You complain about GDPR and cookies, but it is eye-opening when I access the internet in Europe. I would say that it is not that Europeans hate software, but rather that they value privacy and hate surveillance capitalism. And that is a lesson they learned from totalitarian experiences in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Soviet dominated Eastern Europe.
The whole popup thing could be eliminated if companies stopped using the advertising networks or if they agreed on a uniform way of setting a personal cookie policy. Instead we have deliberate bad design intended to annoy users and get them to consent to detailed tracking.
I think a reasonable, measured, sober evaluation of the situation will inevitably conclude that "Accept Cookies" popups are not an effective way of guarding against either fascism or communism.
As a software professional, I genuinely admire Europe’s legacy—after all, European innovation (CERN and the WWW) gave us the very foundation of the modern internet. I also respect Europe's pioneering focus on privacy and security. I undergo GDPR compliance training twice a year myself and take it very seriously in my daily work.
However, I have to be candid: over-regulation has turned into a form of technological suicide. After falling behind during the Web 2.0 era dominated by Google and Meta, Europe is now at risk of falling even further behind in both AI and EVs. It’s genuinely painful to watch. I’m sure you’d agree that the immense compliance burden has effectively choked off local European startups before they even get off the ground?
I guess the real issue here is how does a society cultivate software-intensive industries while maintaining a strong focus on privacy and data security? As a software professional yourself, where do you think the Europeans go wrong in regulating tech, and how could they do tech regulation better?
That is a fantastic question! I'd need an entire essay to do it justice, LOL!
First, let me dispel a common myth: people often blame Europe's language diversity and fragmented market. I 100% disagree. That profoundly underestimates both the technical capability of software engineers and the language fluency of European users.
The real bottleneck is indeed policy attitude. Software innovation inherently requires tolerance, leeway, and gray areas to experiment. Tax cuts alone won't be enough—overly restrictive upfront regulation is industry suicide; it suffocates the baby in the cradle.
I am not saying privacy doesn't matter. Meta's Cambridge Analytica scandal was terrible, no doubt. But look at the mechanism: American enforcement punishes bad behavior after the fact, acting as a warning signal while leaving room for the industry to grow. Europe, by contrast, tried to write a perfect policy upfront to scare off all "greedy bad actors"—and in doing so, ensured nothing gets built at all.
To give an extreme illustration: China is hardly known for regulatory liberalism, right? Yet years ago, Baidu's CEO made a deeply controversial remark: he suggested that Chinese users were more willing to trade privacy for convenience, which could give Chinese AI a speed advantage by feeding models real-world data. Ethically, that’s highly debatable. But politically, it illustrates a mindset: China put industrial dominance first, forcing restrictive policies to yield to industrial goals.
Constraints can always be tightened later. But if the industry itself is killed, and if the space for innovation is choked off from day one, who is a brilliant framework like GDPR ultimately regulating? Only foreign monopolies.
I'm not willing to follow the Chinese into a total surveillance state. Note also that privacy cannot be restored after a breach, so punishing after the fact is not a solution. Digital identity that can be invalidated or that expires regularly might help. Countermeasures against device fingerprinting might help.
Maybe we need a different business model where users pay broad-coverage subscriptions?
Me neither! Definitely not advocating for the Chinese model LOL! I raised that extreme example purely to contrast how Europe's heavy-handed compliance scares off its own software sector. If China and Europe are two extremes, Silicon Valley sits in the middle—and we can certainly debate whether the US should be more cautious or more aggressive.
I must admit, every sentence of yours carries wisdom, even though I don't quite agree with where it lands!
Take the idea of a "pay-as-you-go subscription model." In reality, the "free with ads" model is what brought the web to billions of everyday people over the last 30 years. In the AI era, things might change, who knows? But I'm afraid the trend might lean even harder into "free" to capture users' attention and data instead of money. Sounds terrible, I know, and sorry if it’s the opposite of what you’d hope to see—but that's what I realistically feel could happen.
The focus on “surveillance capitalism” is a European smokescreen to hide the government surveillance and identified phones they want to prevent you from making “antisocial” posts about politicians or against favored groups, or in Germany, so they can charge you with defamation for leaving mediocre reviews of a restaurant on Google Maps
I'm not sure privacy is the key issue. My sense is that Europe is uncomfortable with how network effects in software lead to "winner take all" dynamics and large powerful companies. And to companies using one strong base to expand into other areas, so for example I find Google products a bit kneecapped when I am in Europe.
They are trying to ensure many players in the system I think, but that is a less appealing setting for the companies.
Re: why Indian women wouldn't go out in public more, uh: Maybe because a woman alone in public faces a significant risk of being assaulted, across large swathes of the country?
These are fair questions, but even if that aspect of conditions hasn't changed, people's response to it might change. For instance, if the productivity of labor goes up, such that a single income from a man can support a couple, the couple might rationally decide that exposing the woman to the same level of risk is less worthwhile.
And then you just have to layer on cultural stuff that isn't purely rational. (Compare: Risks to children from being alone in public are probably the-same-or-lower in most situations in the US, compared to the 1970s, and yet we have WAY more helicopter parenting, with norms having shifted so far that if you send a ten year old to go bike around the park alone, some crazy person might call the cops on you for neglect.)
It definitely seems like stamping out the idea that a random woman on a bus is fair game for harassment and assault would do a lot to make women more interested in being out in public.
I wonder why this reply is hidden if I go to all replies in the app, but I can see it when I’m just at the end of the article and the replies are showing at the bottom.
Reading Noah's roundups is always an intellectual treat!
I can fully validate point #5 regarding China’s dominance in critical mineral refining. China’s industry leaders and policymakers are acutely aware that their core leverage lies in refining rare-earth tech, scale, and supply chain integration—not raw natural endowment. There is a strong consensus domestically that the West won't be able to reverse this processing advantage within at least a ten-year horizon.
Broadly speaking, China is far more sensitive to and serious about the value of physical manufacturing, supply chain scaling, and the accumulation of that "tacit knowledge" Noah mentioned. The West—especially Europe—often makes the fundamental mistake of treating policy and GDPR-like laws as something that can top-down dictate and bind technology, rather than letting technical realities shape policy. It’s putting the cart way before the horse.
How can Europe possibly spot the world years of AI development while not having a big software industry of its own and think they would be able to come up with something competitive? They’ll be building data centers to use other people’s AI.
As a French-speaker who has profound respect for French culture, I will add my two cents about the European approach to software. It is merely a further instance of the same kind of wildly poor misgovernance that afflicts the entire EU, the UK, and, to a lesser extent, our blue states, such as California and New York.
Broadly stated, the problems with this approach to governance are: (1) suffocating over-regulation (often written in impenetrable legalese); (2) a Luddite suspicion of new technologies; and (3) economic illiteracy (i.e., an abject inability to understand unintended consequences of public policies).
Some qualifications are in order. There are wonderful pockets of dynamism in many of the places I have mentioned above, esp. California, Massachusetts, and England, but the popular reaction to new technologies in these places is dismaying (e.g., New York's recent ban on data centers). Also, there are some outliers in this sphere: Denmark and Canada come to mind as more practical-minded places. The Luddite tendency is perhaps most pronounced in France, and less so elsewhere.
At least, the Europeans are not further afflicted by maganomics, as we are. By maganomics, I mean the decreased trade, decreased investment, open corruption, and unembarrassed cronyism of the Trump Administration's strange cocktail of policies (e.g., unprovoked trade wars, unprovoked real wars, running up the public debt to unredressable levels, undermining our best universities, scaring away talented foreigners and foreign capital, casting doubt on rule of law, and so on.).
Despite all of the problems with blue-state misgovernance and maganomics, the US economy continues to thrive because it still enjoys the "exorbitant privilege" of holding the world's currency of reserve, there is free trade among the 50 American states, and Americans on the whole remain a very enterprising, talented, dynamic people, who adapt quickly to change.
Lastly, I am an unaffiliated independent who left the Democratic Party in disgust in 2021. It has only gotten much worse since then. Even so, I will "vote blue" in the upcoming midterms only for the sake of imposing checks and balances on this errant Administration, but the sooner we have new, better political formations, the better.
The shift from institutions back to people is interesting. American universities have grown tremendously fat in the last decades, and most of that fat is bloated administration. If scientists can take their grants elsewhere, they will be in a better bargaining position against this class of bureaucrats.
Getting grants is complicated and a huge PITA, I speak from experience as someone who has worked in university research administration. It is far easier for an individual scientist to get grants if they have the assistance of a university research administration team, and also far easier for them to actually carry that research out if they have access to university facilities.
What is a lone scientist supposed to do? Slog through all the paperwork themselves and build their own labs from scratch? It'd take decades to do a project that would have taken six months with institutional support. Scientists work in large institutions for good reason. At most, this proposal might shift some research funds away from universities to other kinds of research institutions, but you can be sure nothing will actually go to individual scientists who are not affiliated with an institution. It's an idea that is simply not aligned with the reality of research.
First, this sounds like "one bureaucracy providing work for another".
Second, even if the grant processing stays as PITA as it is now, you can have specialized firms doing this instead. There is no iron law that it should be done by a university.
In the EU, if you want to get some European money for a (general) project, there will be dozens of specialized small institutions that will do the paperwork for you and compete with each other.
The debt profligacy is worse than you describe and the other observers. Pradhan and Goodhart in their most recent book outline the many policy challenges from an aging population, ,demographic changes and the fact we will have more stubborn inflation as immigration tails off, along with the fact that China will unlikely deflate the world this time around. Perhaps AI will save us but it seems warranted to be skeptical. And central banks may face immense challenges they are not equipped to handle given the political constraints. Maybe a crisis will be needed to get all hands on deck.
Speaking of debt, China is also wrestling with two monumental, interconnected debt traps built up over the last two decades: massive private sector real estate debt and excessive local government off-balance-sheet debt (LGFVs).
The process of deleveraging and digesting these liabilities will likely drag down China's growth engine well past 2030. What makes it particularly precarious is the timing—by the time the worst of this debt overhang is cleared, the full-blown impact of China's rapid demographic aging will hit with full force. It’s a double whammy: a prolonged balance sheet recession followed immediately by a shrinking workforce.
The damage Trump and his administration of Luddites have done to science, debt, and deficit will make him one of the worst Presidents in recent history.
This is what happens when you vote for a guy who loves debt. In his warped mind, the US government has control over our debt because debtors need us to make our interest payments.
This is how Trump got banks to give him another loan for his Atlantic City Casino; he presented them with an option. He could operate the casino or declare bankruptcy. The banks gave him the loan, and he ended up going bankrupt anyway.
Trump mistakenly thinks the US government could declare bankruptcy or change the interest rate, or refinance because he who owes the most is in charge.
As for rare earths, they are critical for so many modern things. Rare Earths are the reason Trump found out he had no cards when China stopped selling them to us, and Trump pulled back his Chinese tariffs.
China is in charge, period. The US is attempting to build them overseas due to NEPA; the objection to such dirty production would tie the US up in court for a decade. Noah, you are correct; the public has no idea that China stopping to sell us Rare Earths would harm the US.
That said, the dislike of Data Centers is so visceral that there are those who would relish rare earths being the reason we stopped building them. They wouldn’t care at all that you need like 50lbs of them to build an F-35.
Most historians agree that James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Herbert Hoover were the three worst US presidents (at least among those whose presidencies were long enough ago to be objectively assessed without the emotions of the moment clouding the analysis, and also long enough ago that we *know how the story ended*). James Buchanan exacerbated the sectional strife and then did nothing as the South seceded; Andrew Johnson messed up Reconstruction; Herbert Hoover failed to do anything effective to address the Great Depression.
Whether Trump becomes the fourth member of their company or is placed in a class by himself as the clearly worst US president ever will depend on the consequences of his misrule. His massive corruption, mishandling of the government's functions, and failed war in Iran are all more than enough to rank him as among the worst, but he probably won't be viewed by future historians as in a class by himself unless the consequences of his actions for the nation prove irreversible. The nation was rescued from Buchanan's mistakes by Lincoln, from Hoover's by FDR, and Johnson's failures were *eventually* undone by the Civil Rights Movement; it remains to be seen whether Trump will be succeeded by someone able to save us or not.
He's been nominated by at least two groups of hardcore haters, but wouldn't win the title once all the votes were counted.
Wilson's handling of WWI was quite good and the nation did pretty well overall during his tenure. He was very racist, but so were lots of presidents, and I daresay the recent efforts to cancel him have far more to do with current intellectual fashions than any reasoned assessment of his presidency as a whole. He also has a lot of haters among the isolationist set, but I don't think their criticisms have much merit.
Everything in item #4 is entirely about _passenger_ trains and you should probably flag that to readers. The comparative picture for freight rail in the US is, following decades of innovation and improvement, hugely different from passenger rail. And hugely different from what it was for freight 50 or 60 years ago.
Regarding the science funding paradigm (#1), I would be thrilled by this in any other administration, but as things stand, anything like this being implemented in the current administration would just represent another tool for OMB to savage existing state capacity. Even the metascience work which should be purely informational can easily be twisted by bad faith actors to steer money away from politically disfavored entities.
I agree with Noah, but am more concerned about the weaponization potential. These are really interesting ideas that should be strongly considered by the next competent administration.
Fortunately, we may be seeing a pattern in which Trump comes up with an idea that's bad when Trump is in power but good when a normal President is in power...
Considering the likelihood of the current Administration actually focusing on doing anything, it's probably a lower end risk that there is actual real action as they seem unable or unwilling (or both) to even focus on systematic items that are amongst their obsessions (vs Trumpian blustering and Big Declarations)
The number of jobs available for women in India is a function of the low number of jobs in the economy.
The Indian License Raj and Nehruvian Socialism more generally has historically constrained job creation, and has had the damaging effect of producing capital intensive growth in a country with a large population needing those jobs. This continued to happen even while India's economy has grown spectacularly in the last 3 decades. Only very recently has the political economy allowed slow and then now much faster labour sector reforms at both the national and state level.
As a result India now has a shortage jobs, even as labour-intensive industries like contract electronic manufacturing spring up rapidly. Witness the recent student protests (over indirect access jobs) and high rates of emigration (to get jobs overseas) even in the context of high GDP growth.
In 2026, in a given family, if there is a choice between the husband or the wife working for pay, most will send the husband to work, and keep the wife at home while she looks after children and family. Because this is often the choice that must be made when there is high competition for formal jobs.
We're starting to see glimmers of this changing. For example, most cell phone factories will preferentially hire young women as factory workers, replicating the East and SE Asian model. But there won't be a meaningful increase of women in the workforce until the proximate cause--an absolute shortage of jobs through lack of labour-intensive economic growth--is fixed.
Another point about the science funding proposal (#1): While it is nice to think about directly funding researchers and disintermediating the institutions, there are reasons why grants go to institutions rather than individuals. The amount of paperwork the federal government requires to manage grants is a burden that institutions have dedicated offices for. No individual researcher wants to have to have to learn the inside details of Fastlane or grants.gov or NSPIRES in order to submit a proposal. They don't want to have to construct compliant budget documents, or monitor all the ways they can get flagged for errors.
Now, we could simply propose getting rid of all of those requirements, but then you have none of the verification, accountability, or compliance that Congress and the American public seem to demand. What if a researcher wants to make use of public data produced by a consortium that includes France, India, China, Brazil, and Russia? How do they parse 2 CFR 200 to decide if the use of the data is allowed? And does the researcher publish their results openly? Taxpayers paid for the research so it must be released, but federal rules (for some agencies) say that you can't include co-authors from some designated countries, so what do you do? It is hard enough for institutions with dedicated grants offices to sort through the thicket of federal regulations - even without OMB trying to eviscerate the scientific community via new regulations.
The Transit Costs Project did a whole report on how to fix it, called A Better Billion. I can't vouch for it's correctness in every detail, but in general I trust those guys. Check it out!
the Better Billion PDF is actually a decent read, there are things that are maybe at least plausibly within reach of reform, the whole kit of course is magic wand territory but... some pieces maybe
A lot of people’s intuitions about ‘violent crime’ are IMO miscalibrated because they have the wrong mental model for what kind of violence they are talking about. They don’t typically mean eg domestic violence or bar fights gone wrong. But both of those numbers have declined precipitously, etc. And this generalizes.
You complain about GDPR and cookies, but it is eye-opening when I access the internet in Europe. I would say that it is not that Europeans hate software, but rather that they value privacy and hate surveillance capitalism. And that is a lesson they learned from totalitarian experiences in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Soviet dominated Eastern Europe.
The whole popup thing could be eliminated if companies stopped using the advertising networks or if they agreed on a uniform way of setting a personal cookie policy. Instead we have deliberate bad design intended to annoy users and get them to consent to detailed tracking.
I think a reasonable, measured, sober evaluation of the situation will inevitably conclude that "Accept Cookies" popups are not an effective way of guarding against either fascism or communism.
As a software professional, I genuinely admire Europe’s legacy—after all, European innovation (CERN and the WWW) gave us the very foundation of the modern internet. I also respect Europe's pioneering focus on privacy and security. I undergo GDPR compliance training twice a year myself and take it very seriously in my daily work.
However, I have to be candid: over-regulation has turned into a form of technological suicide. After falling behind during the Web 2.0 era dominated by Google and Meta, Europe is now at risk of falling even further behind in both AI and EVs. It’s genuinely painful to watch. I’m sure you’d agree that the immense compliance burden has effectively choked off local European startups before they even get off the ground?
I guess the real issue here is how does a society cultivate software-intensive industries while maintaining a strong focus on privacy and data security? As a software professional yourself, where do you think the Europeans go wrong in regulating tech, and how could they do tech regulation better?
That is a fantastic question! I'd need an entire essay to do it justice, LOL!
First, let me dispel a common myth: people often blame Europe's language diversity and fragmented market. I 100% disagree. That profoundly underestimates both the technical capability of software engineers and the language fluency of European users.
The real bottleneck is indeed policy attitude. Software innovation inherently requires tolerance, leeway, and gray areas to experiment. Tax cuts alone won't be enough—overly restrictive upfront regulation is industry suicide; it suffocates the baby in the cradle.
I am not saying privacy doesn't matter. Meta's Cambridge Analytica scandal was terrible, no doubt. But look at the mechanism: American enforcement punishes bad behavior after the fact, acting as a warning signal while leaving room for the industry to grow. Europe, by contrast, tried to write a perfect policy upfront to scare off all "greedy bad actors"—and in doing so, ensured nothing gets built at all.
To give an extreme illustration: China is hardly known for regulatory liberalism, right? Yet years ago, Baidu's CEO made a deeply controversial remark: he suggested that Chinese users were more willing to trade privacy for convenience, which could give Chinese AI a speed advantage by feeding models real-world data. Ethically, that’s highly debatable. But politically, it illustrates a mindset: China put industrial dominance first, forcing restrictive policies to yield to industrial goals.
Constraints can always be tightened later. But if the industry itself is killed, and if the space for innovation is choked off from day one, who is a brilliant framework like GDPR ultimately regulating? Only foreign monopolies.
I'm not willing to follow the Chinese into a total surveillance state. Note also that privacy cannot be restored after a breach, so punishing after the fact is not a solution. Digital identity that can be invalidated or that expires regularly might help. Countermeasures against device fingerprinting might help.
Maybe we need a different business model where users pay broad-coverage subscriptions?
Me neither! Definitely not advocating for the Chinese model LOL! I raised that extreme example purely to contrast how Europe's heavy-handed compliance scares off its own software sector. If China and Europe are two extremes, Silicon Valley sits in the middle—and we can certainly debate whether the US should be more cautious or more aggressive.
I must admit, every sentence of yours carries wisdom, even though I don't quite agree with where it lands!
Take the idea of a "pay-as-you-go subscription model." In reality, the "free with ads" model is what brought the web to billions of everyday people over the last 30 years. In the AI era, things might change, who knows? But I'm afraid the trend might lean even harder into "free" to capture users' attention and data instead of money. Sounds terrible, I know, and sorry if it’s the opposite of what you’d hope to see—but that's what I realistically feel could happen.
How privacy focused can they be when they want to scan devices on the client side for illicit material?
Exactly! Isn't that such a wild contradiction?
"We deeply care about privacy, but to protect children from predators or addictive algorithms, we must forcibly scan their phones."
It just goes to show that restrictive, top-down policies always have a double-edged sword—and the logic is rarely as convincing as it sounds on paper.
The focus on “surveillance capitalism” is a European smokescreen to hide the government surveillance and identified phones they want to prevent you from making “antisocial” posts about politicians or against favored groups, or in Germany, so they can charge you with defamation for leaving mediocre reviews of a restaurant on Google Maps
Disagree. Our political representation may indeed hate capitalism, but my god, it loves them some surveillance.
Source: am an European programmer who spent many hours raising awareness about, and fighting Chat Control.
Even many European voters swallow the "protect the children" line and would gladly accept a continent-wide Big Brother.
I'm not sure privacy is the key issue. My sense is that Europe is uncomfortable with how network effects in software lead to "winner take all" dynamics and large powerful companies. And to companies using one strong base to expand into other areas, so for example I find Google products a bit kneecapped when I am in Europe.
They are trying to ensure many players in the system I think, but that is a less appealing setting for the companies.
And Gdpr is not about cookies anyway. Very superficial take. I'm a bit disappointed.
Aren't cookie controls required by GDPR? That is certainly the most visible difference when I travel in Europe.
I realize GDPR covers much more (I particularly love the scheduled deletion of data.)
Re: why Indian women wouldn't go out in public more, uh: Maybe because a woman alone in public faces a significant risk of being assaulted, across large swathes of the country?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cewqyn2p1lno
https://fpa.org/confronting-violence-against-women-in-india/
Is this more true than in Bangladesh?
And is it more true than it was 20 years ago, when Indian women went outside more?
These are fair questions, but even if that aspect of conditions hasn't changed, people's response to it might change. For instance, if the productivity of labor goes up, such that a single income from a man can support a couple, the couple might rationally decide that exposing the woman to the same level of risk is less worthwhile.
And then you just have to layer on cultural stuff that isn't purely rational. (Compare: Risks to children from being alone in public are probably the-same-or-lower in most situations in the US, compared to the 1970s, and yet we have WAY more helicopter parenting, with norms having shifted so far that if you send a ten year old to go bike around the park alone, some crazy person might call the cops on you for neglect.)
It definitely seems like stamping out the idea that a random woman on a bus is fair game for harassment and assault would do a lot to make women more interested in being out in public.
It's why I avoid public transit.
I wonder why this reply is hidden if I go to all replies in the app, but I can see it when I’m just at the end of the article and the replies are showing at the bottom.
Reading Noah's roundups is always an intellectual treat!
I can fully validate point #5 regarding China’s dominance in critical mineral refining. China’s industry leaders and policymakers are acutely aware that their core leverage lies in refining rare-earth tech, scale, and supply chain integration—not raw natural endowment. There is a strong consensus domestically that the West won't be able to reverse this processing advantage within at least a ten-year horizon.
Broadly speaking, China is far more sensitive to and serious about the value of physical manufacturing, supply chain scaling, and the accumulation of that "tacit knowledge" Noah mentioned. The West—especially Europe—often makes the fundamental mistake of treating policy and GDPR-like laws as something that can top-down dictate and bind technology, rather than letting technical realities shape policy. It’s putting the cart way before the horse.
These roundups are great. I always learn something new and interesting.
How can Europe possibly spot the world years of AI development while not having a big software industry of its own and think they would be able to come up with something competitive? They’ll be building data centers to use other people’s AI.
Indeed. But at least they knew when they were getting cookies!
Yeah, good question, isn't it? I feel like the answer to why Europe is in this spot ties directly into what I just mentioned here:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/roundup-85-most-policy-is-also-industrial/comment/303118912
As a French-speaker who has profound respect for French culture, I will add my two cents about the European approach to software. It is merely a further instance of the same kind of wildly poor misgovernance that afflicts the entire EU, the UK, and, to a lesser extent, our blue states, such as California and New York.
Broadly stated, the problems with this approach to governance are: (1) suffocating over-regulation (often written in impenetrable legalese); (2) a Luddite suspicion of new technologies; and (3) economic illiteracy (i.e., an abject inability to understand unintended consequences of public policies).
Some qualifications are in order. There are wonderful pockets of dynamism in many of the places I have mentioned above, esp. California, Massachusetts, and England, but the popular reaction to new technologies in these places is dismaying (e.g., New York's recent ban on data centers). Also, there are some outliers in this sphere: Denmark and Canada come to mind as more practical-minded places. The Luddite tendency is perhaps most pronounced in France, and less so elsewhere.
At least, the Europeans are not further afflicted by maganomics, as we are. By maganomics, I mean the decreased trade, decreased investment, open corruption, and unembarrassed cronyism of the Trump Administration's strange cocktail of policies (e.g., unprovoked trade wars, unprovoked real wars, running up the public debt to unredressable levels, undermining our best universities, scaring away talented foreigners and foreign capital, casting doubt on rule of law, and so on.).
Despite all of the problems with blue-state misgovernance and maganomics, the US economy continues to thrive because it still enjoys the "exorbitant privilege" of holding the world's currency of reserve, there is free trade among the 50 American states, and Americans on the whole remain a very enterprising, talented, dynamic people, who adapt quickly to change.
Lastly, I am an unaffiliated independent who left the Democratic Party in disgust in 2021. It has only gotten much worse since then. Even so, I will "vote blue" in the upcoming midterms only for the sake of imposing checks and balances on this errant Administration, but the sooner we have new, better political formations, the better.
I’m curious why do you consider Canada practical here? I would lump it with California tbh
The shift from institutions back to people is interesting. American universities have grown tremendously fat in the last decades, and most of that fat is bloated administration. If scientists can take their grants elsewhere, they will be in a better bargaining position against this class of bureaucrats.
Getting grants is complicated and a huge PITA, I speak from experience as someone who has worked in university research administration. It is far easier for an individual scientist to get grants if they have the assistance of a university research administration team, and also far easier for them to actually carry that research out if they have access to university facilities.
What is a lone scientist supposed to do? Slog through all the paperwork themselves and build their own labs from scratch? It'd take decades to do a project that would have taken six months with institutional support. Scientists work in large institutions for good reason. At most, this proposal might shift some research funds away from universities to other kinds of research institutions, but you can be sure nothing will actually go to individual scientists who are not affiliated with an institution. It's an idea that is simply not aligned with the reality of research.
First, this sounds like "one bureaucracy providing work for another".
Second, even if the grant processing stays as PITA as it is now, you can have specialized firms doing this instead. There is no iron law that it should be done by a university.
In the EU, if you want to get some European money for a (general) project, there will be dozens of specialized small institutions that will do the paperwork for you and compete with each other.
The debt profligacy is worse than you describe and the other observers. Pradhan and Goodhart in their most recent book outline the many policy challenges from an aging population, ,demographic changes and the fact we will have more stubborn inflation as immigration tails off, along with the fact that China will unlikely deflate the world this time around. Perhaps AI will save us but it seems warranted to be skeptical. And central banks may face immense challenges they are not equipped to handle given the political constraints. Maybe a crisis will be needed to get all hands on deck.
Speaking of debt, China is also wrestling with two monumental, interconnected debt traps built up over the last two decades: massive private sector real estate debt and excessive local government off-balance-sheet debt (LGFVs).
The process of deleveraging and digesting these liabilities will likely drag down China's growth engine well past 2030. What makes it particularly precarious is the timing—by the time the worst of this debt overhang is cleared, the full-blown impact of China's rapid demographic aging will hit with full force. It’s a double whammy: a prolonged balance sheet recession followed immediately by a shrinking workforce.
There's a bunch of people trying to tax high incomes and wealth more, but that is only really popular among the 99%, not the decision-makers.
The damage Trump and his administration of Luddites have done to science, debt, and deficit will make him one of the worst Presidents in recent history.
This is what happens when you vote for a guy who loves debt. In his warped mind, the US government has control over our debt because debtors need us to make our interest payments.
This is how Trump got banks to give him another loan for his Atlantic City Casino; he presented them with an option. He could operate the casino or declare bankruptcy. The banks gave him the loan, and he ended up going bankrupt anyway.
Trump mistakenly thinks the US government could declare bankruptcy or change the interest rate, or refinance because he who owes the most is in charge.
As for rare earths, they are critical for so many modern things. Rare Earths are the reason Trump found out he had no cards when China stopped selling them to us, and Trump pulled back his Chinese tariffs.
China is in charge, period. The US is attempting to build them overseas due to NEPA; the objection to such dirty production would tie the US up in court for a decade. Noah, you are correct; the public has no idea that China stopping to sell us Rare Earths would harm the US.
That said, the dislike of Data Centers is so visceral that there are those who would relish rare earths being the reason we stopped building them. They wouldn’t care at all that you need like 50lbs of them to build an F-35.
Recent history? He is by all measures the worst President in all history. Like he always says “like nobody’s ever seen before.”
Most historians agree that James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Herbert Hoover were the three worst US presidents (at least among those whose presidencies were long enough ago to be objectively assessed without the emotions of the moment clouding the analysis, and also long enough ago that we *know how the story ended*). James Buchanan exacerbated the sectional strife and then did nothing as the South seceded; Andrew Johnson messed up Reconstruction; Herbert Hoover failed to do anything effective to address the Great Depression.
Whether Trump becomes the fourth member of their company or is placed in a class by himself as the clearly worst US president ever will depend on the consequences of his misrule. His massive corruption, mishandling of the government's functions, and failed war in Iran are all more than enough to rank him as among the worst, but he probably won't be viewed by future historians as in a class by himself unless the consequences of his actions for the nation prove irreversible. The nation was rescued from Buchanan's mistakes by Lincoln, from Hoover's by FDR, and Johnson's failures were *eventually* undone by the Civil Rights Movement; it remains to be seen whether Trump will be succeeded by someone able to save us or not.
There are a lot of nominations for Wilson
He's been nominated by at least two groups of hardcore haters, but wouldn't win the title once all the votes were counted.
Wilson's handling of WWI was quite good and the nation did pretty well overall during his tenure. He was very racist, but so were lots of presidents, and I daresay the recent efforts to cancel him have far more to do with current intellectual fashions than any reasoned assessment of his presidency as a whole. He also has a lot of haters among the isolationist set, but I don't think their criticisms have much merit.
Everything in item #4 is entirely about _passenger_ trains and you should probably flag that to readers. The comparative picture for freight rail in the US is, following decades of innovation and improvement, hugely different from passenger rail. And hugely different from what it was for freight 50 or 60 years ago.
Regarding the science funding paradigm (#1), I would be thrilled by this in any other administration, but as things stand, anything like this being implemented in the current administration would just represent another tool for OMB to savage existing state capacity. Even the metascience work which should be purely informational can easily be twisted by bad faith actors to steer money away from politically disfavored entities.
I agree with Noah, but am more concerned about the weaponization potential. These are really interesting ideas that should be strongly considered by the next competent administration.
Fortunately, we may be seeing a pattern in which Trump comes up with an idea that's bad when Trump is in power but good when a normal President is in power...
Considering the likelihood of the current Administration actually focusing on doing anything, it's probably a lower end risk that there is actual real action as they seem unable or unwilling (or both) to even focus on systematic items that are amongst their obsessions (vs Trumpian blustering and Big Declarations)
Hallo yourself!
Noah, I’m digging your slightly grizzled look on the Prof G podcast. You wear it well.
My beard is just growing faster and faster as I age...
The number of jobs available for women in India is a function of the low number of jobs in the economy.
The Indian License Raj and Nehruvian Socialism more generally has historically constrained job creation, and has had the damaging effect of producing capital intensive growth in a country with a large population needing those jobs. This continued to happen even while India's economy has grown spectacularly in the last 3 decades. Only very recently has the political economy allowed slow and then now much faster labour sector reforms at both the national and state level.
As a result India now has a shortage jobs, even as labour-intensive industries like contract electronic manufacturing spring up rapidly. Witness the recent student protests (over indirect access jobs) and high rates of emigration (to get jobs overseas) even in the context of high GDP growth.
In 2026, in a given family, if there is a choice between the husband or the wife working for pay, most will send the husband to work, and keep the wife at home while she looks after children and family. Because this is often the choice that must be made when there is high competition for formal jobs.
We're starting to see glimmers of this changing. For example, most cell phone factories will preferentially hire young women as factory workers, replicating the East and SE Asian model. But there won't be a meaningful increase of women in the workforce until the proximate cause--an absolute shortage of jobs through lack of labour-intensive economic growth--is fixed.
Another point about the science funding proposal (#1): While it is nice to think about directly funding researchers and disintermediating the institutions, there are reasons why grants go to institutions rather than individuals. The amount of paperwork the federal government requires to manage grants is a burden that institutions have dedicated offices for. No individual researcher wants to have to have to learn the inside details of Fastlane or grants.gov or NSPIRES in order to submit a proposal. They don't want to have to construct compliant budget documents, or monitor all the ways they can get flagged for errors.
Now, we could simply propose getting rid of all of those requirements, but then you have none of the verification, accountability, or compliance that Congress and the American public seem to demand. What if a researcher wants to make use of public data produced by a consortium that includes France, India, China, Brazil, and Russia? How do they parse 2 CFR 200 to decide if the use of the data is allowed? And does the researcher publish their results openly? Taxpayers paid for the research so it must be released, but federal rules (for some agencies) say that you can't include co-authors from some designated countries, so what do you do? It is hard enough for institutions with dedicated grants offices to sort through the thicket of federal regulations - even without OMB trying to eviscerate the scientific community via new regulations.
I think a lot of people are betting that this paperwork burden will be radically simplified by AI.
"in NYC, the problem really is just fixing the system." If you have a magic wand lying around that can do this please bring it by.
The Transit Costs Project did a whole report on how to fix it, called A Better Billion. I can't vouch for it's correctness in every detail, but in general I trust those guys. Check it out!
https://transitcosts.com/A_Better_Billion.pdf
the Better Billion PDF is actually a decent read, there are things that are maybe at least plausibly within reach of reform, the whole kit of course is magic wand territory but... some pieces maybe
Would you settle for a nuclear bomb? Just level the whole city and start over. 😂
(I shouldn't have to say that I'm kidding, but this is the Internet, so better safe than sorry.)
A lot of people’s intuitions about ‘violent crime’ are IMO miscalibrated because they have the wrong mental model for what kind of violence they are talking about. They don’t typically mean eg domestic violence or bar fights gone wrong. But both of those numbers have declined precipitously, etc. And this generalizes.