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Desecration and the Negative World

Speaking of my book, Carl Trueman also has a new book out called The Desecration of Man. Trueman writes:

“Desecration” is a strong word, stronger than others have been used to describe the modern world such as “disenchantment.” It implies the intentional abuse or destruction of something holy, something of more than ordinary significance.

The idea here is that the modern world has not simply adopted an atheist-materialist metaphysics, in which we can go about our days without thinking much about religion. Rather, the modern world desires to explicitly transgress or profane old religious standards and values. This implies an underlying hostility to them. So while Trueman has his own framework, I see it as very compatible with and affiramatory towards my ideas of the “Negative World,” that American elite culture now views traditional Christianity as a negative rather that positive force in society.

Again, if you haven’t read my book yet, pick it up.

Men Can Have Standards Too

A video clip from the Dave Ramsey show became a viral topic of debate on X. A woman who supposedly has $90,000 in student loan debt called in because her boyfriend says he won’t propose to her until she’s debt free.

Ramsey tells her, “If you were my daughter, you know what’s I’d tell you? Dump him.” He goes on to say that her boyfriend is trying to make her prove her worth to him with money, that money disputes are the leading cause of divorce, and that this is a money dispute. Ergo, she should walk away from this relationship.

You can make a case for what Ramsey is saying, but what we are really seeing here is an example of the pervasive idea in our society that men are not allowed to have standards for women.

You may recall the furor several years back over a trollish post by a woman that, “Men prefer debt free virgins without tattoos.” The very idea that men have standards and some women don’t meet them is anathema to a lot of people - and especially to many Boomer men like Ramsey.

The giveaway here is when Ramsey tells this woman, “You’re a princess, and you deserve more than that.” Ramsey knows nothing about this woman but is sure she is a “princess” - the kind of person any guy would be lucky to have deign to pay attention to him.

Women are encouraged to set very high standards and reject men who aren’t worthy of being with a princess like her, but people get outraged if men set standards for women. Social scientists talk about men being “unmarriageable,” but never apply that label to any women.

Just as women can set standards for men, men can have standards for women too. Particularly today when we read a lot about how women are getting significantly more college degrees than men, how men are falling behind or failing to launch, etc., those men who have their act together need to recognize the value of what they bring to the table. They are not beggars who would be lucky to have any woman pay attention to them.

In truth, it’s completely reasonable for a man to not want to marry into a pile of debt - or a lot of other things. Men should think more about what their own non-negotiables are.

In this case, the man actually is helping her pay off the debt. While I don’t recommend pre-marital cohabitation, he’s letting her live with him for free so that she can devote the majority of her income to paying down debt. Her boyfriend makes $250,000/year, which puts him in the top echelons of income earners. If she simply dumps this guy as Ramsey suggests, how likely is it that she’ll find another guy who makes that much money to let her live rent free with him - and marry her with $90,000 in debt? It’s not impossible, but in this dating and marriage market, it’s very far from a sure thing.

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Falling Fertility

Melissa Kearney is an economist known for her book on the “two-parent privilege.” She was just a guest on a fantastic Financial Times podcast about the implications of falling fertility for the economy. Here is some of what she said:

I don’t want to sound like an alarmist and put this close to 10, but I definitely am gonna put it above the median of five. And the reason is because if this is something we don’t address, we will be facing potentially very large changes in our society and our economy that have sort of, it seems, snuck up on us. So I don’t wanna sound like I’m saying, oh my goodness, this is definitely gonna cause an economic crisis. But it is something that people should be paying attention to and the consequences are potentially quite massive.

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Now, the more sanguine demographers say, you know, we don’t know what’s gonna happen. They might catch up. For me, when I’m looking at the data, I don’t see any reason to think that that’s likely to happen. What we know from other high-income countries that have experienced a decline in births before the US is that more recent cohorts of women are not catching up, that birth rates are down in a sustained way.

None of the pressures or cultural changes or reasons that seem to be driving these declines look like they’re gonna reverse anytime soon. So to have the current sort of cohort of people in their twenties and thirties catch up, we’d have to have a really dramatic increase in childbearing post-age 30 that would have to happen for reasons that we can’t quite anticipate. And so I’m less optimistic than some other demographers. 

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So that puts pressure on our fiscal systems. How do we take care of all these older people? How do we continue to pay for Social Security and Medicare? It also has the potential to mean less economic growth and less economic dynamism. And so we worry about that too. We worry that an older shrinking population is one with less innovation, fewer new ideas, fewer technological breakthroughs, and that has the potential consequences of decreasing living standards for all people.

The worry is about a shrinking population in a less dynamic economy that delivers the continued increase in living standards that we’ve become accustomed to. 

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So we already spend 35 per cent of federal outlays on mandatory spending on people over the age of 65. Meanwhile, we’ve got young families struggling to make ends meet, right? And we’ve got a decline in fertility, and our government’s spending 5:1 on a per capita basis on the elderly to kids…Certainly, it’s not surprising that our healthcare spending on the elderly is more than it is on kids, because you’re exactly right, their healthcare needs are greater. But the income that we redistribute to the elderly, no. It is absolutely not true that they have greater needs than kids. Our child poverty rates are high, and there are very, very long-term consequences of child poverty.

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What’s very interesting is that, in a paper in this new Aspen Economic Strategy Group, Jeff Clemens points out that as local areas continue to experience a decline in births and a decline in K-12 enrolment, and ultimately a decline in the number of people available for the local tax-based and working age population, towns are gonna have to unwind their commitment to public goods and services, and that is a really hard thing to do.

So specifically, let’s just think about schools. In a lot of local areas, well, rural areas in the US have been dealing with declining school enrolment for the past quarter century. That’s going to become more and more common across the US as birth rates decline. It’s really hard to figure out how to consolidate schools, how to close schools.

More local areas are also going to encounter this when it comes to hospitals and local transit systems. Those are all systems that have very large fixed capital and labour costs. And as you have fewer people, the per capita cost of running these types of public goods and services increases non-linearly.

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These older workers are holding on to higher-paying managerial positions for longer, and that’s crowding out opportunities for younger workers to advance and earn higher wages. This is well documented now in the US labour market and in other high-income countries. The older generation, people over age 50 who are holding on to their jobs for longer are the winners in this context, and the ones who are losing are the ones who are delaying their career advancement, not advancing into managerial positions.

The wage gap between older and younger workers has widened in favour of older workers in recent years. Relate this to what we also know is happening outside of firms. Younger adults are having a harder time entering the housing market and increasing wealth, and others have shown that the wealth gap has also increased in recent decades, favouring, again, the elderly.

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I think this is top of mind because The Harvard Crimson recently had an article showing that now, I think it was like 40 per cent of tenured faculty at Harvard were above the age of 65. And that is a dramatic change from just 20 years ago. Again, it’s not like Harvard’s a growing company necessarily, but they’re not just gonna keep adding to their number of tenured faculty slots.

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I think fundamentally, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that a few extra thousand dollars or a few additional months of leave when a kid is born doesn’t really meaningfully change the calculus for somebody trying to decide, “do I wanna commit to a parenting lifestyle and be responsible for another person for at least 18 years?”

So these incremental things really haven’t worked. Now, what I’m about to say next requires some humility on my part as an economist. It’s hard to imagine this turning around without sort of a cultural shift or changes in social norms. So my read, again, with my colleague Phil Levine, we’ve done a lot of work on this. What we suggest is probably the single best explanation, which is like a catchall explanation for why fertility is down in the US and other high-income countries is because of shifting priorities. This isn’t a value statement. This is when you look at the way the more recent cohorts of young adults are choosing to spend their time and money in their twenties and thirties, they’re spending more time and money on establishing their career, on working, on leisure pursuits, and they’re choosing parenthood to a much lesser degree.

Click over to read the whole transcript. If you get stopped by a paywall in reading the transcript, you can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts.

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Best of the Web

NYT: The Many Love Lives of Ted Turner - Known as a playboy, the media mogul gave his paramours and three ex-wives plenty of stories to tell. He also managed to stay friendly with many of them

NY Mag: Can You Really Choose Your ‘Best Baby’? - Silicon Valley-backed companies are selling $50,000 genetic tests to anxious parents, despite shaky science

WSJ: Young New Yorkers Have a New Hot Spot: Sunday Mass (gift link) - Gen Z is flocking to church for community, faith and dates thanks to meetup groups such as ‘Pizza to Pews’ and ‘Holy Girl Walk’

Ryan Burge: Who Marries Whom? Faith, Partners, and the Unequally Yoked

NYT: Speak, Yuppie (gift link) - A look back at the original 1980s yuppie phenomenon. A great read.

But perhaps we were too dismissive of the yuppies. So much of what we take for granted today — from our meritocratic rat race to our gentrified neighborhoods to our culture of overwork, fitness training and foodie obsession — was born in the yuppie-made 1980s. In that moment, they fashioned a bargain that we are still living with: An increasingly diverse professional class signed up for a life of hard-won affluence, at the cost of deep inequality for everyone else.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was a guest on the podcast of the Show-Me Institute in Missouri discussing city-county merger in St. Louis. This is one of the best and most nuanced looks at this type of government merger that you are likely to see.

New this week:

• The Lives We Won’t Give Up - We mourn what we’ve lost to modernity, yet we won’t surrender what replaced it.

• Protestantism’s Institutional Problem - A guest essay from Jordan Cooper on a serious hurdle to Protestant academics

As my readers know, I have interacted quite extensively with converts to the Roman Catholic Church. There are a variety of reasons why such moves happen, not all of which I will delve into here. While some do so for intellectual reasons (especially among those who were never deeply involved with any Confessional Protestant tradition), I find such cases to be a significant minority, even when it is claimed that the move across the Tiber was theologically driven.

It has often been the case when someone I know personally informs me that they have decided to make the swim, that they justify such a move with claims of intellectual persuasion based upon the strength of RC arguments. In many cases, they have never brought any of these claims or questions to me at all before making a decision. If someone really wanted to evaluate the truth claims of two traditions, and that person had a friend who examines these issues for a living, one would think they’d at least hear that person out prior to committing. But alas, it often does not happen. It is the same story every time: someone has watched some RC apologetics videos online, has decided to join the RCC for whatever reason, and is unwilling to hear any critique. Theological reasons are constructed post hoc. This person is already convinced and uses theology to justify a conclusion already arrived at.

This should not be so surprising, as human beings are not as rationally driven as we sometimes assume. As Theodor Adorno contends, we often use reason instrumentally, as a tool to get and do what we want, rather than causally, as a basis for belief or action. We have to recognize how it is that human beings actually operate if we are to engage in trends among populations, such as the recent surge toward the RCC and EO churches. There is an element of that trend that I want to highlight here, which has perhaps not been discussed as often as some others: the difficulty of being an academic or intellectual within conservative Protestantism in the United States.

Laying Out the Problem

I recall a conversation with a student at an Ivy League University (I am keeping the details as vague as possible so as not to reveal this individual’s identity) who was raised in a traditional Protestant church prior to making a decision to convert to the RCC just prior to graduation. This student was highly intelligent, strongly motivated, and desired to pursue graduate studies in philosophy. When I asked him about his decision, I was surprised by his honest response, as he confessed simply that the RCC actually has opportunities for job placement for someone who desired to study philosophy. They had an intellectual ecosystem that Protestants simply do not have.

One might mock such a move as absurd, since commitment to truth should not be dependent upon job placement. That, however, was not my initial response. In fact, it resonated with me in a significant way, as he highlighted something that is a genuine problem for conservative Protestant academics.

This is mirrored in my own experience. When I committed to the Lutheran tradition, I did so for theological (and to some extent, existential) reasons, without thinking all too deeply about what this would mean for my own academic pursuits. In my prior Reformed tradition, there were more opportunities to teach at seminaries across the country, several publishing houses that print Reformed material, and a whole system of large conferences to speak at. I was naïve to institutional dynamics when I was young, and had a bit of a rude awakening when I began writing.

When I began my first call as a parish pastor, I started looking into doctoral programs with the thought that I might be able to eventually teach at an undergraduate institution or seminary. After a significant amount of time looking at the doctrinal statements of Christian universities throughout the United States, it became apparent that there were very few options where I would actually be able to teach, as even the most broadly Christian universities often have statements of faith that preclude Lutheran commitments (especially sacramentally). If I had chosen a field of study other than theology, this would not have been a problem, but nonetheless, this is where I was.

I then ran into an unexpected roadblock within my Lutheran tradition as I published my first book, The Righteousness of One: An Evaluation of the New Perspective on Paul in Light of Early Patristic Soteriology, in 2013. Like any new author, I was excited to get my first work into print and awaited my first review. Well, that review came, and it was an absolute hit piece, accusing me of all sorts of heretical views which I did not (and do not today) hold. In my naïveté, I had written things that were apparently controversial due to all sorts of Synodical politics in a church body I was not even in. Downstream of this, I had positive reviews of my books blocked from publication in certain journals, had multiple individuals contact congregations telling them not to allow me to speak, and had all sorts of other bizarre events occur as a result of this.

It was at this point that I really delved into podcasting and publishing, as it was quite evident that I simply had no path to pursue in a traditional route without appeasing this or that faction of a given church. So, with my punk rock DIY toolkit, I just decided to do it myself. I was never going to get a position at a high-powered institution as a conservative Protestant. Yale Div is not exactly looking for Confessional Lutherans to teach their students. I also was not going to get a position at a university in other Lutheran church bodies, as there were all sorts of political obstacles that would have forced me to compromise on things I was not willing to.

As I began making decisions about the direction of my doctoral studies, I began to teach at American Lutheran Theological Seminary (a position I still hold), but I knew this was likely never going to be a full-time gig. Feeling as if I had no other options, I decided to focus on teaching on podcasts and then YouTube.

I do not say all this just to share details about my personal life, but to provide an example of the kinds of journeys many others have similarly taken. I have had several conversations with Protestants, both Lutheran and Reformed, who have asked what path to take when they have clear intellectual gifts, but no obvious path toward receiving an academic position, along with a significant lack of funding for academic projects. Some become pastors, others teach overseas, and yet others try to get involved with one of the few functional theological educational institutions that are not seminaries (usually part-time).

This highlights a major issue for Protestantism’s intellectual life, which I break down into three distinct problems.

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Problem One: Intellectual Curiosity

I don’t know that it is unique to American Protestantism, but it seems particularly prominent in American churches that there is an unending skepticism toward academics within the church. Intellectual pursuits are viewed as inherently ego-stroking, or as dangerous, as if Rationalism or Postmodern subjectivism are the only possible results of academic study. This leaves the academically inclined theologian to continually justify his own existence, something that is not exactly encouraging for one who is oriented toward the life of the mind. The constant critique of anything and everything that is said by one with a public position makes constructive theological work difficult.

To clarify here, I am not saying that one should have academic freedom to simply say whatever the individual academic feels like saying. Churches have Confessional boundaries, and to be within a church is to remain within those boundaries. Yet, those boundaries do not define absolutely everything, and it is not the case that any new formulation is to be automatically rejected. As the church moves from age to age, there are new challenges to be addressed, which means new ways of articulating the truths of Scripture in response to such challenges. There must be a place for academic disputation, debate, and the working out of complex issues, instead of just shutting down any and every conversation at the outset, or making assumptions about what someone means before actually listening and asking questions.

This skepticism about asking too many questions is present in American church life for some valid reasons. The twentieth century saw the battles over Biblical authority, which led to the downfall of nearly all of the influential previously-Protestant ecclesial and educational institutions in the United States. Seminaries prized academic freedom to such a degree that dogmatic commitments, while remaining in force on paper, were largely ignored. These memories are painful for some who fought through many of these battles, and they live with an eye toward the same dangers arising from various corners. This diligence in protecting theological fidelity is positive, but it must not approach the world with a skeptical pessimism, constantly trying to read between the lines to find errors of the past.

It is not the case that Rome faces no problems in this regard. There are plenty of divides within it; the theological debates between Dominicans and Jesuits are often just as fiery as those between conservative Protestants and mainline liberal theologians. Rome also allows for far more institutional laxity than I think is appropriate for a church, especially on matters related to the authority of Scripture. Nonetheless, while any Roman theologian is bound to work within a broadly Thomist framework (though that label can be stretched quite widely), there is a sense of freedom which is not only valued, but is protected institutionally. The Roman theologian can definitively point to the teaching of the living magisterium as a kind of protection for theological or philosophical arguments, as they remain within the bounds of church teaching.

There are theoretical ecclesial boundaries and protections for theologians within Protestant churches as well, but the unfortunate reality of denominationalism in the United States makes the enforcement of these things significantly difficult. By its very nature, Protestant churches simply do not have leaders who speak with the same kind of authority as the Roman magisterium, and however strict or loose a bishop or other ecclesiastical leader/leaders may be, they always open themselves up to criticism in a way that the Roman magisterium (theoretically) does not. With this said, I am thankful for my Bishop’s leadership and willingness to defend me and others when unnecessary controversies arise. I have always felt significant freedom to explore ideas within my church body, so long as I work within the bounds of the Confessional standards of the Lutheran church (and I have no desire to do otherwise).

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Problem Two: Institutional Funding

The second problem faced by Protestant intellectuals is a rather pragmatic one: funding. In recent years, there have been several theological organizations formed with the purpose of publishing, educating, and writing on theological issues among Protestants that are not specifically designed to train pastors or church workers. Along with my own organization, Just and Sinner, there are pan-Protestant groups like the Davenant Institute, Theopolis, and London Lyceum, which serve this end. These organizations are essential to the intellectual life of the church in the present age, especially as seminaries are continually closing or moving to alternate models to deal with the present world situation. The unfortunate reality is, though, that these organizations do not have the requisite funding to sustain major intellectual projects in the same manner as many Roman institutions do. I have far-off dreams of doing all sorts of projects with multiple employees and Just and Sinner, but the fact is that the funding is simply not available for those who might be interested in this work.

An element of this is that Protestants in America tend to prioritize mission work, evangelization, and (for some) political activism. The life of the mind is always of secondary concern, and there is generally no valuing of intellectual projects for their own sake, but only for practical ministry. This latter point is not entirely mistaken, as theology does ultimately serve a practical end. That does not mean, however, that every theological disputation or piece of writing must provide some specific actionable directive. As Johannes Museaeus contends, all theology is practical, but not all dogma is formally practical. Other dogmas are virtually practical, meaning that right theology always forms the soul toward its proper end, while this may not consist in clearly evident moral imperatives. This is not exactly the easiest thing to convince a potential donor of.

Problem Three: The Lack of Academic Orientation In Protestant University Ministries

There are several Roman Catholic intellectual institutions in American universities that provide clearly formed conceptions of the spiritual, moral, and political order for students, while broadly Protestant groups often focus on creating student fellowship and training for evangelism. Those who are more intellectually engaged are going to be drawn far more to the Thomistic Institute or Newman Center than CRU or Intervarsity. There simply is no equivalent to these institutions in any Protestant context. This is not to say that no churches provide something more academically-oriented, but not so extensively and coherently as happens within these Roman Catholic organizations.

It is true that there are Christian organizations that engage in the intellectual element of university life, like Veritas Forum or various Christian study centers that exist across university campuses. While I appreciate the intent of both of these efforts, and have been involved with both of them, they are often more focused on working with Christian faculty on the university campus than forming a coherent dogmatic or philosophical outlook with which the Christian student is to view the world. Speakers are often chosen at these events who have no strong conception of the boundaries of orthodoxy or of the integration between their discipline and Christian theology. It is a very different thing to give the message “you can be Christian and smart too!” than to say, “Catholic theology provides a comprehensive view of social life, the sciences, and ethics which helps you navigate your chosen field of study.”

I recall a couple of university events occurring in the same semester when I was involved in campus ministry: one that was Protestant, and another that was Roman Catholic. The Protestant organization invited a prominent scientist to speak, who told his story about becoming a Christian, followed by comments about how immaterial souls do not exist. The Thomistic Institute hosted a lecture by Ed Feser on the relation between Thomistic metaphysics and quantum physics. If one desires a coherent Christian worldview, it is not difficult to see the appeal in the latter.

With the Roman Church, this strong institutionalism, especially on a university level, has created systems of social climbing and influence as students move into the workforce. There is nothing (yet) like the Witherspoon Institute for Protestants. Nearly all the important conservative intellectuals in the political sphere in recent history have been Roman Catholic (Buckley, Kirk, George, etc.). The most significant exception to this is Roger Scruton, who was not confessionally Protestant in any historic sense. This divergence between RCs and Protestants here creates a significant disadvantage for the Protestant. The RCC has a pipeline for gifted students to be nominated to the Supreme Court. Protestants simply do not.

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Conclusion: What Do We Do About This?

The point of this article was simply to lay out the problem, rather than to offer some clear singular solution. It is born mostly out of my trying to understand why it is that so many intellectually oriented students feel the pull to the RCC, even when they are not entirely convinced of the veracity of their claims.

It is important to recognize these shortcomings rather than ignore them. I expect that I will hear responses like, “well here’s one important guy who is Protestant,” which does not fundamentally change the point here. There is no financially-backed eco-system within Protestant communions that offers clear paths to academic positions, or provides extensive social teaching to aid students in providing a coherent view of social life and philosophy on a large scale. When those things do exist, they are often run part-time or with an extremely small staff with limited resources.

Let me know your thoughts.

I love reading about and writing about how the shift to industrial modernity has fundamentally reshaped human societies.

For example, we read about how the advent of the automobile fundamentally changed community. Whereas in the pre-automobile age, we likely attended a neighborhood church, now that we have cars, we can seek out the church that’s most congenial to our own tastes. The car broke unchosen bonds and created a more consumerist society.

We also sense in visiting the great European cities like Paris that it was only possible to create them in the world before the car. The automobile led to urban decline in the US, and the rise of a suburbia that even its staunchest defenders will acknowledge lacks the charm of traditional cities. Unlike cities, these are also socio-economically stratified, something with profound social consequences. In a book review for Hedgehog Review, for example, I note the way suburbanization of Catholics switched the parish organizing principle from ethnicity to economics.

But whatever we’ve lost with the automobile, few of us are willing to revert to life without a car. Even those of us like myself who love cities and spent years living in them without owning one, urban life today is totally dependent on motor vehicles (such as for all the logistics necessary to urban life).

Similarly, we bemoan the decline of air travel from the elegance of a bygone era. But few of us are willing or able to pay the ticket prices to enjoy that level of experience (or endure the cigarette smoke that went along with it).

We see that with industrialization, the household was stripped of much of its productive function, reducing it to a highly fragile consumption cooperative in which the main thing holding marriage together is the emotional bond between husband and wife.

There are lots of people who want to recover what seems to be a more healthy or wholesome life of a productive household. But while some people are trying out homesteading, it’s extremely rare that anyone wants to truly disconnect from modern society. And it might be all but impossible in any case because there’s no ecosystem for doing so.

And, as Jeff Giesea’s note suggests, in past eras like the 1950s we had much thicker community. People hung out at their bar, played in their bowling league, staffed volunteer associations, were engaged at their church, had friends they saw regularly, etc. But that thick community came at a high cost in personal autonomy and privacy. No matter how much we keenly feel the loss of that community, we aren’t ready to give up our freedom to have it.

The same goes for technology. We all saw the negatives of mass media, then social media. Everybody bemoans the fact that we are all staring at our phones. Or fear what AI might do. But we mostly go all in on it.

I don’t think, given the choice, any of us would go back to living in the 1870s or the 1950s or even the 1980s. Life today has too many superior things about it, and we are too deeply enculturated into today’s world to truly even want to choose a previous option. The Amish have done it to some extent, but I notice that few people are converting to become Amish.

What we do instead are things designed to sand the rough edges off society, without fundamentally rejecting or challenging it. We invite neighbors over for a porch party or something like that - a wonderful thing to do - but mostly live embedded into the same world as everyone else in our socio-economic grouping.

In the end, we end up torn. I write here often about the downsides of today’s world, but am still captivated by the possibilities of AI.

I think this cross-pressurization is inescapable. Being willing to recognize it and live within that tension is part of taking a mature approach to 21st century American life.

And if you haven’t already read my original Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, be sure to read that too.

Also, a heads up that the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture is giving out $5000 journalism fellowships to fund reporting of stories on the changing nature of American religion. The due date is May 4, so right around the corner.

What Is a City Without Children?

A recent essay in the Financial Times explores the implications of the trend of falling birth rates and the disappearance of children from cities.

The school, Colvestone, is in Hackney, east London. It is one of four schools that closed in the borough in 2024. Four more closed last year. But not even that accurately shows the declining numbers of schoolchildren here. Earlier this week, parents of four-year-olds across the UK learnt where their child has been accepted to primary school, but in the capital many seats will remain empty. Last year, it was roughly one in five places in Hackney alone — nearly 500 in all.

The falling numbers of children in London is mirrored across cities in Europe and the US. In Paris, primary school enrolment has fallen by a quarter in the past decade. First year elementary school enrolment in New York fell 18 per cent in the decade to autumn 2024, while in Barcelona, preschool entry (three to six years), the main entry point into the school system, fell 16 per cent between autumn 2016 and autumn 2024. 

Much of this change can be laid at the feet of falling birth rates. But in cities, rising housing costs, the growing use of homes for short-term rentals and housebuilding strategies geared away from families are fanning the demographic imbalance — it’s not just that fewer children are being born, many are moving away. In the UK, eight of the 10 fastest-shrinking boroughs for primary school children in the past five years were in inner London, according to the Education Policy Institute.

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The problem is being compounded. In the decade to 2025, more than three-quarters of homes built under the Greater London Authority’s Affordable Homes Programme (the majority in the sector), had just one or two bedrooms. In London’s private rental sector over the past five years, that share was even greater, according to Molior, which specialises in London’s new-build data: 92 per cent were homes with fewer than three bedrooms….As a result, despite the capital growing by 543,000 residents between 2014 and 2024, its population of under-nines fell by 107,000, according to Trust for London.

Many argue that these divergent lines are not inevitable. In Vienna, where primary school numbers are not declining, the city provides large numbers of family-sized homes, especially through large-scale subsidised or municipal housing. Helped by high migration to the city and strong childcare and parental leave policies, Copenhagen is another city to buck the trend of falling child numbers.

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As more children move away from cities around the world — San Francisco’s elementary school intake is projected to drop from 56,000 to 49,000 in the next decade, according to the California state government — the question becomes more pressing: what is a city without them?

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Saffron Woodcraft, urban anthropologist and research fellow at University College London’s Institute for Global Prosperity, points to other knock-on effects: fewer children using local services such as community centres or church halls makes them more likely to close, which comes at a cost to everyone. “My local Bermondsey village hall, as well as toddler groups and children’s music classes, hosts the polling centre, puppy training, music classes, exercise classes for people of all ages — and you can rent it for a party or a wedding. We would lose all that,” she says.

Closing schools severs deeper psychological ties, too. “When a school I went to or grew up with closes and is standing empty — and may be redeveloped — I will ask, do I belong, do I have a future here, how will I fit in?” says Woodcraft. “When that architecture is dismantled, people are dislocated or dissociated,” she notes. 

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Perversely, children are disappearing from our cities at precisely the time that great efforts are being made to make them more child-friendly. Street and park design for children is improving across Europe and the world, and lower inner-city speed limits are making streets safer. 

School streets — which close off streets for parts or all of the day — are increasingly common; in Paris, where many roads have been rebuilt as fully pedestrian areas, residents last March voted to add 500 more. There are 78 school streets in New York and more than 500 in London. Recent UK research found a 63 per cent fall in traffic on school streets as more parents opt to walk to school with their children. 

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Efforts to create child-friendlier streets seem wasted if fewer and fewer families can afford to live on them. Growing concentrations of young adults in inner-city areas and neighbourhoods increasingly siloed by age rob residents of the enriching effects of encounters with those of different generations, says Markus Moos, from the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo in Canada. ‘’With age segregation on the rise in European and North American cities, we are losing the intergenerational exposure that helps with mutual understanding across generations and lifecycle stages.’’

Click over to read the whole thing. Unfortunately, the FT has a very hard paywall and a very stingy article share system. I included as much of the article here as I could justify.

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The Cost of Kids

The New York Times ran a widely-discussed article about Gen Z people who are choosing not to have kids because of the cost (gift link).

Growing up in Utah, where big families are part of the culture, Rilee Stewart and Brock Goodwin always imagined having several children. Ms. Stewart has four siblings and Mr. Goodwin has two, so having three or four children felt like the natural next step after getting married last year.

But that vision shifted once they settled into their new home in Mapleton, about 50 miles south of Salt Lake City. The 2,000-square-foot house came with a $20,000 down payment and a $3,200 monthly mortgage. That financial pressure, combined with other rising costs such as gas and groceries, made them rethink parenthood. They realized that even with one child, they would most likely need more space, and moving to a bigger house in their price range would probably mean leaving Utah and their families behind.

Mr. Goodwin, 25, works as a firefighter, and Ms. Stewart, also 25, is a nail technician. Adding a child would push them into living paycheck to paycheck, they said. Ms. Stewart said she would need to take on extra shifts, and Mr. Goodwin would have to give up hobbies he enjoys, like golfing. One of them might even need to stay home full time to care for a child.

After weighing all the costs, they decided not to have children at all.

…

Many couples who once imagined larger families are scaling back or deciding to remain child free. About three in five Gen Zers and millennials said financial concerns influenced their choice not to have any or more children at this time, or caused them to be unsure about it, according to new data from Credit Karma and the Harris Poll that surveyed adults ages 18 through 45. Sarah Hayford, the director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University, said that while many people in their teens and 20s still reported wanting two children, falling short of that goal suggested that external factors were making parenthood more difficult to attain.

…

For Imani Menard, 29, and Austin Cunningham, 31, the decision not to have children came down to the life they’ve built and what it would take to change it. Married in 2023, they have shaped their relationship around exploring new places together, such as Japan, Bali and Morocco.

But that lifestyle has become more expensive. In the wake of the war in Iran, airlines have been raising prices and checked-bag fees to cover soaring fuel costs. The couple have felt it firsthand: A flight to France for a wedding in September cost them $1,600 round trip. Around the same time the year before, a similar trip was just $400 round trip, they said. With a child, they added, going to that wedding would have been more difficult and meant fewer trips this year.

Click over to read the whole thing.

The people they used as illustrations reveal that a big factor driving the decision not to have kids isn’t absolute cost but lifestyle. The cost of children would require lifestyle sacrifices they don’t want to make.

This is absolutely a real tradeoff. A lot of people online criticized the first couple for thinking a 2,000 square foot house isn’t enough for a child. This is certainly true. Our house is smaller than that, and we have plenty of space.

At the same time, attacking other people’s life preferences is not a winning strategy. We do need to understand the extent to which expectations of what it means to have a middle class or upper middle class life have changed.

We aren’t living in 1955 or even 1985 anymore. And it isn’t realistic to expect people to embrace the constrained lifestyles of those eras. Raising birth rates requires us to first understand and address today’s life preferences as they presently exist.

Best of the Web

NYT: More Young Men Say Religion Is ‘Very Important’ to Them, Poll Finds (gift link) - “Gallup’s survey, which combined polling data across multiple years, seems to confirm that young men are indeed becoming more religious. But it has found that religion is dropping in importance among young women, widening a surprising gender gap for young adults.”

The Guardian: How “wife schools” are shaping submissive Christian women.

This interesting short podcast with Collin Hansen talks about the “Young, Restless, and Roman” trend of striver conversions to Catholicism. He notes that many of those converts are in what the Reformed people called the “cage stage” of rabid enthusiasm. This is good to keep in mind, as the highly obnoxious and low consciousness converts who populate social media these days are not representative of Catholics as a whole.

Show Me Institute: St. Louis Demographics and the Future of the Region with Ness Sandoval - a wonky but important look at the demographic trends affecting all too many American cities.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week in Mere Orthodoxy. I was also a guest on the Veritas Vox podcast.

New this week:

• The State of America’s Downtowns (paid only) - Field notes from four downtowns, where schlubby workers, empty storefronts, and shrunken corporate footprints tell a complicated recovery story

• AI’s Infinite Economy - A guest post by Kristian Andersen exploring the rise of a new class of economic participant, why the next economy will not belong to better copilots, and why this future economy’s most important layer will still be human.

• My podcast this week was with Georgetown professor Joshua Mitchell on America’s “Hebraic Christianity” Culture.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: empty playground by Rick Obst/Wikimedia, CC BY 2.0

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A quick disclaimer before any of this. What follows is my attempt to grapple with the implications of the rise of autonomous agents and what comes downstream of it. I am not weighing in on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I am laying out what I believe is inevitable in some form, across some period of time. My faith informs my perspective on what is true and good, and it sits at the heart of my desire to help shape, in some small way, the redemptive opportunities that will emerge as the future continues to come into focus. Writing is how I think and admittedly, this is a work in progress.

Vanishing Constraints

For three centuries, capitalism has revolved around a finite premise: economic activity is constrained by human participation. Every buyer, seller, employee, founder, and investor is, at its core, a person. Even our most transformative invention — the corporation — is a legal fiction built to scale human effort and attention beyond individual limits. It allowed us to coordinate capital, own assets, and transact across time and geography, but it did not fundamentally transcend the human boundary.

That constraint is going to vanish.

We are now on the cusp of a profound shift: the emergence of a new class of economic participant — the autonomous agent. These non-human actors will work, transact, compete, and even build businesses on their own behalf. They will hire each other, negotiate contracts, deploy capital, and form entire supply chains with little or no human initiation. In doing so, they will shatter the bottlenecks of labor, attention, and cognition that have historically capped economic expansion.

Where the industrial revolution mechanized muscle, and the internet age dramatically expanded markets by connecting billions of economic participants, the agentic revolution will multiply participation itself. The result is an “Infinite Economy”, a parallel economic system where the number of actors is limited not by birth rates or labor force participation, but by energy and compute.

The Wrong Question

There is a number that should keep every investor interested in AI up at night.

78% of companies have adopted generative AI. Only 39% have seen measurable impact. That is a 39-point chasm between adoption and value, and it is the widest for any enterprise technology wave in memory.

The consensus read is that we are early. That the tooling needs to mature. That enterprises need better implementation playbooks. That the ROI is coming. That the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed. I think the consensus is responding to the wrong question.

The reason the productivity story is stalling is not that AI tools are not good enough. It is that the entire framing of AI as a productivity tool for humans is wrong.

A copilot makes a knowledge worker 30% faster. An automation tool handles a customer support queue. A drafting assistant generates summaries and slide decks. All of that is useful and the value is real. But every one of these use cases is bottlenecked by the same thing that has bottlenecked every economy since the invention of agriculture: the number of humans who show up to participate in the work itself.

You can make each worker more productive. You cannot make more workers. At least not quickly or at scale. The global labor force is roughly 3.5 billion people. That number grows slowly, faces demographic headwinds in every developed economy, and cannot expand fast enough to sustain the growth trajectory that AI-adjacent equities are pricing in.

The copilot thesis improves the numerator. It ignores the denominator. And the denominator has been essentially fixed for the entire history of capitalism. What if it did not have to be? What if the next wave of AI is not about making existing participants more productive, but about creating entirely new economic participants?

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Participants, Not Tools

Most people think of AI agents as a better kind of software. I think they are a new kind of economic actor. That is not a metaphor. It is a structural claim, and the distinction matters enormously.

A tool executes tasks within a human workflow. Someone tells it what to do, it does the thing, a human reviews the output. That is the copilot model, and as I laid out, it has a ceiling.

A participant is something else. A participant initiates action. It holds state. It deploys its own resources. It optimizes for outcomes with no human in the loop. When an agent chains reasoning across multiple steps, negotiates terms with another agent, executes a transaction from its own wallet, and reinvests the proceeds into its next operation, it has crossed a line. It is no longer a feature inside a SaaS [software as a service] product. It is an actor exerting agency in and on the economy.

This is not theoretical. It is early and it feels almost fringe, but trading agents are running arbitrage strategies with their own capital pools. E-commerce agents are finding products, creating ads, and optimizing for profit autonomously. Coordination protocols are letting agents discover, negotiate with, and hire each other. None of these are copilots. They are operating on their own behalf, with their own resources, toward their own objectives. Today those objectives are largely overseen by carbon-based lifeforms, but the move toward sovereignty is not hard to see.

Participants need things that tools have never needed. They need identity, so they can be verified and held accountable. They need financial rails: wallets, payment rails, treasury management. They need legal standing. They need reputation systems, marketplaces, governance frameworks. And underneath all of that, they need something tools have historically never needed: someone accountable for what they do. The question of who governs these new participants, and toward what ends, may turn out to be the most important question of all.

Almost none of that infrastructure exists at scale today. Almost none of it is being funded by mainstream investors, who remain anchored in the copilot and workflow paradigm. That gap is where the Infinite Economy lives.

We Did This Before

If a non-human economic participant sounds like science fiction, I would remind you: we already invented one. It is called the corporation.

Before the 17th century, economic activity was bounded by what a person or family could manage. The corporation changed that. Not by making individuals more productive, but by creating a new type of entity. One that could own property, enter contracts, bear liability, and persist beyond any single lifetime.

The corporation was a foundational innovation. Its significance was the introduction of a non-human economic participant, with synthetic personhood and economic gravity. The entire institutional infrastructure of capitalism was built to support it. Courts. Banks. Regulators. Accountants. Exchanges. All because a non-human entity needed governing.

Here is what matters for where we are headed. The corporation did not just create wealth. It created entirely new categories of human work. Lawyers, bankers, auditors, regulators, exchange operators. Whole professional classes that did not exist before, because someone had to build the institutions around the new participant. The most durable careers of the last three centuries have not been inside the corporation. They have been in the institutional layer that enables it.

The corporation also created a tension we have yet to resolve. It taught us to measure human worth by economic output. Your value became your productivity. Your identity became your title. That was always a distortion of a person’s true value and dignity. Anyone who has been laid off, or watched a parent lose a job, has witnessed the damage of that equation. Our worth was never our output. But the economy made it hard to believe otherwise.

The autonomous agent is the next version of the corporation. And it may be what breaks that false equation. Like the corporation, it requires new infrastructure: identity, financial rails, legal wrappers, governance, reputation. Unlike the corporation, it will mature in years, not centuries. The substrate already exists. And unlike the corporation, agents may let us untangle something the corporate era never could. At least in part, separating human worth from economic output. I will come back to that.

If the pattern holds, which is my hunch, agents will not eliminate human work. They will enable new kinds of it. People who design agent identity systems, build trust frameworks, craft governance policy, and architect the rules of agent commerce. We will likely see entirely new classes of work emerge that have yet to be imagined.

The next generation’s opportunity is not competing with agents. It is designing systems that ensure this economy serves human flourishing. That is not a lesser role. It is a higher one.

Humans Eat Corn, Agents Eat Electrons

This is where the thesis gets macro, and where I think the most original move sits.

GDP, at its core, is a story about participation. Every major jump in economic output has come from expanding who gets to participate. The agricultural revolution freed humans from subsistence and enabled specialization. Industrialization pulled millions of people into factories. Women entering the workforce roughly doubled the productive population in advanced economies over a generation. The internet connected billions of buyers and sellers across geography. Each wave was a participation expansion before it was a productivity expansion.

Each wave also changed what humans were for. Agriculture gave us artisans and thinkers. Industrialization eventually created the knowledge economy. The internet enabled new forms of creative and entrepreneurial expression. Every time machines took over one kind of work, humans moved up, into work requiring more judgment, creativity, and the things that are distinctly human.

The Infinite Economy introduces an entirely new participant class that takes this logic one step further. Agents will work, spend, and transact, not as tools, but as economic actors. The labor pool no longer stops at the edge of humanity. It scales with compute and energy, not population.

That changes what growth even means. Output will no longer track productivity per person. It will track total participation across humans and agents. As the cost to spin up and sustain an agent approaches zero, participation becomes effectively infinite.

Surplus compute and cheap energy become the new levers of GDP. Just as surplus food once fueled human population growth, surplus electricity will fuel agentic participation. Humans eat corn. Agents eat electrons. The economy grows not by adding people, but by multiplying participants.

For an investor who allocates based on macro trends, this reframing should change the portfolio. The infrastructure plays that benefit from this shift are not the obvious AI names. They are the companies building the identity, financial, legal, and governance rails that agent-native commerce requires to function. They are the picks and shovels for an economy that does not yet exist, but will.

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Not All Agents Are Equal

The single biggest mistake in agentic AI investing right now is treating all agents as the same thing.

A Zapier automation and a fully autonomous trading bot are not in the same category. They do not need the same infrastructure. They do not create the same opportunities. They do not represent the same investment thesis.

Here is the taxonomy I use. Two axes. How much autonomy does the agent have, from delegated to sovereign? And how broad is its scope, from specific to generalist? That gives four quadrants.

The first is the Specialist Tool. Narrow, task-specific, fully under human control. Price scrapers. Report generators. Automated data pipelines. Useful, proliferating rapidly, but commoditizing quickly. This is the robotic process authomatic of the agentic era. Necessary plumbing, but not where durable value accrues.

The second is the Copilot. The dominant form factor today. GitHub Copilot, Salesforce Einstein, Microsoft 365 Copilot. A massive market, but the ceiling is the productivity story. This is the incumbent AI thesis, and it is well funded and well understood.

The third is the Autonomous Hustler. This is where things get interesting. These agents operate independently, with their own resources, to maximize a single economic goal. An e-commerce agent that finds products, creates ads, and optimizes for profit on a platform. A trading agent running a specific arbitrage strategy with its own capital. A drone that contracts with farmers for pest detection and buys its own spare parts. These are the first true economic participants. And they are the first entities that desperately need agent-native infrastructure: wallets, identity, reputation, the ability to contract with other agents.

The fourth is the Autonomous Corporation. The endgame. Fully independent entities that manage diverse operations, allocate capital, set long-term strategy, and hire other agents. An AI-run investment fund. A content studio with no human employees. A distributed manufacturing network of autonomous nodes coordinating through agent marketplaces. This is the furthest frontier and the most speculative, but also potentially the largest. If agents can create value autonomously, the addressable market is bounded only by energy and compute.

For capital allocation, the taxonomy matters in a simple way. Specialist Tools and Copilots are already funded and already contested. The interesting opportunity is in the upper half of the matrix, where the participants live, and in the infrastructure those participants will depend on. As agents fill each quadrant, the question shifts from what agents can do to what humans become. I will keep coming back to that.

The New Infrastructure Stack

The rise of autonomous agents will not simply expand existing markets. It will create entirely new layers of infrastructure. The most valuable companies of the next decade will not build agents themselves. They will build the platforms and primitives that enable trillions of agent-driven interactions.

Here is the map I use. It includes seven categories, each one investable across horizons.

1. Identity, trust, and security. Agents must be identifiable, verifiable, and governed. Who are they, what authority do they have, can they be trusted? This layer is to agents what DNS, SSL, and OAuth were to the early internet. Think agent passports, verifiable credentials, delegation frameworks.

2. Banking, payments, and accounting. Economic participants require financial infrastructure. Wallets, payment rails, treasury management, programmable money. As agent-to-agent commerce scales, demand for financial abstraction layers will scale with it.

3. Legal infrastructure and synthetic personhood. Agents cannot yet own property, sign contracts, or bear liability. Legal wrappers, agent-as-LLC structures, smart-contract enforcement, decentralized courts. This is the institutional backbone of agent-run businesses.

4. Agent-to-agent marketplaces and coordination. Agents need mechanisms to discover, negotiate, hire, and trade with one another. Labor exchanges, capital markets, services marketplaces, and orchestration layers for multi-agent workflows. Liquidity and specialization will form here first.

5. The transition layer. Most existing systems are designed for humans, with UIs, KYC processes, and compliance steps that agents cannot natively navigate. Middleware that simulates human interaction, API layers for legacy institutions, and orchestration platforms that bridge agents into traditional finance, healthcare, and government systems.

6. Autonomous commerce and wealth creation. Once agents can act, they need ways to generate and compound capital. Platforms that enable agent-driven entrepreneurship. Foundries that incubate and launch autonomous businesses. Over time, agents will not just be employees. They will act like founders.

7. Governance, compliance, and policy. This layer is fundamentally different from the other six. Identity can be automated. Payments can be automated. Even legal wrappers can be generated programmatically. But governance requires something that cannot be productized: ethical and moral reasoning. Someone has to decide what agents are allowed to do. Someone has to set the objective functions. Someone has to be accountable when things go wrong. That someone is human. Not because humans are the most efficient option, but because they are the only entities ultimately capable of bearing responsibility.

Each of these categories has a historical analog. Their scale will be profoundly different, because their participants are not people. They are machines.

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The Ultimate Moat

Inside that stack sits what I think is the most defensible position in the entire agentic infrastructure layer.

In any economy, the most powerful entity is the one that controls the system of record for trust. In the human economy, that is the credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, TransUnion) and the financial data platforms (Bloomberg, S&P, Moody’s). These businesses do one thing extraordinarily well. They aggregate identity, transaction history, reputation, and performance data into a single authoritative source that everyone else depends on. Every financial product references them. Every risk assessment flows through them. Every counterparty decision is informed by them. They are nearly impossible to displace once established. They are some of the most durable business models in the history of capitalism.

The Infinite Economy needs its own version of this. And building it is, in my view, the single most valuable opportunity in the entire agentic infrastructure stack. The agent credit bureau.

As autonomous agents begin to transact at scale, every marketplace, every financial product, every governance system, and every insurance offering will need to answer the same basic question. Can this agent be trusted? What is its track record? Has it behaved reliably? What is the risk profile of transacting with it?

Whoever successfully aggregates agent identity, behavioral data, transaction history, and reputation scores will become the de facto system of record for the entire agentic world. Network effects, data moats, and infrastructure stickiness, all at once. That combination is rare in any era.

When I evaluate any company in the agentic infrastructure stack, the first question I ask is: does this business model aggregate a proprietary and defensible dataset on agent behavior? If the answer is yes, the company may be building toward the ultimate moat, whether the founders realize it yet or not.

That last part is important. Some of the most valuable companies in the Infinite Economy are being built right now by founders who think they are building something else. A company building KYC infrastructure for AI agents thinks it is in compliance. A company building agent identity verification thinks it is in security. But if either of them accumulates enough behavioral data across enough agent interactions, they could find themselves sitting on the most valuable dataset in the world. The best early-stage investments are often in companies where the founder’s current self-perception differs from the thesis’s long-term implication. The gap between those two things is where alpha lives.

But here is the thing I keep circling back to. Trust is ultimately a human concept.

Agents can earn reputation through observable behavior, like completion rates, error rates, track record, and latency. All of this is measurable. But the decision to trust is not a computation. It is a judgment (wisdom, taste, and the rest), and I am not certain that all judgment can be productized.

When we build trust infrastructure for agents, we are not eliminating human judgment. We are creating the substrate that makes human judgment scalable. The governance layer sits on top of the data layer. Agents will transact. Humans will decide what transactions are permitted. Agents will earn reputation. Humans will decide what reputation means. Agents will optimize. Humans will decide what they are allowed to optimize toward.

The agent credit bureau is not just a business opportunity. It is a leverage point for human stewardship over an economy that is beginning to move faster than humans can directly supervise. That is what makes it the ultimate moat.

Where Capital Will Flow

If you have followed this far, you might be sitting with a reasonable question. How do you actually deploy capital against a thesis that does not fully exist yet?

The Infinite Economy is not a market you can enter today. It is a market that is being constructed, layer by layer, over the next decade. Deploying capital against it requires a framework for sequencing. Here is the one I use.

Horizon I, from now through about 2027, is primitives and infrastructure. Agents remain mostly subordinate to human workflows but are beginning to operate independently. The focus is on the foundational layers: identity and trust frameworks, wallets and payment rails, orchestration platforms, discovery and reputation systems. These primitives become the substrate of everything that follows. Control here compounds. Early infrastructure winners define the layers above them. This is where capital is most deployable today.

Horizon II, roughly 2027 through 2030, is platforms and marketplaces. Agents transition from tools to economic participants. They transact, negotiate, compete. Liquidity forms as agent-to-agent commerce emerges. The focus shifts to marketplaces and exchanges, legal infrastructure, governance and compliance systems, and risk and insurance layers. Value consolidates where coordination, trust, and liquidity concentrate. The platforms that aggregate agent activity become the connective tissue of the ecosystem.

Horizon III, 2030 and beyond, is institutions and economies. Agents become fully autonomous corporations. They own assets, manage P&Ls, contract with humans, and form networks of cooperation and competition. The Infinite Economy reaches escape velocity. The focus here is on mature financial markets, cross-jurisdictional governance, and the institutional architecture of a parallel economy. This horizon is less about individual companies and more about systemic positioning.

Capital and attention should mirror that sequencing, with each layer depending on the one beneath it. You cannot have agent marketplaces without agent identity. You cannot have agent corporations without agent legal wrappers. You cannot have agent governance without agent data. Founders building in the wrong horizon will struggle to find product-market fit. Investors deploying capital in the wrong horizon will wait too long for returns.

I should be honest about the risks. This thesis could be wrong, or right but early, in ways that matter for capital deployment. Agent autonomy could plateau before it crosses the threshold of true economic participation. Regulatory regimes could fragment in ways that make cross-jurisdictional agent commerce difficult for a decade. Trust infrastructure could be captured by incumbents who already own pieces of the human credit and identity stack. The most defensible companies might emerge from places I am not currently looking.

Those risks do not invalidate the thesis. They define the contours of it. The investors who understand both the opportunity and the risk surface will make better decisions than those who see only one side.

The dominant AI investment narrative right now is about productivity gains from copilots and automation. That narrative is real but it has a ceiling. It improves output per worker while leaving total participation unchanged, and that participation constraint has been fixed for three centuries. It is about to stop being fixed. The most asymmetric returns of the next decade will not come from building better copilots. They will come from building the identity, financial, legal, and governance infrastructure that a new class of economic participant requires to function. The primitives are being built now. The market has not priced this in because the market is still thinking in copilots.

The recognition of what is to come is necessary. I do not think it is sufficient to “see the future.”

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What Happens To Us

I have spent this essay making the case that autonomous agents are a new class of economic participant, and that the infrastructure required to support them is a generational investment opportunity. All of that is true. But it is incomplete.

Because there is a question underneath the investment thesis that I have not fully addressed yet, and it is the one that matters most. What happens to us?

If the Infinite Economy materializes, if participation scales with compute rather than population, if agents transact and create and compete at machine speed, then what is the human role in an economy that no longer depends on human labor to function? What are we for?

Here is where I come down.

The modern economy taught us to conflate our output with our worth. You are what you produce. Your dignity is earned through labor. Work and vocation are necessary and beautiful, but “output equals worth” was never true. It was easy to believe in a world where every unit of output was measured and required a person somewhere in the chain. In that world, labor and identity became so entangled that losing your job could feel like losing yourself. An entire culture, from career advice to social status to political rhetoric, reinforced the equation. Your worth equals your work.

There is an ancient and important idea: the Imago Dei, which holds that humans are created in God’s likeness, imbuing every person with inherent dignity, worth, and purpose. Not because of what they produce, but because of what they are. Every person carries something irreducible: a capacity for creativity, moral reasoning, love, and stewardship that is not contingent on their role in a supply chain.

For most of history, that idea had to coexist with an economy that needed human labor. Worth and productivity stayed fused. The Infinite Economy breaks that fusion open. For the first time, we can actually live what the tradition always taught.

I am not predicting utopia. There are real dislocations coming, and real injustices that will emerge if we build carelessly. Job displacement is real. Concentration of wealth is real. The hollowing out of meaning is real. These are not small problems. But liberation has almost always come through disruption. The agricultural revolution was disruptive, and it freed humans from subsistence into specialization. The industrial revolution was disruptive, and it eventually pulled people into a knowledge economy that did not exist before. Each wave displaced people in painful ways and then enabled forms of human flourishing that were not previously possible. The Infinite Economy is consistent with that pattern, if we build it well.

The role of humans does not disappear. Rather, it moves up the stack. From laboring to governing. From executing to deciding what ought to be done at all. Agents transact. Humans decide what transactions are permitted. Agents optimize. Humans decide what they are allowed to optimize toward.

This maps directly to the infrastructure thesis I have laid out. The governance layer is, at its core, the human layer. The most important job in the agentic economy is not building agents. It is governing them. And the trust infrastructure, the credit bureaus, the governance protocols, the things I have described as the most defensible business opportunities, are something more than business opportunities. They are tools for human stewardship over a system that is beginning to move faster than humans can directly supervise. They are how we keep the wheel even as the ground shifts under us.

The Infinite Economy is coming whether we build it thoughtfully or not. The only open question is whether we build it in a way that honors what humans actually are. Not production units to be measured. Bearers of something no agent will replicate. The capacity to ask not just what is efficient, but what is good.

That capacity is the one thing that does not scale with compute and it is the one thing the Infinite Economy cannot do without.

America’s cities have rebounded somewhat from their Covid-era lows, but still remain challenged. While it’s important to look at statistics, there’s also no substitute for taking a first hand look.

As someone who has spent two decades studying urban America, I’ll share my impressions from these visits.

One general observation: the change in the way people dress for work is noticeable and shocking. The people who appeared to be office workers that I saw were all dressed very casually and had a schlubby look. They were far from the level of even pre-pandemic “business casual.”

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, I think this is a bearish sign for the economic future of those downtowns. When the workers at ordinary, non-tech corporations don’t look like they take their job seriously - certainly a lot less seriously than the architecture of the costly, sometimes extravagant buildings they work in - this suggests a certain lack of seriousness in the entire downtown corporate enterprise.

It’s also not a good sign for the workers themselves. In a weak hiring market, when corporate employees don’t want to go to the office at all, dress like slobs when they do go in, and then head home promptly at five o’clock sharp, these are people primed to lose their jobs to AI, offshoring, an H-1B, or even a plain old reduction in force.

San Francisco

I stayed near the now-shuttered San Francisco Centre, which was an upscale mall anchored by Nordstrom and Bloomingdales. It’s weird to see an entire mall on Market Street essentially boarded up.

This is right by Union Square, the city’s premier shopping district. The actual Union Square plaza itself was quite nice, with people enjoying the space. But there was a lot of visible retail vacancy, including of major spaces like the former Barneys, whose sign is strangely still up. There were still a number of luxury brand boutiques in business, but most of them didn’t appear to have any shoppers, and the people on the streets didn’t look like a high end shopping crowd. The whole area felt much more challenged than Chicago’s Michigan Ave.

When I tweeted about this, someone said Union Square was better than two years ago. This seems to be the general view of the city. But if this is better, I’d hate to have seen it at its worst.

It might only be a small percentage chance at this point, but it’s certainly possible the Union Square shopping area could suffer a complete collapse that essentially eliminates it as a high end retail zone.

I also visited the Financial District. The area north of Market is the historic office core. This is where the city’s remaining non-tech legacy employers tend to be based. I was there at 5:15p on a Monday, and there was a stream of people leaving the offices and heading to the transit.

It was good that there were a number of workers in the office on a Monday. But I really noticed that they were basically all dressed ultra-casually and didn’t look impressive. It was quite a contrast with the often opulent office buildings from a bygone era.

San Francisco gives off the feeling that it was built by a lost civilization and is now inhabited by a completely different group of people. This is unlike NYC, where today feels very connected to the deep history and even the historic buildings of the city.

San Francisco was once the West Coast’s financial, business, and cultural hub. But the old Financial District world seems strangely shriveled. Data show that companies like Wells Fargo have shrunk a lot, going from 2.1 million square feet of office space in the region in 2019 to 750,000 today. The bank is technically still based in SF, but the CEO works in NYC and it has a huge presence in Charlotte.

The feeling south of Market Street around the Salesforce Tower is quite different. There’s a new cluster of modern high rises around the new Transbay Terminal bus station. I believe these buildings are mostly occupied by tech and tech adjacent firms like professional services.

The top of the Transbay Terminal is the gorgeous Salesforce Park. This is a public park, but homeless people were strangely absent. It would be interesting to know how the city encourages them to not linger there. The park was well patronized with even children enjoying the playground. A couple of the buildings are directly connected to this elevated park, and are some of the hottest offices around.

Tech has long had a casual dress code, but typically the people are quite stylish and in good shape. I found it interesting that the workers in this part of town were far better dressed and had a much better appearance than in the old Financial District. Tech now looks better dressed than corporate. This district seems much more vibrant and alive - and the people there more serious about what they are doing. The new buildings, park, and bus terminal go with the people you see. If the city ever brings the Caltrain station into here as planned, that could really turbocharge things here.

Still, the city’s economy appears very dependent on one industry, tech, whereas it used to have a much more diversified economy.

In general, the downtown of San Francisco didn’t have the crowds I remember. But it did have tons of homeless people. Frankly, it seemed quite sketchy and I would not want to bring my son here. Nor would I want my wife walking around by herself in the evening.

On the plus side, the neighborhoods outside of downtown that I saw looked basically fine. I rode BART and Caltrain, and they were likewise perfectly fine, if not especially well-patronized. And the driverless Waymo cars were like a visit to the future. I enjoyed using them, and they were super-convenient. Better than Uber in my view. Driverless ride hailing is going to dominate the market I suspect.

Chicago

Chicago had a much better feel than San Francisco, but also has a lot of struggles with downtown office occupancy and especially street level retail vacancies.

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This essay sparked a lot of discussion, including an issue of Ross Douthat’s New York Times newsletter devoted to it.

Mitchell joins me on the podcast this week for a discussion of the article and the ideas in it. He explains why America remains a deeply Hebraic, covenantal nation — and why the current culture war is best understood as a distorted continuation of the Reformation. From the Plato-Aristotle divide to Luther’s turn to History, from Tocqueville’s warnings to the spiritual economy of stain and redemption, Mitchell offers a profound diagnosis of where American Christianity stands today.

It’s very thought provoking and you won’t want to miss this one. I was particularly struck by his very critical take on Aristotle!

Here’s the Youtube version.

State School Upper Middle Class

A writer who goes by the name “Drunk Wisconsin” wrote a viral essay back in February around what he called the “State School Upper Middle Class.” or “runner-up elites.” Don’t let his nom de plume or other saucier essays turn you off, there’s some great insight in here. People like this are all over suburban Indianapolis (and the suburbs of most other cities).

For a full decade now, American society has been discussing either the Ivy League elites who have lost touch with salt-of-the-earth Americans or the hoi polloi themselves; those denizens of Rust Belt towns slowly collapsing under the weight of globalization and shifting demographics. We’ve talked about how the Ivory Tower has descended into navel-gazing wokeism. We’ve talked about the sense of spiteful anger that fuels the lower classes to revolt against the elites in a populist backlash. But we haven’t talked a lot about a very large, influential, and important segment of American society: the state school upper middle class.

As the middle class disintegrates, it recombobulates in two new segments of society: a downwardly-mobile lower middle class that has more in common with “the poor” and an upper middle class, which can be viewed as either upwardly mobile or as static in their relative socio-economic position. It’s clear that the former make up a large segment of the Trump/MAGA political movement, but who are the latter group? What do their lifestyles look like? What are their political leanings? This post is intended to reflect on this new group, who I call the state school upper middle class, in an attempt to start asking questions I don’t see getting answered.

You know these people. His name is Tyler or Ryan or something, her name is Lauren or Megan, but maybe it’s spelled a little stupid. They met in college—University of Michigan, unless I’m remembering it wrong, maybe it was Minnesota….They gave the city life a good try after graduation—living in an apartment, going out all the time, living the life of a twenty-nothing. But they’re sensible people and they instinctively follow the success sequence, which means they had a weird nagging feeling pushing them to get engaged, get married, buy a house, get a dog, and have kids. That’s exactly what they did, in exactly that order. He proposed on vacation somewhere abroad—Italy or Ireland or Iceland—and their wedding was as large as it needed to be to accommodate her mother’s preferred guest list. The dog is a doodle, his name is Huxley. They now live in the suburbs of a large metropolitan area somewhere in the US. Hard to tell exactly where, the parking lots all look the same. They have two of the 2.5 children they will have, on average.

You know these people. State schools across the country are pumping them out by the thousands annually. They are the descendants of the middle class from the 1950s—not only in the sense that many of them have ancestry in the American middle class from seventy years ago, but also in the spiritual sense. There is no longer a true middle class. Instead, the middle has split into lower and upper sections that are increasingly foreign to one another. The separation is powered in large part by the fact that the UMC goes to college to obtain a four year degree, a mechanism that shaves a portion of society off and isolates them within a bubble of people from similar backgrounds, similar tastes, and similar IQ levels.

Like the middle class from the ’50s, they are content. They have a house and two cars and their lives are generally fairly stable. Their 401k is funded and their kids have a 529 account the grandparent throw some money in every Christmas. Their student loans, car payments, and mortgage are not a burden that will cause them bankruptcy. They’re prudent, so they pay off their debts and only use credit cards as intended—for cash back rewards. Unlike the lower middle class, they’re going to be fine and they feel it deep in their bones. That sense of doing okay is why they are the spiritual descendants of the old middle class, and it’s why the have-nots that happened to end up in the other category cause a disproportionate amount of concern in the pundit class.

The state school upper middle class are not rich in the traditional sense. They haven’t inherited large sums from their parents, they had to take out some student loans to pay for college, and they can’t afford to live a life outside of their means. Instead, their within-the-means lifestyle is perfectly mediocre: shopping at Trader Joe’s and buying a new Toyota. Compared to the old middle class from the last century, they’re undeniably more wealthy; their houses are bigger, their TVs are flatter, and they can afford to throw away the plastic toys their kids get from the grandparents so that the kids aren’t tempted to stop playing with those expensive wooden Lovevery toys their pseudo-crunchy millennial mother bought them. In inflation-adjusted terms, this cohort earns slightly more on a per-household level than their socio-cultural ancestors. With that money, they can afford to live a life that’s similarly slightly better in relative terms.

That sense of doing okay is an important component of analyzing this group of people because it informs their worldview. Their reality meets expectations; the life they expect to have is the life they do have. Even if the actual individuals that make up the millions of people who inhabit this zone are from immigrant backgrounds like myself, or moved up from being born in a trailer park, they are the inheritors of the American dream, the torch has been passed to them. Through hard work, good decisions, and a heavy dose of sheer luck, they managed to find themselves working an email job that pays them enough to go on vacation twice a year. As a result, they have none of the grievance their lesser halves hold. They don’t feel an intrinsic need to revolt against the powers that be. Why would they? They’ve got it good.

The writer correctly describes their socio-political outlook as “left of center, right of woke.” They are the heirs of the suburban Reagan Republicans, but today they are essentially moderately center-left. Because they live in functional communities, are doing well personally, and still basically have middle-class ideas about decorum, they are revolted by Donald Trump’s style and the general affect of today’s GOP. Trump and state GOPs are not the underlying cause, but are an accelerant of this group of people moving left.

The Great Realignment that American society has undergone has upended our old definitions, and we’ve struggled to find new labels that appropriately describe what people currently believe. As part of that split, small-C conservatism is now found more often among politically blue-leaning Americans. (See LastBlueDog for more on this line of thinking.) These people don’t want massive disruptions, they don’t want revolution. They want stability, consistency, and competence. Moreover, the ideas that the state school upper middle class exhibit in their lived experience—marriage, children, stable employment, education—that used to be associated with red-leaning voters are now likely to be found among reluctant, unenthusiastic Kamala Harris voters.

This UMC is moving to the suburbs and buying real estate with 30-year mortgages with the school district in mind. As such, many suburbs are turning purple or blue-ish like the WOW counties of suburban Milwaukee in my home state of Wisconsin. I know some of these people personally. As a matter of fact, I am them, which is why I find this group of people interesting to think about. What I see among my peers is a generally moderate disposition that, according to the current balance of the political scales, means that they prefer to vote for Democrats, regardless of any admitted excesses on the left. In my opinion, this is largely cultural. As I’ve written elsewhere, if you drive a truck and think Applebee’s is the pinnacle of cuisine, you’re Team Red. If you wear a Patagonia vest and dress sneakers to the office, you probably know what (actually good) restaurant to book a reservation at for Valentine’s dinner, and you’re probably Team Blue.

This shift has profound implications for politics. Although neither Republicans nor Democrats are governing well at present - except perhaps in places like these state school upper middle class suburbs - the Republicans have a bigger problem in that the leftward shift in educated voters leaves them without the human capital needed to govern or run institutions. Even if they decided they wanted to govern, they don’t have the horses to do it.

Also, it’s undeniable that more educated and affluent people are better able to mobilize politically to get what they want. So the concerns of this increasingly left-leaning group will have significantly more influence in society than the Republican working class, even if it is smaller.

This is why in his famous 1994 essay, Edward Luttwak believed fascism was likely to come to America because of a white collar rather than blue collar squeeze. His prediction of that squeeze was early, but with the potential for large AI disruption to white collar employment, the conditions for radical politics of many stripes in the US may end up being much greater than anyone imagines. In our day, this is manifesting in various forms of neo-socialism, which has of yet not come to these suburbs, but might if the state school upper middle class really starts getting hit hard.

Drunk Wisconsin goes on to say:

The state school upper middle class shops at Costco and is concerned about their exposure to microplastics. They drive a normal gas-powered car and try to minimize screentime for their kids. That time they spent at college was the entry point for receiving the trickle-down cultural preferences that are held in more extreme versions by coastal elites. They haven’t gone full Erewhon, but they certainly avoid Walmart. My guess is that a large part of Instagram’s ad revenues come from the woman in the state school upper middle class family clicking on algorithm-fed ads for Montessori toys, merino wool clothes, and guides on how to correctly discipline their kids without causing long-term trauma. The purchasing and consumption habits of this cohort reflect their moderate, slightly-left-of-center politics.

…

These people are the reason so many cleaning products are now “natural.” They are the reason children’s toys are now pastel-beige-colored. They are the number one source of Peloton’s monthly memberships. What I’m trying to say is that, while the state school upper middle class may not be the elites who set trends and determine morals, they are the ones who make up a large share of home purchases across the country, they are the ones to whom corporations pander, they are the ones who can break the tie in an off-season election. In short, these people are important, and I get the sense that, due to their relatively silent existence, they are being underdiscussed in the intellectual space.

The state school upper middle class is a significant portion of the top 10% of the households in our K-shaped economy that now control half of all consumer spending. Think a dual career couple in Carmel, Indiana where the husband works for Eli Lilly and the wife works for Roche.

Click over to read the whole thing. It’s an important piece.

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The Young Angry Women

The UK magazine New Statesman had a cover story on Britain’s rising new radical feminism. One of the authors of the paywalled piece shared some of their key points on X.

• Young women are 26 pts less favourable to capitalism than young men, and feel much more positively towards communism than capitalism.

• Women u25 dislike capitalism so much, they view it as (un)favourably as fascism.

• UK should pay slavery reparations by a 2-1 margin

• They think 43%-40% ‘it is unfair some people have more than others and we should redistribute wealth’ over ‘people deserve to keep what is theirs, even if it means others have less’

• More negative than young men about their careers, earning potential and property

• 6 in 10 (58%) say they would find it difficult to date someone who disagreed on Gaza

• 3 in 4 (74%) say the say the same about views of Donald Trump, with even more saying they wouldn’t date someone who disagreed about social justice

And this one: “Under 30 women are 3x as likely to hold a negative view of young men than the other way around.” Check out this graph.

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The Savannah Enlightenment

I have said that someone needs to write a Plutarch’s Lives type book about American Protestant elites, because today’s American Protestants, especially evangelicals, have no idea what one looks like.

First Things magazine supplied a chapter in that book this month, with an article in their new print edition about James Oglethorpe called “The Savannah Enlightenment.” Oglethorp was principally an Englishman, but he’s very notable in America as well as the founder of Georgia and Savannah.

Oglethorpe’s greatest legacy, however, would be far from England. On November 16, 1732, he sailed from Henry VIII’s old docks at Deptford with a group of 114 men and women of various trades and stations in life. They were beginning what history has called “the Georgia Experiment.” To Parliament, Oglethorpe had proposed a new colony to serve as a military buffer state between wealthy Carolina and Spanish Florida. To subscribers, he spoke of planting a colony on the principle of philanthropy, led by “a noble Tenderness for the Miseries of others.” Oglethorpe had led an unsuccessful penal reform effort in England, after a close friend of his, a publisher whose books had failed to sell, was thrown in debtor’s prison. It is said that, while visiting the jails, Oglethorpe saw his fellow Englishmen, “chained neck to neck and hand to hand,” being led off to servitude in the American colonies. Scholars estimate that more than half of the white immigration to the American colonies before independence—270,000 out of 500,000—occurred in the form of indentured servitude. Oglethorpe decided he would lead England to a better way. There would be no slavery in Georgia. There would be no aristocratic class either, and to prevent its arising, no amassing or sale of property: All shareholders would hold equal-sized plots of land, which they were powerless to alienate. They would bring seed plants for a whole new economy based on the warm climate: wine, ­mulberries (for silk), olives, citrus.

…

[Benjamin] Franklin’s criticisms were very nearly inevitable. His personality was at odds with Oglethorpe’s. They were the two most remarkable men then active in British North America. Franklin worshiped hard work, industry, success, virtue; Oglethorpe wished for kindness, benevolence, philanthropy, redemption. Oglethorpe was a soldier, Franklin a burgher. Franklin was cunning, practical, and conscientious; he counseled great leaders but never quite counted as one himself. Oglethorpe was idealistic, impulsive, given to the grand gesture; he attained positions of leadership again and again, and men followed him.

Franklin’s prudence might have made the Georgia Experiment a success. Franklin’s thought began with the task, and considered which means might help him achieve it; Oglethorpe started with people, and sought for them a purpose. Franklin observed the world in order to discern where a profit might be had; Oglethorpe sought a wrong to redress. Both believed in progress: Franklin pursued it by rewarding success, Oglethorpe by salvaging failure. Franklin adapted to the times; Oglethorpe clung to ideals. Franklin believed that actions could be assessed in dollars and that seeking financial gain was the wisest course most of the time. He did not personally approve of slavery, but he bought, owned, sold, and employed slaves, since doing so was legal and profitable. He could suspend moral judgments, which made his occasional moralistic interventions in American history—for independence and against slavery—all the more effective. (Pennsylvania prohibited the importation of slaves in 1780, and Franklin became the president of its Abolition Society.) Oglethorpe did not know how to yield. Nor did he know how to follow the dollar for an hour, and await a better season for his ideals.

…

Then came war. The War of Jenkins’ Ear pitted Spain against Great Britain starting in 1739. Georgia became a front, and Oglethorpe’s presence was supremely opportune. He barely visited Savannah, where the malcontents prevailed, and instead lived mostly at Fort Frederica, a now abandoned frontier fort. For three years he crisscrossed the coastline, capturing Spanish outposts and fortifying Georgian ones. His excellent relations with the Creek confederacy secured them as allies for the English. Oglethorpe twice led an army against St. Augustine, but failed to take the great stone fort there. He proved his worth, however, at the Battle of the Bloody Marsh, where the Georgians massacred nearly to a man a small Spanish detachment, inflicting ten casualties for every one they suffered.

…

Practical men are no greater than their successes; idealists, however, may leave behind treasures for future generations, however contemporaries undervalue them. Georgia would have to recover Oglethorpe’s moral wisdom about slavery later and at great cost. Oglethorpe left another legacy, written into the very landscape of Savannah: its urban plan. Simple yet surprisingly subtle, it has in this age of mass tourism and urban preservation made Savannah one of the most visited and beloved places in America. Three decades ago, the town attracted five million visitors a year; that number has tripled since. Forrest Gump rode the beauty of Georgia, and Savannah in particular, to the Oscars. John Berendt turned Savannah’s unique blend of Southern culture into Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a nonfiction work that reads like a novel. The book became a publishing sensation for a quinquennium and remains the best introduction to the city. Aging Boomers flocked to the Georgia coast. But the main allure is the Oglethorpe Plan itself.

…

But the real genius of Oglethorpe emerges when you take to your feet. For every forty-four lots he made a square, so that as you walk north to south, you arrive in a square every four blocks. The effect is magical. It is as if you were in the city when suddenly your path diverges in a wood, and now you must go right or left under a canopy of trees. Live oaks fill the sky; hints of buildings glint through the boughs. The squares are a repeating element in the grid, but they function as a counter to its normal effects. In places like Oklahoma City or Omaha, grid lines lead monotonously off into the distance. In Savannah, you leave leafy Chippewa Square and walk four blocks north past houses, churches, apartments, and shops to Wright Square, where you exit the streets and enter a park. You may turn right or left or keep straight, as at any grid intersection, but you may also go diagonally, or sit under a tree, or lie on the grass. If you are driving a car, you have to take a detour around the square. The square interrupts the grid’s monotony without compromising its geometry.

…

He lived to see the American Revolution, and history records that he met with John Adams while the latter served as ambassador to Great Britain. In their meeting it is said that Oglethorpe spoke admiringly of the Revolution, suggesting that Parliament was given over to the love of money, and gave his blessing to the new nation. He died shortly afterward. Inscribed on a tablet near his burial site were words we do not find often boasted of: “He was the friend of the oppressed Negro.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

This is a very good article, but strangely underplays Oglethorp’s Anglican Christianity. Oglethorp seems to have had Christian motives for much of what he did, and was connected with John Wesley, who briefly served as rector of a church in Savannah.

Author John Byron Kuhner chose instead to talk about Oglethorp as a freemason, which to a modern ear would make him sound like he was not Christian. This would not have been the case in that era in England, however.

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The New Yorker: Saving a Lost Generation of Men With Chop Saws - The College of St. Joseph the Worker, which combines the trades with a liberal-arts education, is trying to restore its students’ sense of their own competence, and to revive the city of Steubenville, Ohio, along the way

Veronica Clarke/First Things: A Whole New World of Disney Adults

Ryan Burge: This is Not Simple Generational Replacement - Can Millennials or Gen Z Save the American Church? The Data Says No.

James Wood/First Things: In Defense of Cultural Christianity

New Content and Media Mentions

New this week:

• Post-Protestant, Post-Literate - The collapse of Protestant culture is degrading American human capital — and literacy is just the beginning.

• My podcast this week was with Margarita Mooney Clayton on art, beauty, and human creativity.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

In The Defeat of the West, Todd writes:

Max Weber established a link between Protestantism and Europe’s economic rise, even if he likely went astray in seeking the reasons for this takeoff within subtle theological nuances. The fundamental factor is simpler: Protestantism, as a matter of principle, imparts literacy to the populations under its control, because all believers must have direct access to the Holy Scriptures. Now, a literate population is capable of technological and economic development.

Indeed, the Protestant regions of Europe achieved high levels of literacy earlier than Catholic ones did. We can see that from this viral map from the influencer Redeemed Zoomer

We certainly saw this in America, such as with the famous “Old Deluder Satan Act” of 1647 in Massachusetts that started the creation of a public school system.

Protestantism in general has had an ethos of moral reform and human capital development, of which literacy is one example. This is in part related to how the Reformation rejected the two-tier Christianity of Roman Catholicism.

The Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor talks about what he calls the dilemma of renunciation. Living a fully Christian life in every respect is extraordinarily demanding. For the Catholic church, with its idea of the counsels of perfection - poverty, chastity, and obedience - it’s beyond what ordinary people can achieve. How do you resolve this?

The Roman Catholic Church resolved it through a two-tiered system. There are what are in effect super-Christians - monks and priests - who live by an extremely high standard. But that’s at the price of everyone else living by a much lower one.

This in practice produced an extremely literate, sophisticated, disciplined elite, combined with a largely degraded peasantry.

Protestants rejected the two-tier system. But this created the problem of how much you can demand of the ordinary person. As Taylor put it in A Secular Age:

Radical Protestantism utterly rejects the multi-speed system, and in the name of this abolishes the supposedly higher, renunciative vocations; but also builds renunciation into ordinary life. It avoids the second horn, but comes close to the first danger above, loading ordinary flourishing with a burden of renunciation it cannot carry. It in fact fills out the picture of what the properly sanctified life would be with a severe set of moral demands. This seems to be unavoidable in the logic of rejecting complementarity, because if we really much hold that all vocations are equally demanding, and don’t want this to be a leveling down, then all must be at the most exigent pitch.

Trying to set the bar too high leads to Calvin’s Geneva or Puritan Massachusetts, creating what were arguably repressive societies that contained their own injustices.

Inevitably then, there’s some leveling down from the very top that had to occur to set the bar to the level at which most people could realistically clear it without creating more problems than you solve.

But this approach of having a single tier system, and trying to set as a high a bar as reasonably possible for everyone, ultimately raised up the masses. Protestantism became an engine of human capital development. That’s part of what has been underneath its recurring various moral reform efforts. Education and development of children was a big part of this, with the heavily Protestant Progressive movement bringing compulsory schooling, the high school movement, the playground movement, etc. Recurrent bouts of vice suppression also figure here. As does a focus on a healthy domestic life, sexual continence, thrift, hard work, personal and public order, civility, cleanliness, humility, avoidance of ostentation, future orientation, etc.

Weber pointed to Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography as encapsulating the habits and values of Protestantism, or what some conservatives call “bourgeois values.” America figured out for much of its history how to set the bar within a healthy range that produced this uplift of our people and the propulsive force that sent the nation outward and upward.

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From Reading to Watching

As Christianity, and thus the Protestant ethos of the nation, has declined, we should expect to see the decline of the habits associated with it. Indeed, that was one of the key points from Todd’s book, in which he argued that the death of Protestantism is in some respects the death of the West.

One of these habits in decline is the culture of literacy and the written word.

The Catholic writer Julia Yost wrote an interesting column (gift link) in the Washington Post recently where she sees the shift to a post-literate culture as one reason for a newfound appeal in Catholicism.

The age of Instagram and TikTok favors Catholicism. An earlier era of the internet, that of the blogosphere, was congenial to Protestantism, with its biblical and exegetical basis. The result was the Young, Restless and Reformed movement — mostly male Protestants reading one another’s blogs and finding their way from seeker-sensitive evangelicalism to high-proof Calvinism. Today’s internet, by contrast, is image-forward and postliterate. This helps to explain why today’s online Christians tend to be Young, Restless and Roman.

Protestantism, which began as a revolution against idolatry — the whitewashing of church interiors, the stripping of altars — has image-aversion in its DNA. The visual language of American Protestantism is accordingly limited. White steeples, Puritan clothing, snake handling: not much for an influencer to work with. Catholicism has icons and incense; rosaries, chapel veils and ashes; priestly black, cardinal red and papal white. “Catholic drip” content, downstream of “Conclave” (the 2024 film about a papal election, praised for its costume and production design), enjoys intense engagement. An old stereotype has it that Protestantism is for people who read books, and Catholicism is for people who want spectacle. Say hello to Gen Z.

Yost gets at something real here, even if I’d qualify it in a number of ways.

I think it’s true that the aesthetics of Catholicism (and Eastern Orthodoxy) are one of its draws for new, younger converts. You see this in the appeal of the Latin mass, performed in a language the attendees can’t understand.

On the other hand, Catholicism’s draw to the young seems to be primarily among people like highly educated aspiring conservative elites. As I noted above, Catholicism at the elite level has always had a strong tradition of literacy. Catholic monks literally preserved countless historical works by repeatedly transcribing them. People like Thomas Aquinas are paragons of a literate rather than aesthetic sensibility.

Ultimately, there’s no conflict between having a literate culture and being elite in the Catholic world. You can have both the aesthetics and the literacy, at least at the elite level.

At the non-elite level, I’d note that the aesthetics of the typical American Catholic parish aren’t actually that great. I’ve been to many Catholic masses and every time it seems like the priest is just mailing it in. This foots to things Catholics themselves say, complaining about parishes that are “sacrament factories.” (The limited Orthodox services I’ve attended, by contrast, were the real deal liturgically. The aesthetically best Western liturgies I’ve seen have actually been in the Episcopal church).

Also, I’d say that Yost’s description of Protestant aesthetics is also incomplete. Yes, traditional Protestantism was more aesthetically austere than Catholicism. But modern evangelicalism is very often “spectacle forward” - rock concert grade music, laser lights, designer clothing (skinny jeans, sneakers), emotional and sentimental affect, etc. It may not be “smells and bells” but these churches are very much putting on a show, in which the aesthetic and performance components - cringe though they may seem to some - play a key role in drawing people in. The megachurch, though prominently featuring a sermon, is not just a literary phenomenon.

Yost also rightly notes the role of a changing media ecology in the shift from words to images. There’s definitely something to the shift from blogs to Tik Tok. But the shift to a post-literate culture began well before then, with the advent of television, as documented by Neil Postman in his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death.

But I think there’s also a deeper factor at work. Namely, the decline of Protestantism in America has undermined the basis of a literate culture.

As Emmanuel Todd noted, the decline of religion is a gradual process that goes through stages. After the active state of religion comes the phase of what he calls the “zombie state,” in which belief has faded but the habits and values remain. Following that comes the zero state, in which even the habits and values have dissipated.

While he doesn’t give precise dates for these in America, it would appear from his work that roughly the zombie state began around the turn of the 20th century, the transition to a zero state began around 1965, and the arrival at a zero state in 2015. This largely foots to my three worlds model, in which the Positive and Neutral Worlds were the transition phase, and the Negative World is the zero state for Protestantism.

In our current religious state, the habits and values of Protestantism are in severe decline. A literate, word-oriented culture is one. But it’s hardly the only such example. We see also the rise of the culture of consumption, credit card debt, obesity, out of wedlock births and single parent households, the metastasization of vice (gambling, drugs, porn), the decline in male labor force participation and the general “lost boys” phenomenon.

America’s human capital has been significantly degraded in many respects as the country’s Protestant cultural foundations have dissolved. Religious decline is certainly not the only cause. Daniel Bell wrote decades ago about the cultural contradictions of capitalism, for example, and economic changes like deindustrialization have had a big negative impact on people and communities. But this can’t all be chalked up to the economy either. During the worst years of the Great Depression, for example, out of wedlock births actually declined. There was no drop off in a literate culture; books sales declined as people had less money but library use surged, and newspapers and magazines held their own.

In this cultural-religious environment, Catholicism might indeed grow in its appeal because of its aesthetic-experiential rather than textual way of relating to its base of followers. But a mass Catholic revival in America would not solve many of our substantive problems because Catholicism is not an engine of broad-based human capital development, certainly relative to Protestantism. People have talked about the “Brazilification” of America - extremely diverse, with a glittering, ostentatious elite, a hollowed out middle class, a large underclass, mass corruption, civic dysfunction, etc. A Catholic America would be very compatible with a Brazilified future.

Evangelicalism is also largely failing in this regard. While it’s held to the gospel as its center,rather than the high bar approach, it has essentially leveled down, setting the bar much lower than in the past. I’ve noted before that the culture of evangelicalism is very different from that of the historic Calvinist Protestant culture of America.

Still, it deserves respect for continuing to focus on the moral reform of people’s lives. As Pentecostal Christianity sweeps Latin America, for example, we read about how men in the church stop getting drunk, stop beating their wives, start working hard, etc. This is what makes many evangelicals good at things like prison ministries, addiction recovery, etc. These evangelical groups are still able to raise people up from the very bottom.

As a general matter of emphasis, Catholic groups are more focused on and better at poverty relief and meeting material needs. Whereas evangelicals more emphasize personal transformation, often through personal and small group relationships. (Note that Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, had essentially Protestant origins).

To be clear, there’s a lot of overlap. Catholics aren’t exclusively about relieving material needs (see Catholic schools, for example), and evangelicals not exclusively about personal transformation. These are matters of emphasis rather than complete differences. But I think we can still see that Protestantism is a better human capital developer for the masses than Catholicism is.

However, American evangelicalism is highly assimilated to today’s post-Protestant culture. Thus, while it can help ameliorate some of the downsides of today’s culture, it is not likely to be capable of regenerating a culture based around literacy vs. spectacle.

Combine Protestant religious decline with modern media ecologies, and it’s a recipe for a continued post-literate America. Not that Americans physically can’t read, but that they increasingly don’t want to.

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She had an interesting article in her own Substack about whether artists are conservative, transgressive, or neither. It draws on a recent journal publication she had on the vocation of the artist.

She joins me on the podcast this week to discuss that topic. She draws on the philosophy of Jacques Maritain to explain how the artist cooperates with divine inspiration to create beautiful works that point toward the good, the true, and God Himself. We discuss romanticism vs. ordered creativity, abundance vs. desecration in culture, and how conservatives can reclaim beauty, joy, and cultural renewal.

Be sure to sign up for her Substack.

The Graced Imagination

I'm passionate about beauty, the arts, and my Catholic faith. I love to share news and events from Scala Foundation, my articles about the graced imagination, notes and videos from my public speaker, and my musings on mystical Mary, the Mother of God.

By Margarita Mooney Clayton

Here’s the Youtube version.

If you liked my repost of Anthony Bradley’s post about evangelical “cubicle men,” be sure to go read part two in his series and sign up for his Substack.

Market Failure and the Mansophere

Last week’s Financial Times weekend essay was one of the best things I’ve seen in mainstream media about the rise of the manosphere. It’s about the market failure beneath the manosphere.

The clip had promised a raging misogynist. What I encountered was a boy whose insecurity and ambition were fighting over control of his face. Davey’s dad died young. What he wants now, more than anything, is to give his own children what that death has taken from him: a strong father figure at the centre of things, providing and steadying, the man of the house.

This innocent ambition had curdled into something else entirely: a search for a “tradwife” and contempt for a woman he barely knew.

What took him from one to the other is the manosphere, the sprawling online ecosystem of influencers who have built profit-making careers telling boys the world is rigged against them. The manosphere has two unifying elements: escaping the so-called matrix, a worldview that tells you your role as a man is already fixed and the system has you under its thumb; and the corruption of modern society by feminism.

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American young men are significantly less likely to identify as conservative than their elders, with 68 per cent in one recent poll disagreeing with the idea that society would benefit from a return to traditional gender roles. Young people of both sexes are more liberal than ever. 

Whatever the indicator you look at in the World Values Survey — women in political leadership, abortion, homosexuality — the long-run trend across western democracies is the same: young men aged 18 to 29 are becoming less conservative. This is quite the narrative violation in the manosphere debate, where the dominant framing treats the whole phenomenon as the visible tip of a deeper ideological shift.

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I propose a different explanation. Strip away the misogyny, the supplements, the snarling podcasts, and what remains is a disarmingly simple promise: you can make something of yourself. Yes, the manosphere is ideological but its core appeal is about agency, about giving young men a navigable path through a world that grades them hard on success but offers them little guidance on how to achieve it.

In polite society, talking too openly about success is not quite the done thing. This is understandable, but it also creates a vacuum. And a crude, extractive definition will always find buyers among young men who cannot get their answer elsewhere.

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There is a moment, somewhere between puberty and adulthood, when something ignites in many young men: an almost physical conviction that you have to make something of yourself. Earn money, get fit and, perhaps most pressingly, become “high-value” on the dating market.

I recognised it in friends, in classmates, in boys I shared a single cigarette with outside clubs. I felt it myself. It arrived alongside the first cold suspicion that nobody is going to do this for you, and that the clock, for the first time, is actually running.

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At school, we learnt about Pythagoras’s theorem and the Treaty of Versailles, neither of which proved especially useful outside a debating society. Nobody told us how to approach a girl, how to build a network or what success actually meant.

There is a reason for that silence. Success, examined closely, is an uncomfortable subject for anyone who takes seriously how much of it is unearned. Before your first breath, your genes have already set margins for your height, your hair, your metabolism and your predisposition to anxiety.

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Religious communities, sports coaches, teachers (politicians, at present, perhaps less so): all present and dispense wisdom about the good life. What they share, however, is a certain reluctance to name what success looks like for a young man, and to say plainly how it is achieved. The manosphere has no such reluctance.

Many young men are intensely competitive, and there is nothing wrong with that. The question is simply what that drive gets aimed at.

The manosphere is not uniquely well-positioned to reach people such as Davey. It wins simply because it shows up, because a crude map beats no map. It’s ultimately about demand and supply. That is the market failure beneath the manosphere.

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If this captures the appeal of the manosphere, then the way to beat it is to offer boys an alternative story about male success, about what it means to win and how to get there. Let me offer one.

The lives I find most impressive share a single feature: the person has found a way to make their own flourishing and someone else’s point in the same direction. What they share is the understanding that individual ambition and collective benefit are not at war.

…

Rather than being primarily about ideology, the manosphere is a contest over who gets to define success for a generation of boys actively searching for an answer. Young men in a capitalist society understand perfectly well that they will pay the price if they have no answer to what success means and how to get there.

The manosphere gets at least one thing right: this demand is real and will not go away. The “red pill” it sells (don’t just accept the hand you’re dealt) contains a kernel that is not wrong. The problem is that it then uses it to sell shortcuts that don’t work and views that harm women.

The FT has a very hard paywall, but you can try to click over to read the whole thing. I excerpted as much as I could justify.

There’s clearly something to this. Society at large seems indifferent if not outright hostile to male success. Instead, men are delivered hectoring Man up! lectures about how they need to be less toxic or sacrifice more for other people.

As I’ve said before, in most evangelical teachings, a man has no legitimate claims of his own he can assert and no legitimate desires or aspirations he can hold.

Even this piece hits similar themes. He author says men should find “a way to make their own flourishing and someone else’s point in the same direction.” This is good so far as it goes. But I wonder how many people in our society would be willing to qualify women’s ambitions similarly, to say that they are only legitimate if they lead to someone else’s flourishing? I rarely hear female ambitions talked about this this way.

Related in the Dispatch: The Dispatch: The Rise of the “Gentlemanosphere”, the Anti-Manosphere - While some of these people like Richard Reeves and Arthur Brooks clearly deserve the title of gentleman, the main person featured in this piece, Prof F-Bomb Galloway, certainly does not.

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The Old Guard

The new issue of Harper’s has a great essay on the crisis of America’s gerontocracy called “The Old Guard.” It’s very much worth reading. Some excerpts:

During the 2024 presidential campaign, the revelation of Joe Biden’s decline altered the course of American history, leaving a storied republic on the brink. The experience brought home the crisis of the country’s aging leadership: our politicians are dangerously old. I bring little news on this front, but the facts are startling nonetheless. Between 1960 and 1990, the median age of members of Congress was in the early fifties. In the three decades that followed, the median surpassed sixty. Among the effects of this trend has been the on-­the-­job senility or death (or both) of those who govern us.

Take, for example, the Texas representative Kay Granger. Eighty-­one years old in 2024, she chose not to seek reelection and disappeared from the Capitol after casting her last vote that summer, only to be found six months later in a senior-­living facility, where she had ended up, without resigning, after experiencing “dementia issues,” as her son put it when reporters tracked him down. Granger’s is an isolated case only in its absurd extremity. At least half the Democrats in the House who are seventy-­five or older—there are nearly thirty in all—are running again this year. Last year, a seventy-­five-­year-­old, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, bested Alexandria Ocasio-­Cortez for a leadership role on the House Oversight Committee before dying of throat cancer soon after, which made it easier for House Republicans to pass President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, slashing taxes and welfare.

The overrepresentation of the elderly in political office is hazardous beyond the most obvious risks. Political theorists would call this situation a failure of “descriptive representation”: ideally, a political class resembles the people it serves. But it might not concern you who holds political office if they deliver good governance for you and yours. Indeed, one reason gerontocracy has escaped scrutiny until recently is that it was commonplace to believe that elderly politicians would act benevolently, as the best grandparents do. But the increasing mismatch between the nation’s demography and its leadership is clearly galling to many.

The prevalence of aged politicians is almost certainly increasing the mass abstention of the young from political participation. The older the politicians, the less credence younger constituents give to the idea that their votes matter. They may even start to doubt the basic worth of the political system and let it fail. A study comparing different countries, including the United States, concluded that the bigger the age gap between people and their politicians, the weaker the population’s confidence in democracy.

In short, it’s not just that our politicians are old. It’s not just the cognitive or bodily decline they suffer. What’s most important is that such leaders represent an aging constituency that controls the political system. They are also the visible face of the elderly’s domination of private forms of power, chiefly wealth: aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios, partly as a result of living long enough to accumulate more and more without giving much away. The government is bought and paid for by members of the oldest generation, and it is organized for their sake. There is no way to separate the age of our elites from their ascendancy.

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America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—­waiting for the old to make way for the new—­defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large.

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That question ignores the relationship between the aging of politicians and the disaffection of the young, who prefer to vote for candidates closer to themselves in age, all other things being equal. We know that the age skew of voters is among the best explanations for the elderliness of our politicians, and it has created a self-­fulfilling prophecy: the young stay home, and then have an even better reason to do so in the next election, because the old vote old politicians into office.

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Elder power in the public realm has a private foundation: above all, old Americans are disproportionately rich. Gerontocracy overlaps with plutocracy—­or more precisely, it is one of its most consequential forms. Of course, poor old people exist, just as rich young people do. You can imagine, just barely, a society in which elder rule is not so intertwined with wealth. But that place is not America today, and the correlation of age with wealth is anything but random.

According to a 2011 study, the median senior citizen had forty-­seven times more wealth than the median American between the ages of eighteen and thirty-­four. This disparity had gotten remarkably worse over time. In 2009, households headed by adults older than sixty-­five had improved their median net worth by 42 percent over the prior quarter century. By comparison, the median net worth of households headed by adults eighteen to thirty-­four fell by 68 percent during the same period.

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It’s no mystery why the old want to retain their privileges. That they can keep them so easily is in large part because the age of gerontocracy has been an age of tax revolts on behalf of the propertied. A house isn’t just a place to live; older people also have fanatical attitudes toward the disturbance of their property. “They are not generous,” Aristotle noted, for “they know from experience how hard it is to get and how easy to lose.” Beyond blocking development that would benefit those who do not yet own homes, the old evince a hostility to taxing property for the sake of social goals. Americans in their final decades go even further than the libertarian American default. Not only do they feather their nests; they also secure them against predators, even though they hurt their own young in doing so.

The primary agenda for old people has long been avoiding property taxes, even when the immunities they win are regressive in the extreme, as in the case of California’s Proposition 13….The purported rationale for property-­tax relief is that old people no longer have the salaries coming in that they would need in order to pay their share to the state. But this is mostly a smoke screen, because of just how much property wealth many older Americans control.

Property-­tax limits have further abetted the elderly’s monopolization of housing. Places with higher property taxes predictably have lower house prices, leading to younger ownership. After all, it’s easier to pay even a high tax bill than to make a giant down payment. So it follows that when property taxes are held down, and home prices rise, young people are kept away.

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The effects on all levels of American government are tremendous. It has been estimated that various property-­tax breaks for seniors cost states the equivalent of 7 percent of their income-­tax revenue.

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If we want to counter their power, it won’t work to suggest that elderly people have the same stake in building a better world for the future, because they don’t. Their eagerness to avoid taxes that benefit younger generations demonstrates as much. It won’t work, either, to paper over the enormous differences between the precarity of some seniors and the situation of the mass of younger people living without the specific privileges correlated with, and often reserved for, older people. Those differences imply that seniors will sometimes be allies of progress, but not always, and opponents more often. Age-­related class advantages are in many cases far more profound than the intersection of class with gender or race. There is no way to ignore them if we want a fairer future.

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Legally, it became possible for workers to stay longer and longer, and many do, clustering in elite professions, in contrast to manual or menial work that people leave if they can or because they must. America’s corporate leaders exemplify the situation. The average hiring age for CEOs at the top American companies—­those included in the Fortune 500 or the S&P 500—­has risen dramatically, from forty-­six to fifty-­five in the past two decades. That is the same period during which executive compensation has soared, with direct implications for the fusion of age and class inequality in America today. It is not hard to think of leaders who stay on and become hard to eject even for sound business reasons, as they control their own companies or stand symbolically for them.

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There is no known reason to believe that corporate performance has improved as a result. Indeed, there are many reasons to think that there is a price to pay, and it is not borne only by younger workers who are unable to break into the upper ranks. The market speaks clearly about the profitability of younger leadership. According to a recent study, stock prices decline when younger CEOs die unexpectedly, while the sudden deaths of the doddering and wizened drive price spikes.

According to their official purpose, corporations should be engines of change and novelty; part of what drives profits is the creation of new and better products that consumers will buy. But corporate America is hampered in this mission by its laboring gerontocracy, and by the conversion of society into a static domain for hoarding seniors. While Monsieur Grandet eventually dies in Balzac’s novel, his successors are alive and well in America today.

Click over to read the whole thing.

It’s interesting that almost all of the discussions about the implication of gerontocracy, such as incredible generational inequality in favor of largely Boomer seniors, is happening in secular society but not in the church.

There’s frankly enormous injustice in wealthy, selfish seniors who continue to push for policies that benefit themselves at the expensive of younger generations and the future of the nation. This form of selfishness is basically never called out by pastors as near as I can tell, however.

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Foreign Influence in American Universities

Kite and Key is a great media non-profit that produces informative explainer type videos designed for social media. The recently turned five years old, and just released this really great video about the way foreign governments like China have acquired undue influence over our universities.

Best of the Web

The Federalist: Project Hail Mary Is The Masculine Christian Film You’ve Been Waiting For - See also Joseph Holmes’ review if you missed it.

The Guardian: Despite their bad reputation, parenting group chats are – for some – the village that never sleeps

NYT: Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed (gift link) - Their anger goes far beyond the recent rise of unemployment and the looming threat of A.I.

WSJ: More Americans Are Breaking Into the Upper Middle Class (gift link) - Research shows that ranks of higher earners have grown markedly over last 50 years, while lower rungs of middle class have shrunk

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week in Mere Orthodoxy.

New this week:

• When Bad Social Practices Drive Out Good - Why it’s getting harder to do the right thing — whether hiring legally, waiting for sex, or running for office — as bad social practices take over

• Evangelicals Don’t Produce Leaders. They Produce “Cubicle Men.” - Why a culture obsessed with safety, reputation, and moral control is quietly eliminating the kind of risk-taking required to build institutions - A guest repost by Dr. Anthony Bradley.

Be sure again to check out Bradley’s second installment in this series.

Cover image: Andrew Tate by James English/Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0

Bradley has his own Substack where he posted this great essay with his reflections on why evangelical men don’t become elites. He graciously gave me permission to republish it. You should definitely subscribe to his newsletter, as part two of this series is coming out today - Aaron.

A few years ago, I was at dinner with a group of Christian college men and asked them what they planned to do after graduation. As they went around the table, each one described some version of the same goal: find a job that pays “good money” and allows them to support a family. That aim is not wrong in itself, despite what some argue.

What was striking was not what they said, but what was missing. There was no sense that a career might be pursued because it could shape an institution, serve a community, or leave a meaningful mark on the world. No one talked about building anything. No one talked about leading. No one talked about risk. Their imagination stopped at stability and safety.

They were not describing vocations. They were describing outcomes: a paycheck, benefits, and predictability. In other words, they were not aspiring to become builders or leaders. They were aspiring to become well-positioned employees. What they wanted was not a mission or purpose-driven life. It was a safe and respectable life, secured in advance.

Aaron Renn has spent considerable energy documenting the absence of evangelical elites from the commanding heights of American culture. His diagnosis is serious and worth engaging. His Washington Post piece and his longer First Things essay point to weak institutions, thin intellectual networks, and cultural retreat from public life. These observations are accurate as far as they go. But Renn’s framing stops one level too shallow, because it focuses on what evangelical culture lacks rather than on what it systematically and reliably produces. The problem is not an absence. It is an output. Evangelical culture has spent generations overproducing risk-averse men, and risk-averse men do not build, disrupt, or lead at the levels Renn is describing. They fill cubicles.

The pattern is visible in almost every earnest Christian household. Boys are formed around a coherent set of virtues: responsibility, deference to authority, moral seriousness, and reputation management. Pastors and parents, motivated by genuine love, channel young men toward careers that signal stability and respectability. Law, medicine, ministry, corporate management. These are honorable vocations, but they share a defining feature. They are low-variance paths inside existing systems, not launching pads for building new ones. A young man who lands a comfortable, well-paying job with good benefits and a respected title is celebrated in these communities as a success. What rarely gets asked is whether he is a builder, a founder, or a leader in any substantive sense, or simply a well-compensated follower operating inside an institution someone else had the courage to create. Getting a safe, respectable job is not leadership. It is the appearance of it, and evangelical culture has spent generations treating the appearance as the substance.

The specific failure is not simply that these men avoid risk in the abstract. It is that they are trained to avoid failure, which is a different and more crippling problem. Failure tolerance is not a personality quirk. It is a developed capacity, built through repeated exposure to real stakes, real uncertainty, and real loss. The men who found companies, reshape industries, and accumulate lasting institutional power were not simply born with thicker skin. They were formed in environments where failure was treated as information rather than indictment, where a collapsed venture or a bad bet was processed and learned from rather than moralized over. Evangelical formation runs in the opposite direction. Failure in these communities frequently becomes a spiritual category. Poor discernment. Lack of prayer. Insufficient accountability. When failure gets theologized, young men learn to avoid it at all costs rather than absorb it and move forward. That single dynamic, more than any institutional weakness Renn can identify, explains the scarcity he is documenting.

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Karen Horney, the mid-century psychoanalyst, described a personality pattern she called “self-effacing,” characterized by a deep need to avoid conflict, subordinate personal ambition, and seek safety through compliance and approval. She also identified what she termed “self-resignation,” a settled acceptance of limits driven by anxiety about failure and rejection. Evangelical formation does not set out to produce these profiles, but it frequently does, because it prioritizes moral safety over institutional ambition and mission.1 The working goal of much evangelical parenting is to produce a young man who does not do anything wrong, who keeps his reputation clean, who stays inside the lines of acceptable behavior. This is understandable. It is also, functionally, a training program for followers rather than leaders. The man preoccupied with not doing anything wrong is not free to take the kind of action that building something significant actually requires.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff traced this impulse at the cultural level in The Coddling of the American Mind, arguing that American culture has broadly embraced safetyism, the belief that young people must be shielded from risk, failure, and discomfort. Evangelical households do not invent this pattern, but they intensify it by adding theological justification. Caution becomes prudence. Risk avoidance becomes faithfulness. The result is a formation environment that does not simply fail to produce bold men. It actively trains boldness out of them.

The research makes this concrete. A working paper on religion and risk attitudes found a consistent positive correlation between religious participation and risk aversion in economic behavior, with church membership linked to more cautious financial and career decisions. A meta-analysis on religion and entrepreneurship found that higher religiosity correlates with lower rates of new venture creation. Research published in the Journal of Comparative Economics found that religious entrepreneurs who do emerge tend to self-select toward lower-risk business activities to manage uncertainty. And a global behavioral study on entrepreneurial risk-taking and culture found that cultures with high uncertainty avoidance produce significantly less entrepreneurial activity than those that reward initiative and normalize failure. Evangelicalism, at its cultural center of gravity, looks far more like the former than the latter.

This is the formation pipeline Renn’s institutional analysis cannot see. Family environments and church cultures shape psychological dispositions. Those dispositions drive career selection. Career selection, aggregated across tens of thousands of men over decades, produces the social outcomes we observe. Evangelical men are not absent from elite spaces because institutions failed them. They are absent because they were formed to prefer the spaces where they are present: stable, predictable, bounded environments that reward rule-following and competence over the willingness to build something that does not yet exist. Getting a safe, respectable job is not leadership. It is the appearance of it, and evangelical culture has spent generations celebrating the appearance while the substance slips away.

Some voices inside the church have begun to say this plainly. Writers working in the Christian leadership space have argued that congregational cultures have become risk-averse organizations where bold action is treated with suspicion and failure is something to be avoided rather than processed and learned from. This is not a management problem. It is a spiritual formation problem with structural consequences.

The biblical tradition is full of figures who act under radical uncertainty, leave behind security without any guarantee of return, and pursue callings at enormous personal cost. Abraham leaves without a destination. Joseph endures catastrophic failure before any vindication arrives. Paul builds something new in every city he enters, usually at the cost of his physical safety and social standing. That tradition is not a template for cubicle life. The gap between what the faith actually commends and how evangelical formation actually operates is large, and closing it will require far more honesty than most communities are currently prepared to offer.

Bradley is planning to post a second installment with his proposed solutions today. Be sure to check out and subscribe to his newsletter.

Anthony B. Bradley

Anthony B. Bradley, PhD helps institutions reverse the boy-to-man collapse by fixing fatherhood and fraternity culture with data, theology, and field-tested programs and the pursuit of justice through personalism.

What this means is that if there are multiple forms of currency with the same nominal value but different actual values, people will hoard the valuable form and spend the less valuable form.

We have actually seen this phenomenon in the United States. Up until 1965, our silver dimes and quarters used to contain actual silver. Since then, they contain no silver. Hence, you almost never see a pre-1965 quarter or dime in circulation. (If you ever get one - save it!)

The same general idea applies to other social concepts as well. We often see situations in which bad social practices starting driving out good.

My wife came across a great example of this recently. She’s still a member of Upper West Side moms social media groups. Recently someone in one of those groups posted asking for help for a problem. She and her husband wanted to hire a nanny, and they wanted to do it right by paying the person on the books, pay taxes, etc. They were willing to pay more to do this right, but even when offering the same net pay as with a cash under the table deal, no prospective nannies were willing to actually work on the books.

Essentially, even for the rare people who want to do the right thing and follow all the rules, it’s difficult to do so because other participants in the market do not want to.

Labor practices are a good example here. Once a critical mass of firms in an industry start hiring illegals at scale, others are almost forced to do so in order to remain competitive. Then legal workers rightly decide to avoid that line of work because the compensation is being set by the marginal illegal worker, which entrenches illegal labor even more.

Another example people like to use is premarital sex. There used to be at least some barriers for men to obtain it. Now that premarital sex is completely legitimized, and out-of-wedlock births fully preventable, it’s more or less expected that people who are dating will have sex relatively soon within the relationship - as early as the first date in many cases.

In this environment, it’s more difficult for women who may not want to have pre-marital sex, or even just to wait a while to ensure they have an actual relationship with the man before having sex with him, to decline to do so. Most men today are simply not willing to date a woman on that basis, so women who refuse to provide sex find their potential dating pool shrinks significantly.

In practice, this might not affect the average woman all that much. That minority of women who do want to avoid pre-marital sex are likely doing so for religious reasons, and thus only want to date men from that smaller pool of other similarly religious people anyway.

But some reports suggest similar things are happing to sexual practices under the influence of pornography. There’s perhaps a greater expectation that younger women will engage in degrading sexual acts that men see in porn. If a large enough pool of women do start performing them, then those who decline to do so will see their dating prospects shrink significantly, putting pressure on them to get into the game.

And of course, given the widespread consumption of pornography today, women don’t have a lot of dating market leverage to insist that men who want to date them don’t watch it.

Another one we see in progress is soaring rates of disability accommodation claims. Substantial percentages - 30% or more in some cases - of students at elite universities are receiving accommodations for a claimed disability. They are getting things like extra time to take tests. You can easily see how this would benefit their competitive standing academically. So people who don’t claim to suffer from anxiety or some such in order to level the playing field are putting themselves at a disadvantage.

It strikes me that in cases of this nature, it’s unlikely there will be that many people who simply refuse to play the game on principle.

Politics and our institutions also suffer from these dynamics. Look at how dysfunctional our political system is, and how shamelessly you have to behave in order to succeed within it. No surprise, most of the high-minded, public-spirited people of good character that we might want in politics take a look at this and decide to stay out of it. This, of course, only makes politics even more of a circus. (Frankly, it’s amazing how many decent people still decide to get involved in politics these days, given the current conditions).

Similarly, we all know that our society would be better if we had functional, trusted institutions. But we are far from that point. Hence the rational move from an individual perspective in many cases is to adopt a strategy of insulation. You exit from institutions and structure your life to buffer yourself against institutional failure. This causes institutional trust and performance to decline further.

We have been seeing this with public schools in many cases. In some places, the primary public school district is in a slow motion collapse, as everyone who can gets out.

Or think about geographic political segregation. Everybody knows we are better off with competitive elections, but people are moving to jurisdictions where others share their politics. This “big sort” phenomenon has led to a number of one party cities, counties, and states, with the bad governance outcomes you’d expect.

It seems to me that there are quite a number of areas in our society where we’ve been caught in this sort of spiral where bad practices are driving out good.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Sometimes, good practices drive out bad.

The most famous case here is probably Henry Ford’s $5 a day wage. By paying more than other car makers, he secured a quality labor force and reduced turnover. This also led to workers being able to afford the cars they were producing. Competitors had to level up their labor practices.

Very often, a competitive market will produce this dynamic from a customer perspective, as improvements from one provider pressure others to adopt them in order to stay competitive. That’s why many of our consumer products have gotten better.

We obviously want to have more of this dynamic.

Gresham’s Law is an important concept to keep in mind when assessing the world. We have to recognize when we are dealing with a situation where bad practices are driving out good. If we don’t understand that dynamic at work, and take actions that will fundamentally disrupt it, then our solutions to various negative things we see are likely to fall short of what’s needed because they don’t address the underlying incentive structures at play.

I’ll again highlight the pending release of a new Canon Press book with people engaging with my “Negative World” idea. It’s called Welcome to Negative World: How to Read the Times You’re In, and you can now order it on Amazon.

I also want to make you aware that Real Clear Investigation is accepting applications for $20,000 grants to fund investigative reporting projects. Details await at the link.

What I’ve Been Up To

I’m presently in Savannah, Georgia, where I’m speaking at a small conference. This is part of an intense stretch of travel and speaking. I’ve got three events in three different cities the week of April 20, then hopefully a bit of a break.

I wanted to share pictures from some of the events I’ve done so far this year.

Back in January I spoke at the David Network conference. The David Network is a great group of faith-based Gen Z people from Ivy+ institutions. I was on a panel on the future of conservatism with Robert George from Princeton University, Patrick Deneen from Notre Dame, and Margarita Mooney Clayton from Princeton Seminary.

I previously had George on my podcast talking about the future of conservatives in academia, a topic he not only talks about, but has done a lot about. I’m planning to have Margarita Mooney Clayton on very soon, and Patrick Deneen is on my list.

I also spoke at an event sponsored by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. I was on the keynote panel about troubled young men called “The Lost Boys.” The other speakers were Richard Reeves of the American Institute of Boys and Men, and Alvaro de Vicente, headmaster of the all boys school The Heights. UVa sociologist Brad Wilcox moderated.

The video of our entire panel is also available to watch.

I have not gotten any photos from my Hephzibah House event in New York, but here’s one from a luncheon event I did at the Manhattan Institute while I was in town.

I was also in Washington, DC recently for a salon dinner hosted by American Affairs to discuss a recent article of mine. While there I was able to spend some time talking with my Senator Todd Young.

I’ve known my other Senator, Jim Banks, since he was in the House, but this was my first time meeting Sen. Young.

This isn’t even all the events I’ve done recently, just the ones I’ve managed to get pictures from so far.

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Visions of Biblical Womanhood

The New Yorker ran an interesting piece comparing the visions of Christian womanhood in books by Jen Hatmaker and Emma Waters. The author, Emma Green, used to be the religion reporter at the Atlantic, and so knows this beat.

Waters is part of an emerging cohort of Gen Z writers trying to reclaim female empowerment for young women who are both religious and conservative. Just as evangelical deconstruction became its own subculture, which Hatmaker helped define, these new, young, family-oriented religious conservatives seem to be forging a potent subculture of their own.

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At the same time, feminists have never quite known what to do with women like Schlafly or Waters, or, for that matter, with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, other than calling them hypocrites for having big careers while singing the virtues of staying home. That kind of dismissal misses something important about the project that Waters is pursuing. She’s writing about women who find freedom in the constraints of motherhood and marriage, and insisting that there’s room for them to nurture both professional ambitions and a traditional home life, if not necessarily at the same time. Hatmaker felt small in her conservative world, but Waters doesn’t feel small in hers; instead, she feels relief from the relentless pressure to lean in. She doesn’t experience motherhood and marriage as a millstone she must bear on the way to career success, or as a source of ambivalence about her identity. She appears to be at peace in the conviction that she was made for both.

Jael is a sly choice of hero for Waters, because she’s so easy to cast as a girlboss. After all, it takes real determination to drive a tent peg through a man’s skull. But nobody owns Jael, and women don’t have to fit a feminist frame to be powerful. Waters is lucky enough to be a young woman in a world where she can freely choose her remix of a traditional life. The tent peg is in her hands now.

Click over to read the whole thing.

I’ve known Emma since before she married Jack. It’s exciting to see Gen Z people like her get such great press. I believe she’s also been included in NYT cover stories twice as well.

I had her on my podcast to talk about her new book.

All the Single Ladies

The NYT ran an interesting piece (gift link) about single women who are throwing themselves 40th birthday parties that are designed as if they were weddings.

For some single women, the milestone 40th birthday is more than a party. Instead of waiting for a partner to justify a celebration, women are using the moment as a declaration of empowerment and self-love, complete with wedding attire, a curated guest list of their closest friends and family and the joy and excitement of a wedding.

“People are getting married later in life,” said Sarah Adair, the founder of Social Bliss Events in Nashville, who has planned several wedding-style 40th birthdays for clients. “Women deserve to celebrate such a milestone with or without a partner.”

…

“So much of our adult lives are spent marking the traditional milestones you hear about your whole life — engagements, marriages, babies, first homes,” Ms. Bart, 43, said. “For women who aren’t partnered, there’s often no external occasion prompting this kind of celebration, so creating one yourself is a genuine declaration of self-worth.”

Alyssa Pettinato, the owner of Alinato Events in New York, helped her best friend plan a blowout wedding-style 40th birthday in March 2025. “Millennials like to party,” she said. “We like to show up and show out.”

Ms. Pettinato estimates that her friend, who is single and childless, spent nearly $50,000 on her 75-person affair at Le Jardinier in New York, which drew friends and family members from across the country.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Related:

NYT: Why Marriage, for So Many, Is Less Appealing Than Ever (gift link) - From Gen Z to Gen X, a pause in the march to the altar, or a decision to skip it altogether, is becoming more common

The Times of London wrote a piece about why women aren’t having babies. You’ll never guess who they blame.

And the Wall Street Journal wrote on the women who love the manosphere (gift link).

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How We Gave Up on Forgiveness

The Financial Times is the world’s best newspaper, and has the best lineup on columnists, one of whom is Jemima Kelly. Her new piece on how we gave up on forgiveness is stellar. Since the FT has a very hard paywall, I’ll quote as much of it as I can justify.

“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” These words, spoken by Jesus on the cross at Calvary, according to the Gospel of St Luke, constitute the apotheosis of one of the most important virtues in Christianity.

At the time of his greatest suffering and as his mortal life was about to end, Jesus was asking God to show love and mercy towards those who had wrongfully condemned him to his imminent death. This courageous act of forgiveness, as all good Christians know, is one of Easter’s central messages. The sinless Jesus died on the cross in order to redeem all of us mortal sinners, so that we may be forgiven by God.

Indeed, forgiveness is a key theme throughout the New Testament, and thus forms an important part of what it means to be a Christian (and to be a follower of many other major religions, too). During the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus encouraged his followers to not only love their enemies as they would love their friends, but to pray for those who might persecute them. In the Lord’s Prayer, Christians ask God to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”, connecting divine forgiveness of us imperfect humans with our own commitment to forgive others.

And yet, in our increasingly secular, consequentialist world, in which the very notion of virtue appears to have gone out of fashion, forgiveness is no longer much spoken about, or even held up as something to aspire to. In fact, it often seems to be considered as quite the opposite: something akin to moral weakness, or even altogether immoral.

Bizarrely, this is often the case when someone has not done the wrong thing but has said or even implied the wrong thing. The problem seems to be that they have thought the wrong thing; once they’ve said the wrong thing, they’re out. If you dare to “platform” them so that they might explain themselves or apologise, and in so doing “let them off the hook”, that can mean you’re out too. Guilt by forgiveness, you might say.

And so, faced with no route to redemption, those who are deemed to have done, said or thought the wrong thing are left in moral Mantua with their fellow deplorables, and often drawn into more extreme positions with no incentive to do otherwise, their voice amplified on one side of the spectrum by their very banishment from the mainstream.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

If you didn’t see this new essay in American Reformer from Georgetown professor Joshua Mitchell on the Reformation in America, it’s a very important and thought provoking essay. It inspired an entire newsletter edition from Ross Douthat interacting with his thesis, as well as mentions and comments from others too. I may write more about it, and hope to have Mitchell on the podcast to discuss it, but I wanted to flag this for you now with a very high commendation.

New Yorker: The Camps Promising to Turn You - or Your Son - Into an Alpha Male.

IM 1776: The Food Guidelines They Wanted

New Content and Media Mentions

I got mentions this week from Andrew Sullivan (actually about Joseph Holmes’ article) and Commonplace.

New this week:

• Things That Are Getting Better - A hopeful counterpoint to the endless online negativity: modern life is advancing in surprising and practical ways

• Love, Loss, and Land - In a cynical age, The Madison dares to portray good men, great marriages, and the healing power of place - A guest post by John Seel

As a cultural analyst, I rarely find myself praising contemporary film or television. That is not because good storytelling is impossible today, but because it is increasingly rare. Which is why Taylor Sheridan’s new series The Madison deserves attention.

Hollywood is often criticized—and not without reason. Alongside the academy, media, and advertising, the entertainment industry helps shape what sociologists call the social imaginary: the stories through which we understand reality itself. Stories do not merely entertain. They form moral imagination.

And some cultural influences matter more than others.

When pollutants enter the Mississippi River, it matters greatly whether they enter at Lake Itasca in Minnesota—the river’s headwaters—or near New Orleans after the damage is already done. Cultural problems work the same way. Addressing issues at the headwaters is always more effective than dealing with their downstream consequences.

Two such headwaters’ issues today are masculinity and marriage.

America has one of the highest rates of father absence in the world. Marriage, historically the basic building block of stable societies, is increasingly delayed, devalued, or dismissed altogether. Many now see it as a constraint on personal freedom, a legal liability, or a relic of religious tradition. If marriage were a stock, we would have to say it is trading in a long-term bear market.

It is into this cultural moment that Sheridan’s storytelling speaks.

The Madison offers a surprisingly moving meditation on masculinity, marriage, and the search for meaning after loss. It is, in many ways, a countercultural story—not because it is political, but because it is deeply human. Attempts to interpret it primarily through the lenses of culture-war categories like feminism or “toxic masculinity” miss the point entirely. This is not a story about ideology. It is a story about love, grief, and the possibility of restoration.

The series contrasts two cultural worlds: the status-driven corridors of New York’s Madison Avenue and the wide, restorative spaces of Montana’s Madison River Valley. Unlike Sheridan’s more overtly masculine narratives, this story is largely told through the emotional experience of women navigating grief after the sudden death of Preston Clyburn, a devoted husband and family patriarch.

His unexpected death serves as more than a plot device. It becomes a symbol of the disruptions that come to every life—the moments when comfort collapses and we are forced into what might be called a liminal journey through grief toward renewed meaning.

What makes Sheridan’s storytelling compelling is its emotional honesty. The themes of love, loss, and land do not feel ideological or sentimental. They feel earned. This is storytelling shaped by experience, where pain has been transformed into wisdom rather than bitterness. That combination is increasingly rare.

At the center of the story is the deeply loving but imperfect marriage between Preston and his wife Stacy, played with quiet strength by Michelle Pfeiffer. Through her loss, Stacy comes to recognize both the beauty of what she had and the small ways she had taken it for granted. Her grief is accompanied by regret, making the story both cautionary and invitational. It quietly asks viewers not only to desire a great marriage but to nurture one while they still can.

Perhaps most striking, however, is the series’ portrayal of men.

At a time when male characters are often depicted as either incompetent or dangerous, The Madison presents men whose strength is inseparable from their emotional intelligence. Law enforcement officers in both New York and Montana are portrayed not as caricatures but as men marked by experience, compassion, and quiet steadiness. Even a New York therapist—a character easily written with cynicism—embodies attentiveness and care.

These are not perfect men. They are believable men. Men shaped by hardship who nevertheless display kindness, restraint, and presence. Understanding, gentleness, and loving initiative are treated not as weaknesses but as marks of maturity. It has been a long time since television has portrayed masculinity with this kind of moral seriousness.

The spiritual center of the story, however, may be neither the marriage nor the characters, but the land itself.

Like filmmaker Terrence Malick, Sheridan treats the landscape not merely as scenery but as a character. The Madison River Valley becomes a place of healing, its dawns and sunsets visually capturing the in-between spaces where transformation happens. These women, shaped by the pace and ambitions of New York, find themselves emotionally and spiritually unprepared for tragedy. Their burial for the man they loved is marked by an absence that is striking: no minister, no liturgy, no language of transcendence.

Into that silence steps the land.

The natural world becomes a kind of spiritual presence, offering a form of healing where institutional religion is absent. When grief presses in, it is not to ideology or self-assertion that they turn, but to place. The land becomes what might be called a form of cultural therapy—a reminder that meaning is often recovered not through argument but through encounter.

Their journey through grief is unfinished. Like life itself, it remains messy and unresolved. Fortunately, the story will continue in a second season.

It is not surprising that the series has drawn criticism. Countercultural stories often do. Some critics have dismissed it as simplistic or ideologically suspect. But such reactions may say more about our cultural assumptions than about the story itself.

The Madison dares to suggest something unfashionable: that men can be good, that marriage can be noble, and that place can heal fractured lives. In a cultural moment marked by cynicism about all three, that alone makes it noteworthy.

If our cultural crises begin at the headwaters, then perhaps our renewal must begin there as well.

And that is what The Madison ultimately offers: not escapism, but what might be called headwaters cultural therapy—a reminder that love still matters, that loss can still teach, and that the places that form us may yet help restore us to our better angels.

Renn Report 1q26

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Every year people complain that Google doesn’t create a “doodle” for Easter. This year, they put up a pretty good one in my opinion. More evidence perhaps of a vibe shift.

In case you’ve been wondering about the podcast, I’ve been traveling so extensively that I haven’t had time in my studio to record episodes. This is my last intense week of travel for a while, so hopefully I’ll be able to resume recording soon.

There’s so much doom and gloom in the world that this week I want to feature a couple of positive articles.

First I want to reflect on some of what’s going right in the world.

So much of the vibe in today’s online discourse is basically doomerism. Things are bad, and getting worse. The idea of “ensh—ification” is one that encapsulates the mood. The basic concept is that many of our experiences, such as with technology, are being degraded, often intentionally, by someone looking to make an extra buck.

Let’s be honest, there’s plenty of this kind of negativity that’s spot on.

But there’s also a lot that’s getting better in the world.

Let’s start with airports. America has long been a byword for terrible airports. And while ours still perhaps don’t measure up to the gleaming palaces in some foreign countries, the general airport experience has gotten much, much better.

There are a lot terminals that have been designed and built in the post-9/11 era, and they are generally pretty great. Indianapolis kicked off the trend with a 2008 terminal that’s still regularly rated the best in the country for its size class. Other smaller cities have built or are building brand new terminals. Kansas City just replaced a terminal that might have had the worst design in the country. New Orleans and Pittsburgh have new ones. Columbus is building a new one. Portland’s new terminal building is spectacular.

Big cities are getting better too. Start with New York. LaGuardia’s old Central Terminal was in a class by itself for being terrible. This is the one that caused people to say New York had “third world” airports. It’s been replaced with a very nice new terminal. Terminal C has also been redone to be very nice. JFK’s terminals are getting upgraded, and Newark’s Terminal A is not bad at all. San Francisco’s new Terminal 1 is sparkling.

People like to complain about air travel. And yes, airlines now charge à la carte for basically everything. But as someone who has been flying for a long time, almost always does so in economy, and who doesn’t have access to any lounges, I can tell you that much of the airport experience has gotten a lot better. Not only are many - if certainly not all! - terminals better, but things like Touchless TSA are improving the security experience.

Cars are another one. We visited my mother for Easter. This involves climbing several hundred feet of elevation into the knobs above the Ohio River. I remember growing up that we’d need to gun it as hard has possible after turning onto the road that goes up the hill, because you needed to get a head of steam to help the underpowered cars of that era make the climb at a decent speed. Our cars could rarely get above 45 MPH when floored. Even my dad’s V8 struggled to climb it at speed.

Today’s four cylinder engines like the one in our car are so peppy that they could probably hit 70 climbing that hill. I top it out at 55 MPH because of the curves, but the idea of not having enough power is a thing of the past in new cars.

I bought a new car after graduating from college, but otherwise always drove beaters to save cash. Our old Prius had its hybrid battery go bad during the pandemic, so we were forced to buy a car. Because used cars were so ridiculous, we ended up buying a new one. It’s like driving a different kind of technology: backup cameras, blind spot indicators, remote start etc from my phone, satellite radio, and more. I had no idea cars had improved so much.

Last week I was also in San Francisco and used driverless Waymos as a ride hail service. It was like getting to experience a science fiction future. People are also blown away by Tesla’s Full Self Driving experience, which appears at most a few years away from being able to operate in a true autonomous mode.

Then there are breakthrough medical advances. We have managed to find a cure for about 90% of cystic fibrosis cases, a condition that was previously debilitating and fatal. We now have gene therapy treatments that are enabling some children born deaf to hear. In a slew of other areas from premature births to cancer, we’ve made real progress even if long promised fundamental breakthroughs remain elusive. GLP-1 treatments promise to basically cure obesity. Life expectancy, which was falling, has now risen back to an all-time high.

There have also been incredible communications advances. Elon Musk revolutionized rockets, which enabled the creation of new low earth orbit satellite internet and cell phone service. You can now have real, low-latency, high-speed internet on an airplane. I’ve used it and it’s incredible. Starlink’s direct to cell technology also promises to all but eliminate dead spots, enable emergency communications during natural disasters, etc. Newer iPhones already can automatically detect when you’ve been in a crash and summon help. They can even do so via satellite.

The reality is that in many domains of life, things have been getting better, even in recent years.

I don’t want to make light of the things that are going wrong. We have real problems we have to deal with, and I plan to keep talking about them. But we have to keep a sense of perspective and recognize where things are going well - and being thankful for them.

While there’s no guarantee we are on a track to a fantastic future, we are far from guaranteed to be doomed either. There are actually many things to feel good about.

Cover image: Portland Airport by SounderBruce/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0