This is one of the best and most timely discussions I’ve hosted on the podcast, so I’d encourage you to give this one a listen.

First, author Michal Leibowitz describes the problem our higher education institutions have had:

The last few years have not been kind to American higher education. There are the academic problems: widespread artificial-intelligence-enabled cheating; digitally castrated attention spans; rampant grade inflation. There are the political tensions: the collapse of public trust; the protests, encampments and counterprotests that were so mishandled on college campuses after Oct. 7; now the Trump administration’s research funding cuts and threats. And there’s the demographic cliff, finally here…These challenges have, rightly, occasioned some soul-searching for American higher education.

…

These reflections are a start, but they ignore a core problem at the root of so many campus and social issues. It is not just that we lack civility and the capacity to respectfully disagree, but that many of us live as collections of strangers, each pursuing our own ends, and that our college education does almost nothing to develop the sense that what we do in our day-to-day lives resonates with people beyond ourselves.

Oh, our schools claim to foster community. They advertise residential communities and student clubs and intellectual fellowship. But, in reality, many are opaque bureaucratized customer-service institutions that offer students little stake in a common life.

She then goes on to talk about Deep Springs College, and how it’s different:

“We all, technically, legally own the place,” Will Xu told me last year. We were sitting at a picnic table on the campus of Deep Springs College, a tiny, experimental school in the California desert where he is a student. The White and Inyo Mountains were ringed around us.

The college was founded in 1917 by a hydroelectric tycoon, L.L. Nunn. Today, Deep Springs educates about 26 students each year, offering them a free, two-year liberal arts education on a working cattle ranch. Many go on to elite colleges like the University of Chicago. After Mr. Xu graduates in June, he plans to work in tech policy.

The students of Deep Springs are the sole beneficiaries of the Deep Springs trust. This college is theirs to look after and to safeguard.

This isn’t a symbolic position. Of course, millions of American students work part or full time while trying to get an education. But the students at Deep Springs have an unusual kind of responsibility for their collective lives: They work as cowboys and butchers, they mow the lawns, and they serve on the board of trustees, the curriculum committee and the communications committee. They staff a team of volunteer firefighters, responding to accidents on the twisting roads beyond the school. They help make the food that feeds everyone here — students, faculty, staff members and their families.

And they care for the animals that share the ranch with them — the chickens, cattle, pigs and horses. Rebecca McMillin-Hastings, who graduated last year, described the process of cleaning an infected wound on the flank of a dairy cow named Euclid: “You just kind of have to get your soap in your water and, just like, push on the wound. And it really hurts her.” She described throwing her entire body weight against the animal, knowing that she was hurting her, feeling that she was hurting her, but also knowing that it had to be done.

Students aren’t just mixing manual labor with intellectual studies. They are intimately involved in running the college, learning how to steward an institution.

David Neidorf has filled just about every role there is at Deep Springs College over his many years at the school: lecturer, professor, dean, vice president of operations, president and interim dean again. He told me that most students come here to live up to some kind of demanding ideal. “They wanted more responsibility than they’re going to get — for their individual lives, for their communal lives — elsewhere,” he said.

The students must choose not only which classes to take but also which ones will be offered to the college at large. They help to pick the professors and to run the admissions process, and are involved in ever bigger decisions about the future direction of the college, like whether to hire someone for fund-raising.

There’s a lot more in this great piece, including a briefer look at Berea College. Be sure to read the whole thing.

Is It All About the Phones?

Birth rates have declined substantially, not just in America, but around the world. This suggests that falling fertility can’t be related to simply US domestic factors, since the same thing is happening in a wide range of countries, with a diversity of cultural and religious backgrounds, in every region of the world.

John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times took a look at this, and suggests that the advent of the smart phone played a big role. First, he notes the global nature of fertility trends:

In more than two-thirds of the world’s 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 that keeps populations stable without immigration. In 66 countries, the average is now closer to one than to two. In some, the most common number of children born to each woman is zero.

He then hits a point I’ve referenced before, namely that a decline in marriage/partnering rates at least partly underlie this, not merely an across the board fertility decline.

In previous decades, the world’s fertility rate went down because couples had fewer children. Now the main reason is that there are fewer couples. Had US rates of marriage and cohabitation remained constant over the past decade, the country’s total fertility rate would be higher today than it was 10 years ago.

A pioneering study by demographer Stephen Shaw shows that in the US and most high-income countries, the number of children that mothers give birth to is stable or even rising. But the proportion of women who have any children at all has fallen steeply in the past 15 years.

The decline in partnering among young people is really incredible, as his chart shows.

He goes through various explanations ranging from economic stresses to rising female accomplishment before dialing in on the key factor of the smart phone:

Dissatisfied with purely economic explanations, researchers are beginning to point the finger at a new culprit — the digital devices and platforms that play an outsized role in young people’s lives across the world.

Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso-Boedo of the University of Cincinnati published a paper last month looking at birth rates through the lens of the rollout of 4G mobile networks in the US and UK.

The number of births fell first and fastest in the areas that received high-speed mobile connectivity earliest. The authors argue that smartphones have transformed how young people spend time with one another, sharply reducing in-person socialising and leading to the collapse in their fertility.

For example, US, British and Australian birth rates for teens and young adults were broadly flat during the early 2000s but began to fall markedly from 2007.

The same slide began in France and Poland around 2009, and in Mexico, Morocco and Indonesia around 2012. What had been steady declines in fertility in Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal became precipitous drops between 2013 and 2015.

All of these inflection points coincided with the mass adoption of smartphones in local markets — as measured by Google searches for mobile apps.

In country after country the birth rate plunged after the introduction of smartphones, no matter what the previous trend was. The younger the age group, the more pronounced the downturn — a mirror image of smartphone usage patterns.

Melissa Kearney, professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, says it is “quite plausible that the modern digital media environment has had profound effects on society that have led to a decline in romantic coupling”.

This is a longform FT “big read” piece that’s well worth reading in its entirety, if you can get past the paywall.

I can’t help but contrast the intentional and highly physical formation of young people at Deep Springs College with the more purely digital formation shaping most of our young people today - a formation with profound consequences for their lives and our society, as the FT piece shows.

Related in the NYT: They Started I.V.F., Then Split. Now Who Gets Custody of the Embryos? (gift link)

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Catholic vs. Protestant Culture

Another interesting data post from scholar Ryan Burge sheds additional light on Protestantism as a superior engine of human capital development.

I’ll start with Burge’s conclusion:

What I take away from all of this is that evangelical identity carries something that can’t be fully explained by how often you show up or how conservative you vote. There’s a theological and cultural foundation to evangelicalism that shapes how adherents think about the body, sexuality, and the family in ways that Catholic identity simply doesn’t replicate — even among the most devout and politically conservative Catholics. The Church may teach the same things on paper, but the people in the pews aren’t internalizing them the same way. And that gap between official teaching and lived belief is, frankly, one of the most interesting stories in American religion right now.

Let me state this a different way: in Protestantism, there’s a high standard for the laity. They are expected to both believe the full teachings of the church, and put them into practice in their own lives. Whereas Catholicism, practically speaking, has much lower expectations of the laity. Culturally, lay Catholics feel free to dissent from the teachings of the church.

If this is true of theological matters, how much more is it true of secondary matters such as the famed “Protestant work ethic”?

Burge illustrates this by looking at social conservative beliefs. He has previously shared data showing that Catholic views on social issues are often not aligned with the teachings of their own church. This drew critiques from Catholics who argued that these results were only because he’s including nominal Catholics or some such. His new post attempts to take that critique seriously.

So let’s test out this idea that Catholics are just as socially conservative as evangelicals by pulling in both things that we’ve learned. I am going to show you three graphs: the entire sample of evangelicals and Catholics, only weekly attenders of those two groups, and finally only weekly attenders who also identify as politically conservative. That way we can control for those differences as much as possible.

There are some very interesting charts in there, but I’ll just share this one. It’s the share of people who believe pre-marital sex is always wrong. I think this is an interesting point to look at because while believing that will make someone look culturally retrograde or strange, it’s not one of those “third rail” issues that can get you cancelled.

Even when looking at just weekly white attenders who are conservative - and keep in mind, that excludes the larger share of Catholics vs. Protestants who attend weekly but aren’t conservative - still less than half of Catholics believe pre-marital sex is always wrong.

Evangelicals are far from perfect when it comes to believing their church’s nominal teaching, let alone practicing it, yet Catholics score worse. Again, being unable to convince even half of its regular, explicitly conservative attendees to even believe its own teachings, I’d argue Catholicism is much less likely than Protestantism to function as a broader engine of human capital uplift. Protestantism is more transformational of people’s beliefs and practices.

Catholicism has many positive attributes, as I’ve highlighted in my book and elsewhere, but this is an area where Protestantism shines. The decay of Protestant culture is thus very consequential for the country, and its role cannot be plausibly replaced by Catholic culture, even were some great religious transformation to occur.

There’s a lot of great material in Burge’s post, and I’d encourage you to read the whole thing.

I should note that this analysis only looked evangelicalism. Mainline Protestantism may have lost some of this traditional function. It’s a bit harder to say using the same analysis, since many of these churches no longer promote traditional moral teachings, at least not with any vigor.

But mainline Protestantism is a repository for other virtues that are in increasingly short supply in our country. Just look at Burge himself. He’s an archetype of the high-minded mainline Protestant man who is interested in truth, fairness, and getting it right above merely championing his own team or cause. If you read him, you know that his analysis is not sectarian. He may not always be right. He’s not above criticism. But you see all too few people even trying these days. The production of this type of person is another thing Protestantism historically did well in America, and we feel keenly today the loss of that ethos.

What It Takes to Shape Culture

I wrote earlier this week about the meaning of the cancelation of CBS’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But there’s another lesson to learn from this. CNN’s Brian Stelter tweeted this picture of the staff of Stephen Colbert’s show gathered on the Late Show stage:

This prompted an outpouring of contempt from conservatives, who mocked what they see as the show’s bloated staff, and how it was losing an estimated $40 million per year on a budget of $100 million.

I’m sure the show could have been produced with fewer staff on a leaner budget. But this is consistent with a longstanding observation that I’ve had that conservatives have no idea the amount of talent and money it takes to produce compelling and impactful media and cultural products. Hence, their efforts are chronically understaffed and underfunded, limiting their broader cultural impact.

Best of the Web

In last week’s digest, I mentioned conservative institutional neglect of libraries. A librarian wrote to me to agree that few conservatives become librarians. But he did want to point me at the Association of Library Professionals, a new association of librarians who want the profession to stay true to its historic mission and avoid the turn towards social activism.

Samuel Abrams/AEI: Civic Knowledge Is Returning. Civic Formation Is Not.

NYT: What to Know About the New Obsession With Testosterone (gift link) - From politics to influencers and beyond, the hormone is being used not just for medical reasons but in pursuit of a new masculine ideal

WSJ: More Dads Are Scaling Back at the Office for Kids and Housework (gift link) - College-educated men lead the way among dads sacrificing hours at work for time at home

The Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, one of the most prestigious awards in film, went to “Fjord.” This film is apparently about an evangelical family from Romania that moves to Norway, where child protective services tries to take their children away from them. It’s very interesting to see a film with this theme win such an award, and I wonder what the political subtext is. (For example, is the real meaning a commentary on how the much larger Muslim immigrant population of the Nordic countries are treated?) But interesting regardless. I hope this film shows near me so I can go see it.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week from Fortune magazine and from Tim Challies. I was also a guest on the Immanuel Network Podcast.

New this week:

• Stephen Colbert Didn’t Get Cancelled - Mass Culture Did - From 55 million to 6.7 million viewers in 34 years — and what that tells us about the end of America’s shared mass-media, mass-consumer culture

• Nihilism with a Business Model - The gig economy didn’t just change how we work. It changed how we imagine ourselves. A guest post by John Seel.

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

Read more

One of the reasons our country features a lack of civic cohesion and a high level of political polarization is the fragmentation of our previous mass-media, mass-consumer common culture. This fragmentation resulted from new technologies, such as cable television and the internet, as well as structural economic changes that helped set the upper middle class apart from the rest of society.

That old common culture started emerging in the early 20th century with the dawn of Hollywood and radio, but it crystallized after World War II, particularly with the coming of television.

In this world, with three or four TV networks, at best a handful of newspapers in any given city, a limited menu of local radio stations, a small number of book stores - and no internet - Americans basically watched the same limited number of TV shows, listened to the same handful of musical genres, etc.

There was a genuine national common culture in this world, in which Americans coast to coast shared at least some key cultural touchstones and references, even if there was along with this local and regional specific cultures as well. These might include TV shows like M*A*S*H, or news programs and personalities like Walter Cronkite of CBS Evening News, or a late night talk show host like Johnny Carson of the Tonight Show on NBC.

Younger people can’t relate to the degree of cultural mindshare someone like Johnny Carson once had. We can see in this the size of the audience for his final show, compared to those of David Letterman and Stephen Colbert. Johnny Carson drew as many as 50-55 million for his final show. David Letterman drew 13.8 million. Stephen Colbert had only 6.7 million viewers - in a country with 80 million more people than when Carson signed off the air. Colbert’s audience would no doubt be bigger than this if we included social media clips, but it’s clearly the case that he’s no Johnny Carson in terms of cultural reach.

Everybody knew Johnny Carson. Even the people who didn’t watch his show regularly had at least seen it on occasion, and knew some of his recurring gags like Carnac the Magnificent. CBS struggled to find anything to compete with Carson. ABC opted out of fielding a direct talk show competitor, and instead focused on news with its well-regarded program Nightline.

In this mass media environment, news and entertainment companies needed to appeal to the broad middle of America. They couldn’t afford to be overly politicized or too niche. It was just good business sense. What’s more, they might well find themselves in political or legal hot water if they did get too political or controversial, as broadcasters operated on spectrum licensed by the federal government. Because not just anyone could start a competing broadcaster due to the limited spectrum available, there were certain standards imposed on those who held the licenses.

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In addition to a mass-media culture, we also lived in a mass-consumer culture. Americans mostly bought the same basic mass market consumer products from the same limited number of major purveyors, with only a handful of truly rich people enjoying a differentiated experience.

America largely did not have “artisanal” products like coffee from a local micro-roastery or beer from a micro-brewery. The number of breweries, for example, hit its low in the 1970s and 80s. People bought mass market products from chain stores. Americans had certain shared lifestyle and consumer habits in common, though again with some local or regional flavor under that.

The Baby Boomers and Generation X were the last generations formed in this mass-media, mass-consumer common culture environment. Thus they are the only ones with real first hand knowledge of “old America.”

The great American common culture fragmented in the 1990s. Cable television led to an explosion of different channels, that might be explicitly or implicitly segmented by age or other demographic characteristic. The Internet turbocharged this fragmentation.

America thus went from three TV networks to “57 Channels and Nothin’ On” (1992) to 257 channels and nothing on to no channels at all. Everyone now has their own algorithmically curated social media feed.

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show was itself in part a product of this fragmentation. CBS launched it as a platform for David Letterman. Letterman was the host of NBC’s Late Night, which aired immediately following Carson. But he was passed over as Carson’s replacement in favor of Jay Leno, at which point CBS hired him to launch a competitor. The number of late night talk shows only proliferated from there. Now the entire format is in decline along with linear television itself.

Americans no longer share a media diet. The way to survive in this market is to create content that reaches a specific niche. For Stephen Colbert, that was comedy for a heavily Democratic audience. For a figure like Jordan Peterson, that was young men who felt adrift the modern age.

I’m amazed at people with huge followings that most people have never heard of, such as Tik Tok stars with millions of followers. But that even includes people in the traditional media. A former Bravo TV personality named Jeff Lewis hosts a radio show on SiriusXM with a seven figure audience of passionate fans who call themselves “Chumps.” He’s basically Howard Stern for middle-aged women. But my searches show that he’s barely ever mentioned on Twitter.

Because this environment is so competitive, would be media personalities have to focus on grabbing attention, which often means extreme content, lowbrow antics, conspiracy theories, partisan red meat, etc. Today’s media figures don’t have the luxury that the old dominant networks did of creating content that was designed to meet certain standards, or even to occasionally be educational or somewhat uplifting to the public. They have to hustle hard everyday. As Colbert’s cancellation shows, even big traditional media companies can’t afford to run financial losses on a show forever anymore.

Americans simply share much less media in common than they used to. Perhaps only the Superbowl remains as a unifying media phenomenon. Though even here the halftime musical act this year was someone that many Americans had never heard of before even though he’s a global megastar.

Add to this changing consumer habits. There’s a lot of talk about a K-shaped economy, in which the top income earners are doing ever better, while the rest fall behind or decline. But this bifurcation started taking place in consumer culture as well, also hitting hard in the 1990s.

This is illustrated by Charles Murray’s “Bubble Quiz,” designed to help affluent knowledge elites in America know if they are living in a bubble. (Answer: probably). He asks questions such as: Have you ever purchased Avon products? During the past year, have you ever stocked your fridge with a mass-market American beer? How many times have you eaten at restaurants like Applebees, Denny’s or Ponderosa?

As with middlebrow media content, some of the traditionally middle class consumer landscape has also disappeared. The department store went into steep decline, while luxury boutiques on the one hand and value brands like Wal-Mart on the other expanded. Online retailers like Amazon allow for a nearly infinite variety of products to be ordered by people in different market niches.

The upper middle class knowledge elite has different consumer habits, different folkways really, than the rest of America. Americans no longer inhabit the same consumer universe in the way they used to, though the fragmentation here is likely less than for media specifically.

In today’s media ecology, and a bifurcated consumer culture and folkways, social solidarity and a political middle ground are simply harder to find. Stephen Colbert is a product of this environment much more so than of “media bias.” Johnny Carson himself would be struggling on late night TV in today’s world.

Watching Johnny Carson or drinking Maxwell House in common doesn’t necessarily mean two people would be fast friends or vote the same way. But they’d at least have some experiences that would provide a language for them to relate to each other. And for politicians or others to reference when appealing to them. (Knowledge of the Bible, another similar cultural touchstone, has also dissipated).

That old mass-media, mass-consumer common culture was inevitably time bound. It was created by a particular set of media technologies and a particular industrial landscape, in an era when America was demographically homogenizing due to low levels of immigration.

But it shows how we were able to create a shared layer of “thin” culture - I would call this part of the “Human-Social Stack” - that worked well for our country in conjunction with the “Techno-Industrial Stack” of new media technologies like television and the explosion of modern consumer goods.

Today’s techno-industrial acceleration of the internet, social media, now AI, and globalization have disrupted the cultural glue such as a shared media and consumer experience that made the old system function, but without building a replacement capable of filling the same role. Our human-social leg has not kept pace with our techno-industrial one. No surprise we are seeing social and political stresses as a result.

Sociologist James Davison Hunter observes that America is “a nihilist culture without nihilists.” This is because culture shapes individuals long before individuals shape culture. Culture is more than the sum of the beliefs and values of individuals, rather it is the reigning ethos and logic of the institutions that shape our lives. Most Americans could not define nihilism. Few have read Friedrich Nietzsche, its great prophet. Yet increasingly we live as though transcendent meaning does not exist. We behave as if there is no sacred order beyond personal desire, emotional satisfaction, and economic utility.

Human beings are shaped less by abstract arguments than by rituals, habits, and systems of daily life. Our practices disciple us long before our philosophies explain us. Here is where our human-social formation attention should be placed. We are heavily impacted by the environments we work and live within.

This reality helps explain one of the most overlooked developments among younger generations today: the rise of what might be called gig addictions.

A hard truth facing recent college graduates is that the American economy no longer reliably delivers what previous generations were promised. Recent graduates now experience unemployment rates significantly higher than the national average. Underemployment among degree holders has climbed above forty percent. Meanwhile, most graduates leave school carrying substantial student debt into one of the weakest entry-level labor markets in decades.

This produces more than economic anxiety. It produces existential instability.

When your only options are working in the fast-food industry (underemployment) or live at home with your parents (unemployment), it is understandable that finding quick fixes in the gig economy are a logical option. Some of these options may not be the best for you, but reality has not made the best option an easy or attainable default experience for many. Reality points in other self-destructive directions: the white-collar hustle of sports betting among young men and OnlyFans postings among young women. Before judgment should come some measure of understanding as this is a cultural condition before it is a personal behavior.

One of the defining features of modern economic life is the rise of the gig economy. The gig economy is an economic system built around short-term, flexible, and often digitally mediated work in which individuals earn income through temporary tasks, freelance labor, side hustles, or platform-based services rather than stable long-term employment. Increasingly, younger generations no longer imagine work through the older categories of vocation, profession, institution, or long-term career. Instead, work is experienced as fragmented, temporary, transactional, and endlessly flexible. Drive for Uber. Deliver for DoorDash. Sell products online. Build a personal brand. Monetize your following. Create content. Manage multiple side hustles simultaneously.

At one level, the gig economy reflects an understandable economic adaptation to a rapidly changing technological environment. But every economic system eventually shapes not merely how people make money, but how they imagine reality itself.

The gig economy does not simply create gig work. It creates a gig mindset.

And that mindset is increasingly reshaping the moral imagination among younger generations in deeply consequential ways. At the center of the gig mindset is the assumption that nearly everything can become monetized, optimized, and converted into market value. Everything and every experience are now for sale. The self itself becomes a platform.

Consider two rapidly expanding phenomena among young adults: men are increasingly addicted to online sports betting, and women are increasingly posting on platforms such as OnlyFans. These two are deeply connected manifestations of the same cultural logic. Together they speak to the contemporary challenges of human-social formation.

The level of sports betting involvement among college-age men has risen dramatically over the past several years and is now considered a significant public health and campus-life concern. Recent research suggests that roughly 58%–60% of Americans ages 18–22 have participated in sports betting, while among college students specifically, estimates rise as high as 67% participation on some campuses. More concerning than participation alone are the addiction indicators emerging among young men. Approximately 10% of men ages 18–30 now show behaviors consistent with gambling problems, compared to about 3% of the overall adult population. Gambling is becoming a major problem among college age males.

Online sports betting transforms competition, risk, and uncertainty into perpetual digital monetization. Young men are increasingly drawn into algorithmically engineered gambling ecosystems operating continuously through their phones. Every game becomes a financial opportunity. Every moment becomes speculative risk. Every emotional high becomes chemically reinforced through dopamine-driven cycles of reward anticipation.

The danger is not merely financial loss. The deeper danger is psychological formation.

Sports betting trains young men to experience life itself through the lens of volatility, stimulation, risk, and immediate payoff. Patience erodes. Discipline weakens. Work and reward become psychologically disconnected. Slow formation loses emotional appeal compared to instant speculative excitement. The result is not simply addiction but habituation into instability.

Not to be outdone, young women have their own onramp to gig addiction.

The same logic appears differently but relatedly in the rise of platforms like OnlyFans among young women. In 2019, the site featured approximately 350,000 creators. That number today, in part thanks to Covid-19, is over 4.1 million. Approximately 1.4 million American women are now creating content on OnlyFans. This represents one out of ten women in the college age cohort, depending on the methodology used.

One can think of OnlyFans as Uber for pornography. But its cultural significance is more than the normalization of pornography. It reflects shifts in our culture toward the monetization of identity, direct-to-consumer sexuality, the “creator” economy, and the blurring of public and private lives. The average OnlyFans creator does not make a lot of money, but the promise that they could and the normalizations of the thinking behind the platform make it increasingly common and attractive on college campuses.

New York City-based psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert warns about the concerning trend. “Psychologically, it offers instant gratification, attention, validation and income all at once. Those same rewards can create dependency and affect self-worth. Students risk tying their identity and confidence to clicks and subscribers. What is framed as independence often masks a deeper vulnerability.”

The deeper issue is not merely morality in the narrow sense. It is the view of the person being fueled by economic realities and the resulting rituals. Today’s America teaches young women to view their bodies primarily through the lens of monetized visibility. The body becomes detached from covenant, transcendence, mystery, and sacredness. It becomes economic inventory within an attention marketplace. But if the view of the body is already so detached, why not make money from this detachment?

This is why both sports betting addiction and OnlyFans participation emerge from the same cultural soil. Both reflect the convergence of technological acceleration, digital capitalism, fragmented identity, weakened institutions, declining transcendence, and algorithmic monetization.

The gig economy intensifies this because it conditions people to think of life itself transactionally. Everything becomes a hustle. Every talent becomes potentially monetizable. Every hobby becomes side income. Every interaction becomes economic opportunity.

The older idea of vocation quietly disappears. Vocation implied calling, stewardship, a contribution to something larger than oneself. All of this is dissolved in the gig economy.

This helps explain the growing emotional exhaustion among younger generations. Constant self-monetization is psychologically draining. One must continually perform, market, optimize, and compete for attention within digital systems engineered to produce insecurity and comparison.

What makes this especially dangerous is that the system often disguises itself as empowerment. Flexibility appears liberating. Monetization appears entrepreneurial. Visibility appears validating. But beneath the surface many young adults increasingly experience fragmentation, emotional detachment, and quiet despair. They are becoming economically connected while existentially unmoored. When everything is for sale, utility is everything, and nothing is sacred, they end up with a condition of commodified nihilism.

The answer is not merely stricter rules or louder moral outrage. Church-based finger wagging is not going to help. The deeper need is the recovery of a larger story of human dignity rooted in creation, embodiment, and transcendence.

Previous pushbacks against gambling and pornography are typically framed as individual moral failures. While this is partially true, the challenge is far more than this. This behavior is located within a nihilistic cultural context where this kind of plausibility and normalization dominate. To narrow prohibitions to individual morality is to ignore the forest for the trees.

Young adults do not simply need restraint. They need meaning larger than the marketplace. Until that meaning is recovered, gig addictions will continue multiplying. Human-social formation needs more than an individualistic response. We also need to attend to the structural and cultural realities that give these behaviors their rationale. Working to recover the dignity of the person and the dignity of work in this setting must be our starting point.

Cover image: OnlyFans model Annie Knight via Expert on Nothing podcast.

Buying these teams and keeping them local would be a rounding error on the net worth of multiple Silicon Valley tech figures. Yet things like this don’t even seem to be on their radar.

Contrast this with Mel and Herb Simon, founders of what’s now the largest shopping mall owner in the country. The Indiana Pacers were originally an ABA team, maybe the most successful of the ABA franchises. They were one of four ABA teams that joined the NBA when their league closed. The Pacers struggled in the NBA. In the 1970s they had to hold a telethon to sell enough tickets to save the team from closure. In 1983, the Pacers were still not financially viable, having gone 20-62 the previous season, playing to mostly empty seats. They were going to either go out of business or relocate.

Then Indianapolis mayor Bill Hudnut asked the Simon brothers to buy the team. Even though it looked like a bad investment, reputedly one of the Simons said to the mayor, “I guess I have to do this, don’t I?” They bought the team for $11 million and it’s still in the city today. The team and its arena have played a key role in Indianapolis building one of the nation’s most lucrative franchises in hosting major sporting events.

This also turned out to be an incredible investment for the Simons. The Pacers are worth an estimated $4.2 billion today, far more than the total Simon family net worth back then.

Today’s tech elite need to expand their vision of their civic role, locally and nationally. Delivering amazing new technologies will always come first. But with the rewards of that come obligations that are not always freely chosen.

Sometimes you choose your duties. Sometimes your duties choose you.

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Conservative Institutional Neglect of Libraries

Apart from public schools, libraries are arguably the most important government formation institution for children, and even adults. Libraries are well known for being very culturally and politically leftist in their orientation. But this is not a case where the left had to “capture” an institution. It is one that conservatives have largely neglected.

People say “conservatives don’t read.” That’s not entirely fair. There are segments of the conservative world that are very into books. Christian homeschooling family types are big users of libraries around here. But I think it’s fair to say that liberals are more interested in books than conservatives, which we see in the very leftist skew of independent bookstores as well.

Conservatives don’t typically become librarians, even though this could be an ideal profession - similar to teacher - for a significant number of conservative or religious women. It’s not a field that is valorized or put into the imagination of conservative children.

I’m also not aware of a single scholar in the conservative think tank or policy space who is chartered with studying libraries and developing policies for them as their main job. Stephen Eide is the closest person I know of, and he has a great essay on libraries in the new issue of National Affairs. But this is mostly a personal passion project for him and is not the focus of his day job. Perhaps this lack of conservative policy interest is because there’s little federal policy action, or because there are no conservative funders willing to underwrite library policy research.

Given the importance of libraries as a formation institution, conservatives should have greater interest and engagement with them.

In light of the Yglesias post above, it’s worth noting that America’s library system was originally built out through the generosity of the Gilded Age elite Andrew Carnegie. Many Carnegie library buildings are still standing, and some are still even used as libraries.

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Personal Standards in Today’s World

How to raise general standards and elevate our people without imposing crushing and cruel judgments is one of the challenges of our age.

Liana Graham and Scott Yenor have an interesting essay in First Things on repentance and forgiveness in a pornified age that illustrates this in one domain of life:

In 2012, one of us asked two dozen young conservative women in San Diego—most aged twenty-five to thirty—whether they were married. Only one was. When pressed for reasons, the answer came quickly: “The men are addicted to porn.” That moment revealed a quiet crisis. If committed, attractive, faithful young women hesitate to marry because of pornography, the pro-marriage project is in deep trouble.

…

Today, women rightly sense that many men under forty have warped expectations shaped by endless visual novelty. They are jealous, suspicious, and increasingly unwilling to risk marriage with men whose loyalties seem divided. Porn explains why women are more skeptical about and less interested in marriage and dating than men. Porn is a significant source of conflict in nearly 20 percent of married and engaged couples. For more than a third of women, frequent porn use is a marital deal-breaker.

…

Women are encouraged to be tolerant of male sexual impurity today because some girls have gone wild. For nearly every porn video there is a female “porn star.” Call Her Daddy, a podcast where the girls brag about getting around, is wildly popular. Women are reading erotica, watching more porn than in the past, and posting highly suggestive and borderline pornographic photos of themselves on social media. At best, women today are torn between the desire to settle down and have a family and the career pressures of feminism, extraordinary sex positivity, and a dating culture built on premarital sex.

Today’s world, where many of the standards of the past are pervasively violated and thus long gone, puts people, and institutions, in a bind who want to set a higher bar than what society has on offer.

Porn is an obvious example. A woman who demands a man who doesn’t watch porn, at least on occasion, is going to narrow her pool of prospects considerably. Similarly, you see many men on the internet proclaiming women damaged goods because of their “body count,” but if they insist on only marrying a “debt-free virgin without tattoos,” they are setting a standard that excludes a majority of younger single women.

Men and women can make those choices, but they come with greater tradeoffs than would have been the case in the past. As Graham and Yenor put it:

Before the sexual revolution, men and women could more easily hold one another to high standards of premarital conduct, but these novels instruct us not to glorify the good old days. As sixty years of sexual revolution have compromised both men and women, both must balance standards with realistic expectations.

I’ve also noted similar effects in other domains. It’s hard for anyone to be too judgmental these days when it comes to things like substance abuse problems, divorce, a suicide, etc. because everybody’s family now has somebody in it - maybe more than one somebody - with big life problems.

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Scott Greer: The Irrelevance Of Pro-Lifers - America has largely moved on from abortion, to the chagrin of people who make their living off the issue. Note: Greer is a dissident right figure who likely doesn’t care about abortion personally.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

New this week:

• The End of the Moral Majority - The pro-life movement is one of the first casualties of a political architecture built for a country that no longer exists

• My podcast this week was with Seth Barron on the left’s institutional capture of institutions.

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Cover image: New York Public Library by Vallue/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Wall Street Journal, “Trump is the problem. The president is the problem.” Pro-lifers like her are upset he has appointed abortion supporters like Robert F. Kennedy to key positions in his administration, is allowing mail order abortion pills, and is leaving abortion policy to the states.

Dannenfelser says Trump’s approach means “the movement as we know it is finished.” She’s right that it’s finished. But it’s not Trump who ended it. It’s the American public. The movement to ban abortion stalled not because of him, but because abortion bans have been shown to be a loser at the ballot box. We now know that a majority of Americans want abortion to be legal.

Abortion has been on the ballot several times since the repeal of Roe vs. Wade, and the pro-abortion position has dominated in terms of results. I can only identify two cases in which the anti-abortion position won a majority of the votes, in South Dakota and Nebraska.

There’s also a wide belief among analysts - even among opponents of abortion themselves - that abortion was the reason Democrats significantly over-performed in the 2022 midterms. This was a shock result in an election that should have otherwise been a “red wave.”

In this voting climate, Republicans are not going to line up to support social policies that are proven political losers. The pro-life movement is not prepared for this reality, and their reaction makes it clear.

An Obsolete Architecture

The pro-life movement is not a one-off exception. It’s just one early example of a much larger institutional challenge facing social conservative movements and organizations in coming years. They were largely created during a period from the 1970s through the 2000s on two founding assumptions that are no longer true: that traditional morality was still held to by a majority of Americans, and that the way to ensure their triumph was through Republican politics.

I call this combination moralistic-majoritarian politics. It’s moralistic in that it believes its positions are moral absolutes, so compromise is impermissible. In abortion, this means abortion is murder and thus must be stopped at almost any cost. It’s majoritarian in that it is structured around winning political victories in electoral politics, which comes with the implicit assumption that its beliefs are broadly popular in society.

With abortion, moralistic-majoritarian politics works, in theory, like this:

It’s no surprise that moralistic-majoritarian sounds like Jerry Falwell’s flagship social conservative organization Moral Majority. In my “three worlds” framework, this is a relic of the Positive World, in which Christianity is in decline but still viewed positively by society. In this era it was plausible - if not necessarily accurate - to claim that social conservatives still spoke for the American mainstream. The theory was that the secular left had been getting its way through institutional capture and procedural manipulation, but that their ideas weren’t actually held by most people.

Fast forward and America is now in a Negative World, where traditional morality and social norms are now expressly repudiated on a range of issues extending far beyond sexuality matters like abortion. This shift in the religious culture of America is one of the most important parts of the American transition now under way.

In this new, Negative World America, moralistic-majoritarian politics fails because social conservative positions are not actually supported by a majority of the people. Hence efforts to ban abortion lost momentum quickly after the repeal of Roe vs. Wade as this became clearly evident at the ballot box.

This is particularly hitting the pro-life movement because it has an audacious goal, and abortion is a particularly polarizing issue that has been subjected to repeated direct ballot box tests. But similar reckonings are coming for churches and denominations, Christian colleges, and other such groups and movements.

Despite what you are reading about a vibe shift, packed Catholic masses, or a Gen-Z religious revival, generational turnover is only going to accentuate this trend, eroding the demographic base of support for banning abortion. As Ryan Burge has noted, each generation is less religious than the last, and with the large and very religious Boomer generation set to pass on, this will produce a steep decline in the number of religious conservatives who are the base of movements like opposition to abortion. There’s no prospect of moralistic-majoritarian politics succeeding anytime soon, except on marginal or popular matters, or on a very temporary basis.

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Political Coalition Implications

Moralistic-majoritarian politics on abortion - or other social issues - is a problematic fit for today’s Republican Party. Social conservatism was never that popular with the dominant libertarian/classical liberal and foreign policy legs of conservatism’s proverbial three-legged stool. Populist or MAGA conservatives are more interested in cultural conservative policies like immigration than social conservative ones like abortion. Add to these abortion bans being a proven electoral loser, and GOP politicians are going to pivot away from the issue.

The pro-life movement has done itself no favors within the Republican coalition by attacking Trump, and even opposing him during parts of the 2024 campaign, as prominent pro-life activist Lila Rose did. Politicians are never going to be fully comfortable with people who view themselves as on a holy crusade, and these behaviors are only going to further marginalize the movement.

Some pro-life people in one state I know complained to me that pro-life groups had been marginalized during their state’s process of developing abortion restriction legislation. I used to be puzzled by this, but after seeing how people like Marjorie Dannenfelser and Lila Rose conduct themselves, it now makes sense to me.

Pro-life groups have also lost credibility through many years of claiming polls showed that the public was on their side or was trending their way. This turned out to be completely wrong. Yet these organizations continue to publish what they claim are favorable polls. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America still maintains a polling dashboard. Live Action recently touted that a “new Pew poll shows gains in pro-life sentiment.” People are going to treat claims coming out of these groups with increasing skepticism - as well they should.

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New Politics for a New Age

The travails of the pro-life movement augur for a new kind of politics for religious conservatives: prudentialist-minority.

It is minority politics in that it recognizes that their moral vision is not presently accepted by the majority of the public. It is prudentialist in that rather than taking an all-or-nothing stand on moral absolutes, it accepts that in a fallen world, politics will always fall short of a perfect moral standard. It asks what the most reasonable and realistic approach to improving the general welfare is right now in light of the present culture, public opinion, institutional and political realities, etc.

A prudentialist-minority approach recognizes that change is a long-term, probably multi-generational game, and that trends are running against the preferences of religious conservatives. Thus the first imperative is to sustain moral integrity within your own community. Then, while achieving what victories are possible within the realm of prudence, working to change hearts and minds in society over time. This project requires a broad-spectrum set of initiatives.

The left did this. The book The Sexual Revolution was published in 1936. The Summer of Love was in 1967 - 59 years ago. Today we are still going through the outworking of ideas and efforts ongoing for nearly a century. And sexual liberation proponents are still aggressively working for cultural, not just legal change. Christianity has pulled off similar changes over time, as with the early church itself and the abolition movement. So it has this tool in its toolbox as well.

The pro-life organizations no doubt feel they were playing the prudential coalition game, but when it came to be their turn to get what they wanted, the GOP pulled the rug out from under them. This is understandable. Still, keep in mind, they did get their biggest ask delivered, the repeal of Roe vs. Wade. But when it came time to then ban abortion, the times and public sentiment had changed. The GOP took big swings at this in some places, but electoral reality intervened. It’s not the Republican Party’s fault that the public was much less supportive of banning abortion than pro-life groups had led it to believe. It’s a different world today post-Dobbs, and post-referendums on abortion.

The Anti-Pornography Example

The religious right has already made this shift from moralistic-majoritarian to prudentialist-minority in at least one important area: anti-pornography activism. Not long ago, religious conservatives wanted to ban porn. Legally and culturally, that turned out to be a loser. No surprise, as Politico put it in 2018, “the GOP gave up on porn.”

In response, anti-porn activism changed its approach. Some organizations rebranded around opposition to sex-trafficking, a more popular cause. Porn itself was rebranded as a personal moral failing that needed to be opposed and disciplined inside the church. Non-religious couples today might happily be watching porn together at home, but the church was not going to accept porn for its own members.

The ubiquity of minors accessing hard core pornography on their smart phones opened a door to renewed political action. Nobody wants 11 year old boys having access to this material. So state legislatures have passed popular laws requiring age verification for access to porn. This won’t keep the likes of Pornhub out of those states forever, but it does show the kind of policy advances that are possible when there’s broad popular support for them. Prudentialist politics doesn’t necessarily mean you get nothing. And over the long term, who knows what shifts in public beliefs are possible?

I expect that it will take some time before the pro-life movement adjusts to this new reality. The current moralistic-majoritarian approach is deeply rooted in the pro-life ecosystem. The moralistic side of that is not a political ploy, but a deeply held moral conviction, one mostly aligned with historic church teaching. This conviction need not change in order to adopt a new political approach, but in practice it inhibits adopting one. The movement has a lot of older, long-time leaders and funders who are unlikely to change course at this stage of the game. The realities of demographic decline in the church have yet to become fully manifest to them.

But ultimately a new approach will be forced on them, if only to stave off irrelevance. Other religious conservative groups and movements should take note and adjust before they encounter their own crisis.

Cover image: Donald Trump with Marjorie Dannenfelser and others in happier times in 2017.

From “defund the police” and anarcho-tyranny in New York City to open borders, the erosion of assimilation, and the battle over American identity, we talk about what has happened to key institutions and domains of life as they have been transformed to advance political ends.

First, the New York Times recently published a list of their top 30 living American songwriters. It was a source of tremendous controversy and discussion, which of course makes it a huge success from the Times perspective.

One of the critics of the Times list was the popular and very knowledgeable music Youtuber Rick Beato, who recorded an interesting short video looking at the background of the Times critics who selected the list:

Beato notes the prevalence of Ivy League and elite degrees among the critics, pointing especially the lack of any degrees in music. Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica went to Harvard and got a B.A. in English, for example. I ran the list of six critics through Claude, which indicated none of them have any formal musical training.

I don’t think one needs to have a degree in music or be a musician to be an effective pop music critic. But Beato’s complaint about the Times critics’ educational backgrounds does illustrate something about the changing nature of education and meritocracy in America.

It used to be that prep schools and elite colleges took people who were already destined to become top leaders due to family background, and formed them with a particular ethos. Now those schools provide those who would not otherwise likely become top leaders with the credential that allows them to obtain those positions.

We call this new system meritocracy. But listening to Caramanica complain about white male songwriters and dismiss Billy Joel, I ask myself: is he really the best person in the entire country in understanding and writing about pop music such that he should be a major critic at the New York Times based on merit? When I see that over 700,000 people watched a Rick Beato video breaking down some subtle elements that make Toto’s “Africa” a megahit, or note that almost 300,000 people subscribe to the deeply knowledgeable Ted Gioia here on Substack, I’m not convinced.

It’s great for Caramanica that he got that gig. I’m sure he has real talent or he wouldn’t be there.

But this illustrates the way that our present system of credentialing, filtering, and elevating people is not producing the results we would necessarily expect from a system that’s supposed to be organized around skills, competence, and merit.

The next piece will take a deeper look at this topic, looking at the question of what the right model is for elite formation and structuring.

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The Best Model for an American Tech Elite

Palantir’s Alex Karp wrote a widely-discussed book called The Technological Republic about the role he advocates Silicon Valley play in our society. I previously highlight a review essay by Tanner Greer that is very critical of Karp, and which lays out a history of the late 19th and early 20th century Eastern aka WASP Establishment that he views as the real model of fusing new technology with national development and leadership.

Geoffrey Kabaservice at the Niskanen Center did his doctoral dissertation on the last generation of the WASP establishment, which he adapted into an excellent book I’ve mentioned before, The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment.

He is out with his own long and interesting essay interacting with Greer. He is something of a friendly critic, arguing that instead of the Gilded Age establishment, it was actually the later 1940-1970 establishment that provides a better model for Silicon Valley.

Greer’s analysis of the Eastern Establishment offers real insight into the realities of power and influence in America in the 19th and 20th centuries, but that same analysis also complicates his argument in significant ways. Taking a page from E. Digby Baltzell — the sociologist who popularized the term WASP — Greer describes this establishment as the postwar fusion of a New England-centric patrician class with a rising group of industrial magnates…Baltzell believed that American society benefited from the creation of this establishment. In his view, the wealthy industrialists reinforced the power and standing of the upper class while also putting them in touch with the realities of a modernizing world. At the same time, the upper-class code of conduct operated as a check on the magnates who otherwise might destroy the republic through their greed and lust for power.

Kabaservice argues that Greer’s account is overly New York centric, and downplays the important role played by the Boston tradition:

Grant, however, emphasized: “Most important, Union forces had struck a major blow for freedom and equality.” Greer’s account, in my view, generally underestimates the importance of moral and egalitarian ideals (including the principle of racial equality) in the formation of the post-Civil War leadership. He believes that “The key city in [the Eastern Establishment] constellation was always New York City,” and that the scholarship of historians and sociologists like Baltzell “is distorted by its focus on elites in lesser Establishment cities such as Boston and Philadelphia.”

But this is to dismiss the genuine struggle within the establishment, throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, between American commercial impulses embodied by New York and the ideals embodied by Boston. Conservatives who believe that politics is downstream from culture should consider how the post-Civil War histories written in Boston, for example, influenced Americans’ perceptions of national identity and national priorities. Historian Mark Peterson has demonstrated how the South’s defeat in the Civil War allowed Boston “to put its impress on the future of the United States,” not least by enabling Boston’s pioneering historians (including Francis Parkman, William Hickling Prescott, and John Lothrop Motley) to construct new narratives.

Kabaservice is critical of the brand of rapacious capitalism practiced by Gilded Age elites. He also points to conflicts within the governing class of America, such as over the scope of corporate power:

And while many people believe the late 19th and early 20th centuries to have been a laissez-faire era, governments at all levels (including local and state as well as federal) took action not only to support economic growth but also to limit corporate excesses. Landmarks along this path included antitrust legislation and regulatory action, civil service reform, and the institution of progressive taxation as well as the creation of a rudimentary social welfare safety net. The Supreme Court affirmed the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911, and Congress created the Federal Reserve two years later in order to ensure the nation would not have to depend on the good graces of individual bankers to survive the next financial panic. Many of these initiatives were advanced by Republicans with the support of GOP presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, which calls into question the idea of an all-encompassing political establishment.

One of the points Baltzell makes is that the WASP establishment stood as an affront to the Marxist conception of class. Here you had a class in which its own class interests did not straightforwardly determine its politics. There were people of different parties and different persuasions within the establishment itself. This ability of the establishment to make space within itself for high-stakes conflict, while regulating the conduct of that conflict, and ensuring its participants retained personal relationships and ties, was one of the establishment’s core functions. In our age of no-holds-barred, zero-sum, winner-takes-all political and cultural wars, we feel keenly the lack of this establishment function today.

Kabaservice here also emphasizes what I call the “human-social stack,” focused on making sure that techo-industrial acceleration worked well for America and Americans broadly, not just a narrow stratum of industrialists. So much focus today is on how we accelerate new technologies, build more housing or energy, etc. But the social structures and institutions in which this is embedded and deployed are of equal importance.

In general, Kabaservice argues that Greer’s account makes the establishment appear too unified and monolithic.

He also argues that the Great Depression did not mark the establishment’s decline as Greer claims, but that it continued into the postwar era. In this, I should note that Greer follows Baltzell, who sees the decline of the establishment in the 1930’s, viewing its postwar reflowering as, in his words, an “Indian summer.” Kabaservice writes:

There is no doubt that the Depression did discredit the Republican Party and many of the policies it had upheld since the 19th century, which the considerable majority of Americans came to believe had brought on the economic collapse and which offered few solutions for the widespread misery that resulted. Some Old Guard Republicans continued to cling to Gilded Age nostrums. But the party as a whole moved toward moderation during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, endorsing parts of the New Deal social welfare safety net as well as policies to educate and empower the workforce — and the result from 1940 to 1970 was both a much faster rate of growth (measured in output per person) and a more egalitarian and cohesive society than in the period from 1870 to 1940.

The Eastern Establishment pivoted in response to the Depression, away from knee-jerk association with the GOP and toward the model of Henry Stimson and his acolytes, who offered dedicated public service to both Republican and Democratic administrations as an expression of placing the interests of nation above class. Although many today would dismiss this idea of noblesse oblige as a myth, it was reinforced by the high rate of World War II casualties among graduates of elite prep schools and universities as well as the service of dollar-a-year men in government and the wholesale conversion of American industry to wartime production. The postwar era also saw the movement toward meritocracy in Ivy League universities under leaders like Harvard’s James Conant and Yale’s Kingman Brewster Jr., largely because they believed that elite institutions had national responsibilities that transcended the interests of the class into which they had been born.

I see two basic models of thinking about governance modernization in America. One is the Gilded Age/Progressive Era. The other is the era from 1933-1964, running from the New Deal through to the postwar institutions (like the UN and NATO) to the Civil Rights Act. In both cases, America was creating a new set of institutions to deal with new challenges. Kabaservice is very enamored of the latter era.

FDR is an archetype of the kind of leader who can operate within the American cultural and political tradition, and yet still carry out major institutional reforms. Not everything he did was positive, obviously, but transformation was definitely necessary.

But Greer’s choice of the Gilded Age/Progressive Era may be a better parallel to our own time due to the rapid development of disruptive technologies with the potential to radically reshape society, depending on how AI turns out. Our Silicon Valley style startup world that can create stupendous wealth and power for founders is definitely more akin to that era than say the 1950s “organization man” one.

Kabaservice also has to reckon with the fact that in his preferred era, the establishment failed to accomplish the most critical thing it needed to do, namely perpetuate itself.

Also missing within the accounts of Greer, Kabaservice - and me - is a look at the streak of self-critique and even self-loathing within the WASP class that emerged in the early 1900s. This is over-emphasized by non-WASPs with an ethnic ax to grind, like Michael Knox Beren in his book Wasps, and I have not yet come across a good modern treatment of it.

Greer and Kabaservice agree on a key point that is very relevant today, namely the importance of the establishment being willing to make personal and class sacrifices for the sake of the nation in order to perpetuate their own dominant position.

Tanner Greer is correct that the Eastern Establishment played an outsized role in American history over a decades-long span because it aligned industrial wealth, political power, and a culture sustained by upper-class rituals and institutions. But what made the establishment durable — and indeed gave it legitimacy — was less lockstep agreement on political issues than an ethos that subordinated class interest to national interest. At its heart was a compromise that involved not just the negotiated mutual absorption of two rival groups but their adjustment to a higher national creed. The New England aristocracy allowed the “crude but vital America” into its ranks, while the industrialists agreed to Puritan-inspired limits on their pursuit of profit at all costs. The establishment that emerged did, at its best, prove willing to incorporate talented outsiders, to adhere to an ethos of disinterested public service, to abide by norms of liberal democracy, and to build institutions that ultimately undermined its own dominance — even while helping to make the United States the most globally competitive society the world had ever seen.

This echoes Antonio Gramsci, who wrote in his Prison Notebooks:

Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed—in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind.

This is a critical element missing from the worldview of Silicon Valley elites, Wall Street financiers, and other would-be dominant groups like “the 9.9%” upper middle class.

You can click over to read Kabaservice’s entire essay.

Related: The newsletter Upper Middle - targeted at the anxieties of the urban upper middle class - has a fun online game called “The Elite Game” in which you try to perpetuate your ruling class over the generations by deciding which people to include or exclude.

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New Content and Media Mentions

I got a link this week in Ross Douthat’s New York Times newsletter. And the crew at Theology Pugcast had an interesting discussion about my essay on the link between the decline of Protestantism and the decline of literacy.

New this week:

• There Is No Boomer Succession Plan - How a generation that didn’t form its successors is structuring around its own absence

• The Three Ages of Boss Rule - The era of political machine bosses is remembered as one of corruption. It was also one that mastered important parts of politics and governance that we’ve forgotten. A guest essay by Stephen Eide.

These are the kinds of human-social formation questions about flourishing life together that are not being discussed enough in an era focused on techno-industrial policy matters like housing policy, building codes infrastructure. Both are necessary for navigating periods of American transition, as Eide shows.

Please enjoy this guest essay from Stephen Eide - Aaron.

Between roughly the Civil War and World War II, most American cities were at some point dominated by a boss and his machine. The term “boss” referred not only a powerful politician, but one who acquired, held and exercised power outside the channels dictated by law. Progressive reformers fought the bosses for control of American city government for over a century. The Progressives ultimately won, or, at least, the bosses lost.

All this is well known. What is less well known is that the entire history of bossism is contained in three films: Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (the origin), Preston Sturges’ The Great McGinty (the peak), and John Ford’s The Last Hurrah (decline).

Gangs of New York: How Tammany Hall Civilized New York City

Gangs of New York (Gangs) takes place in New York City during the Civil War. Its plot concerns the war between Irish and nativist gangs for control of lower Manhattan. Both lose, leading to the rise of Tammany Hall, whose innovative manner of conflict resolution laid the foundation for modern New York. The ward heelers replace the warlords and the rigid identities of immigrant and nativist are dissolved. That’s how New York was tamed.

The film’s most memorable character is Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis), the nativist gang leader bent on keeping the Irish down. A primitive man, Bill resembles Homer’s Cyclops in that he has only one eye and maintains his political authority through the open threat of violence. He’s the sometimes ally of Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent), who functions as Tweed’s liaison to the slums of lower Manhattan.

In Gangs’ moral order, Boss Tweed represents progress. Tweed’s understanding of progress means thievery on a grand scale (rigging contracts for a new courthouse vs. exacting tribute from pubescent pickpockets) and bringing the Irish into the fold. Tweed tells Bill that to rely purely on violence is crude and inflexible, and he vows that Bill won’t last if he doesn’t adapt. Bill is less greedy than Tweed, and more principled in his own (bigoted) way. He’s ferociously independent, but also fatalistic. Bill knows that Tweed is right that his days are numbered. Nonetheless, he will go down fighting.

But the debate between Bill and Tweed is really a side show. Gangs’ main action concerns the struggle between the Irish and natives. The Irish are if anything even more primitive than Bill. They live in torch-lit caves, they are vengeful and as bigoted towards blacks as Bill’s crowd, and they reject the Civil War. Unlike Bill, the Irish have a bright future, but they, too, have bitter truths to learn. They seem to think that they can be New Yorkers without also being Americans. They are wrong. Scorsese asserts this by making the film’s climax not the 1863 draft riots themselves but the Union Army’s brutal suppression of them. The Army forces the Irish to submit to the legitimacy of the Civil War, and, by extension, the unconditional obligations implied by American citizenship. (Nation-building, 19^th-century style.) Becoming American means becoming an American citizen, and citizenship implies renouncing the right to pick and choose among one’s obligations, and not least during times of crisis. Scorsese is slightly less clear about what becoming less Irish and more American will mean for the Irish than he is about the nativists’ education. But, at bare minimum, it means that they too will have to become more tolerant and capable of solving their conflicts through politics instead of violence.

Tammany did not itself vanquish the gangs (which were real by the way-see Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York (1928), on which the film was based, and Tyler Ambinder’s Five Points (2010)). That task required guns and muscle. But, in providing a ready-at-hand political alternative to the gangs, Tammany answered the question: What next?

What is the purpose of city government? It is not only to provide basic services such as education and street-cleaning, but to manage conflict. Government is much more than just a fee-for-service arrangement. Humans tend to disagree about the true and the good, which produces conflict, which we need politicians to manage for us by means of persuasion, intimidation, flattery, deal making, and so forth. Politics will always be with us and we will always need politicians.

The urban party machines excelled at managing conflict. If we believe that honest, rational debate will be inadequate to resolve most conflicts, then something else will be necessary to prevent government from being rendered completely impotent and to minimize the potential for violence. In most functional democracies, that “something else” has been a party system. Centuries of political experience strongly suggest that a democracy requires some form of organized mediation to recruit and vet candidates for office, and then, when in office, provide them with the support they need to be effective. “Parties are as natural to democracy as churches to religion” (James Q. Wilson).

Scorsese seems to understand these virtues of boss rule, while remaining aware of its corruption and vulgarity. Gangs argues that boss rule was an improvement over what came before: the gangs were just as corrupt, more violent, less enlightened, and, most crucially, pettier. Modern New York for Scorsese is, above all, a great city. Tweed was not a great man, but, according to Scorsese, Tweed’s political system provided the conditions for New York’s future greatness.

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The Great McGinty: Bossism Ascendant

The Great McGinty (McGinty) takes place in an unnamed American city sometime in the first half of the 20^th century. Its plot traces the title character’s (Brian Donlevy) rise from the soup line to the governorship by means of his skills at repeat-voting, fighting, bullying, carousing, wisecracking, bid-rigging and spending public money wastefully. “The boss” (Akim Tamiroff) gives McGinty his initial break and then directs his rise. McGinty chafes under the rule of the boss, and hilarity, and McGinty’s downfall, ensue. The third major character is McGinty’s wife (Muriel Angelus), his moral guide, who bucks him up to reject the boss.

McGinty depicts boss rule at its height, when it seemed almost the natural form of American city government. Sturges gives us the fully-developed specimen. All of the essential features of Progressive age city politics are in evidence:

First, the boss was often not the mayor. Of the 20 municipal bosses surveyed in Harold Zink’s City Bosses in the United States (1930), 19 held some public office of some kind, but only two were mayors. There was no reason for the boss himself to be the mayor, since it was a ceremonial position with no real power. The office now known as the “strong mayor” did not become common until well into the 20^th century. Progressive reformers strengthened the office of mayor by wresting fiscal and administrative authority away from the local legislature and lengthening the term of office. This left no choice to the boss but to become mayor. What few bosses have emerged to dominate urban politics since WWII have all been mayors. Examples include Richard Daley pere, Philadelphia’s Frank Rizzo, and Newark’s Sharpe James.

Second, machine politics was genuinely democratic in the sense that it enabled men to rise from exceedingly humble beginnings to positions of high authority. In this respect, a real life equivalent of McGinty would be Harry Truman, who owed his career to Tom Pendergast, the notorious boss of Kansas City.

Third, the lines between reformer and boss could be sometimes blurry. McGinty is first elected as a reform candidate (“Down with McBoodle! Up with McGinty!”). Wise bosses were highly sensitive to public opinion. They sometimes had to run candidates who were just distant enough from the machine to be considered graft-free. This practice was known as “perfuming the ticket.” Problem was, such candidates did not always stay in line when they got into office. Sometimes they chafed like McGinty did.

Fourth, women hated grafters. The Progressive-era movements for women’s suffrage and municipal reform were practically indistinguishable. Women getting the vote dealt the bosses a grievous blow.

McGinty is a satire and therefore anti-boss. Sturges certainly expects us to like McGinty, the boss and the gang, and McGinty does eventually redeem himself by breaking with the boss (on top of earning the love of a good woman), but to say that his deep engagement in machine politics required redemption implies that bossism was a rotten system. The audience’s proxy is McGinty’s wife. She loves him, but she certainly doesn’t love his politics.

At the same time, Sturges depicts a world in which bossism as such is not seriously under threat. No fundamental structural reforms are at hand, just the occasional defeat at the polls and visit to the hoosegow.

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The Last Hurrah: Ciphers Ascendant

The Last Hurrah’s protagonist Frank Skeffington (Spencer Tracy) is based on Boston’s James Michael Curley. We know this because of the many details drawn directly from Curley’s eventful life and career: Skeffington’s longstanding feuds with his city’s Cardinal and with the bluebloods, his personal dislike for FDR, his uxoriousness, his considerable charm and rhetorical skills, and the fact that he’s an old man running yet again for mayor in a predominantly Irish New England city.

Skeffington’s final campaign forms the plot of Hurrah. Its events transpire in the mid-20^th century, contemporaneously with the film itself (1958) and the book on which it was based (by Edwin O’Connor, published in 1956). Skeffington loses, to a young, upwardly-mobile Irish American put up by the local WASP establishment.

Times have changed since Skeffington entered politics in the late 19^th century. TV and radio have replaced flesh-pressing and spontaneous, street-corner oratory. The city is wealthier, and some of that wealth has reached the Irish, Skeffington’s traditional base. Their wealth has made them less resentful, rendering WASP-baiting demagoguery less effective than it used to be. Skeffington is aware of these changes, but he’s still convinced that one last victory is in his grasp. He believes that all it will take is a mix of charm, intimidation, patronage and loyalty, but events prove him wrong.

Skeffington’s is a personal machine. Bosses created machines, not vice versa. All urban machines depended on the leadership from a strong boss. We see this in the fact that we tend to refer to most of the important machines by the names of the boss who gave them life and influence (Pendergast, Hague, Crump). Tammany Hall, which did manage to last a long time and transcend the leadership of individual bosses, was the exception, not the rule.

And in that he controls the machine and not vice versa, Skeffington may be said to be his own man, the genuine article. He may be a bit of a grafter, but, in Hurrah, he’s not the candidate beholden to special interests. That would be McCluskey, Skeffington’s nebbish opponent. The film argues that, for all their faults, decline of Skeffington and his like heralded a more inauthentic form of politics. (The phrase used in Hurrah the novel is “a generation of ciphers.”) Politicians would thenceforth be packaged, handled and promoted like so many different brands of soap. The backlash against scriptedness and inauthenticity we see in the appeal of candidates such as Herman Cain and Ross Perot. These are not great men, but, in that authenticity is surely a condition of greatness, the decline of Skeffington’s ways portends the decline of greatness in city politics.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Hurrah depicts the last stages of unity and reconciliation projected by Gangs. The subtitle of The Last Hurrah could be The Revenge of the WASP. Skeffington finds himself fighting against both the new Irish middle-class and old money Protestants. His moment seems to have been a blip, a brief transition phase in American urban history. By the film’s conclusion, history has come full circle and ethnic conflicts are resolved in a way that could never have happened while blueblood-baiters like Skeffington remained in power.

It’s somewhat difficult for the audience to appreciate how Skeffington could have lost to McCluskey. Based on what we are shown, the latter seems like a total boob. But we’re not the voters. To the increasingly affluent second and third generation Irish-Americans, Skeffington comes off as uncouth, just as he always did to the WASPs. They want a mayor that mirrors their conception of themselves: young, well-educated (in a conventional sense), nicely (not nattily) attired, and untainted by unsavory connections and loyalties.

In their classic study City Politics (1963), Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson argued that this trend was general among ethnic voters in the American city at mid-century. Yes, Jews still preferred to vote for Jewish candidates, Irish for Irish candidates and so on, but:

[t]he candidates must not be too Polish, too Italian, or too Irish in the old style…[N]owadays, the nationality-minded voter prefers candidates who represent the ethnic group but at the same time display the attributes of the generally admired Anglo-Saxon model. The perfect candidate, then, is of Jewish, Polish, Italian, or Irish extraction and has the speech, dress, manner, and the public virtues-honesty, impartiality, and devotion to the public interest-of the upper-class Anglo-Saxon (p.43).

According to Hurrah, the Progressives were far less consequential in bringing down the bosses than two other factors. First, New Deal social welfare programs devalued the soft and hard currencies with which the machines purchased the immigrant vote (this thesis is advanced more explicitly in the book than the film). Second, the rising tide of prosperity produced the lace curtain Irish, who were wealthier, younger and less angry than their parents and grandparents who had composed Skeffington’s base. There are Progressives in Hurrah, who provide important leadership and money, but this was a battle that they had been waging for decades. Why did they prove more successful at this moment? Because the Irish were ready to move on.

Conclusion

Gangs, McGinty and Hurrah set the standard not only because of their combination of historical accuracy and artistic merit, but because they are actually about politics. David Simon’s The Wire is probably the most highly-regarded recent treatment of city politics. But Simon doesn’t take politics seriously. The Wire holds that the real life of the city occurs in society, not government, and that politicians and their policies and institutions cause more problems than they solve.

Aside from the 2004 Gangs, most of the first-class filmmakers and writers in our own time tend to look past city politics. No one makes movies like these anymore. Perhaps the triumph of the Progressive vision of municipal reform made city politics less colorful. Hurrah portends a future of McCluskeys. But the problem cannot be purely for lack of material: there is nothing McCluskey-esque about Rudy Giuliani, Baltimore’s William Donald Schaefer, Philadelphia’s Ed Rendell and Providence’s Buddy Cianci. All made great copy, and yet they seem to have been largely overlooked by our more serious poets, filmmakers and novelists.

America needs to both navigate through generational turnover, and start rebuilding its leadership capacity.

A recent article in the New York Times on the future of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute annual gala (gift link) sheds light on how some institutions and leaders are thinking about this transition to post-Boomer leadership.

Simply put, they aren’t planning for there to be one. The existing Boomer head of the Met Gala, longtime Vogue magazine supremo Anna Wintour, age 76, is sticking around. And the plan is that by the time she’s done, the gala will be financially superfluous.

The piece starts by asking about the future of the event given its high profile stature, very high dollar take, and high wattage leader in Anna Wintour.

For years, as the Met Gala has grown ever bigger, blanketing social media with pictures of guests in their finery, smashing cultural fund-raising records, teetering on the line between fabulous and ridiculous, the questions and controversies surrounding New York’s “party of the year” have likewise proliferated.

Could the shindig, nominally a benefit for the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, get any more high-profile? When most of the country was struggling, should any institution be charging $100,000 a ticket for a party? And perhaps most important: What would happen when Anna Wintour, the evening’s mastermind and the woman who transformed it from a typical charity ball into an attention-guzzling juggernaut, retired?

…

What made the Costume Institute an anomaly in the museum ecosystem was that it raised most of its money via a party — one that had increasingly overshadowed almost every other activity of the museum itself, and that, like Wintour’s daytime employer, Condé Nast, seemed increasingly reliant on her presence and power. And though Wintour has been quick to say she is not going anywhere, she is 76 and last year relinquished day-to-day control of American Vogue to focus on her role as Condé’s chief content officer.

“Anna Wintour is not replaceable,” said William Norwich, the editor for fashion and interior design at Phaidon Press and a former editor at Vogue. [emphasis added]

This story is deeper than the Met. It illustrates a pattern of how many Boomers have led in American institutions. Wintour is a legendary editor. She was known as a fashion kingmaker and worked with a stable of photographers she helped make famous (or in some cases, more famous). But she is not especially notable as a developer of equivalent editorial talent, and seems not to have produced anyone who could plausibly succeed her at the Met Gala.

That failure seems characteristic of very top tier Boomer leaders. From what I’ve observed, they saw themselves as talent developers, but were unable to successfully create successors or protégés of similar accomplishment.

Two additional examples will illustrate. Mitch Daniels is widely seen as the greatest political leader in recent Indiana history. He was a transformational two-term governor. He gained national press for a successful transformational tenure as president of Purdue University. He was touted as a potential Presidential contender. He is associated with a leadership development program that bears his name, showing his commitment to the subject. Yet none of his protégés have come close to equalling his record. This is a big contrast to Daniels’ own mentor Richard Lugar, who not only helped develop Mitch Daniels himself, but multiple other very high impact local civic leaders whose names are not nationally known.

Another example is the legendary urban pastor Tim Keller, builder of New York’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church and the de facto creator of evangelicalism’s modern urban church movement. He invested a lot of personal time and money to train the next generation of pastors, something clearly very important to him. But none to date have become leaders or had impact on a similar scale.

It’s not obvious why this happened with Boomer leaders, but it’s worth studying in more detail. I have noticed that top Boomer leaders, like Wintour, tend not to surround themselves with people who might ever plausibly equal or upstage the boss someday. Or who have their own ideas. They want people who will completely subordinate themselves to the boss’ ambitions and vision. They also seem to believe that they alone have what it takes, which might account for why many of them hold on to their positions for so long.

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Returning to the Met Gala, it appears that for quite some time the Met has realized it is not sustainable. Part of this is because it is the very nature of such events to rise and fall. Especially in fashion, we should be expecting things to be going in and out of style.

But Met leadership also recognizes that it simply will not be possible for anyone to plausibly fill Wintour’s shoes. What do you do when your leader is irreplaceable?

Their solution appears to have been underway for some time: save enough money from the last days of Wintour into an endowment so that the Costume Institute never has to raise funding again - or at least nothing like what it does now.

Would the brands and people willing to pony up these exorbitant sums to be in one another’s orbits instead pocket the money [after Wintour is gone]? And if so, what would that mean for the future of the Costume Institute, a department that has been almost fully dependent on the gala as a source of its annual funds since the party began, in 1948?

Could it even survive without the extravaganza?

It turns out the museum itself has been quietly working on an answer.

“Since 2016, we have been putting some money that we raised for the gala aside into a quasi endowment,” Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, said this month.

And by 2030 — possibly as soon as 2028 — the Costume Institute will have saved enough of a nest egg to potentially support its own basic operations for the foreseeable future, no matter what happens in the greater museum economy or with the gala itself.

…

Though [Costume Institute curator-in-charge Andrew] Bolton and a museum spokeswoman said it was museum policy not to discuss specific department finances, and though the Met does not break out such numbers in its annual report, they did acknowledge the Costume Institute fund had been formally created in 2016 and was, like most of the museum’s endowments, run by the Met’s investment and development teams…Still, some back-of-the-envelope math is possible. Given that the operating budget of the Costume Institute is approximately $5 million a year, it would most likely require an endowment of between $100 and $130 million. (According to the American Alliance of Museums, 5 percent is the average draw of an endowment fund.) The gala has raised $166.5 million over the past 10 years, so subtracting the operating costs and the amount that goes directly to the Met would suggest there is approximately $106 million in the fund (a bit less if there were unusual expenses one year). This year’s gala added a record-setting $42 million to that sum, so if the party continues on the financial trajectory it has set for another two to three years, that would easily ensure enough capital in the fund to allow the department to essentially live off the interest going forward.

This plan has obviously been ongoing for some time.

To some extent, this is a smart move. The Met recognized that there was no next generation leader that could sustain the event at its current level. So they created an endowment to sustain the Costume Institute without pressure on Wintour’s ultimate successor to continue raising huge dollars via the gala every year is a good idea.

Tim Keller’s succession plan at Redeemer Pres had some similar attributes. After he officially retired as pastor, he used his star power to conduct a large fundraising campaign that no successor could plausibly pull off - about $100 million. He also split his church into three separate, smaller church entities with shared services between them. I said at the time, and still believe it, was a really great plan. There simply wasn’t, and in his case perhaps never could have been, a successor with the kind of star power and competence necessary to sustain the enterprise in its previous form.

It seems likely that many institutions will follow a variation on this path: maximize the return on current Boomer leadership, while structuring around a future with a diminished role for leadership - and possibly the institution itself - once the Boomer leader is no longer there.

This is actually the right move in many cases. When there’s no obvious high stature successor, or institutional sustainability is in question, institutions where it’s feasible should be thinking about this kind of approach. (This was not necessary, however, at Purdue, where Daniels recruited a solid successor in Mung Chiang, someone who was largely formed at Stanford and Princeton, outside of the Daniels ecosystem).

However, there’s another side to the Met Gala story specifically. Wintour took over an event tradition nearly 50 years old. She transformed it into something bigger and bolder than anything her predecessors could have conceived of. But she also squeezed much of the juice out of it such that when she in turn does ultimately hand the baton to a successor, it’s likely destined to diminish rather than continue growing. Her successor will never have the ability to do what Wintour herself did with it, regardless of how talented that successor might be. As Bolton, who is Gen X, put it cryptically, “It’ll be interesting to see how it’s going to evolve.”

This reminds me of how at a partnership I used to work for, as soon as the last Boomer made full partner, they IPO’d the company and capitalized all the future returns for themselves. Future generations would never get the opportunity previous ones had. Or think about how the United States went from $3 trillion in debt when the first Boomer became President to $39 trillion today. No future generation will ever get the same benefit of being able to borrow $36 trillion that they won’t have to pay back.

As a rule, institutions should not allow themselves to become over-optimized around a single person (or generation), no matter how talented, in ways that sacrifices the long-term trajectory of the institution or future generations.

Part of leaving a place better than when you found it means making sure its future stewards have the same or better opportunities than you had. Our failure to do that in America writ large - or at least the widespread feeling that we’ve failed - is why so many people think the American Dream is dead.

Perhaps the most important part of getting through the American Transition is to reset the game board here, so that people think they are on a personal, institutional, and national upward escalator extending behind and ahead of them through time.

Cover image: Anna Wintour by UKinUSA/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.0

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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.

…

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. 

…

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. 

…

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.

…

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.

…

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.

…

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.

…

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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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

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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.

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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.

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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.