Certainly, AI may come up with novel ideas, but will AI be able to recognize them as novel or as worthwhile? Humans have accidentally stumbled on useful innovations, but they were smart enough to recognize that their oopsies were beneficial. Penicillin was discovered when an attempt to grow bacteria was disrupted the accidental introduction of a mold. Rubber became useful when Charles Goodyear dropped a rubber/sulfur mixture on a Hot stove and learned this way how to harden it.
I can personally attest as an AI researcher that the central idea in my last publication came from Claude. The significance and theoretical interpretation of it was polished in dialogue but without AI I would not have made the connection between the neural network representation and a concept from quantum entanglement which was the key.
For what it's worth, while I'm not about to invent penicillin, I am a R&D engineer working on relatively high tech stuff and also something of a technical generalist. AI makes it easier for me to innovate, because it's really good at reminding me the details of things I've learned but partially forgotten, doing light literature searches, and making it so I spend less time writing non-production data analysis code. It basically removes barriers to push you to the forefront of what we already know.
Now, if I had grown up in a world where I never had to learn any of this stuff in the first place, and lacked the understanding and connections forged over way too many years, then I'm not sure.
This seems like an odd question. There are companies founded all the time based on AI’s ability to come up with novel solutions to known problems. “Accidental discoveries” don't need to be incentivized because they are not, by definition, things we are striving to achieve. But they will happen anyway in the course of deliberately exploring other matters, so there is no reason to believe that artificial superintelligence will not be able to recognize and exploit them at least as well as humans can. That would be one mark of “super” intelligence, after all.
If you can give me three instances where Ayotte came up with a novel solution to a known problem, I would find your comment more convincing. My understanding is that AI has solved unknown math theorems primarily through its ability to crunch numbers in massive quantities, rather any innovative techniques.
A few examples below. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "massive number crunching", but that could describe a lot of what science does to make discoveries:
1) Protein structure prediction using techniques previously unexploited;
2) Game strategies in both video and board games that had not previously been observed;
3) Invention of faster algorithms for matrix multiplication;
4) Advances in materials science like the discovery of millions of crystalline structures previously unconsidered or explored by humans, hundreds of which have since been produced in labs;
5) Drug discovery / molecule design (e.g., Insilico's drug for ideopathic pulmonary fibrosis;
6) Identification of antibiotic molecules overlooked by researchers (halicin, abaucin);
7) Invention of novel plasma control strategies in tokamak reactors, improving the prospects for functional fusion reactors;
“if Democrats get in power and just borrow more and more and more, it could make the problem worse.” Are not the Republicans the party of spend these days? Not tax and spend as they don’t like taxes, just spend and add to the deficit.
Both are. Republicans cut taxes without cutting spending, thus increasing deficit spending. Democrats create entitlements that almost inevitably cost far more than predicted, thus increasing deficit spending even when they manage to raise taxes. At this point, we can only pick our preferred poison.
I'm really nostalgic for when social media actually connected you socially. I used to use it as essentially a shared calendar, to organize my group dnd games, find out what events were going on near me, get a heads-up about a the-more-the-merrier-style party without being explicitly invited, and figure out who was single at the events I was going to. It augmented my ability to move around my social world.
Now, it is unequivocally an anti-social technology. To organize social events like parties, a new app, Partiful, has risen to fill the void left by Old Facebook. It's great that Partiful exists! But that it's useful AT ALL in a social-media-saturated world is the sharpest possible indictment of the social utility of social media.
We all got bait-and-switched into spending weekends alone. It's infuriating.
Regarding Dems and the top fifth of earners: What you see here seems to me to be evidence that the Democrat voting base consists of the classes of people most resistant to demagoguery. Not fully resistant of course, but much more resistant to the least credible and most dangerous charlatans.
These are also the voters who, if they have decent principles, can best afford to stand on them. The Democrat voters still more often than others seem to operate on the presumption that policies should be pursued in good faith based on reasons (even if often misguided or mistaken). They remain much more characterized by respect for expertise, confidence in the scientific method, and deference to well-founded institutions and authority.
I am not surprised they are pursuing tax policy aimed at turning the tide of the 2017 bills that obviously targeted the well-off professional.
Sure, the mob is unlikely to “follow.” They have always been easy to activate against the learned professions by simple provocations. But as Samuel Johnson wrote, “That ignorance and perverseness should always obtain what they like was never considered the end of government.”
Evidently there is a need for a Committee of Public Safety led by the good and virtuous and morally correct professional class to stand for the entirely good faith and rational and reasoned politics.
That…is what government is? You can say that speed limits or whatever example you choose are imposed by a “committee for public safety” or any other pejorative term… People are meant to be incentivized to select representatives with sound judgment. And sound judgment is generally the result of some combination of intelligence and applicable experience….
I guess I don’t follow. I am not saying that a foundation of respect for expertise, confidence in the scientific method and deference to well-founded authority and institutions is fool proof, but I think those qualities characterize most of what got us to the present miraculous state of civilization. I am skeptical that rejecting those principles will have results that are consistent with what I think of as the good life….
And, per the top post, I think the growing concentration of learned people among Democrat voters is a result of that party’s being more often than not kind of obviously activated in good faith by those principles… And, of course, there is a big difference (1) between failing to live up to such principles now and then (which definitely happens!) and (2) being actively hostile to them (which is simply bad - and characterized much of the Republican leadership and voter base)
I mean, I wouldn’t expect them to? That seems like a straw man — I don’t know that anyone has thought it worthwhile or wise to expect that.
But I would expect better results over the long term from a good faith commitment to respect for expertise and confidence in the scientific method. And I think the intuition behind this is widely held (if inarticulately) and at least partially explains the voting pattern indicated in the article.
From 1975 to 2025, NYC and SF went on a FIFTY year run of wealth creation and success not seen since like 13th century Venice. Mississippi? Hmmm.
Like, NY and CA not perfect obviously, but NYC really did used to look like the French Connection and now it really does look like Sex and the City. These are the successful parts of the country. I cannot believe how many more articles I have read about homeless people in NYC compared to articles about the wasteland between Houston and…the Atlantic Ocean. Why is there a double standard? Because NYC and SF very rightly have higher expectations — and very frequently fall short of them. I think it is fine to have higher expectations. It is not enough that NYC has gone on this journey since the mid-70s. I think it should aim to be nicer than Tokyo. Still a long road to get there obviously. But what is the goal for the deep south? See how often you can get three dollar stores in the same interstate adjacent strip mall?
Things like having high taxes to fund massive investment in public transportation and other elements of state capacity?
But I don’t know what progressives have to do with it. We are talking about values. About respect for expertise, confidence in the scientific method, and deference to well-founded authority and institutions. Those are not partisan values. During much of the 1975-2025 period, both parties nominally adhered to these values. And per the original post, it is the abandonment of these values by Republicans that I am guessing has led to the concentration of the learned classes among Democrats. Because if you hold those values, they are community-forming, and are more important than any particular policy blunder.
I mean, ok, everything is a matter of degree. I think the gap on this front is very large among leadership. I mean, there are goopy Democrat voters, but there is very very little chance that someone like RFK Jr gets put in place by Democrat leadership. Or as bigoted as Hegseth. Or as incompetent as Bondi. Or as just plain weird as Patel.
But importantly: there is just a very big difference between (1) failing to live up to principles at all times (even in large ways) and (2) being actively hostile to them and loudly promoting hostility to them.
In my memory, there's a group of people who tinkered in their garage. Inventors we not always PhDs in well equipped labs. I used to remember people's phone numbers, I can barely remember my wife's, and couldn't even begin to tell what my two daughters are.
I never used the slide rule, but I'll bet the people who did knew all the principles of how it worked and why it was useful. Do we mourn the death of the slide rule? I remember the controversy over the personal calculator and whether it could be used in class.
What I do know is that other than the uber curious, most Americans will be content to ask their personal agent. I wonder if engineering can be sustained? Would you trust a human or a computer to tell the stress load on a bridge? Humans often are fallible.
Do students today read Dante's Inferno and just read the Cliffs Notes
I read a few years ago that people who never learned to read have better memories for what they hear than the rest of us. As soon as a technology can be substituted for an ability, that ability will be allowed to wither away by all but a few people. Those few might keep it alive as a hobby or an art form, but for most of us it will become ridiculous.
I agree with @FreneticFauna -- the problem isn't that Democrats want to tax the richest, and Republicans want to tax the poorest. The problem is that neither party is serious about balancing what we want from our government against government's revenue.
In my opinion, the US really jumped the rails when Mondale and Bush 1 lost, both for saying there would have to be more taxes. Politicians learned that cutting taxes was good for them, and that there were no consequences for spending money that wasn't there.
Meanwhile, the ultra-wealthy (the 0.1%) have decided that they would rather have the state crumble and just buy what used to be state services a la carte for themselves. It seems like they don't even want the rest of us to pay for these things. They want the state strangled.
Alas, I can't imagine that telling people that if they want things, they will have to pay for them, is going to be a winning campaign strategy against you can have what you want for free.
As far as I can tell, that option isn't on the table. Instead, the state simply buys us the things we want by borrowing, not taxing.
I'm a Keynes fan, so it seems fine to me if the state borrows when times are bad. But when times are good, we shouldn't be borrowing for stuff we can just pay for, should we? To the limited extent I understand these things, it seems like debt service costs are eating away at our budget.
I think your understanding is sound. Keynes was a proponent of countercyclical government policies. When things are good, government should save. When things are bad, government should spend.
Matt Yglesias has written jokingly that Trump is fighting global warming by closing the strait of Hormuz, but honestly he is? Unless I'm missing something, it seems to me that an extended strait closure would be both more effective at reducing emissions than anything Biden or Obama did in office, and cost less to the world (and since we're a net exporter minimal cost to the United States) per ton of co2 abated.
Just to quantify things, the Biden administration used a social cost of carbon of $190 per ton to assess whether regulations restricted co2 met cost/benefit. Note that most of this cost is to countries other than the United States, but Americans would pay for the cost of the regulations. A barrel of oil has 430 kg of co2, so this means that policies that add up to $82 to the cost of consuming a barrel of oil pencil from a cost benefit assessment.
Raising the price from a strait closure results in market mechanisms finding more efficient ways to reduce consumption than regulations are able to, and also ensures the cost is more fairly distributed globally.
If Biden's $190 figure is correct, any price rise up to $147 ($65+$82) per barrel is 'welfare improving' and up to $188 is closer to the welfare optimal price than the pre-war $65 price.
The main drawbacks I see from a strait closure are:
- Absent intelligent sanctions, it provides a windfall to Russia.
- It results in volatile oil prices that make planning and investment difficult.
These drawbacks don't appear to me to be enough to make a strait closure a bad thing on net.
Because high oil prices are politically unpopular, there's a risk that we'll spend military resources trying to open them. This seems like a bad use of resources to me. Let the gulf states reopen them.
Open minded that I might be missing something. Let me know what you all think.
Very interesting take! I’m also ambiguous about the consequences. The reason for going in are nevertheless quite opaque (and most certainly not to reduce CO2 emissions).
Maybe something like wanting to help Israel, who were going in anyways. Seems not in the US interest to waste munition on this rather than Ukraine but the global decision making in general seems to have shifted a bit from what’s good for the nation to what’s good for the local ruling clique. Trump seems to play the role of the highly indebted king (historically quite common) who is controlled by various obligations and kompromat.
But yeah, the market will be better at finding solutions. A CO2 tax that would have helped with the deficit would have been better but like this also works I guess. Either way the clean energy revolution is unstoppable.
A CO2 tax would definitely be better if it had near universal world-wide adoption. If the US adopted one unilaterally there would be a lot of leakage because some of the reduction in US oil consumption would be offset by increased consumption in other countries.
I agree with your concern about the US running down its munition stockpiles. It's a reason I don't think it's a good idea for us to spend them trying to reopen the strait when we're not harmed by a strait closure.
And it's certainly true that reducing CO2 emissions is not the reason we got involved, and it would be political suicide for a politician to point to this is a decision factor.
I want to believe you, but there's an offsetting pressure, especially in the short run, that could result in much higher and continued use of coal.
Some countries on the edge of making big investments in renewables backed up by LNG generation for resilience are rethinking their plans. Generally, coal isn't as flexible as LNG for power generation and that can make it tougher to integrate as high a level of renewables as gas allows. Plus coal is obviously much dirtier than LNG.
I'm probably still with you as an optimist on this overall. But the coal vs LNG thing seems like a real risk on the downside. I guess no matter what, electrification should get a boost and that'll be an undeniable win, even if we see more coal generation, especially in the short term.
If you haven't seen it, this heatmap article has a good overview of this:
It's unclear whether LNG exports in the near term are good or bad for the climate on margin, I think the effects are pretty small either way. Regardless, the effect is small compared with the effect of reduced oil consumption.
11 billion cubic feet of natural gas transits the strait each day, and 20 million barrels of oil.
It takes 7.42 cubic feet of gas to generate a kWh of electricity, and 1.14 lbs of coal. Coal is 2.07 lbs of co2 per lb of coal. Natural gas emits 0.12 lbs of co2 per cubic foot. There are 2205 lbs in a metric ton.
Based on this, with the most generous assumptions for LNG reducing emissions that 100% of LNG through the strait was previously used to generate electricity now being generated by coal, and not including the emissions to compress the gas or from methane leaks, Hormuz strait LNG reduces emissions by 988 thousand metric tons per day.
A barrel of oil is 430 kg and 20 million barrels transit the strait a day, so cutting off this oil consumption corresponds to 8.6 million metric tons a day.
First, appreciate your very cogent response. Thanks for engaging.
But I do have a complaint about your analysis - it doesn't factor in the cost of non-carbon air pollution emissions from coal.
These costs, including cost of QALYs lost, healthcare costs, and productivity losses are likely as high or higher than the cost of just the carbon emissions alone, depending on assumptions.
IMO, once you include non-carbon emissions costs, which frankly, are modeled in a much more robust and less controversial way, the LNG vs coal math changes dramatically and it's not even close. That's just my opinion, but I think the math really does work out this way.
I do agree with you about reduced oil consumption likely being a much bigger impact factor (both on carbon and air pollution). So we agree there. My only caveat is that because of the greater flexibility of gas generation, I expect it'll be cheaper and more reliable to use gas for firming on a 60-80% clean grid vs coal. Lower electricity costs will result in more electrification of transport vs higher electricity costs. I could be wrong about all this, but I don't think so.
I think we're in agreement. I think LNG exports are good for the environment overall on margin and Biden was wrong to block export terminals. If there was some policy that resulted in the Hormuz strait oil being blocked but not the LNG, that would be ideal.
I'm not able to do a back-of-the-envelop calculation to prove this, but I suspect the non-carbon air pollution reduction from burning less oil exceeds any increase due to coal from a strait closure (there will be some local areas where this is not true, but overall globally). I think you're in agreement with that too.
To summarize my position overall, I think the environmental benefits of an extended strait closure exceed the economic costs. While I don't think the US should discourage other countries from reopening the strait, I don't think we should expend resources on that ourselves.
Very interesting. Your position is bold and I'd like to think you're right. I sort of think you're discounting the amount of suffering and economic loss higher energy prices are going to cause, but I haven't thought that through rigorously really.
I suppose it comes down to the timeframe we use (electrification will prob take > 5-10 years for big impact) and the difference in the rate of electrification with the straight open vs with the straight closed.
Glad to see your take on the Acemoglu paper. And you stated better than I the idea that hallucinations could randomly produce brilliance, the way 2022-era ChatGPT came up with books that I *should* have written and now I am.
You are wrong about Ehrlich and about degrowth. From an Ehrlich memorial essay:
"Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. Borlaug made a point of agreeing with Ehrlich in his Nobel lecture, saying the Green Revolution was a temporary reprieve and that population control was also essential in the ongoing battle against hunger."
It turns out that Green Revolution crop yields depend on massive inputs of N fertilizers made from natural gas by the Haber-Bosch process, and inputs of water, often taken at unsustainable rates from aquifers that cannot be replenished. Climate change also threatens crop yields. In brief, the Green Revolution is not sustainable. Soil loss exceeds soil formation on most of the world's croplands. Scarcity caused by growth will only get worse with more growth. Industrial farming methods relying on fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides are not sustainable.
Ehrlich's Malthusian views contributed to a density dependent decline in fertility rates that cut world births per woman in half and population growth from 2% to 1% per year. That helped prevent a rise in density dependent mortality rates. Over the same 50 years, however, popualtion doubled from 4 to 8 billion (now 8.3 headed to 10). Countries that cut birthrates got richer. Countries where fertility stayed high stayed poor. If the world fertility transition can be completed and population falls, that opens a path towards an economy of abundance and universal prosperity. Much of the current economy is based on drawing down the earth's bank accounts of non-renewable resources. Most of the fossil fuel has to stay in the ground.
Food is probably not the main limiting factor determining earth's sustainable carrying capacity for humans. My personal "limiting factor" candidate is human folly. Simon's "ultimate resource" (human intelligence) as a limited resource. Chris Tucker argues that it is more likely to be damagee to earth's life support systems. We don't know sustainable maximum population (Tucker guesses 3 billion, Ehrlich calculated 1-2 billion) but whatever the number, it is almost certainly less than current 8.3 billion headed to 10 billion. Oxygen levels are falling (there are already anoxic dead zones in oceans). Earth's present average surface temperature is 15 C. In the past it got as high as 36 C. Humans would find life very difficult on a planet that hot. Jim Hansen thinks the IPCC has underestimated climate response. He's been right so far. A third of all 8 million species are at risk of extinction. All life is interconnected, coevolved, a resilient complicated system of feedbacks that keep populations in balance with resources. Extinction of species can lead to extinction cascades. Like popping rivets out of spaceship earth, extinctions could lead to planetary life support failures. We eat other species and they make oxygen and soil we need to survive. Decomposers recycle life. 21,000 scientists have signed a "second warning to humanity." Economists ignorant of ecology are not qualitied to pontificate on Ehrlich's worries about the future.
Moreover, if you read Ehrlich's 2003 memoire, it is obvious he was a humane, intelligent person concerned about reducing human suffering. I visited Ehrlich and found him to be generous, decent and humane. As a college student he organized sit-ins against racial discrimination, yet his population concerns led to false accusations of racism. Ehrlich should be remembered as one of the scientists who tried with more success than most, to save humanity from the folly of the ideology of a cancer cell. Endless growth on a finite planet is a formula for extinction, not success. Herman Daly and others--Kerryn Higgs, Ugo Bardi, Charles Hall, Jim Hansen, Rockstrom, et al--point out that critics of limits to growth relied on hand waving and magical thinking, while those insisting on limits base their conclusions on data, physics and chemistry and projecting measurable trends. Check out the declining numbers of birds in your back yard, soil losses in Iowas, forest fires at all lattitudes, declining sperm counts, and similar trends before you criticize those who say we are wrecking the planet because too many of us are consuming too much.
Regarding Ehrlich, he was too narrow a student of Malthus. However, he was correct in that all these technological innovations that have increased the carrying capacity for civilization are rapidly eroding the stability and resilience of the ecosystems that support it. Right now, it's a race to see whether civilization can survive past 2050. The Earth will always take care of itself, but human societies, even in the Pleistocene, have rapidly exhausted local resources and had to move on. Read the recent book "Goliath's Curse" for a good introduction. How many people will Mars be able to support without a fantastical energy source and technology?
It is pure doomerism to write 2050, civilisation will not collapse in mere 20 odd years.
I can grant 2100 and the potential for systems issues though for overall human advanced tech civilisation (and indeed the Earth itself gives no fucks - overall life has been through much worse than humanity is yet capable of).
i don’t feel doomed!! You know that the climate crisis is already here, inducing mass migrations out of central america, and syria 10 years ago. Moreover, water shortages have come to the Colorado River, Tehran, and Bogota. Trump owes the fossil fuel interests, and is spending our money to shoot all of us in the foot. This is annoying.
I follow a few bloggers who, if they don't literally call themselves degrowthers, nevertheless write quite a bit about the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet and how the things we need to do to rein in global climate change are also the things global climate change and the profligate use (and therefore eventual using-up) of certain non-renewable resources are going to force us to do sooner or later anyway. One thing I will say for those bloggers is that they walk their talk. If you were to throw that word "immiseration" at them, they'd be like "This is how I already live and I don't feel miserable at all." Then they would go on at length about how their pocket farm meets some high percentage of their nutritional needs or how their superinsulated house is so thermally efficient that most years they can keep it comfortable through the winter (in a ski resort area) burning only half a cord of wood a year and, yes, it's more physical work than a conventional lifestyle but that just means they don't need a gym membership.
Of course there are problems with AI but they will be solved, just as the speed limit placed on trains was determined as 25MPH because otherwise our bones would be shaken out of our bodies. When I remember my undergraduate days spent in libraries looking for books I needed to read in order to write an essay, my memories are of the fact that most of that time was wasted. If AI can remove that waste, or even a large portion of it, it will transform our knowledge and the time we have for other things, like understanding quadratic equations. Roll on the day when you can pick an investment without the need to read the comparative history of the investment companies over a period of years.
The famine chart shows that Ehrlich should have known he was wrong. The famines in the '40's probably have to do with WWII arnd the one in the late '50's and early '60's has got to be the Great Leap Forward. At least some of famine deaths int he '30's are in the Soviet Union. By the time he was writing the Population Bomb, famines due to not enough food rather than governments doing stupid things were mostly a thing of the past.
I just wonder if The Population Bomb and other such books spurred us on to create the Green Revolution and adopt the sustainable family planning practices that have stabilized population growth? Also, would people have invested as heavily in female education in developing countries without its admonitions? Based on the growing carbon footprint and shrinking wildlife habitat alone, I believe the population curve is finally shifting toward sustainability. I am old enough to remember the fear we all had of massive desperate starving populations in various parts of the world. Dystopia comes in many forms for a variety of reasons. The negative effects of declining population seem to be caring for the aging and economic growth. I am not sure those are the only factors worth considering.
"if Democrats get in power and just borrow more and more and more, it could make the problem worse."
Is there any particular reason to let the party that runs the biggest deficits and gave us most of the debt off the hook here? You manage to avoid mentioning the massive, massive deficit under the current Republican trifecta but manage to include a swipe at a caricature of Democrats...
Certainly, AI may come up with novel ideas, but will AI be able to recognize them as novel or as worthwhile? Humans have accidentally stumbled on useful innovations, but they were smart enough to recognize that their oopsies were beneficial. Penicillin was discovered when an attempt to grow bacteria was disrupted the accidental introduction of a mold. Rubber became useful when Charles Goodyear dropped a rubber/sulfur mixture on a Hot stove and learned this way how to harden it.
I can personally attest as an AI researcher that the central idea in my last publication came from Claude. The significance and theoretical interpretation of it was polished in dialogue but without AI I would not have made the connection between the neural network representation and a concept from quantum entanglement which was the key.
For what it's worth, while I'm not about to invent penicillin, I am a R&D engineer working on relatively high tech stuff and also something of a technical generalist. AI makes it easier for me to innovate, because it's really good at reminding me the details of things I've learned but partially forgotten, doing light literature searches, and making it so I spend less time writing non-production data analysis code. It basically removes barriers to push you to the forefront of what we already know.
Now, if I had grown up in a world where I never had to learn any of this stuff in the first place, and lacked the understanding and connections forged over way too many years, then I'm not sure.
This seems like an odd question. There are companies founded all the time based on AI’s ability to come up with novel solutions to known problems. “Accidental discoveries” don't need to be incentivized because they are not, by definition, things we are striving to achieve. But they will happen anyway in the course of deliberately exploring other matters, so there is no reason to believe that artificial superintelligence will not be able to recognize and exploit them at least as well as humans can. That would be one mark of “super” intelligence, after all.
If you can give me three instances where Ayotte came up with a novel solution to a known problem, I would find your comment more convincing. My understanding is that AI has solved unknown math theorems primarily through its ability to crunch numbers in massive quantities, rather any innovative techniques.
A few examples below. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "massive number crunching", but that could describe a lot of what science does to make discoveries:
1) Protein structure prediction using techniques previously unexploited;
2) Game strategies in both video and board games that had not previously been observed;
3) Invention of faster algorithms for matrix multiplication;
4) Advances in materials science like the discovery of millions of crystalline structures previously unconsidered or explored by humans, hundreds of which have since been produced in labs;
5) Drug discovery / molecule design (e.g., Insilico's drug for ideopathic pulmonary fibrosis;
6) Identification of antibiotic molecules overlooked by researchers (halicin, abaucin);
7) Invention of novel plasma control strategies in tokamak reactors, improving the prospects for functional fusion reactors;
... and more
“if Democrats get in power and just borrow more and more and more, it could make the problem worse.” Are not the Republicans the party of spend these days? Not tax and spend as they don’t like taxes, just spend and add to the deficit.
Both are. Republicans cut taxes without cutting spending, thus increasing deficit spending. Democrats create entitlements that almost inevitably cost far more than predicted, thus increasing deficit spending even when they manage to raise taxes. At this point, we can only pick our preferred poison.
And yet, one party consistently runs much bigger deficits than the other. If you care about them, vote Democrat. They are better.
I'm really nostalgic for when social media actually connected you socially. I used to use it as essentially a shared calendar, to organize my group dnd games, find out what events were going on near me, get a heads-up about a the-more-the-merrier-style party without being explicitly invited, and figure out who was single at the events I was going to. It augmented my ability to move around my social world.
Now, it is unequivocally an anti-social technology. To organize social events like parties, a new app, Partiful, has risen to fill the void left by Old Facebook. It's great that Partiful exists! But that it's useful AT ALL in a social-media-saturated world is the sharpest possible indictment of the social utility of social media.
We all got bait-and-switched into spending weekends alone. It's infuriating.
+100
Regarding Dems and the top fifth of earners: What you see here seems to me to be evidence that the Democrat voting base consists of the classes of people most resistant to demagoguery. Not fully resistant of course, but much more resistant to the least credible and most dangerous charlatans.
These are also the voters who, if they have decent principles, can best afford to stand on them. The Democrat voters still more often than others seem to operate on the presumption that policies should be pursued in good faith based on reasons (even if often misguided or mistaken). They remain much more characterized by respect for expertise, confidence in the scientific method, and deference to well-founded institutions and authority.
I am not surprised they are pursuing tax policy aimed at turning the tide of the 2017 bills that obviously targeted the well-off professional.
Why of course Our Side is Good and Right and morally correct, and the unlearned heathen should follow,
Sure, the mob is unlikely to “follow.” They have always been easy to activate against the learned professions by simple provocations. But as Samuel Johnson wrote, “That ignorance and perverseness should always obtain what they like was never considered the end of government.”
Evidently there is a need for a Committee of Public Safety led by the good and virtuous and morally correct professional class to stand for the entirely good faith and rational and reasoned politics.
That…is what government is? You can say that speed limits or whatever example you choose are imposed by a “committee for public safety” or any other pejorative term… People are meant to be incentivized to select representatives with sound judgment. And sound judgment is generally the result of some combination of intelligence and applicable experience….
Ah the intellectual professional's blind arrogance.
Mr Robespierre of course.
Self praise to one's own class and utter blindness so often go hand in hand.
So, do you have anything besides a conviction that idiots should be able to fuck up things for the rest of us?
I guess I don’t follow. I am not saying that a foundation of respect for expertise, confidence in the scientific method and deference to well-founded authority and institutions is fool proof, but I think those qualities characterize most of what got us to the present miraculous state of civilization. I am skeptical that rejecting those principles will have results that are consistent with what I think of as the good life….
And, per the top post, I think the growing concentration of learned people among Democrat voters is a result of that party’s being more often than not kind of obviously activated in good faith by those principles… And, of course, there is a big difference (1) between failing to live up to such principles now and then (which definitely happens!) and (2) being actively hostile to them (which is simply bad - and characterized much of the Republican leadership and voter base)
Why can't those filthy proles just realize that it is clearly us who have their best interests in mind?
I mean, I wouldn’t expect them to? That seems like a straw man — I don’t know that anyone has thought it worthwhile or wise to expect that.
But I would expect better results over the long term from a good faith commitment to respect for expertise and confidence in the scientific method. And I think the intuition behind this is widely held (if inarticulately) and at least partially explains the voting pattern indicated in the article.
Really? I think the Dems have sucked ass since 2014.
Why do Mississippi fourth graders read better than Maine fourth graders?
Why does NYC have the tax rate of Norway and yet still have barefooted homeless people roaming the subway?
Why has California spent 100 billion on a train system that has never carried passengers?
Why have New York, California, and Illinois hemorrhaged so much population that these states are losing house reps?
And let's not get into how much the Dems cultural priorities suck ass.
The lower classes are wrong to vote for Trump, but Dems need a better strategy than just waggling fingers.
Well, it depends on your lens?
From 1975 to 2025, NYC and SF went on a FIFTY year run of wealth creation and success not seen since like 13th century Venice. Mississippi? Hmmm.
Like, NY and CA not perfect obviously, but NYC really did used to look like the French Connection and now it really does look like Sex and the City. These are the successful parts of the country. I cannot believe how many more articles I have read about homeless people in NYC compared to articles about the wasteland between Houston and…the Atlantic Ocean. Why is there a double standard? Because NYC and SF very rightly have higher expectations — and very frequently fall short of them. I think it is fine to have higher expectations. It is not enough that NYC has gone on this journey since the mid-70s. I think it should aim to be nicer than Tokyo. Still a long road to get there obviously. But what is the goal for the deep south? See how often you can get three dollar stores in the same interstate adjacent strip mall?
NYC improved because it started doing all the things progressives rail against.
Things like having high taxes to fund massive investment in public transportation and other elements of state capacity?
But I don’t know what progressives have to do with it. We are talking about values. About respect for expertise, confidence in the scientific method, and deference to well-founded authority and institutions. Those are not partisan values. During much of the 1975-2025 period, both parties nominally adhered to these values. And per the original post, it is the abandonment of these values by Republicans that I am guessing has led to the concentration of the learned classes among Democrats. Because if you hold those values, they are community-forming, and are more important than any particular policy blunder.
My point is that large numbers of people in both parties have abandoned it.
I mean, ok, everything is a matter of degree. I think the gap on this front is very large among leadership. I mean, there are goopy Democrat voters, but there is very very little chance that someone like RFK Jr gets put in place by Democrat leadership. Or as bigoted as Hegseth. Or as incompetent as Bondi. Or as just plain weird as Patel.
But importantly: there is just a very big difference between (1) failing to live up to principles at all times (even in large ways) and (2) being actively hostile to them and loudly promoting hostility to them.
In my memory, there's a group of people who tinkered in their garage. Inventors we not always PhDs in well equipped labs. I used to remember people's phone numbers, I can barely remember my wife's, and couldn't even begin to tell what my two daughters are.
I never used the slide rule, but I'll bet the people who did knew all the principles of how it worked and why it was useful. Do we mourn the death of the slide rule? I remember the controversy over the personal calculator and whether it could be used in class.
What I do know is that other than the uber curious, most Americans will be content to ask their personal agent. I wonder if engineering can be sustained? Would you trust a human or a computer to tell the stress load on a bridge? Humans often are fallible.
Do students today read Dante's Inferno and just read the Cliffs Notes
I read a few years ago that people who never learned to read have better memories for what they hear than the rest of us. As soon as a technology can be substituted for an ability, that ability will be allowed to wither away by all but a few people. Those few might keep it alive as a hobby or an art form, but for most of us it will become ridiculous.
When I used to wait tables, I definitely had a better memory.
fortunately you and I are reading this
I agree with @FreneticFauna -- the problem isn't that Democrats want to tax the richest, and Republicans want to tax the poorest. The problem is that neither party is serious about balancing what we want from our government against government's revenue.
In my opinion, the US really jumped the rails when Mondale and Bush 1 lost, both for saying there would have to be more taxes. Politicians learned that cutting taxes was good for them, and that there were no consequences for spending money that wasn't there.
Meanwhile, the ultra-wealthy (the 0.1%) have decided that they would rather have the state crumble and just buy what used to be state services a la carte for themselves. It seems like they don't even want the rest of us to pay for these things. They want the state strangled.
Alas, I can't imagine that telling people that if they want things, they will have to pay for them, is going to be a winning campaign strategy against you can have what you want for free.
How do we escape this trap?
You have to let “The People” go without those services. Few people really know the value of something until it is gone.
We may have to relearn a whole bunch of stuff that we previously took for granted.
As far as I can tell, that option isn't on the table. Instead, the state simply buys us the things we want by borrowing, not taxing.
I'm a Keynes fan, so it seems fine to me if the state borrows when times are bad. But when times are good, we shouldn't be borrowing for stuff we can just pay for, should we? To the limited extent I understand these things, it seems like debt service costs are eating away at our budget.
I think your understanding is sound. Keynes was a proponent of countercyclical government policies. When things are good, government should save. When things are bad, government should spend.
Matt Yglesias has written jokingly that Trump is fighting global warming by closing the strait of Hormuz, but honestly he is? Unless I'm missing something, it seems to me that an extended strait closure would be both more effective at reducing emissions than anything Biden or Obama did in office, and cost less to the world (and since we're a net exporter minimal cost to the United States) per ton of co2 abated.
Just to quantify things, the Biden administration used a social cost of carbon of $190 per ton to assess whether regulations restricted co2 met cost/benefit. Note that most of this cost is to countries other than the United States, but Americans would pay for the cost of the regulations. A barrel of oil has 430 kg of co2, so this means that policies that add up to $82 to the cost of consuming a barrel of oil pencil from a cost benefit assessment.
Raising the price from a strait closure results in market mechanisms finding more efficient ways to reduce consumption than regulations are able to, and also ensures the cost is more fairly distributed globally.
If Biden's $190 figure is correct, any price rise up to $147 ($65+$82) per barrel is 'welfare improving' and up to $188 is closer to the welfare optimal price than the pre-war $65 price.
The main drawbacks I see from a strait closure are:
- Absent intelligent sanctions, it provides a windfall to Russia.
- It results in volatile oil prices that make planning and investment difficult.
These drawbacks don't appear to me to be enough to make a strait closure a bad thing on net.
Because high oil prices are politically unpopular, there's a risk that we'll spend military resources trying to open them. This seems like a bad use of resources to me. Let the gulf states reopen them.
Open minded that I might be missing something. Let me know what you all think.
Very interesting take! I’m also ambiguous about the consequences. The reason for going in are nevertheless quite opaque (and most certainly not to reduce CO2 emissions).
Maybe something like wanting to help Israel, who were going in anyways. Seems not in the US interest to waste munition on this rather than Ukraine but the global decision making in general seems to have shifted a bit from what’s good for the nation to what’s good for the local ruling clique. Trump seems to play the role of the highly indebted king (historically quite common) who is controlled by various obligations and kompromat.
But yeah, the market will be better at finding solutions. A CO2 tax that would have helped with the deficit would have been better but like this also works I guess. Either way the clean energy revolution is unstoppable.
A CO2 tax would definitely be better if it had near universal world-wide adoption. If the US adopted one unilaterally there would be a lot of leakage because some of the reduction in US oil consumption would be offset by increased consumption in other countries.
I agree with your concern about the US running down its munition stockpiles. It's a reason I don't think it's a good idea for us to spend them trying to reopen the strait when we're not harmed by a strait closure.
And it's certainly true that reducing CO2 emissions is not the reason we got involved, and it would be political suicide for a politician to point to this is a decision factor.
I want to believe you, but there's an offsetting pressure, especially in the short run, that could result in much higher and continued use of coal.
Some countries on the edge of making big investments in renewables backed up by LNG generation for resilience are rethinking their plans. Generally, coal isn't as flexible as LNG for power generation and that can make it tougher to integrate as high a level of renewables as gas allows. Plus coal is obviously much dirtier than LNG.
I'm probably still with you as an optimist on this overall. But the coal vs LNG thing seems like a real risk on the downside. I guess no matter what, electrification should get a boost and that'll be an undeniable win, even if we see more coal generation, especially in the short term.
If you haven't seen it, this heatmap article has a good overview of this:
https://heatmap.news/energy/iran-coal-solar
It's unclear whether LNG exports in the near term are good or bad for the climate on margin, I think the effects are pretty small either way. Regardless, the effect is small compared with the effect of reduced oil consumption.
11 billion cubic feet of natural gas transits the strait each day, and 20 million barrels of oil.
It takes 7.42 cubic feet of gas to generate a kWh of electricity, and 1.14 lbs of coal. Coal is 2.07 lbs of co2 per lb of coal. Natural gas emits 0.12 lbs of co2 per cubic foot. There are 2205 lbs in a metric ton.
Based on this, with the most generous assumptions for LNG reducing emissions that 100% of LNG through the strait was previously used to generate electricity now being generated by coal, and not including the emissions to compress the gas or from methane leaks, Hormuz strait LNG reduces emissions by 988 thousand metric tons per day.
11 billion * (1.14*2.07/7.42-0.12)/2205=998 thousand
A barrel of oil is 430 kg and 20 million barrels transit the strait a day, so cutting off this oil consumption corresponds to 8.6 million metric tons a day.
First, appreciate your very cogent response. Thanks for engaging.
But I do have a complaint about your analysis - it doesn't factor in the cost of non-carbon air pollution emissions from coal.
These costs, including cost of QALYs lost, healthcare costs, and productivity losses are likely as high or higher than the cost of just the carbon emissions alone, depending on assumptions.
IMO, once you include non-carbon emissions costs, which frankly, are modeled in a much more robust and less controversial way, the LNG vs coal math changes dramatically and it's not even close. That's just my opinion, but I think the math really does work out this way.
I do agree with you about reduced oil consumption likely being a much bigger impact factor (both on carbon and air pollution). So we agree there. My only caveat is that because of the greater flexibility of gas generation, I expect it'll be cheaper and more reliable to use gas for firming on a 60-80% clean grid vs coal. Lower electricity costs will result in more electrification of transport vs higher electricity costs. I could be wrong about all this, but I don't think so.
I think we're in agreement. I think LNG exports are good for the environment overall on margin and Biden was wrong to block export terminals. If there was some policy that resulted in the Hormuz strait oil being blocked but not the LNG, that would be ideal.
I'm not able to do a back-of-the-envelop calculation to prove this, but I suspect the non-carbon air pollution reduction from burning less oil exceeds any increase due to coal from a strait closure (there will be some local areas where this is not true, but overall globally). I think you're in agreement with that too.
To summarize my position overall, I think the environmental benefits of an extended strait closure exceed the economic costs. While I don't think the US should discourage other countries from reopening the strait, I don't think we should expend resources on that ourselves.
Very interesting. Your position is bold and I'd like to think you're right. I sort of think you're discounting the amount of suffering and economic loss higher energy prices are going to cause, but I haven't thought that through rigorously really.
I suppose it comes down to the timeframe we use (electrification will prob take > 5-10 years for big impact) and the difference in the rate of electrification with the straight open vs with the straight closed.
Still, all good food for thought. Thx.
Apple could really clean up with a diet smart phone. I went dumb phone myself and have very much enjoyed experiencing boredom again.
I would pay quite a lot for that. But it would eat up Apples margins in the App Store.
Glad to see your take on the Acemoglu paper. And you stated better than I the idea that hallucinations could randomly produce brilliance, the way 2022-era ChatGPT came up with books that I *should* have written and now I am.
You are wrong about Ehrlich and about degrowth. From an Ehrlich memorial essay:
"Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. Borlaug made a point of agreeing with Ehrlich in his Nobel lecture, saying the Green Revolution was a temporary reprieve and that population control was also essential in the ongoing battle against hunger."
It turns out that Green Revolution crop yields depend on massive inputs of N fertilizers made from natural gas by the Haber-Bosch process, and inputs of water, often taken at unsustainable rates from aquifers that cannot be replenished. Climate change also threatens crop yields. In brief, the Green Revolution is not sustainable. Soil loss exceeds soil formation on most of the world's croplands. Scarcity caused by growth will only get worse with more growth. Industrial farming methods relying on fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides are not sustainable.
Ehrlich's Malthusian views contributed to a density dependent decline in fertility rates that cut world births per woman in half and population growth from 2% to 1% per year. That helped prevent a rise in density dependent mortality rates. Over the same 50 years, however, popualtion doubled from 4 to 8 billion (now 8.3 headed to 10). Countries that cut birthrates got richer. Countries where fertility stayed high stayed poor. If the world fertility transition can be completed and population falls, that opens a path towards an economy of abundance and universal prosperity. Much of the current economy is based on drawing down the earth's bank accounts of non-renewable resources. Most of the fossil fuel has to stay in the ground.
Food is probably not the main limiting factor determining earth's sustainable carrying capacity for humans. My personal "limiting factor" candidate is human folly. Simon's "ultimate resource" (human intelligence) as a limited resource. Chris Tucker argues that it is more likely to be damagee to earth's life support systems. We don't know sustainable maximum population (Tucker guesses 3 billion, Ehrlich calculated 1-2 billion) but whatever the number, it is almost certainly less than current 8.3 billion headed to 10 billion. Oxygen levels are falling (there are already anoxic dead zones in oceans). Earth's present average surface temperature is 15 C. In the past it got as high as 36 C. Humans would find life very difficult on a planet that hot. Jim Hansen thinks the IPCC has underestimated climate response. He's been right so far. A third of all 8 million species are at risk of extinction. All life is interconnected, coevolved, a resilient complicated system of feedbacks that keep populations in balance with resources. Extinction of species can lead to extinction cascades. Like popping rivets out of spaceship earth, extinctions could lead to planetary life support failures. We eat other species and they make oxygen and soil we need to survive. Decomposers recycle life. 21,000 scientists have signed a "second warning to humanity." Economists ignorant of ecology are not qualitied to pontificate on Ehrlich's worries about the future.
Moreover, if you read Ehrlich's 2003 memoire, it is obvious he was a humane, intelligent person concerned about reducing human suffering. I visited Ehrlich and found him to be generous, decent and humane. As a college student he organized sit-ins against racial discrimination, yet his population concerns led to false accusations of racism. Ehrlich should be remembered as one of the scientists who tried with more success than most, to save humanity from the folly of the ideology of a cancer cell. Endless growth on a finite planet is a formula for extinction, not success. Herman Daly and others--Kerryn Higgs, Ugo Bardi, Charles Hall, Jim Hansen, Rockstrom, et al--point out that critics of limits to growth relied on hand waving and magical thinking, while those insisting on limits base their conclusions on data, physics and chemistry and projecting measurable trends. Check out the declining numbers of birds in your back yard, soil losses in Iowas, forest fires at all lattitudes, declining sperm counts, and similar trends before you criticize those who say we are wrecking the planet because too many of us are consuming too much.
Actually regenerative farming practices can now achieve comparable yields to conventional farming.
So it turns out we don't have to starve after all.
"Ehrlich's Malthusian views contributed to a density dependent decline in fertility rates"
No they didn't. Aside from China's draconian one child policy, the rest of the world didn't care.
Fertility rates have been dropping because of the invention of birth control combined with more educating women working.
Regarding Ehrlich, he was too narrow a student of Malthus. However, he was correct in that all these technological innovations that have increased the carrying capacity for civilization are rapidly eroding the stability and resilience of the ecosystems that support it. Right now, it's a race to see whether civilization can survive past 2050. The Earth will always take care of itself, but human societies, even in the Pleistocene, have rapidly exhausted local resources and had to move on. Read the recent book "Goliath's Curse" for a good introduction. How many people will Mars be able to support without a fantastical energy source and technology?
It is pure doomerism to write 2050, civilisation will not collapse in mere 20 odd years.
I can grant 2100 and the potential for systems issues though for overall human advanced tech civilisation (and indeed the Earth itself gives no fucks - overall life has been through much worse than humanity is yet capable of).
i don’t feel doomed!! You know that the climate crisis is already here, inducing mass migrations out of central america, and syria 10 years ago. Moreover, water shortages have come to the Colorado River, Tehran, and Bogota. Trump owes the fossil fuel interests, and is spending our money to shoot all of us in the foot. This is annoying.
I follow a few bloggers who, if they don't literally call themselves degrowthers, nevertheless write quite a bit about the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet and how the things we need to do to rein in global climate change are also the things global climate change and the profligate use (and therefore eventual using-up) of certain non-renewable resources are going to force us to do sooner or later anyway. One thing I will say for those bloggers is that they walk their talk. If you were to throw that word "immiseration" at them, they'd be like "This is how I already live and I don't feel miserable at all." Then they would go on at length about how their pocket farm meets some high percentage of their nutritional needs or how their superinsulated house is so thermally efficient that most years they can keep it comfortable through the winter (in a ski resort area) burning only half a cord of wood a year and, yes, it's more physical work than a conventional lifestyle but that just means they don't need a gym membership.
Of course there are problems with AI but they will be solved, just as the speed limit placed on trains was determined as 25MPH because otherwise our bones would be shaken out of our bodies. When I remember my undergraduate days spent in libraries looking for books I needed to read in order to write an essay, my memories are of the fact that most of that time was wasted. If AI can remove that waste, or even a large portion of it, it will transform our knowledge and the time we have for other things, like understanding quadratic equations. Roll on the day when you can pick an investment without the need to read the comparative history of the investment companies over a period of years.
The famine chart shows that Ehrlich should have known he was wrong. The famines in the '40's probably have to do with WWII arnd the one in the late '50's and early '60's has got to be the Great Leap Forward. At least some of famine deaths int he '30's are in the Soviet Union. By the time he was writing the Population Bomb, famines due to not enough food rather than governments doing stupid things were mostly a thing of the past.
I just wonder if The Population Bomb and other such books spurred us on to create the Green Revolution and adopt the sustainable family planning practices that have stabilized population growth? Also, would people have invested as heavily in female education in developing countries without its admonitions? Based on the growing carbon footprint and shrinking wildlife habitat alone, I believe the population curve is finally shifting toward sustainability. I am old enough to remember the fear we all had of massive desperate starving populations in various parts of the world. Dystopia comes in many forms for a variety of reasons. The negative effects of declining population seem to be caring for the aging and economic growth. I am not sure those are the only factors worth considering.
"if Democrats get in power and just borrow more and more and more, it could make the problem worse."
Is there any particular reason to let the party that runs the biggest deficits and gave us most of the debt off the hook here? You manage to avoid mentioning the massive, massive deficit under the current Republican trifecta but manage to include a swipe at a caricature of Democrats...