This may be the most important story you’ll read all month. Konrad Putzier and Rachel Louise Ensign report in The Wall Street Journal (gift link) that we are losing our economic dynamism. Americans have stopped moving to different parts of the country, and they are less likely to leave their jobs to try something new.
In addition, the combination of record-low interest rates a few years ago and much higher rates now means that too many people feel like they’re locked into their home. Putzier and Ensign write:
This immobility has economic consequences for everyone. The frozen housing market means growing families can’t upgrade, empty-nesters can’t downsize and first-time buyers are all but locked out. When people can’t move for a job offer, or to a city with better job opportunities, they often earn less. When companies can’t hire people who currently live in, say, a different state, corporate productivity and profits can suffer.
This phenomenon has been building for years, although it’s gotten worse since COVID. Some of the more traditional liberal policies that Joe Biden was pursuing might have helped reverse these trends, but now Donald Trump is creating economic uncertainty with massive tax cuts for the rich and his chaotic tariff policy.
I’m one to talk. I have always lived in the Boston area, and I wouldn’t live anywhere else; my wife and I have lived in one apartment and three homes in just two communities. Over the past 45 years I’ve worked at exactly three jobs, not counting a few short-time stints when I was unemployed during the 1990 recession.
But that was a conscious choice. In the Journal article, you’ll see that a number of people interviewed would like find a better job and a different place to live, but they’re stymied by factors beyond their control.
Our country is not just spinning out of control — it’s also spinning down. We need government policies that will help restore the dynamism that defined us until recently.
An ‘abundance’ of punditry
Do we need another publication aimed at helping to define a new form of liberalism? Whether we do or not, we’re getting one. It’s called The Argument, and it sounds like it might be interesting.
Max Tani of Semafor reports that Jerusalem Demsas left The Atlantic recently to start the project, which sounds like it will be largely rooted in the “abundance” agenda promoted by writers like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their book of that name. The idea is that the left has stymied innovation and growth by creating a bureaucratic and legal framework aimed more at stopping things rather than building, whether it be public transportation or housing.
Indeed, Thompson will be one of the contributors to The Argument, which is published at Substack.
Based on Demsas’ introductory video and message, it sounds like The Argument will mainly appeal to the center left in an attempt to try to craft a vision that reaches beyond not just the MAGA pestilence that has infected the body politic but also the excesses of the progressive left, which she doesn’t exactly define. That’s going to be hard given the ease with which the right caricatured Kamala Harris as a left-wing menace while she was actually espousing moderately liberal policies. Demsas writes:
We will convene not just self-described political liberals, but socialists, moderates, libertarians and center-right conservatives. I won’t agree with everyone we publish, and I doubt they all agree with everything I have said, but we will only publish people who seek truth from facts and who are excited to engage directly with their opponent’s ideas.
I can think of a whole host of reasons why The Argument might fail, or modestly succeed while fading into obscurity and irrelevance. But let’s hope that it will have a wider impact than that. Democrats have a difficult needle to thread if they are going to return to power in 2026 and ’28. A new source of ideas with broad, popular appeal would be a welcome development.
AI’s power grab
We are nearing the end, blessedly, of what’s been a brutally hot summer. I don’t know what we’d do without air conditioning, or, frankly, how we got by without it when I was growing up — and yes, heat waves were shorter and nights were cooler back in the 1960s and ’70s.
But air conditioning is powered by electricity, and we are using it at a reckless rate as the AI surge continues apace. You can’t avoid it. It’s not just a matter of consciously using it with programs like ChatGPT and Claude; now you can’t even search Google without getting an AI-generated answer at the top of your screen. I recently tested the latest version of ChatGPT by asking it to draw a photorealistic version of Bob Dylan drumming. You can see the result; but how many kilowatts did I use?
The economist Paul Krugman’s latest newsletter post is about AI and electricity, noting that AI data centers were already consuming 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023, and that it may rise to 12% by 2028. We need vastly more electricity-generating capacity, and yet Krugman observes that Trump has “a deep, irrational hatred for renewable energy.” He adds that many tasks being performed by brute-force AI could be turned over instead to lighter, less-energy-intensive versions; still, he observes:
It’s obvious that any attempt to make AI more energy-efficient would lead to howls from tech bros who believe that they embody humanity’s future — and these bros have bought themselves a lot of political power.
So I don’t know how this will play out. I do know that your future electricity bills depend on the answer.
Among other things, news organizations are embracing AI both for better and for worse. My own view is that there’s a lot more to dislike about AI than to like. But it’s here to stay, and we might as well try to use it in ways that are ethical and responsible. Unfortunately, we appear to be rushing headlong in the wrong direction.
