops like wheat, but less so of others like maize. Also. More people means more innovation, so newer agricultural technology, like nitrogen fixing plants are more likely to be developed with more people working on the sciences.
I’m trying to tune out news about DOGE and the Trump Presidency in general because they’ve clearly lost their minds and are delusional about what people want, which is stability instead of chaos.
Regarding Musk, the best piece of advice for him, if he were open to it, is a line from Robert Downey Jr’s character in Tropic Thunder - “Never go full retard”. It’s in the context of acting roles that can win an Oscar but applies to his current avatar as well. A bit of eccentricity and chaos is fine when done in moderation but when you overdo it, it turns people off.
Yes, "leftists" (not really just leftists) see pro-natalism as anti-feminist. That's because most of it, even when it comes from centrists, is really sexist. But this is really not the main point at all.
The main point is environmental destruction, which is inevitably going to be catastrophic even at this population load. If you keep increasing the population indefinitely, we are headed to absolute hell. Every pro-natalist article I have ever read ignores this completely, while the comments section is jam-packed with people saying, "Excuse me! If the population keeps growing, all those billions of people are doomed."
There is no math that can force Earth to produce enough resources for all those billions, nor is there any means to absorb the pollution they will create. Instead of having a better economy, they will all die of starvation or in resource wars on an overheated planet, when they are not just croaking from microplastic contamination in their brains and hearts, of respiratory problems, of cancers related to chemical contaminants, etc..
Meanwhile, in a world where people are just left alone to have the number of babies they want, the expansion in the need for elder care would eventually stabilize, and could be managed by changes to how we handle the work. Everyone who sows panic about this issue acts as if we're completely and absolutely helpless to address this one problem—unlike every other policy problem we face. And even if the problem *wasn't* handled, all it would mean is that elderly people get worse care—as they did for most of human history. This is bad, but it's not nearly as bad as the death of the freaking planet.
So please talk about this issue more responsibly in future. That bullshit about deluded "leftists" is not worthy of you.
This doesn’t have anything to do with Malthus. It’s concern over projected changes to rainfall and temperature that will make many agricultural areas much less productive for current crops. Now maybe you’re optimistic that we’ll manage these rapid changes and still produce more food, because you’ve thought deeply about it. I’d feel a lot better if you were explaining the plan, rather than interrogating people about stuff you should already be familiar with.
The original person I was replying to didn't say food explicitly, but let's focus on that aspect for now. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization states that the current global food production is able to support 12B people. On the other hand, the latest UN projection is that global population will peak in around 2080 at level of 10.5B. And keep in mind this kind of forecast has always been too large, because UN demographers seem to have difficulty visualizing current 3rd world countries becoming low birth rate.
So all in all, if we are to freak out we should worry about population shrinking per se, and population shrinking being too abrupt; not some kind of leftover phantom fear of scarcity.
If it is sexist to give birth, then that is a bad definition of sexism.
Global population is expected to peak soon, and there are no visible resource constraints, other than human resources. Energy, minerals, agriculture, computing, meat production, GDP have all been rising as population increases, and poverty, hunger and disease have been decreasing. Can you point to one resource which we are in danger of losing because we use too much of it?
Here's one example: wild-caught fish. Overfishing has destroyed the populations of many kinds of fish to the point where they are no longer readily available to consumers.
Okay, I will certainly miss my maguro and unagi when they are decimated by overfishing, but when walking through Costco, while there are fewer varieties of seafood than a decade ago, there is more than enough of the types that can be raised in aquaculture like salmon, shrimp and tilapia. Maybe tastes will change, 200 years ago lobsters were only served as prison meals because it wasn’t considered a delicacy.
You asked for one example, and I gave you one I was pretty sure of. There is another natural resource, though, that is currently plentiful but could become a significant bottleneck in a couple of hundred years, though: phosphate rock.
Phosphorus is essential for life, and, as a chemical element, there is no possible substitute for it; Issac Asimov once called it "Life's Bottleneck" in an essay. Modern agriculture relies on phosphate fertilizer made from mined phosphate rock, and there's a large but finite supply. Life is normally pretty good at recycling phosphorus; plants get it from the soil, animals get it by eating plants (and other animals), and the soil gets it from urine, feces, and animal carcasses. However, the modern world is terrible at returning the phosphorus in human waste and farmed animal waste back into the soil; most of it eventually ends up in bodies of water from which it would be extremely difficult to extract. So in the long run, "peak phosphorus" actually could become a limit to the number of humans that agriculture can feed. But that's going to be a problem for a future generation to deal with...
Something I want to note on DOGE is Christopher Rufo, yes that Rufo, is in parallel trying to purge civil servants as well for anything they deem not aligned with Trump, predominantly LGBTQ folks. There are people in the intelligence community who did nothing but be part of a chat room that existed for employees to use that had LGBTQ concerns as a topic who have been fired and/or placed on leave. Their goal isn't reform in even an extended sense of the term, it's just about consolidating power
It happens every day, usually under the guise of claiming whatever was said was racist, sexist, creating a hostile workplace etc. James Damore wrote a whole essay about it happening in one well known company, you could start with what happened to him for a real world example of how this operates.
But c'mon Noah! This is highly misleading (actually outright false, but I'm trying to be generous):
"But as Trump continues to roll out new chaos every day — more tariffs, missed Social Security payments"
No Social Security payment has been missed. The link you have on that phrase goes to an article with the headline "DOGE actions threaten ‘interruption of benefits,’ ex-agency head says".
LOL, "ex-agency head"! Sure, just like all the ex-Twitter employees claimed the site would collapse in weeks. But amazingly, not only is it still up, you're still posting there, most recently less than an hour ago: https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/1898282829093781574
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This is not TDS. And it is not hysterical, it’s RL. Although it is not a missed check it is terrifying for millions of (poorer) Americans who before Feb. knew they could rely on a functional department with access to their own information. There is ZERO reason this should be happening.
I am less pessimistic about low birthrates than Noah is, because fewer kids are usually also associated with more investment (time, money, affection) in those kids. So yes, on the one hand there will be fewer people to take care of all the old people, but on the other hand they will be more educated and better able to bear this burden.
If you ever actually have to care for an old person, you will discover that tasks like spoon feeding and diaper changes are not much helped by education.
You are correct. However, I have an in-law in memory care. Thankfully their well educated children married well educated people who can afford to hire a credentialed care facility to do the spoon feeding and diaper changes, so we can focus on educating our kids.
I am thinking that in the future scenario of low birth, the well educated can’t even pay for a care worker because they do not exist anymore (barring advances in AI robots).
Children don’t actually care for their elders, they are just needed to keep paying into the Social Security Ponzi scheme, which requires minimal intelligence. I support a big increase in natality, and think we should replace social security with a basic income for poor seniors, maybe funded by a tax on AI and make people save for their own retirement if they want more than basic survival.
Accusing DOGE of politically purging folks is (A) sloppy thinking (JD’s ramblings aside, there’s not much evidence for it), and (B) gives them too much credit.
There’s not much rhyme or reason to the cuts, other than going after the folks without career protections. My die hard MAGA friends are getting pushed out as quickly as my crunchy liberal ones. Instead, other than headline grabbing DEI / USAID cuts, it seems…..really random? If it was a political purge that would at least have the benefit of bringing logic to the chaos. And if we were purging and replacing with MAGA people, at least we’d know who to talk to. Instead we just don’t know what program is disappearing next, or who to call to start picking up the pieces.
"Accusing DOGE of politically purging folks is (A) sloppy thinking (JD’s ramblings aside, there’s not much evidence for it), and (B) gives them too much credit."
I think the idea is that the "deep state" -- which is presumed to be left-wing, reality be damned -- is to be destroyed by any available means, and then once it's gone, it can be replaced with a political machine of MAGA loyalists.
Your MAGA friends who got fired are more or less collateral damage in this campaign.
I believe that Musk's strategy when taking over Twitter was to fire huge numbers of people at random, then, when things started breaking, hire back only the people whose jobs turned out to be critical after all. "Breaking things" through random mass firings, followed by much smaller re-hirings of some of the same people that were fired (like what happened to the people responsible for nuclear security) actually is Musk's general method of improving the "efficiency" of organizations.
I also believe that it is a plan that's much more likely to lead to a disaster when applied to government agencies than when applied to a technology corporation (people don't normally lose access to lifesaving medicine if Twitter moderation goes to hell), but it's also consistent with what I've heard about Musk and DOGE.
Regarding point #5, an obvious confounder is the relative urbaness of left leaning population. Would like to see if the left-right factor still remains present after one controls for this.
The modernizing and integrating IRS systems started under the Biden administration with the additional funds from IRA—DOGE deserves no credit for that. (Salesforce.com systems are being implemented).
“If AI is like that — if you have a few superstar companies and a few rich countries using it to their advantage, while everyone else languishes — then the result of AI could be low long-term growth coupled with massive inequality. So hopefully this isn’t a good theory of AI-human production.”
The pessimistic scenario seems much more in keeping with the zeitgeist. Given that the effect on blue collar angst could be comparable to *another* China shock (or five) I would hope the progress studies folks realize that egalitarianism really does matter.
Ruiz's post was way too charitable. DOGE has exhausted the benefit of the doubt; they are trying to destroy the government, not improve it. There is no other explanation for their dissolution of 18F.
Noah - what are we doing here? What DOGE is doing when they "stop payments" to groups that Elon Musk personally dislikes, this isn't "a good idea" - it's *a crime*. DOGE is committing crimes. The crime is called impoundment, and it's in violation of Article I of the US Constitution. The executive branch has no authority to choose which parts of federal statues they want to follow. You can find plenty of scholarly articles by legal experts who can explain this.
If you want "singaporean style efficiency", great! Pass laws, amend the US Constitution most likely if you truly want the executive branch to have unilateral spending authority, and do it legally. I can't believe you're arguing for a lawless approach and in support of actual criminals.
This point cannot be made too strongly— a deal is a deal said Republican Governor Stitt. Failure to pay for services rendered is breach of contract plain and simple. No Supreme Court review needed. Likewise employment contracts that have termination clauses and notice clauses must be respected. And there is a process for negotiating tariffs, Trump 1.0 USMCA, for example. White House random daily tariff announcement is not a process, it is chaos or in technical terms a shitshow.
When some thug breaks into my house and steals my money, we don't say look at the bright side -- some of the stuff he was going to spend that money on was wasteful and stupid, maybe this will turn out better. We say he's an effing criminal and a menace to society and should be put in jail.
I don't know why, but arguments based on constitutional law seem so... irrelevant now. When an angry mob stormed the capital and attempted to overturn a democratic election, then the ringleaders were pardoned and the man orchestrating it was elected president a second time, I just realized that people don't care. They don't care about the constitution, they don't care about laws, they don't care about rules.
Saying "they can't do this, it's against the law" just feels like it's 5 years too late to be useful anymore.
Impoundment is not a crime. It is probably against the law, but it's against the law in the same way that a breach of contract is against the law. You go to court and get an order for the other side to do what they're supposed to, and that's the end of it. No one goes to jail.
With vital signs rapidly declining, Trump/Musk/Doge/Project 2025 have induced the Stoke Economy … hey, it’s anti-woke!
‘DOGE is a political purge’ is spot on. Honestly I can sort-of see why it’s appealing; many political and cultural institutions are dominated by deeply ineffective Donkey Tribe people. I’m a European and our regulatory apparatus could also use some rough handling to align itself with our actual interests.
But I find the conspiratoritorial anti-‘deep state’ type thinking that’s seized the right to be even worse than the damage it does to state capacity. They really think Zelensky is a plant by the CIA deep state, who also somehow faked the Maidan revolution and probably several past elections. Literally going to Fort Knox to see if the gold’s still there, as if NGO libs’ main problem isn’t thr overbearing sincerity of their beliefs and an unwillingness to get their hands dirty. I know a lot of that discourse is just crazy people on Twitter but they’re close enough to Elon that it’s very worrisome, and I’m afraid it has already started to seep into foreign policy. It’s beyond owning the libs, veering into actual insanity.
Aren't you starting from the assumption that they're 'obviously' wrong about those things? There are so many beliefs about bad stuff in left-wing managerial governance that used to be considered totally beyond the pale, markers of clear insanity etc, yet which turned out to be true. All the "conspiracy theory" guff was just psychological manipulation to discourage people from asking the hard questions.
In my life, the following have gone from "crazy people belief" to "everyone knows that":
1. The government is spying on and recording every one of our conversations, even for unimportant people. Considered obviously mad until Snowden gave us the PowerPoints describing how the NSA does it.
2. Governments will force us to take a COVID vax against our will, issuing unforgeable tracking codes to prove whether you took it. Labelled as a wild conspiracy theory when people said it in 2020, government policy two years later.
3. Lab leak is plausible.
4. The US government manipulates foreign governments throughout the world, especially in Ukraine. Then we got the tapes of Nuland deciding who would be in charge there, the USAID receipts and so on.
5. The media is fake propaganda, bought and paid for by billionaires. Once crazy, now we know even institutions like the AP or the BBC are heavily reliant on huge sums from "charitable foundations" and the US government.
6. The POTUS's mind is gone and decisions are really being made by a hidden cabal. Considered mad until the debate.
And sometimes it's even gone backwards. Before 2020 the fact that there was real-life Nazis with swastika tatoos and the like in the Ukrainian army was reported on in the west and "everyone knew that", half a decade later and now only crazy people talk about that.
This happens so frequently and it's got so tiresome that anytime someone says "ugh look at these insane people who think there are government conspiracies", I want to just automatically believe the crazy people. Their batting average is insanely good. People who put their faith in these malign institutions are constantly being embarrassed and yet hardly ever seem to update their beliefs.
As someone who spent their whole career working on surveillance, cryptography and privacy (and was involved in the reporting on the Snowden leaks) I can assure you that none of your viewpoints were “left-wing”. Almost every bad thing the NSA did popped out of the post-9/11 “we must stop terrorists at all costs and damn those leftists and their foolish love of civil liberties.” That was project started under Bush and (shamefully) not stopped under the centrist Obama administration, because they were afraid of being vulnerable on their right flank. And it was crazy left-wing journalists who reported on it all while the right screamed “traitor.”
The rhetorical project you’re embarking on here is to take a bunch of stuff the right was dead wrong about, then just assert that “actually it was the left.” The best part about this “logic” is that you can be wrong forever without any consequences! Maybe you know this and you’re just another troll arguing in bad faith. Maybe you’ve just been fed a line of bullshit.
I don't consider the neocons to be great examples of small-state libertarian conservatism; weren't the Cheneys campaigning for the Democrats this time around? The rise of Trump was partly a reaction to the discrediting of the Bush-era "RINO" Republicans. But it's true, you're right that the press back then did report on it including places like the Guardian, so that particular example is a good example of out of control managerialism but a bad example of specifically left-wing managerialism, being as it was a bipartisan thing at the time. I wonder if they'd still do it these days.
Still, the NSA is a clear case of something that went from "take off the tinfoil hat" territory (the ur-cause for wearing tin foil!) to "oh ok i guess that's happening".
And a clock is always right twice a day? I don’t know how old you are, but in my lifetime most of the notions you claim to have shifted from “crazy” to “obvious” are reflections of changing technology, the ideology of those in power, and policy responses to specific events (many of which are out of anyone’s control). Your points #3 and #6 are especially nonsensical unless you were born in 2019, and it’s rhetorically disingenuous to use the term POTUS instead of Biden. These notions are obviously dynamic and depend on specific historical moments.
By "lab leak" do you mean "Covid was a naturally ocurring virus that somehow ended up in the Wuhan Institute, perhaps in a bat tissue sample, and then infected people," or "Covid was created by humans who deliberately modified a virus to be more dangerous?" Because the first of those two explanations is a whole lot more plausible than the second.
I'm not sure what you're basing your idea of "plausibility" on (perhaps you're an expert in this field with years of experience and have an informed opinion), but the FBI doesn't agree with you. They most recently concluded with "moderate confidence" that the virus was created in a laboratory. During the Biden admin, in case you're thinking it was politically motivated by the Trump crackpots.
All the ‘conspiracies’ are the result of conspiracies by the Cabal, okay
Shorter version: liberals can be a PITA but they’re competent; right wingers are f’ing crazy.
Let’s start at the end: the republicans having 17% more babies than dems. This goes into the bin with “the gays will disappear because they don’t reproduce.”
No one has a solution to the fertility problem. In the modern world, it is a tremendous inconvenience to have children. If I didn’t have kids, I would have less stress, more education (I’m a lifelong learner), more meaningful adult social interaction, and been able to retire at 50. I don’t regret having kids, but people are able to appreciate what the costs are and are saying no.
Noah is a big enemy of de-growth advocates (and so am I), but I think our prosperity and ease have raised the relative cost of having children greatly.
It was so very convenient in the past?
It's surely much more convenient to have children now than it was 100 years ago. Everything is easier, safer, there are so many more options that come with wealth.
There are lots of ways to improve fertility but they would require repudiating and overcoming 100 years of social engineering in order to return to the old ways (socially, not technologically). That so far proves too difficult.
It is about opportunity cost. The opportunity cost in the past may have been relatively lower.
Children were farm labor, and your only means to have anyone take care of you when old. Parental investment was also lower.
At current income levels and technology, life is so easy and prosperous if you are only supporting yourself that having kids makes a big dent on your comfort level.
Well, children are still the only means to have anyone take care of you when old. Money doesn't do anything by itself. If you don't have them you're automatically relying on the effort of other people's children to take care of you in old age, and that might not be a great bet. Of course you might still end up in that position even if you do have children, but when it's an exception society can handle it. When it's the rule, not so much. Hence why social security systems and pension funds are all heading for bankruptcy (unless there's a truly massive spurt in growth).
I say this as someone without kids and who would like to have them. The difficulty is the attitude of Mrs Penbroke. She's been taught that earning money is the ultimate goal in life and anything that interferes with that goal is automatically a non-starter. That's sad, as we have more than enough money through me and I do worry about what happens when we get old.
In agrarian society, the children are a necessity, the more the better. They’re not so necessary, at the individual level, now.
Maybe we just industrialize baby production similar our current agricultural system.
Is it weird that the novel "Brave New World" popped into my head while reading this comment?
I immediately thought back to this book as well.
I have long thought fully artificial incubators is one idea from science fiction that would mark a true revolution in family planning and fertility. It definitely could reduce the global decline in fertility.
However, even if these produced fully healthy babies, the societal consequences could be vast and totally unpredictable. Now that we know how to create embryos that are a generic clone of the mother, what if a lot of unpartnered women who wanted kids simply decided to incubate and raise their own clones? What if this then lead to a future gender imbalance?
Also, if a state used these incubators simply to increase population en masse, it might have to raise vast numbers of children in orphanages. This could have an effect on human capital, as kids raised in orphanages tend not to thrive as they would in regular families or foster homes.
Yes, we need a direct state intervention. Margaret Atwood already written a plan. Her plan had the Chads hard at work, with no need for the Incels, because they’re flawed goods. And we want future generations not be flawed like the current ones? And remind me, in this crisis, what are gay men good for?
This is not your plan? Then please describe your plan here.
If you truly believe this is the most important crisis, please recognize that once it’s firmly established in the public eye, you will not control the stretch and pull of the Overton Window framing it.
There’s a lot of rational and disgusting solutions currently hidden from sight.
Finally, I happy to discover that Noah and you are in agreement with that senator/philosopher Tommy Tupperville, and his insightful words, “Wes gots ta have more babies.”
After a moment’s thought, there are some concrete policies that could promote fertility, even if marginally.
- A huge expansion of the au pair program making it easy for many more people to afford to live-in nannies.
- Federally mandated paid maternity leave and subsidization of early childhood education programs.
- A higher dependent tax benefit or even a dependent/based earned income tax credit.
Current sentiments towards immigration might throw the first idea into oblivion. I believe conservatives are the main obstacle to the second. Maybe we can get behind the third but an EITC might reignite the welfare wars of the 80s.
You’re right. Having more babies doesn’t mean that they’ll all turn out to be conservatives. There was a time when people were very religious. Did their kids turn out to be equally religious?
Or the plot of the movie Idiocracy.
DOGE basically bypasses the congress and, therefore, damages the constitution. In addition, it tries to ignore courts. I wonder how would Elon put that in GDP. What is the price a constitutional credibility?
Anything that can't go up forever, won't. That includes population growth.
Our planet is not getting any bigger.
Having ever more young people to care for ever more old ones is, like all Ponzi schemes, doomed to fail.
There will be offsetting behaviors in response to declining birth rates, like people having more babies, and it's not helpful to extrapolate our now falling birthrate to zero.
I have long held this opinion, although I don't know that I ever wanted or expected birth rates to crater this quickly. It could be quite painful, and additionally, as I look around at my friends and there's one only child for each six adults, it's a little sad - and I don't even particularly like kids! (And am part of the problem, of course).
The potential for major problems is real though and we should prepare for them.
What does it do to a society when more than half the population is over 50?
What happens politically when a huge economic burden is placed on young people, but in a democracy they’ll have very little voting power?
AI and robots will be the new working class! Until they aspires to be the boss class.
With global warming making more land usable, an effect predicted to more than offset land lost to sea rises, the (livable for humans part of the ) planet is getting bigger.
As for if society responds to declining birth rates, we have a natural experiment ongoing in South Korea.
The “livable” space on the planet isn’t the barrier in most places. We could fit a billion people into the US. The real barrier is food production, and global warming is doing nothing good for that.
I agree that space is not the issue, we could fit a billion people in Texas. Growing areas are moving north as the climate warms, opening new growing and grazing areas in Canada and north Asia. CO₂ also promotes plant growth, and as hothouse farmers know it increases yields. This is true of some grain crops like wheat, but less so of others like maize. Also. More people means more innovation, so newer agricultural technology, like nitrogen fixing plants are more likely to be developed with more people working on the sciences.
If someone asked me, “would you think Trump would hide bad economic news?” My answer would be, absolutely.
I’m trying to tune out news about DOGE and the Trump Presidency in general because they’ve clearly lost their minds and are delusional about what people want, which is stability instead of chaos.
Regarding Musk, the best piece of advice for him, if he were open to it, is a line from Robert Downey Jr’s character in Tropic Thunder - “Never go full retard”. It’s in the context of acting roles that can win an Oscar but applies to his current avatar as well. A bit of eccentricity and chaos is fine when done in moderation but when you overdo it, it turns people off.
Yes, "leftists" (not really just leftists) see pro-natalism as anti-feminist. That's because most of it, even when it comes from centrists, is really sexist. But this is really not the main point at all.
The main point is environmental destruction, which is inevitably going to be catastrophic even at this population load. If you keep increasing the population indefinitely, we are headed to absolute hell. Every pro-natalist article I have ever read ignores this completely, while the comments section is jam-packed with people saying, "Excuse me! If the population keeps growing, all those billions of people are doomed."
There is no math that can force Earth to produce enough resources for all those billions, nor is there any means to absorb the pollution they will create. Instead of having a better economy, they will all die of starvation or in resource wars on an overheated planet, when they are not just croaking from microplastic contamination in their brains and hearts, of respiratory problems, of cancers related to chemical contaminants, etc..
Meanwhile, in a world where people are just left alone to have the number of babies they want, the expansion in the need for elder care would eventually stabilize, and could be managed by changes to how we handle the work. Everyone who sows panic about this issue acts as if we're completely and absolutely helpless to address this one problem—unlike every other policy problem we face. And even if the problem *wasn't* handled, all it would mean is that elderly people get worse care—as they did for most of human history. This is bad, but it's not nearly as bad as the death of the freaking planet.
So please talk about this issue more responsibly in future. That bullshit about deluded "leftists" is not worthy of you.
What exactly are the resources that will be the bottleneck? The Malthusian fear mongering has been disproved again and again.
This doesn’t have anything to do with Malthus. It’s concern over projected changes to rainfall and temperature that will make many agricultural areas much less productive for current crops. Now maybe you’re optimistic that we’ll manage these rapid changes and still produce more food, because you’ve thought deeply about it. I’d feel a lot better if you were explaining the plan, rather than interrogating people about stuff you should already be familiar with.
The original person I was replying to didn't say food explicitly, but let's focus on that aspect for now. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization states that the current global food production is able to support 12B people. On the other hand, the latest UN projection is that global population will peak in around 2080 at level of 10.5B. And keep in mind this kind of forecast has always been too large, because UN demographers seem to have difficulty visualizing current 3rd world countries becoming low birth rate.
So all in all, if we are to freak out we should worry about population shrinking per se, and population shrinking being too abrupt; not some kind of leftover phantom fear of scarcity.
If it is sexist to give birth, then that is a bad definition of sexism.
Global population is expected to peak soon, and there are no visible resource constraints, other than human resources. Energy, minerals, agriculture, computing, meat production, GDP have all been rising as population increases, and poverty, hunger and disease have been decreasing. Can you point to one resource which we are in danger of losing because we use too much of it?
Here's one example: wild-caught fish. Overfishing has destroyed the populations of many kinds of fish to the point where they are no longer readily available to consumers.
Okay, I will certainly miss my maguro and unagi when they are decimated by overfishing, but when walking through Costco, while there are fewer varieties of seafood than a decade ago, there is more than enough of the types that can be raised in aquaculture like salmon, shrimp and tilapia. Maybe tastes will change, 200 years ago lobsters were only served as prison meals because it wasn’t considered a delicacy.
You asked for one example, and I gave you one I was pretty sure of. There is another natural resource, though, that is currently plentiful but could become a significant bottleneck in a couple of hundred years, though: phosphate rock.
Phosphorus is essential for life, and, as a chemical element, there is no possible substitute for it; Issac Asimov once called it "Life's Bottleneck" in an essay. Modern agriculture relies on phosphate fertilizer made from mined phosphate rock, and there's a large but finite supply. Life is normally pretty good at recycling phosphorus; plants get it from the soil, animals get it by eating plants (and other animals), and the soil gets it from urine, feces, and animal carcasses. However, the modern world is terrible at returning the phosphorus in human waste and farmed animal waste back into the soil; most of it eventually ends up in bodies of water from which it would be extremely difficult to extract. So in the long run, "peak phosphorus" actually could become a limit to the number of humans that agriculture can feed. But that's going to be a problem for a future generation to deal with...
Something I want to note on DOGE is Christopher Rufo, yes that Rufo, is in parallel trying to purge civil servants as well for anything they deem not aligned with Trump, predominantly LGBTQ folks. There are people in the intelligence community who did nothing but be part of a chat room that existed for employees to use that had LGBTQ concerns as a topic who have been fired and/or placed on leave. Their goal isn't reform in even an extended sense of the term, it's just about consolidating power
But why not? That's what the left always do when they're in power, it's how governments ended up in this situation in the first place.
Also, you really don't want crazy extremists working at the NSA of all places.
When did the left last purge everyone who was in a chat room about ideologically unfriendly but totally legal things?
It happens every day, usually under the guise of claiming whatever was said was racist, sexist, creating a hostile workplace etc. James Damore wrote a whole essay about it happening in one well known company, you could start with what happened to him for a real world example of how this operates.
Rufo is ridiculous, but he isn’t in DOGE or the Trump administration.
"Bananas republic" is a great term!
But c'mon Noah! This is highly misleading (actually outright false, but I'm trying to be generous):
"But as Trump continues to roll out new chaos every day — more tariffs, missed Social Security payments"
No Social Security payment has been missed. The link you have on that phrase goes to an article with the headline "DOGE actions threaten ‘interruption of benefits,’ ex-agency head says".
LOL, "ex-agency head"! Sure, just like all the ex-Twitter employees claimed the site would collapse in weeks. But amazingly, not only is it still up, you're still posting there, most recently less than an hour ago: https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/1898282829093781574
The SS website is down this am.
“Online Service Not Available
We're sorry, but the online service you requested isn't available right now. We apologize for the inconvenience.
This is not TDS. And it is not hysterical, it’s RL. Although it is not a missed check it is terrifying for millions of (poorer) Americans who before Feb. knew they could rely on a functional department with access to their own information. There is ZERO reason this should be happening.
SSA website is usually not available on weekends. I don’t think this is DOGE related.
Google it.
https://x.com/lxeagle17/status/1893187315662512461?s=46
I am less pessimistic about low birthrates than Noah is, because fewer kids are usually also associated with more investment (time, money, affection) in those kids. So yes, on the one hand there will be fewer people to take care of all the old people, but on the other hand they will be more educated and better able to bear this burden.
If you ever actually have to care for an old person, you will discover that tasks like spoon feeding and diaper changes are not much helped by education.
You are correct. However, I have an in-law in memory care. Thankfully their well educated children married well educated people who can afford to hire a credentialed care facility to do the spoon feeding and diaper changes, so we can focus on educating our kids.
That's the benefit of education.
I am thinking that in the future scenario of low birth, the well educated can’t even pay for a care worker because they do not exist anymore (barring advances in AI robots).
Fair enough, I was thinking more along the lines of the ability to pay taxes and invent stuff to stimulate economic growth. But: Fair point.
Children don’t actually care for their elders, they are just needed to keep paying into the Social Security Ponzi scheme, which requires minimal intelligence. I support a big increase in natality, and think we should replace social security with a basic income for poor seniors, maybe funded by a tax on AI and make people save for their own retirement if they want more than basic survival.
Accusing DOGE of politically purging folks is (A) sloppy thinking (JD’s ramblings aside, there’s not much evidence for it), and (B) gives them too much credit.
There’s not much rhyme or reason to the cuts, other than going after the folks without career protections. My die hard MAGA friends are getting pushed out as quickly as my crunchy liberal ones. Instead, other than headline grabbing DEI / USAID cuts, it seems…..really random? If it was a political purge that would at least have the benefit of bringing logic to the chaos. And if we were purging and replacing with MAGA people, at least we’d know who to talk to. Instead we just don’t know what program is disappearing next, or who to call to start picking up the pieces.
"Accusing DOGE of politically purging folks is (A) sloppy thinking (JD’s ramblings aside, there’s not much evidence for it), and (B) gives them too much credit."
I think the idea is that the "deep state" -- which is presumed to be left-wing, reality be damned -- is to be destroyed by any available means, and then once it's gone, it can be replaced with a political machine of MAGA loyalists.
Your MAGA friends who got fired are more or less collateral damage in this campaign.
Yes. Seeing what is destroyed while being blind to what is created is no way to gage intent.
I believe that Musk's strategy when taking over Twitter was to fire huge numbers of people at random, then, when things started breaking, hire back only the people whose jobs turned out to be critical after all. "Breaking things" through random mass firings, followed by much smaller re-hirings of some of the same people that were fired (like what happened to the people responsible for nuclear security) actually is Musk's general method of improving the "efficiency" of organizations.
I also believe that it is a plan that's much more likely to lead to a disaster when applied to government agencies than when applied to a technology corporation (people don't normally lose access to lifesaving medicine if Twitter moderation goes to hell), but it's also consistent with what I've heard about Musk and DOGE.
This is my view as well. It’s disorganized chaos. Musk and Trump fanboys think they’re playing 4D chess even when they’re doing retarded stuff.
Regarding point #5, an obvious confounder is the relative urbaness of left leaning population. Would like to see if the left-right factor still remains present after one controls for this.
The modernizing and integrating IRS systems started under the Biden administration with the additional funds from IRA—DOGE deserves no credit for that. (Salesforce.com systems are being implemented).
“If AI is like that — if you have a few superstar companies and a few rich countries using it to their advantage, while everyone else languishes — then the result of AI could be low long-term growth coupled with massive inequality. So hopefully this isn’t a good theory of AI-human production.”
The pessimistic scenario seems much more in keeping with the zeitgeist. Given that the effect on blue collar angst could be comparable to *another* China shock (or five) I would hope the progress studies folks realize that egalitarianism really does matter.
Ruiz's post was way too charitable. DOGE has exhausted the benefit of the doubt; they are trying to destroy the government, not improve it. There is no other explanation for their dissolution of 18F.