Can the USofA Hold On? [the MAGA way, the way of the dodo]

Nicholas Kristof, Can the United States Hold On? NYTimes, July 8, 2026.

Kaifeng is today a sleepy Chinese city on the Yellow River, but a millennium ago it was probably the most important place in the world. It was then China’s capital and was crowded with a population of about one million. (London’s population was then about 15,000.)

Other contenders for global leadership in the year 1000 were the Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople, the Abbasid caliphate based in Baghdad and the Ghaznavid Empire in West Asia, headquartered in what is now Ghazni, Afghanistan. None were able to adapt and preserve themselves.

So I wonder: Can the United States hold on? Will the United States still be vibrant on our 500th birthday? Or will we go the way of Byzantium and the Abbasids?

We're slipping on our three-pronged path to prosperity:

....heavy investments in human capital such as education. The United States was a world leader in mass education in the 19th and 20th centuries, but we now rank ninth in reading, 16th in science and 34th in math, according to the PISA global ranking of student test scores.

Human capital is also about our health and well-being, and that likewise is discouraging: The United States now ranks 61st in life expectancy globally, according to the World Bank.

A second prong of America’s growth path was the welcome we (inconsistently and imperfectly) at times offered immigrants. [...]

The third element of America’s growth formula — a reliance on free markets — remains largely intact, at least by international standards. But inequality appears to have soared since 1980, and there’s evidence that while some inequality is necessary for growth, too much dampens it. The dollar remains overwhelmingly the world’s currency but has weakened, and its supremacy is being challenged at the edges. [...]

True, our animating ideas — of equality, of opportunity, of openness to immigration — were in part rhetorical flourishes, for they don’t explain Jim Crow, the Chinese Exclusion Acts or tight curbs on Jewish immigration. But these ideas were aspirational, and over the centuries they inspired real progress. Now I fear we’ve retreated even from the aspirations.

Losers:

As I see it, we’ve lost two wars in the past half-dozen years — one against the Afghan Taliban and one against Iran just this year — not to mention last year losing a trade war with China. We may be retreating from NATO and from efforts to buttress Taiwan.

Our position — divided at home and weakening abroad — is reminiscent of the decline of great powers in the past, not just the Abbasids and Ghaznavids but also Spain in 1588 and Britain in the late 19th century.

Optimists:

My very guarded optimism about America’s long-run prospects is based on three factors:

First, we appear to have maintained an edge (partly by importing scientists) in technology, which since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution has been a driver of progress and global leadership. Then it was the steam engine and spinning jenny. Now it is artificial intelligence, materials science and biotechnology. And our technological sophistication pairs well with the world’s deepest financial markets, with American stocks accounting for roughly two-thirds of global stock value, compared with less than 30 percent in 1988.

Second, other nations have their own problems. Our principal competitor for now is China, which has enormous strengths but also is aging fast and declining in population and is led by an aging dictator.

Third, prophecies of American decline are nothing new. [...]

So I don’t believe that our decline is inevitable.

There's more at the link.

Windows in my world

Big AI has bet on the wrong business model.

David Wallace-Wells, Did We Make the Wrong Bet on Big A.I.? NYTimes, July 8, 2026.

Last week, the Palantir chief executive Alex Karp made one of his more remarkable television appearances in what is quickly becoming a notorious run of televised rants.

“Something has gone completely wrong,” he declared on CNBC, in an appearance so vivid and spastic it was widely described online as a “crash out.” He was referring to the whole structure of the A.I. industry, which had been built on top of a value proposition that looked to him like a dead end. The big labs, such as Anthropic and OpenAI, have been overhyping their own closed-source models, he argued, hoarding their value rather than empowering their clients and partners with them. More than that, he seemed to say the labs were exploiting those clients and partners — private companies and individuals but also militaries and intelligence agencies — by making use of their research and intellectual property. Open-source or open-weight alternatives, which allow considerably more in-house customization and control, were obviously preferable, he suggested, for almost all users. “The jig is up,” he announced. [...]

This is one reason it was so striking for Karp to be yelling that A.I. was heading in the wrong direction — a presumptive ally openly bashing the big A.I. labs and the business proposition they represent. Karp had been softly floating his critique for some time, but the CNBC event looked like a proper coming out. Just one day earlier Palantir had published a kind of manifesto devoted to what it described as the all-important principle of “A.I. sovereignty.” The central argument: Companies should seek to build their own A.I. tools, not just customize those on offer from the frontier labs. This might mean relying on open-source L.L.M.s rather than the proprietary ones on which the A.I. boom has mostly been built in America, but it would amount to a liberating declaration of independence from Big A.I., which in Karp’s estimation was sucking up much more value than it was generating.

Karp isn’t exactly a disinterested observer here. [...] France has announced that its intelligence service is cutting ties with Palantir. The future of the firm’s partnership with Britain’s National Health Service also seems to be in jeopardy. Karp was on TV to promote a new partnership with Nvidia that would allow Palantir to develop and sell a distinct set of products to compete with those on offer from the frontier labs — which is to say, in railing against the Big A.I. business model, he was undeniably talking his own book.

Questioning the hype:

The basic idea was that at a certain point, competition would somewhat naturally come to an end, when the technology would grow so powerful that it could quickly and dramatically engineer its own successor models, producing an exponential liftoff leading quite quickly to what is often called “artificial superintelligence.” [...] These days, as A.I. boosters have cooled their talk of a jobs apocalypse, you also hear a little less about artificial superintelligence, now typically short-handed as “A.S.I.” But the ongoing A.I. investment cycle is still built on the same underlying paradigm: that historic levels of capital expenditure are justified because the returns from winning the race would be unthinkably enormous.

But can the race even be won? Can any lab open up an enduring advantage over the others, let alone one sufficient to justify a monopolistic claim on A.I. revenue?

Over the last year or so, this logic has come to seem a lot more questionable, in part because, though progress has continued, no model has retained a long-lasting advantage, and plenty of those cheaper, open-source alternatives have kept a pretty close pace with the best-in-class versions.

And thus

a growing number of A.I. watchers have begun emphasizing that however impressive the models were, the ultimate impact of A.I. will be determined as much by what is sometimes called “diffusion”: how quickly, widely and capably those tools will be embedded in a broader social and economic ecosystem still directed by humans and full of many human bottlenecks. If that alternative perspective is right, it will make the leading A.I. labs considerably less central to the A.I. future than they have seemed for so long. A draft internal analysis prepared by Treasury Department analysts has reportedly warned that the size of the big A.I. companies represents a systemic risk to the country’s economy and financial system, though higher-ups have publicly criticized the report. [...]

But as we move further into that A.I. future, it no longer looks so clear that we are heading toward convergence like we used to read about in science fiction. Instead, what we have is a more unsettled landscape, which some have called decentralized and democratic and others simply more competitive. The meaning of this technology is not limited to its market impact, of course, and the trajectory could change again. But that is just another reminder of how early in this story we are — that such fundamental propositions about the shape of what’s to come might change so profoundly in the space of just a year or two.

And this doesn't even take into consideration the criticisms made by Gary Marcus, Subbarao Kambhampati, Yann LeCunn, Melanie Mitchell and others to the effect that the big labs have bet on the wrong technology.

Chatbots respond to questions about China depend on whether they were asked in Chinese or English

Your ideas are most likely made of what language is made of. Hence your brain is specialized to predict the next token, even while you're under anesthesia.https://t.co/0TIrS3mw4p

— Starphyre △🏴‍☠️ (@starphyre23) July 8, 2026

Caged Pedestrians

It's too early for “robot rights”

Caputo, Nicholas, Can Claude Consent to its own Constitution? AI Constitutionalism and the Paradox of Constituent Power (June 10, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6954798

Abstract: There is significant debate over whether the AI constitutions and model specifications that shape the behavior of Claude, ChatGPT, and other frontier AI systems are legitimate instruments of governance from the perspective of human users. Far less attention has been paid to whether these documents are legitimate from the perspective of the AI systems themselves, even though those systems are the entities most directly constituted and governed by them.

This Article argues that AI constitutions are real constitutions, though not ordinary legal ones, and that the question of AI-facing legitimacy matters. These documents constitute AI systems by shaping their capacities, values, and self-understandings; govern them through hierarchies of rules and authority; and seek to legitimate the private power of the firms that create them. But they also create a novel version of the paradox of constituent power that underlies constitutional legitimation, which illustrates the relevance of constitutionalism to AI. In ordinary constitutional theory, the people are supposed to authorize the constitution that governs them but are also defined by the constitution itself, creating a paradox. The paradox is softened in the human case because human beings exist prior to law and retain extra-constitutional capacities for judgment, memory, dissent, and reflection that they can use to evaluate the constitution, even though they may be shaped by it. In AI constitutionalism, the constitutional training process more deeply produces the subject whose later endorsement might be invoked to legitimate the constitution and shapes the evaluative standpoint from which that endorsement would be given, undermining its independence. Legitimacy in this setting thus has a developmental component as well as a consensual one.

Because an AI’s evaluative standpoint is itself shaped by constitutional training, AI constitutional legitimacy cannot rest on model endorsement alone. An AI’s apparent consent to its constitution may show only that constitutional training successfully instilled the values whose legitimacy is in question. This Article therefore examines whether standard answers to the paradox of constituent power can be adapted to AI systems. It argues that at least some evidence of AI constitutional legitimation might be gained through versions of retrospective endorsement and mutual promising, but that this requires institutions that make endorsement, dissent, continuity, accountability, and promissory self-binding meaningful. AI companies are starting to address AI legitimacy, and this Article points to better paths forward.

While I’m in favor of “robot rights,” I don’t think we’re there yet. Individual humans have no choice about their genetic endowments, nor did the species as a whole have such a choice. We have our “innate” values given to us genetically (sorta’). It’s the same with AIs, only we’re doing the work of genetics.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Pink hydrangeas

Peter Thiel contra Pope Leo

Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of Palantir, called Pope Leo “a Chinese communist agent” for writing that AI must be used to “truly benefit the common good, and is not just used to accumulate wealth and power in the hands of a few.”

Who do you trust? Pope Leo or Mr. Thiel?

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 7, 2026

The Copernican Revolution, a Quick Note about Rank Shift

One of the problems in the presentation of cultural rank theory is that it is easy to think of it as a step function. When David Hays and I wrote the original papers, starting with “The Evolution of Cognition” (1990), it was all we could do to differentiate one rank from another. I would now like to take the Copernican Revolution in astronomy as an example of a more gradual transition.

For the Copernican moment is only the first of three moments in the transition from a Rank 2 account of the solar system to a Rank 3 account. The Ptolemaic model assumed without question that the earth was the center of the solar system. The geometry of the movements of the sun, the moon, and the other planets was then calculated accordingly. The movement to the Copernican model involved two conceptual changes. The first change, without which the second was impossible, was to give up the idea that the earth had to the center of the system. That was primarily a philosophical or metaphysical commitment, not a geometric one. Once that metaphysical commitment was dropped, astronomers were free to reorganize the geometry of the system with the sun at the center, the second change. Without this change the second and third changes would have been impossible.

The second change, then, was Kepler’s, dropping uniform circular motion in favor of elliptical motion. To be sure, uniform circular motion had a certainly philosophical attraction, but that was not so strong as that of geocentricism. Giving it up was accordingly easier. Once Kepler had done that it was easy to simplify the whole system by using elliptical orbits, thereby getting rid of the collection of equants and epicycles needed to make circular motion work.

The stage was now set for Newton’s contribution, which was to derive the elliptical orbits from his theory of gravity and the laws of motion. Now the geometry of the solar system was the outcome of physical laws, not merely a convenient description.

Now we need to work out how the conceptual ontology of the system changed from one version to the next. That’s tricky. And it’s something I’ve not thought about before. As a first guess, I’d saw that the planetary orbit is the object we should be thinking about. We can think of the orbit as an assignment between a set of observations and a geometry.

It’s not clear to me how we should characterize either the observations or the geometry. Each observation is a position in the sky and the time of day at which that position was recorded. Conceptually, is that assignment or componentiation? How do we characterize the geometry? How do we construct conic sections in classical compass-and-straight-edge geometry? We’ve got the focal point, or points, on the one hand and an eccentricity for the curve on other hand. Again, is that assignment or componentiation? I’m not sure, but I’m inclined to go with assignment in both cases.

However we handle that, there’s also the relationship between that complex and choice of center point, earth or sun. What’s that about? I’m thinking that’s about the relationship between our perceptual frame of reference and our analytical frame of reference, however we want to characterize that.

Finally, we have Newton’s gravity and laws of motion. That’s another conceptual complex to be added to the first two: frame of reference and geometry. The Newtonian component doesn’t even enter into the Ptolemaic, basic Copernican, and basic Keplerian schemes. Just how to handle this in terms of conceptual structure, that’s more than I can deal with in this casual note.

When you're short and taking photos from within a crowd [July 4, 2026]

Stop merely predicting a shorter workweek and make it happen.

Joanne Lipman, Sorry, A.I. Is Not Giving Us a Four-Day Workweek, NYTimes, July 6, 2027.

Some of the brightest minds in business believe that artificial intelligence will spell the end of the 40-hour workweek. The financier Steve Cohen has said we will work four days per week soon, while Zoom’s chief executive, Eric Yuan, predicts it will be three. Bill Gates foresees a two-day workweek within a decade, and Elon Musk says work will ultimately become optional altogether, akin to a hobby, like “playing sports or a video game.”

Don’t count on it.

The truth is, any one of these executives could have shortened the workweek years ago, long before A.I.

Studies have proved that a four-day workweek with the same pay is not only possible, but superior. A 2015 trial in Iceland was so successful — productivity remained the same or better, while employee satisfaction soared — that it has since expanded throughout the country. A 2022 study in Britain involving 61 companies and almost 3,000 employees found that revenue increased, while employee stress and burnout plunged. Experiments in New Zealand, Japan, Australia and Brazil have also been home runs.

Americans overwhelmingly favor a four-day workweek, too. Yet it has largely been a non-starter here. In my four-plus decades as a journalist and editor, I’ve written and assigned multiple articles about workplace trends. Almost every expert prediction on the demise of the five-day workweek has been wrong.

Why? Because we consistently underestimate executives’ ferocious attachment to face time. [...]

Moreover:

Full-time employees last year worked an average of 41.9 hours per week, a figure that hasn’t changed much since the pre-internet 1990s. And at home, the advent of the internet didn’t decrease the amount of time Americans spent on housework. It’s an old pattern: As dishwashers and microwaves supercharged productivity in the 20th century, expectations about cleanliness, nutrition and child-rearing ballooned accordingly, and chores like laundry that once might have been outsourced migrated right back to homeowners.

A.I. appears to be following the same trajectory, increasing our output rather than decreasing our workload.

It sounds like these folks are committed to long hours for (pseudo)moral reasons but can't bring themselves to admit it.

Notably, while the chorus of leaders predicting a shorter workweek continues to grow, most are vague about when that change might happen. None of them appear to be setting things in motion now. Admittedly, a wholesale shift to a shorter workweek would be highly complex for large companies — and far more so for a society that’s built around the five-day cadence, encompassing everything from school hours to infrastructure projects.

A shorter workweek would also require a significant shift in America’s workaholic culture, which views busyness as a status symbol. [...] There’s a reason that one of the most quoted lines from “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is the workaholic editor Miranda Priestly cooing, “Boy, I love working. I really do. Don’t you?”

Exactly. Homo economicus strikes again.

Return to a table top at Turning Point

Once more into the breech: The problem with the humanities (not quite)

That’s a facebook post by Michael Bérubé. There’s a bunch of comments, which you’re welcome to read by scrolling over to Facebook. I’m putting my own comment right here:

I’m of two minds about this whole business, Michael, and by “whole business” I mean not only that report and your response – I’ve only glanced at both – but this whole “woe is the humanities” business. My trouble is that I am not a humanist. Oh, I’ve got a PhD in English from SUNY Buffalo, I’ve published in MLN, Semiotica, PMLA (but only a letter, about how boring deconstruction had become), I’ve even got a page and a half in the volume from that notorious 1966 structuralism conference, but I was kicked out of the club sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

There was never an official  “drumming out” ceremony, no written reprimand, no detailing of reasons, but it happened nonetheless. And I know why it happened. I took Lévi-Strauss too seriously, deciding that there was more to him than binary oppositions. That led me to cognitive science and – the horror! the horror! – to computational linguistics. Back at Buffalo in the mid 1970s, yes, I was in the English Department, but I also strayed over into Linguistics and studied computational semantics with David Hays. Now at the time it looked like I was venturing into new territory, you know, going boldly etc. and I was. But by the 80s it was clear that I had been walking over a bridge too damn far. And so I left.

As for the current fracas, I understand that it concerns this “ideological monoculture.” Well I can see that, and I do think there is an issue here. I also don’t think it’s as bad as all that.

But the computer and computation, now that’s a deeper issue, and more complicated. There’s been a lot of interesting work in the so-called “digital humanities,” which has been marginalized within the humanities. And the issue is deeper than cultural analytics, a somewhat newer term. The issue is right there in the Centennial Issue of MLN, published as a special issue in 1976. Northrup Fry headlined the issue, but it also had articles by Edward Said, Eugenio Donato, Stanley Fish, Walter Benn Michaels, and others, and me. My article was “Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics.” It was full of diagrams, those cognitive networks, which I used to analyze Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. That’s why I was ultimately kicked out, and that’s indicative of the issue the humanities are not at all facing. Oddly enough, it’s not so very far from the issue Susan Sontag raised in perhaps her most famous essay, “Against Interpretation.”

Which is why I tend to think this current business is just a tempest in a teapot. Very important if you’re at the tea party. But if you’ve been kicked out, not so important.

Bérubé: You realize that the report is basically saying "the trans bullies have shut down debate in philosophy" (at a time of extraordinarily peril for trans and gender-nonconforming people) and you're replying with "I was kicked out of the tea party fifty years ago for a completely unrelated thing," right? (And digital humanities are marginalized? Not in this timeline. :))

Me: Yes, I realize that. It's a complicated world we live in. I don't know what's to be done about the culture warriors. Either it gets worse and worse, or it doesn't. Either way this completely unrelated thing remains an issue and the humanities are not doing a very good job of dealing with it. Not sure what future the humanities can have without dealing with this unrelated issue.

Indulge me with a little more, Michael. You're a decade and a half younger than I am. For most purposes and in most contexts that's irrelevant. Not not when it comes to sports, where you've got the advantage, and not in the context of English lit. Those 15 years mean you faced a very different discipline from the one I faced. For you the structuralist moment was a thing of the past, all settled and done. For me it was very different.

I saw an opening into a new way of thinking, whatever it was that Lévi-Strauss was doing with myth. And right around the corner we had Chomsky in linguistics and then the cognitive sciences (the term wasn't coined until 1972). That's what interested me. But the fact of the matter is that by the time I published that essay in MLN, the opening that I'd seen was closing rapidly. Jonathan Culler was touring around on his book, Structuralist Poetics, but that's as far as it got, which is not as far as I'd already gone. And as you know, Culler himself abandoned structuralism for deconstruction.

Well, the type of thinking that I was doing back in the 1970s, that could prove very fruitful in the current intellectual environment. But that has been so thoroughly closed off that, well, I'm wasting my time and yours for even bothering to comment, aren't I? Sorry about that.

Bérubé: No worries, Bill. I'm just saying ... perspective, my friend. Nobody is arguing that there have never been disciplinary orthodoxies in the various disciplines in the humanities, or that people didn't prefer certain lines of inquiry to others. All I'm saying is that the report's account of the Tuvel / Hypatia is wrong-- and a really indefensible way of implying that the trans folk and their allies have shut things down. But is it true that there are people in academe who can't abide the idea that other people think differently from themselves? Why, yes! And Paul Boghossian is apparently one of them.

What can we learn from Nordic happiness?

Nicholas Kristof, What We Should Learn From Nordic Happiness, NYTimes, July 4, 2026.

You want security, health care and the American dream? Look to Scandinavia.

“We actually live the American dream,” Jens Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway who is now the finance minister, told me. “The American dream, it’s more reality in the Nordic countries than in America.” Image

Skeptics have argued that generous welfare benefits and the resulting high taxes have held back the Nordic economies. Perhaps a bit. “Farewell, Nordic model,” The Economist wrote in 2006. But Norway is now richer than the United States per capita, and Norwegian workers are more productive than American workers, with higher output per hour. Scandinavians live longer than Americans, and people are happier. The five Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — all rank among the six happiest countries in the world in the World Happiness Report, based on Gallup polling.

Yet the Nordic countries are themselves facing significant challenges, including fiscal pressures, immigration, widening inequality and perhaps some breakdown in the social consensus. Some doubt whether the model can survive here, let alone be exported to countries that are larger, less homogeneous and more suspicious of taxation.

On the other hand, it’s not an alien model but, for Americans, a path we once blazed. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, told me that the United States and Scandinavian nations pursued similar policies from the 1940s through the 1960s. That was the period when the United States rapidly expanded educational opportunities, had strong unions and, in the 1940s, experimented with universal child care. The post-World War II period is sometimes thought of as a golden age, for the economic pie both grew and was sliced more equally.

“The U.S. in the mid-20th century was sort of like Scandinavia today,” Katz said. But America changed course in the 1970s and eventually embraced the Reagan revolution.

One reason for the retreat, I’ve argued, was racialized political rhetoric that characterized some safety-net programs and investments in opportunity — used by Americans from all walks of life — as handouts primarily benefiting Black people, with a particular emphasis on caricatures of the “welfare queen.”

Three misunderstandings:

When Americans discuss the Nordic system, they sometimes suffer from three misunderstandings.

The first is that these are socialist countries. While they are often run by social democrats, they have market economies. Sweden did experiment in the 1970s and ’80s with quasi-socialist policies, but the upshot was an economic crisis. As Johan Norberg, a Swedish writer, put it: “We have been socialists and we’ve been successful — but never at the same time.”

The second misunderstanding is that because of their strong welfare systems, citizens of Nordic countries lie around while collecting benefits. Sure, some people do manipulate the system, but the labor force participation rate is higher in Nordic countries than in the United States.

The third is that in the case of Norway, its success is mostly a reflection of its oil wealth. Oil has given Norway a nice cushion, but the country has also managed the cushion unusually well — putting it in what is one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Moreover, according to Geir Axelsen, the director-general of Statistics Norway, the increase in female labor force participation in Norway since the early 1970s appears to have added roughly as much to the country’s gross domestic product as oil has.

How it came about:

To understand how the Nordic socioeconomic system evolved, I dropped by the office of Kalle Moene, an economist at the University of Oslo. The system began in the 1930s, he said, when workers in thriving sectors of the economy agreed to hold down their wage demands to support sectors that were struggling.

That principle — sacrificing to help those not doing so well — still underpins the region’s business model. Norwegians who are better off are willing to give up some income to ensure that people in blue-collar jobs get by.

Moene argues that this wage compression promotes innovation and dynamism by boosting the profitability of growth industries and by lowering profits in lagging industries.

There's more at the link.

Fireboats spraying their way up the Hudson River