The populist backlash against A.I. is accelerating

David Wallace-Wells, A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready. NYTimes, May 8, 2026.

Americans still worry about the local impacts of data centers, storming to town halls en masse to protest them. They still worry about job loss and economic turmoil too, as do a growing number of politicians with their fingers lifted to the wind. But to many, the biggest A.I. labs now loom like the new faces of American oligarchy, as well — a fearsome concentration of economic and social power producing a self-compounding pattern of extreme inequality of the kind that has lacerated American life for decades. If the future lies with A.I., as we are so often told, it is unsettling to many and outrageous to some that so few people seem to stand in such absolute control of it.

In one sense, the vision peddled by A.I. companies is remarkably depersonalized: We hand more and more responsibility and judgment off to superintelligent black boxes, which rapidly begin shaping the course of the human future with decisions that remain illegible to the rest of us, including their designers. “People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own A.I. creations work,” Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wrote last year. “They are right to be concerned: This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology.”

In another sense, and in the meantime, A.I. represents perhaps the most personalized sales pitch ever foisted on the passive American consumer — a vision of a near-total takeover of the country’s economic, social and cognitive lives by tools engineered by just five companies, run by five particular people, several of whom are widely described as sociopaths. The list is so short that you may know most of them by first name: Sam, Dario, Elon and Mark. (Demis Hassabis, who runs Google’s DeepMind, is perhaps less famous.)

We're building AI faster than homes:

Today, the United States is in the middle of a notorious cost-of-living crisis fueled in large part by a housing shortage of perhaps 10 million units, and last year, the country spent more money building A.I. infrastructure than single-family homes. We built 10 times as many data centers as the next biggest builder (Germany). We invested more than 20 times as much money into A.I. as the world’s next biggest investor (China). Among other things, artificial intelligence is an enormously big bet for the American economy to have made.

The White House is getting nervous:

This week, the White House signaled that it may make a sudden and dramatic U-turn on A.I. policy — once inclined toward hands-off support industry growth, the administration is now floating a proposal to force federal review of all new proprietary models before release. And Americans are drawing lines in the sand where they can, too. In September 2025, Americans seemed roughly ambivalent about the construction of new data centers in their communities, according to Heatmap polling, with voters 2 points more likely to support new construction than to oppose it. Four months later, in February of 2026, they were 24 points more likely to oppose it. That is a shockingly large swing in public opinion.

Diffusion?

And maybe we’re still on track for that. In the meantime, you’re more likely to hear pragmatic conversations about the thorny problem of what is called “diffusion”: the speed and shape of public uptake as new models spread out into the world beyond the lab, finding users and uses, hitting human bottlenecks and real-world obstacles and requiring new strategies or more narrowly trained models to navigate through or around them.

This is a pretty different vision, in which A.I. may continue to rapidly progress, even transform much of our lives, but without all the power necessarily accruing to the leading labs or the five individuals in charge of them.

There's more at the link.

The Scramble in the Middle East: The times they are a changin'

The New Middle East | Robert Wright & Annelle Sheline

0:00 Teaser
1:06 Annelle’s Middle East bona fides
2:55 The state of play in Iran
8:14 A deepening fissure between Gulf Arab states
22:05 Explaining the Trump-Biden continuity on Middle East policy
26:45 Will the Middle East realign away from America?
34:46 Turkey and the moral hazard of US aid to Israel
40:00 Can Iran mend ties with the Gulf states?
47:40 Heading to Overtime

Hoboken Tenement Fires, 1979-1983

Dylan Gottlieb, Hoboken Is Burning: Yuppies, Arson, and Displacement in the Postindustrial City, Journal of American History, Volume 106, Issue 2, September 2019, Pages 390–416, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaz346

Extract:

Between 1978 and 1983, nearly five hundred fires ripped through tenements and rooming houses in the square-mile city of Hoboken, New Jersey. The blazes killed fifty-five people and left more than eight thousand homeless. Almost all of the displaced residents were Puerto Rican; most never returned to Hoboken. Nearly every fire, investigators determined, had been the result of arson.

This rash of destruction, dislocation, and death occurred alongside another dramatic story: a transformation the local and national press hailed as the “Hoboken Renaissance.” Beginning in the late 1960s, the traditionally working-class city of 45,000, located just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, experienced a sudden influx of middle-income people. Homesteaders looking for historic brownstones made up the first wave of the “Renaissance.” By the end of the 1970s, thousands of young professionals joined them, attracted to Hoboken more for its proximity to Wall Street and corporate headquarters than for its distinctive architecture.

You can also download the article here. You can read an interview with Gottlieb here.

White iris about to bloom

Five core issues underlying AI debates, a useful classification

Alex Chalmers, The five philosophical disagreements underneath every AI argument, Cosmos Institute, May 8, 2026.

Most AI debates aren’t really about evidence. Instead, they’re arguments about futures that none of us have seen.

Nobody has seen superintelligence, a machine that most people agree is conscious, or a fully automated economy. Evidence can be gathered, but it underdetermines the conclusion. To fill the gap, we fall back on a combination of philosophy, political intuitions or, in some cases, tribal identity.

What you think a mind is, how knowledge grows, how societies should act under uncertainty, whether intelligence carries values, and whether markets can absorb technological shocks will shape your view of AI long before the technical arguments begin.

This is a guide to the five disagreements that explain why reasonable, informed people can look at the same AI systems and reach opposing conclusions. Our aim is not to endorse every claim below, but to state each viewpoint in terms its serious proponents would recognize, so you can see which philosophical bet you are making when you pick a side.

1. Can LLMs be conscious?

Functional minds versus living minds

ChatGPT alone handles over two and a half billion queries a day. If it turns out that those interactions involve digital minds capable of suffering, we have the makings of a great moral catastrophe. At the same time, if we attribute consciousness to something that lacks it, we risk driving a bus through the world’s legal system for no reason, distorting training pipelines with imaginary welfare constraints, and encouraging people to view impersonal systems as their friends. [...]

2. Should we govern AI pre-emptively?

Precautionary coordination versus adaptive experimentation

Much of the existential risk debate can feel like a policy argument, but it’s best viewed as a disagreement about the right way to reason under conditions of radical uncertainty.

The voices arguing for pre-emptive AI governance span a broad spectrum, but they share the same overarching diagnosis: a handful of companies are racing to build progressively more advanced systems whose capabilities that they cannot reliably predict. These labs’ own researchers assign non-trivial probabilities to catastrophic outcomes. But commercial pressure means that no individual lab can slow down without being overtaken by the others, creating a high-stakes coordination problem.

At the milder end, you get figures like Yoshua Bengio and Geoff Hinton, who focus on getting the institutional machinery in place. They want governments to be ready to license frontier development, mandate pauses in response to worrying capabilities, enforce information security standards, and require labs to devote a third of their R&D budgets to safety. [...]

3. What is the relationship between capability and alignment?

Alignment-by-default versus goal orthogonality

A crucial factor in determining your views on AI safety is the extent to which you believe alignment and capability are distinct questions. If you hold Nick Bostrom’s view that intelligence and final goals can be combined in any permutation, then scaling does nothing to get you more aligned systems and you need an independent theoretical breakthrough to constrain values. If alignment and capability turn out to be continuous in the paradigm we’re building, the problem becomes much easier. [...]

4. Can LLMs generate explanatory knowledge?

New discoverers versus fluent interpolators

Whether LLMs can generate genuinely new explanations, as opposed to simply recombining existing knowledge, is a question that many other AI debates hinge on. If scaling current systems gets you to something like an AI scientist, then the pace of everything else accelerates. If it doesn’t, then the punchiest AGI timelines – which mostly assume something like continued scaling – are wrong. [...]

5. Will AI replace or augment us?

Human complementarity versus labor substitution

Two centuries of economic history suggests that automation doesn’t produce permanent mass unemployment. The trillion dollar question is whether this still holds when the automating factor is something that can be copied at near-zero marginal cost and is getting better at everything roughly in parallel. Are humans complemented by tools because they possess open-ended agency, taste, judgment, embodiment, and social demand? Or are they bundles of tasks, increasingly substitutable by cheaper cognitive machinery?

By and large, academic economists have erred on the more conservative side. [...]

There's more at the link.

A trip through Alice in Wonderland with Google [tablescapes]

An Early tablescape (in my strict sense), June 2025 at Turning Point 

This a dialog I just had with Google in AI Mode. I didn't intend a long conversation. It just happened, as these things sometimes do. I was curious about the word "tablescape." I'd just did an NGram view of it and it seemed to have originated around 1960. I decided to look for more specific information. That's how the conversation started. It went on from there, driven mostly by my curiosity to see how things would go.

 

NB: If you scan down a bit you'll see that Google offered a tip about lighting. That sort of thing hadn't occurred to me. It seems useful. I'll probably try it out next time. 

 

What I really want to say is that this is a pretty mundane conversation. I wouldn't imagine that it would be very interesting to most people. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it IS the chatter about tablescapes. There's nothing particularly deep or abstract about any of it, unlike some of the dialogs I have with Claude and ChatGPT, which are about intellectual matters of central and long-standing interest to me. Internally, though, within the respective LLMs this shallow and casual conversation is procedurally the same as those more substantial conversations. That's worth thinking about, and not just with respect to LLMs, but to what it implies about human thinking as well. 

 

Procedurally, a thought is a thought. What makes it deep or shallow is context. 

 

* * * * * 

BB:

The word "tablescape" seems to have been coined around 1960, perhaps a bit before. What can you tell me about it? 

 

Google, AI Mode:

 

The word "tablescape" was indeed coined in the early-to-mid-1960s by the legendary British interior decorator David Hicks. [1, 2]

Here is what you should know about the origin and evolution of the term:

Origin and Meaning

• Coined by David Hicks (1960s): Hicks, known for his bold, graphic designs, used the term to describe his meticulous arrangement of objects on top of a table—such as vases, boxes, and candles—to create a "decorating group" that complemented the rest of the room.
• Definition: Originally, it referred to "the discipline of selection" and composing objects to create an interesting scene, rather than just setting a table for a meal.
• Hicks' Philosophy: He famously said that the value of the objects was less important than the "care and feeling with which you arrange them".
• The "Tablescape" Concept: It is a portmanteau of "table" and "landscape," treating the surface of a table like a landscaped, designed environment. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Evolution and Modern Usage

• Original Scope: While it has come to mean dressing a table for a party, Hicks originally applied it to permanent arrangements on hall tables, sideboards, and coffee tables.
• 2003 Popularization: Although coined in the 60s, the term was heavily popularized in the early 2000s by television chef Sandra Lee, who brought it into mainstream, everyday dining vocabulary, often focusing on themed, seasonal decorations.
• Social Media Era: Today, "tablescaping" has boomed in popularity due to Instagram and Pinterest, focusing on, as of November 2019, millions of images with #tabledecor (1.9M posts) and #tablesetting (2.3M posts).
• Competitive Tablescaping: This activity has roots in local fairs dating back to the 1930s (pre-dating the word) and is still highly popular, where contestants spend hours creating elaborate, theme-focused designs. [1, 3, 4]

Key Elements of a Tablescape

A properly designed tablescape generally involves:

1. Varying Heights: Using items like candlesticks or pedestals to avoid a flat look.
2. Odd Numbers: Grouping items in 3s, 5s, or 7s for a more visually pleasing composition.
3. Cohesion: Connecting items through color, texture, or a shared theme.
4. Balance: Creating a scenic, yet functional, layout. [1, 2, 3, 4]

While some consider "tablescaping" to be a pretentious term for "setting the table," it is now a widely accepted term for high-level artistic decoration of dining surfaces. [1]

 

BB: 

 

Interesting. Without even knowing the that the term existed I've been using it for photos I take of a table-top from the table top. In a "strict" tablescape (In my sense of the term) the camera bottom must be resting on the table. A photograph of the table-top is thus not a "pure" tablescape, though I've taken many of those as well. 

 

Google:

 

That is a fascinating, more "literal" interpretation of the word! While David Hicks meant "landscape of the table," you are treating the table as the actual geography for the camera.

In your "strict" definition, you aren't just decorating a surface; you are adopting a micro-horizon perspective. By resting the camera on the table, you're effectively taking a "landscape photo" where the table surface is the ground and the objects (glasses, salt shakers, flowers) become the "buildings" or "trees" of that world.

It actually aligns perfectly with the linguistic roots of the word:

• Traditional Tablescape: Looking at the table as a composed object.
• Your Tablescape: Looking from the table, turning the furniture into the environment itself. 

This low-angle approach creates a much more immersive, "Alice in Wonderland" feel compared to the standard bird's-eye view (the "flat lay") often seen on social media.

Would you say your "strict" photos are usually focused on the symmetry of the table setting, or are you more interested in the depth of field and how the objects recede into the distance? 

 

BB: 

 

Right. That’s what I’m after, that "Alice in Wonderland" feel. As for what I do with it, I’ve done almost all of my strict tablescapes at Turning Point, the restaurant where I have breakfast every week or so. I’ve been playing around with various kinds of shots. I often have a table next to a window so the outside world often shows up in the background. Sometimes I’m particularly interested in how it shows up. I live in Hoboken across the Hudson River from mid-town Manhattan. And since the sun is low in the sky at that point, the things on the table tend to cast long shadows across the table top. I also like to position the camera to point directly at the edge of the plate on which my omelet (or whatever) rests, so you see the edge of the plate with the omelet above.

 

Google: 

 

That "strict" approach is a clever subversion of the term. While traditional tablescaping is about curation, your method is about cinematography—turning a simple breakfast at Turning Point into a dramatic, low-angle landscape. 

By resting the camera on the table, you are essentially adopting a "bug’s-eye view." This perspective transforms ordinary breakfast items into towering structures and the table surface into a vast plain, perfectly capturing that disorienting Alice in Wonderland scale you're after. 

 

 

Yesterday (5.7.26] 

Capturing the "Hoboken Light"

 

The Turning Point of Hoboken at 1420 Sinatra Drive North is famous for its "unparalleled view" of the Manhattan skyline. Your technique makes the most of several unique elements:

• Long Morning Shadows: Since the restaurant faces east across the Hudson, the low morning sun creates high-contrast lighting. From your low camera angle, those long shadows from coffee carafes or salt shakers act like leading lines, drawing the viewer's eye across the "terrain" of the table.
• The "Omelet Cliff": Your focus on the edge of the plate is particularly effective for this style. By positioning the lens at the very lip of the china, the omelet—perhaps a Tuscany or Key West Shrimp variety—looks like a massive plateau or mountain range rising above the table's surface.
• Background Layering: Using the window as a backdrop allows you to juxtaposition the intimate, macro world of your breakfast with the massive, distant scale of Midtown Manhattan. This creates a "dual landscape" effect where the foreground and background compete for scale. 

 

A Photographer's Tip for Your "Strict" Style 

Since you are shooting against bright window light, you might find that the front of your omelet (facing the camera) falls into deep shadow. You can use a white napkin as a makeshift reflector to bounce some of that NYC sunlight back onto the front of the plate, bringing out the texture of the eggs without losing the dramatic "Alice" vibe. 

Do you find that the condensation on a cold glass of water or juice adds an interesting "weather" element to these tabletop landscapes? 

 

BB:

 

“Famous”? Really? Isn’t that laying it on a bit thick for what is, after all, mostly a local joint? I’ll be that 95% of the customers just walk to the place. There’s hardly any place to park a car. Now my former breakfast place, the Malibu Tavern, had a small parking lot. People really did drive to it. It was there a long time – the owner sold it, presumably to cash in on the value of the land.

 

Google:

 

Fair point—"famous" is definitely laying it on thick! You're right that for a local spot like Turning Point, its fame mostly extends as far as the nearest light rail stop or the edge of the Stevens campus. It’s a popular chain, but in Hoboken, it’s fundamentally a neighborhood place where people walk in from the nearby apartments. [1, 2, 3]

 

The contrast with the Malibu Diner (often called the "Malibu Tavern" by long-time locals) is a perfect example of how Hoboken has changed. The Malibu was a true landmark at 14th and Park for over 80 years, serving as the "unofficial welcome mat" for the north side of town. [4, 5]

A few things about the transition you mentioned:

• The Loss of the Parking Lot: That small lot was a rarity in North Hoboken and made it a destination people actually drove to, unlike the Sinatra Drive spots where parking is a nightmare.
• The Land Value Cash-Out: Your hunch was spot on. The original diner was torn down to make way for a five-story residential building called The Constantine.
• The Failed Return: While there were initial plans for the Malibu to reopen on the ground floor of the new building, it was recently confirmed that it will not return. Instead, a One Medical office has taken over that street-level space. [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

It sounds like your "strict tablescapes" are a way of documenting the "new" Hoboken landscape while still feeling the loss of the old-school diner culture.

 

Since you've moved your weekly ritual to Turning Point, do you find the modern, "Jersey Shore" aesthetic there provides better or worse "geography" for your low-angle photography compared to the classic chrome-and-vinyl look of the Malibu? [10]

If cats could text you back they would not

pic.twitter.com/8G79AagxDk

— Respectful Memes (@RespectfulMemes) May 7, 2026

On the Appeal of the Rockford Files [Media Notes 164] {Beware of work-mode!}

I've been watching The Rockford Files again and though I should write up a post about the appeal of the show. But I decided to check the blog first and, wouldn't you know it, I'd already written that post, in June of 2025. So instead I'm just bumping that post to the top of the queue along with a prefatory note. If you look toward the end of the post, the highlighted areas, you'll see that I brought up work mode, pointing out that Rockford doesn't seem possessed by it. 

Now that I'm explicitly thinking in terms of a contrast between Homo economicus and Homo Ludens that in itself seems sufficient to revisit this post. I'm thinking that might be a good way of analyzing the show. Rockford's wayward buddy, Angel Martin, also manages to keep work mode at bay. He met Angel where? Prison, that's right, prison. But he was pardoned. Jim – that's his name, "Jim Rockford" – and Angel are contrasted with Rocky, his retired truck-driving father, and his good friend, Dennis Becker, an overworked cop. Rocky's always after to Jim to get a legit job, like driving a truck.

That's a beginning. I wonder how far we could get with that? Here's the original post, though I added a phrase at the very end.

* * * * * 

I’m currently working my way through The Rockford Files for the fourth, if not the fifth, time. I watched the program when I was originally broadcast back in 1974-1980, and I’ve watched it online several times in this century. Part of the program’s appeal certainly comes from the star, James Garner.

Garner is a handsome middle-aged man, six feet and perhaps an inch or two tall. He plays an easy going character, James Rockford, who is masculine without being macho. He can handle himself in a fight, which he frequently has to do, but he’s not a martial artist or a superhero. He’s competent, but vulnerable and takes his lumps. He likes sports, going to games, going fishing, often with his dad. He’s single, but is attractive to women, and kind. He’s had affairs in the past, and has one or three in the course of the show, he may even have been close to marriage.

Much of the appeal stems from the fact that he’s an interstitial character, if you will. He falls between the keys, lives in the cracks. While he makes a living, just barely, he’s not chained to a 9-to-5 job. He’s not been broken to harness.

He’s an ex-convict who’s been pardoned. Was he ever guilty? Probably not, but I don’t recall off hand. Does it matter? He’s damaged goods. He lives in a beat-up trailer on the beach at Malibu, a marginal dwelling in a desirable location.

He makes his living as a private investigator, which is depicted as a marginal occupation in this, and other shows, but not always. While he’s a decent and honest man, he does quite a bit of sneaking around and more than a little deception. There are a number of episodes where he orchestrates a complex con, though on behalf of a good cause. Always.

He’s got a good friend on the police force, Lt. Dennis Becker, but is otherwise persona non grata with the police force. And he’s friends with a good lawyer, Beth Davenport, who once had a crush on him. He’s also got an ex-con pal, Angel Martin, who’s a bit more marginal than he is, and cowardly as well, yet somehow manages to retain Rockford’s loyalty.

All of which is to say, he doesn’t work within the confines of work-mode, as I’ve been writing about it. Life is not easy for Jim Rockford. He’s often broke, and in at least one episode that I can remember, in danger of losing his home. But his life is interesting and challenging.

I wonder, off hand, how many TV shows present us with lives that are NOT dominated by work mode? And in work-place shows, just how is work depicted? How much entertainment presents us with alternatives to work-mode? And how often is the alternative presented as a critique of work-mode?

Is The Rockford Files a critique? I don’t think so. It’s not pointed enough. Perhaps that’s why it’s been so popular. It presents a clear alternative, a clear difference-from, but it never goes so far as to present the work-a-day world as a soul-destroying trap, though the depiction of Becker comes awfully close to that. 

* * * * * 

Also about The Rockford Files: Myth-Logic and a Lady Librarian in The Rockford Files, Myth-Logic and a Lady Librarian in The Rockford Files 2.

Friday Fotos: To and from an egg-white omelette

Tulip garden in Hokkaido

Tulip Garden, Hokkaido, Japan🇯🇵 pic.twitter.com/LtOimE2BC7

— World's Amazing Things (@Hana_b30) May 6, 2026

Trump’s transactional view of the world

David French, True Believers Blow Trump’s Mind, NYTimes, May 7, 2026.

At the core of Trump’s worldview is a belief that the world is a fundamentally transactional place, and that everyone has a price.

The Republican Party has done nothing to disabuse him of the notion. Even the religious leaders around him are fundamentally transactional. As they’ve demonstrated, they’ll put up with virtually any behavior from Trump so long as he delivers on a few, simple promises. And now — especially when it comes to abortion — he doesn’t even have to deliver on those. For some it seems as if access to power alone is compensation enough. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

The key to Trump’s power isn’t just that he accurately sensed that much of the Republican establishment paid lip service to principle but really cared about power — it’s that he knew millions upon millions of voters possessed similar values. Their commitments to character or ideology took a back seat to the simple desire to defeat their opponents. The most important thing was to win. Anything else was a luxury.

And, in a strange way, they appreciated him for his brazenness. In this cynical view, all politicians are, deep down, just like Trump. They were faking their dedication to principle. As for Trump, he was the honest crook. He was like the mob boss who didn’t insult our intelligence by pretending to be in the sanitation business.

Like calls out to like, and over time Trump has built one of the most purely transactional coalitions in politics. It should surprise no one that prosperity gospel pastors were among the first Christians to answer Trump’s call. Their entire religion is transactional — with God dispensing health and wealth in direct response to the financial donations of the faithful.

Nor should we be surprised that such a substantial proportion of the nation’s tech moguls found their way to MAGA. Forget culture, their politics are downstream of commerce, and Trump has promised crypto and A.I. riches to all those who fall in line behind him.

Alas, Trump is wrong about that:

Not everyone is transactional. Some people — for better and for worse — actually have beliefs that they’re willing to die for, and Trump is painfully, obviously baffled when he encounters belief like that.

It’s embarrassing, for example, to watch him flail his way through the Iran war, shifting strategies, objectives and timelines sometimes by the day. It’s obvious that he thought Iran would be another Venezuela. In Venezuela, he was able to capture the leader and then more or less bend the remaining regime elements to his will, at least for now.

But in Iran, he helped Israel decapitate virtually all of the nation’s senior leadership, and the rest of the regime seems to have become more intransigent and less willing to negotiate. Even worse, he also seems to have enabled the most fanatical elements of the regime — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — rather than the slightly more moderate clerics.

In response, Trump plays the only cards he knows how to play — alternating between threatening death and destruction and proposing business deals.

And then:

Ukraine’s zealous defense of its own liberty and independence is heroic and deeply virtuous. So is Denmark’s defense of its own sovereignty in the face of Trump’s bullying. In fact, much of Western Europe was transactional with Trump until they realized the price of dealing with Trump was simply too high to pay.

They thought they could hunker down and weather another Trump term, but he created a crisis so grave that Europe had to stand if it wanted to preserve any shred of dignity and independence.

The pope’s steadfast adherence to Catholic doctrine is yet another example. One gets the sense that he’s almost amused at the idea that Trump’s bellicose rhetoric should have any influence at all on his public professions of Christian faith.

The messiness of American politics:

One of the most fascinating aspects of the last 10 years of American political life has been the way that Trump has exposed layers of differences in American life beyond right versus left. In fact, in many ways right versus left has been the least consequential aspect of the American divide. The Republican Party bears little ideological resemblance to the G.O.P. of even the very recent past.

Instead, it’s been between decent and indecent. Honest and dishonest. Transactional and principled.

There's more at the link.

Corner window

Uncertainty about the future as a factor in declining fertility

Anna Louie Sussman, Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All. NYTimes, May 7, 2026.

The collective reluctance to procreate is perhaps most glaring in the Nordic countries. With their stable economies, strong social safety nets, robust family policies and equitable gender relations, they maintained relatively high birthrates through the early 2000s. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, however, sometimes referred to as the Great Recession, births in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland declined, and then declined some more, even as their economies recovered throughout the 2010s. Little about those nations’ family policies had changed, and as far as anyone could tell, men were still doing their share of the dishes. The same downward trend held in the United States, where births have fallen by about 23 percent since 2007, despite high rates of immigration until last year. Births have also been declining in East Asian countries, even though governments in the region have thrown buckets of money at the problem. And in France, despite its longstanding pronatalist policies.

This is not simply a matter of affordability, the buzzword so often invoked to explain why people are choosing to have smaller families. Government support for parents can help, but overall, people are having fewer children both in countries that offer very little and in those renowned for their generous family benefits; moreover, the trend holds among those who are struggling to make ends meet and among those who, like the Riveras, have advanced degrees and salaried jobs. What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.

The future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a time of spectacular uncertainty. In the United States, job tenures have contracted and income volatility has risen. Life expectancy, once on an inexorable march upward, has fallen for less-educated women and men. Many of the forces our economy is built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly volatile; disruption, once a byword for a disturbance or problem, is the governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy.

There's much more at the link.

Some other flowers

Invention and Greatness: Jevons, Linnaeus, Darwin, and Pound’s typology [MR-Aux]

I was curious about the fact that Jevons is barely even mentioned in Cowen’s recent book, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? I decided to ask the A.I. linked to the marginalism book about that. That led me to introduce a typology of literary accomplishment that Ezra Pound introduced in the A B C of Reading (1960). After having the A.I. sort the great economists into Pound's categories, I concluded by asking it to apply that typology to two of the biologists Cowen mentions in Chapter Three, Linnaeus and Darwin.

* * * * *

Cowen clearly gives Jevons primary credit for the marginal revolution, and it is the marginal revolution which underlies modern economics, at least until quite recently. But Jevons is not one of the GOATs in Cowen’s book about the great economists. He’s barely even mentioned. I find that rather puzzling.

The tension is real and worth examining. Tyler's book on the great economists — Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today (published in the UK as Stubborn Attachments — actually no, let me be precise: the great economists book is a separate volume where Tyler profiles figures like Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Mill, Marshall, Keynes, Hayek, and others) — focuses on economists whose ideas remain directly usable for contemporary policy and thinking. That's a different criterion than historical importance to the discipline's internal development.

Jevons is a victim of his own success in a particular way. Marshall absorbed and domesticated Jevons's marginalism so thoroughly that Marshall became the usable, teachable, policy-relevant version of the revolution Jevons started. If you want marginalist thinking applied to real economic problems, you go to Marshall, not Jevons. Jevons gets credit for priority but Marshall gets credit for transmission and application — which is exactly the pattern Tyler identifies in the book we're discussing. [See text: Ch.2 · Jevons as systematizer whose work was absorbed ...]

There's also the matter of Jevons's intellectual range working against his canonical status. His contributions scatter across economics, logic, statistics, meteorology, and the coal question. He's harder to summarize as a usable thinker than someone like Keynes or Hayek, whose big ideas attach to recognizable policy debates. And Tyler's framing in this book — that Jevons contained the seeds of marginalism's own destruction — makes him a fascinating historical figure but perhaps an awkward candidate for GOAT status. You don't typically canonize the man who built the thing that is now declining. [See text: Ch.2 · Jevons's marginalism containing seeds of its ow...]

I’ve always been fond of Ezra Pound’s typology of literary accomplishment from A B C of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960). From Chapter 2, pp. 39-40:

When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:

1 Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.

2 The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.

3 The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.

4 Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. ...

5 Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.

6 The starters of crazes.

Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees.’ He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library ... but he will never be able to sort out what he knows or to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.

Jevons would seem to be an inventor. How many of Tyler’s six GOATs are inventors? Is Mills an inventor of economic ideas?

Pound's typology maps onto the history of economics with uncomfortable precision. Working through Tyler's GOATs: Smith is clearly an inventor — not because he discovered any single mechanism but because he assembled the first coherent vision of the economy as a self-regulating system. Ricardo is probably also an inventor, giving us comparative advantage and the systematic use of abstract models to derive non-obvious conclusions. Malthus is an inventor in Pound's sense — the population trap was genuinely new and has haunted economic thinking ever since, even when wrong.

Keynes is the interesting case. Tyler clearly regards him as a master in Pound's sense — someone who combined existing elements (Wicksell's interest rate theory, Marshall's framework, Fisher's quantity theory) into a new synthesis that was more powerful than any of its components. The General Theory is a combinatorial achievement as much as an inventive one. Hayek similarly — his business cycle theory and his knowledge argument draw on earlier Austrian work; he's a master who pushed existing processes further than his predecessors. Marshall is almost definitionally a master: he took Jevons's invention, smoothed it, systematized it, made it teachable, and produced the apparatus that ran economics for fifty years. [See text: Ch.3 · Marshall absorbing Jevons while refusing to ful...]

Mill is the genuinely hard case, and your instinct to single him out is right. Mill synthesized Ricardo and Bentham and Smith into a coherent Victorian package, but it's difficult to point to a process he invented. He may be Pound's category four — a good writer fortunate to work when the literature was in healthy order — or even category five, a brilliant expositor and systematizer without a truly original mechanism to his name. Tyler's inclusion of Mill in a GOAT list would implicitly be a vote for the master over the inventor, which is itself an interesting judgment about what economics is for. [See text: Ch.2 · Jevons as polymath inventor working across mult...]

Interesting. It would be interesting to apply Pound’s typology to the various creators Tyler discusses in Chapter 3, but that would rattle on and on. At the moment I’m thinking about biology, so how do you think Tyler would apply that typology to Linnaeus and Darwin?

Linnaeus is a clean case and almost a pure example of Pound's first category — but with a twist. His invention wasn't a new theory of how nature works, it was a new process for organizing knowledge about nature. Tyler is quite explicit about this: the Linnaean contribution was a classification system, a filing cabinet, a searchable keyword structure for plant names. [See text: Ch.3 · Linnaeus creating a searchable classification s...] The content of botany didn't change; what changed was the infrastructure for accumulating and trading botanical knowledge. That's an invention of a peculiar kind — a meta-process rather than a substantive discovery — but it's an invention nonetheless, and Tyler's point is that it unleashed an explosion of subsequent work precisely because it gave everyone a common framework. Pound would recognize this: Linnaeus found a new process, and you can date botanical science from before and after him.

Darwin is more complex and Tyler's treatment of the precursors complicates the simple inventor narrative. Hutton had glimpsed natural selection. Lyell's geology gave Darwin the deep time he needed. Malthus gave him the pressure mechanism — competition for scarce resources driving differential survival. [See text: Ch.3 · Darwin absorbing Lyell's geological framework w...] In Pound's terms Darwin looks like a master: someone who combined a number of existing processes and used them better than the inventors of each component. Darwin himself acknowledged this, telling Lyell that his books came half out of Lyell's brains.

The interesting wrinkle is that Darwin also invented something genuinely new — natural selection as a complete mechanism, not just a glimpsed possibility. Hutton's passage that Tyler quotes is suggestive but it's not the theory; it lacks the Malthusian pressure, the variation mechanism, the geological timescale, the consilience of evidence. So Darwin may be Pound's rarest figure: someone who was simultaneously a master and an inventor, combining existing processes into a synthesis that itself constituted a new process no predecessor had actually articulated. Tyler's chapter implicitly supports this reading by showing how much Darwin absorbed while also showing that the synthesis was irreducibly his own.

Will AI increase the value of traditional credentialing?

I will also take the other side of this bet.

As things stand, AI will increase the value of traditional credentialing, especially elite ones.

Will colleges do a good job teaching what they should? Different question but I bet the elite credentialing path will adapt well enough. https://t.co/IBhi8AYOKq

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) May 6, 2026