The article representing the ascending top leg of the K was a great profile of a high tech industrial boom in Columbus (gift link) in the New York Times. It highlights the giant factories being built there by Intel and the defense tech startup Anduril. “Columbus,” the Times notes, “has been transformed. The metropolitan area has become a critical hub for advanced manufacturing and artificial intelligence.” Founder Dennis DeMeyere says, “It’s wild. Everything is under construction. It feels like the Bay Area felt 13 or 14 years ago.” Manufacturing employment is up, growing 4.4% from 2021 to 2024. The city’s highly aligned and business friendly approach, dubbed the “Columbus Way” is credited for this success.

The descending bottom leg of the K was covered by Mark Barbash, a longtime veteran economic development official who is now retirement age. He warned in a Columbus Dispatch op-ed (free AOL link) that the Columbus Way is no longer fit for purpose in addressing the city’s major challenges. The city has 240,000 people living in poverty, about a fifth the population. Food bank visits have doubled since before the pandemic. Homelessness is at a record high. And housing prices have soared. What works for luring Intel can’t address these kinds of social issues.

Juxtaposed, these two pieces show the K-shaped society playing out in one city. A friend of mine describes Columbus as “60% Sunbelt, 20% Cleveland, 20% Appalachia.” Factor into that also that the city also has the second largest Somali refugee community in the United States, with an estimated 50-60,000 people, one that is experiencing social and economic integration challenges. It’s a mix of demographic and economic boomtown, combined with significant inequality and social challenges.

What’s happening that civic leadership seems so effective on headline economic matters, yet hasn’t been able to address the inequality or social issues highlighted? Barbash highlights, “Corporate leadership is less anchored to place, with executives whose networks extend far beyond the region and for whom civic engagement is no longer assumed to come with the territory.” And, “Growth no longer reliably creates broad-based jobs.”

These are true, but miss a more fundamental lack of economic alignment between corporate success, local success, and individual success for leaders today. And how Columbus’s leadership model has shifted, from one once led by Titans to one now organized around technocrats.

The Titans

I’ve highlighted many times the decline in civic leadership in America’s cities resulting from a combination of the decline of “WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) establishment” type blue blood elites, and corporate consolidation that dramatically reduced the number of significant companies, and thus corporate leaders, whose economic interests were directly tied to the overall fortunes of the city where they were located.

In this older model, a relatively small number of tightly connected white male institutional leaders dominated civic life. In Columbus, this was the era of the so-called “Titans,” six particularly dominant city power brokers, as well as the constellation of other often intermarried, multigenerational Bexley-focused elites around them. (Bexley is an old money enclave city within Columbus, similar to Highland Park in Dallas). As Columbus Monthly wrote in 1989, “There are six. All are men; all are white. They are the people who can make a project move forward, or stop it in its tracks, if they so choose. They are the people who can weigh in, who run such strong institutions with such financial clout that they cannot be ignored in any decision affecting the overall community.”

In the era up through the Titans, civic alignment took place informally, through personal, and sometimes familial relationships. As Columbus Monthly said, “Politicians touch base with them; community leaders touch base with them, and they touch base with each other.”

Many of these older elites grew up together, went to kindergarten together, summered together on the same lakes. There were institutions like chambers of commerce and city clubs, but they were often supplemental to other longstanding personal ties. Prior to the 1980s finance revolution and deregulation, even CEOs who didn’t come from a blue blood background had businesses heavily tied to the fortunes of the local community, and with a lot of latitude to run their firms without activist investor pressure.

This group in Columbus was likely unusually cohesive and dominant because unlike many Midwest and Northeast cities, the Columbus elites never had to deal with ethnic political machines or similar rival bases of power.

This era lasted into the 1990s, when its economic and other bases fragmented. Two of the six Titans were members of the Wolfe family, which for at least three generations - over 100 years - had built the city’s dominant business empire. Over roughly a 35 year period they liquidated their holdings, starting with their bank (1984), then their brokerage (1998), the sale of the Columbus Dispatch newspaper (2015), and their local TV/radio group (2019). The Wolfe family still has a local philanthropy and some real estate, but is no longer “Titanic.”

Another was John B. McCoy, the third generation CEO of Bank One, the city’s largest bank that was once a major “super-regional.” McCoy had held basically every major civic position in town. Bank One was merged with First Chicago in 1998 and the headquarters moved to the Windy City. The McCoys are no more as a civic force, though the bank, now part of JPMorgan Chase, is still a huge local employer.

Two others were John Fisher of Nationwide Insurance, a mutual, and Frank Wobst of Huntington Bancshares. These were organization men, not family patriarchs. Interestingly, their businesses carry on in Columbus today, with Nationwide in particular a corporate anchor. One might naively think that a multigenerational family dominated business would be more likely to survive, but that’s not always the case. Neither Fisher nor Wobst had children of comparable stature in the city.

The last was Les Wexner, the upstart self-made man who built the Limited retail empire. While some spinoff brands are still in town, the Limited empire is not what it once was, and the elderly Wexner has been badly damaged by his deep ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

You can imagine similar dynamics playing out at lower levels in the hierarchy, dramatically reducing the economic base of personal civic power, and severing multigenerational traditions of leadership in the community.

This older leadership model also had something of a cultural underpinning of a “social gospel” ethos (or whatever you prefer to call it). In talking about the past, Barbash notes that Columbus’ “business, philanthropy, nonprofits, religious institutions and government worked from a shared playbook.” He explicitly lists religious institutions. There was a much more robust religious life and powerful religious institutions in that era, the remains of the “P” in WASP that had transformed into a sort of generic Judeo-Christianity in the postwar period.

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The Technocrats

From the 1990s into the 2000s, cities began to sense that the old model of leadership was no longer going to be viable in the future, and began to create new leadership institutions and structures to compensate. These organizations were designed to regionalize, organize, professionalize, and formalize civic leadership in an era where old informal and familial ties could not be relied on.

Today’s CEOs, for example, aren’t third generation patriarchs, but individuals often hired from out of town and who likely won’t be in the city for the long term. They are more completely reliant on formal institutions for mobilizing leadership connectivity since they lack the pre-existing ties of the older elite. In today’s world they also cannot treat their corporations as a personal fiefdoms.

These new leadership structures and institutions would be staffed by professionals to enable focused effort on key civic priorities like economic development. This was ultimately a technocratic elite, with both the CEOs overseeing these organizations and their staff achieving their positions through professional competence under meritocratic conditions.

In Columbus specifically, the key organization was the Columbus Partnership, the local CEO council, founded in 2002. There have been variations of these CEO clubs going back over a hundred years to groups like the Commercial Club of Chicago or the midcentury Allegheny Conference in Pittsburgh. But there was a wave of new or reorganized groups of this type around the same time and addressing the same leadership issues, including the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership (1999), the Atlanta Committee for Progress (2003), and the Itasca Project in Minneapolis (2004, now the Greater MSP Partnership). Notably, groups like the Columbus Partnership include CEOs of universities, foundations, and other non-profit civic groups as well as for-profit corporations.

The Columbus Partnership created an economic development organization now called One Columbus in 2010, and recruited ace economic developer Kenny McDonald from out of town - not some local scion - to run it. It was an enormous success, as the Times article illustrates. This is what most people today mean when they talk about the Columbus Way.

This era was also when we saw tremendous growth in the “NGOctopus” of non-profit groups. In Columbus this included Campus Partners (1995) and the Columbus Downtown Development Corporation (2002). But there was also an array of various more charitable type groups, typically organized around advocacy or service delivery with foundation or government driven funding, not the older associational or membership based models (see Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy).

It was also an era of broadening of leadership. Rather than six Titans, there are 82 members of the Columbus Partnership. It’s no longer just white men, but women and racial minorities as well. Various constituency groups throughout the city, if not directly represented in elite organizations like the Columbus Partnership, have a voice as “stakeholders.”

Religion, however, has faded significantly. In contrast with how he talks about the past, when Barbash talks about the future, religious institutions are missing. He wrote, “What is needed is a table where business, philanthropy, nonprofits and government align on strategy.” Columbus today is in fact among America’s least religious cities, ranking 7th in one such survey, one of only eight cities in the country where “unaffiliated” is the top religious choice.

The Limits of Technocratic Leadership

This second model of civic leadership successfully grabbed the baton from the older one. For a time, it has seemed to be as good or better than the old model. Cities like Columbus boomed or came into their own. Columbus, for example, is now a genuine big league city, with franchises in the NHL (2000) and MLS (1996). Columbus has never been a larger, more important, more influential city in America than it is today. In fact, it’s positioned as potentially the first Midwestern breakout city to join the Sunbelt boomtowns. If Columbus were a stock, I’d buy it.

The new system was also fairer in some ways. No longer, for example, would a freeway simply be plowed through an urban neighborhood. Leadership would be more inclusive, if not genuinely democratic.

However, as with corporate consolidation, some of this urban success story was not only a result of local efforts but also macro trends external to Columbus itself. Cities generally started to revive in the 1980s, with a big takeoff in the 1990s. This was the era of the so-called “super mayor” like Rudy Giuliani in New York, Richard M. Daley in Chicago, and Tom Menino in Boston. Is it likely that all these cities got amazing mayors at the same time, or that those mayors, who may well have been skilled, benefitted from a general shift in the urban fortunes?

As cities were coming back, the large Millennial generation started graduating from college and moving to urban centers. This turbocharged central city growth and spread it out beyond the elite centers. The Great Recession from 2007 to 2010 actually benefitted cities, as it inhibited people from buying houses and moving to the suburbs.

Columbus has been growing, but most of its stats are very similar to its neighbor Indianapolis, another sprawling state capital without a heavy industry legacy. Most likely both cities are being shaped by similar forces in ways that have benefitted them in similar ways.

Looking behind these positive trends, we can also see that the new technocratic leadership model has limits. Most importantly, the leadership class that comprises it is structurally weak. It no longer has the kind of real personal, economic, or social power that the old “Titan” style elites did. These leaders exist in a national or global, not local talent marketplaces. They are technocrats, not Titans. As a result they can only remain bankable within the marketplace to the extent that they reflect the current consensus of it, apart from any local needs or considerations. Their careers and positions are much more fragile.

This is the root of what Barbash is seeing when he wrote, “When the same handful of leaders decide everything, the answers tend toward the cautious and the incremental.” But that risk aversion is a core element of the technocratic leadership model, not a result of a handful of leaders making the big decisions. The Wolfes or Les Wexner in his prime could say or do anything they wanted, for good or for ill. We even see some legacy of that older today in select places, such as with Dan Gilbert in Detroit. Gilbert is another self-made man, one who poured billions of dollars into buying up and redeveloping downtown Detroit real estate, and moving key companies he controlled and their thousands of employees into those developments, at a time when that looked like folly.

Technocrats cannot take that kind of risk. Just as one example, look at the Covid era. In Columbus, like in most other cities, this class opted for an extended hard lockdown strategy, with very lengthy periods of school closures and work-from-home. It also pivoted to make BLM/DEI the central organizing principle of urban institutional life in the city for two to three years in the wake of the George Floyd killing. The Columbus Partnership turned hard into racial equity, with then CEO Alex Fischer saying, “If we keep it up week after week, month after month, year after year—I think we can change Columbus, and I think we can make a huge difference. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much energy, depth and commitment by a broad segment of our leadership, which is exciting.”

It’s notable that this is very similar to what leadership in other cities did, showing Columbus’ leaders following a national consensus, not local needs. And there was a very high level of local leadership unanimity in these choices.

Later, as the national consensus changed, Columbus’ leadership changed with it. As the DEI movement went into a partial retreat nationally, the Columbus corporate community mirrored that. There were also some attempts to rebalance on work from home, again in line with national trends.

Privately, many business and civic leaders will acknowledge that cities and their institutions “over-corrected” in the Covid era (as one such leader described it to me). Not that they should have done nothing, but they went too far for too long. This over-correction inflicted enormous harm on America’s downtowns and urban centers, such as in their office based employment base, likely setting them back a decade or more. Downtown office employment may never recover in some cities.

Columbus has been more fortunate than most here. It still has very high downtown office vacancy, but has been a leader in converting office space to residential. It as also not fallen prey to the hard left political insurgency that became so successful elsewhere.

But the key point is this: today’s post-Titan technocratic corporate leaders in Columbus must be risk-averse consensus followers. They mostly cannot step out of line no matter what the implications for their city. They probably can’t even have an honest public conversation about what happened from 2020 to 2022. In fact, one could argue that this is likely more true in Columbus than elsewhere, because cities that boast of their high levels of civic alignment, as with the “Columbus Way,” tend to be places where public dissent is frowned on or simply not done.

This is why the social problems Barbash notes are not being solved. Today’s urban civic leaderships mostly must follow the national consensus. That consensus is consistent with working to attract high-value employers. But the consensus moves on the matters Barbash cites are basically not solving those problems anywhere. To potentially solve them, Columbus leaders would need to undertake uncertain, risky, expensive initiatives that are not being done elsewhere. The degree of difficulty in doing that is high. Add to that the missing religious element that would have been more squarely focused on those social challenges, and you can see the difficulties.

What Barbash proposes is effectively doubling down on the technocratic leadership model: more convening organizations, more civic training for leaders less locally rooted leaders, etc. But this can’t overcome the structural problems, one resulting from the shift from Titan to technocrat. Solving that is, admittedly, difficult.

Barbash exhorts regional leaders by saying, “A region cannot be economically successful and socially strained at the same time and still sustain its growth. Eventually, one track pulls the other down.” But realistically, Columbus, like many other places, can probably continue powering ahead on its present success track even if the bottom leg of the “K” is struggling.

Rather than too much poverty, the main risk to Columbus today might be a macro change that puts the upper leg of its K-shaped economy at risk. If addressing that challenge required challenging the national elite consensus in some way, I’m not sure if Columbus’ leadership (or that of most other cities) would be able to do that. The way America’s urban leadership classes responded during the Covid era, in ways that really hurt their own cities and downtowns, should be a cautionary tale against thinking they’ll rise to the occasion in the future. Until yet another new model emerges, the technocratic approach to urban leadership will remain with us, with all the strengths and weaknesses that come with it.

For a long time I said I didn’t want to have kids. What that might mean for me down the road as I got older didn’t really register. It wasn’t a consideration.

I was in my early 30s when my grandfather died. I was sad, but it didn’t cause me to reflect on my own mortality. Then, when I was about 40, my grandmother got sick and was hospitalized. My mother called to ask me to come down and take shifts staying with her. Several family members did likewise, so she had someone staying with her in the hospital 24 hours a day.

When I was with her and looked at her lying in that hospital bed, for the very first time in my life it hit me. When I’m old and lying in that hospital bed, who is going to come stay with me? The answer was, nobody. Nobody would be coming to stay with me. That was a sobering thought.

In my observation, it’s not until people get to be roughly 35 years old that they gain the ability to really understand that they will change in the future, and to emotionally connect to the future story arc of their life.

Younger people know how much they’ve changed in the past - Oh, how much I’ve changed! How much I’ve learned! How much I’ve grown! - but not how much they will change in the future. Nor can they really emotionally relate to the later-in-life consequences of decisions made today.

I don’t think we ever fully outgrow these tendencies. We all suffer from the so-called “end of history illusion” in which we underestimate how much we will change in the future. But I do think there’s a transition around our mid-30s where we gain a sense of new perspective.

This has profound implications around decisions we make about two of the biggest elements of life: getting married and having kids. People make critical decisions about whether or not to pursue them at a time in life when they cannot understand that their desires may well be different in the future, and before they can emotionally connect to the full implications of the decisions they are making.

Beyond that, the positive consequences of forgoing these elements of life - more freedom, more fun - arrive immediately whereas the negative ones don’t show up for potentially decades. This is very unlike decisions around college or career, where real-world feedback arrives quickly if you make a mistake.

Add it up and it’s a recipe for many people to only have the magnitude of what they have done fully hit them at a time at which there’s only a limited runway to change course - or even when it’s too late.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal helps illustrate this. It’s a profile of Amy Kant (gift link), a non-profit fundraiser and artist in Massachusetts. She’s a single, childless, 65-year-old woman dealing with the health challenge of an extended recovery from heart surgery. The piece tells the story of how she arrived there.

Kant “didn’t set out with a master plan.” Unmarried, she “long cherished the freedom that came with being single.” In her 20s and 30s, her friends with kids envied her life. She was able to choose work that gave her time for her art rather than focus on making money. Still, she ended up with an MBA, a successful fundraising career, and significant retirement savings.

By her 40s she was starting to feel more strongly the desire for children, and even considered adoption. By her 50s, she regretted she hadn’t actually done it. Now, facing health issues, she’s forced to juggle her friend network to call on for help. The Journal says, “A longtime college friend serves as her healthcare proxy, and Kant maintains a spreadsheet of friends to coordinate visits when she’s ill. Still, she understands the boundaries of a chosen family. Her friends have their own households to manage; some have already died.” She’s also worried about whether the amount she saved will really be enough, and struggling with what to do in making a will.

A financial person might talk about discount rates, and say that the value of 20 years of fun times a single, childless person has will outweigh the net present value of 30-40 years or more of regrets and challenges after that. But I wonder if Amy Kant’s younger self had known then what she knows now, if she might have been more intentional about making a plan to get married and have kids.

As the Journal notes, her story is far from unique. There are 12.5 million people aging alone, and that number is only expected to grow. This includes many men, who might have a much more challenging time of it than Kant, since they may well not have the close friends that she has been able to call on.

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In the past, getting married, and then having kids, tended to “just happen” naturally, without anyone having to have a “master plan.” It was part of the culture and rhythms of life, backed up by social pressures.

This is no longer the case. Family formation and fertility rates are in decline. There’s growing polarization between the sexes. People have soured on dating apps, which have become the leading way people meet. Terms like “heteropessimism” have emerged. Permanent singleness or childlessness is now socially normalized. Many people have sworn off marriage or having kids. One of the earliest subcultures of the manosphere was “Men Going Their Own Way,” those young men who explicitly argued against marriage as a bad deal. Others plan to defer marriage until after getting established in a career and gaining some enjoyment of life as a young single, the so-called “capstone” model of marriage. Parents may be as likely to advise against getting married too young as to wonder where the grandkids are. The evangelical church inveighs against the “idolatry of the family.”

The degree of difficulty dial on life has been turned up for younger generations. Kids growing up today can no longer expect the major elements of life like college, a career, marriage, or home ownership to arrive organically. They require much more focus, intentionality, and effort to obtain.

We become cognizant of this in some areas, like college. Parents and children today understand that good grades and high test scores are no longer enough. They know how to build a compelling résumé, what to put in their application essay, which schools they can realistically hope to get in. We provide young people with a script and guidance to give them the best chance of success here.

But we have not done this for other areas, notably finding someone to marry and have kids with. There’s still an expectation that young people will simply meet someone and fall in love. People rely on apps as their dating strategy. And there’s an implicit belief that there’s plenty of runway to get married and have kids. If anything, the capstone marriage model is the norm for the college-educated. The promise of fertility treatments seems to suggest to people that even the biological clock is not what it used to be.

Young people are thus left alone to fend for themselves in a world where dating is difficult, there’s growing polarization and conflict between the sexes - at a time when they are ill-equipped to understand the whole life implications of what they are doing. No surprise that coupling is in decline and fertility is falling.

We need to provide young people with the same sort of structure for finding a spouse that we’ve given them for getting into college. And they need to understand the degree of effort and intentionality required to get married.

One reason we have been hesitant to do this is that the traditional pressures to get married seemed overly restrictive and confining. Social pressure to get married makes those who are not, whether by choice or bad luck, feel bad. Making fun of “old maids” can be cruel. Some people legitimately aren’t cut out for marriage, or simply don’t want to be married (or have children). In a free country, that’s a choice we want people to be able to make. People in their 20s don’t like getting pressure from parents to get married and start making babies.

We aren’t going back to the old model of social pressures to channel people into conformity with a single life script. None of us really wants to go back to that world. Many people will be perfectly happy being single or childless for life. These aren’t for everyone.

But college isn’t for everyone either. Yet we educate our high schoolers on the economic value it can bring, the prestige of various schools, the likely career prospects of different majors, the realistic schools one could attend and how to get into them. We could do something similar for marriage. In fact, we could tack some of that onto the college advice. We should let young people know that college is a once in a lifetime opportunity to meet large numbers of high quality singles who are potential future spouses, for example. And we should also stop mindlessly promoting the capstone model for marriage.

Marriage, if not for everyone, is probably for more people than the average twentysomething American might believe. We don’t want a 38 or 43-year-old person to one day suddenly realize where the road they are on leads and say, “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

We can’t abandon them to make profoundly consequential decisions in partial ignorance. We must equip young people with the tools and knowledge they need to make good decisions that are made with the full awareness of what they are doing.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthony B. Bradley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We obviously want to have more of this dynamic.

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

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

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

And some cultural influences matter more than others.

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

Two such headwaters’ issues today are masculinity and marriage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Into that silence steps the land.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a good reason we never stop talking about toxic masculinity. Men are powerful, so when they go bad, they’re dangerous. Recently, the Netflix documentary Into the Manosphere and The Young Women Leaving the New Right reignited conversations around how many men have modeled their views off of misogynist and racist figures like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.

But as many have noted, it’s not enough to criticize. You have to offer an alternative. Author and CEO of the American Institute for Boys and Men, Dr. Richard Reeves, notes that much of the reason men turn to bad men for masculine models is that we often use “toxic masculinity” to refer to simply “masculinity”. “What does non-toxic masculinity look like?’ And people will often say things like ‘well, that’s where you’re more emotionally vulnerable, you’re much more caring, you’re nurturing.’ And then you say, ‘Well, how is that different from stereotypical femininity? Say, positive femininity?’ And then they’ll say, ‘Well, it isn’t really.”

This is one reason I think people found Project Hail Mary to be a breath of fresh air. The film has been a monster success among critics and audiences, achieving a 94% critics and 96% audience Rotten Tomatoes score and the second-highest box-office opening for a non-franchise in the past decade (only behind Oppenheimer) with $140.9 million global and $80.5 million domestic. The film is also a textbook case in positive masculinity. While many Hollywood films make it seem like you have to choose between Barbie’s toxic “Dictator Ken” or “Doormat Ken”, Project Hail Mary’s male heroes are distinctly positive while distinctly masculine. Understanding why can help us give men a viable vision for their manhood today.

Scientific Problem Solving

Ryland Grace–the hero of Project Hail Mary, portrayed by Ryan Gosling–is a problem solver. He’s a scientist who loves picking things apart, experimenting with them, and understanding how things work. And when he does–whether he’s figuring out how the bacteria work, how to translate his alien friend Rocky’s language, or how to save the world–he jumps for joy.

This ethos is at the heart of the film. Ryan Gosling describes it this way: “We’re so saturated with apocalyptic narratives and sort of just bleak outcomes, rarely given solutions. I think what he’s done is he’s giving us this opportunity to say maybe the future isn’t something to fear, rather just something to figure out, and that we’re capable of incredible things as human beings. It’s kind of our thing — that’s what we do.”

What’s fascinating is that this attitude is a well-established hallmark of masculinity. Sociologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt noted in The Anxious Generation that easily the biggest and most replicable cross-cultural male-female sex differences are that (on average) women like people more than things and men like things more than people. As kids, boys overwhelmingly play with trucks and girls with dolls. As teens, boys get addicted to video games and girls to social media. As adults, men choose STEM and women choose HEAL occupations. (Something even more true in more gender-equal societies.) Men choose religion, and women choose spirituality. Men find much more joy in looking at life like a machine to understand, problems to solve, and obstacles to overcome. Women look at life far more as relationships to love and reconcile with. Hence, men’s preference for stories about overcoming obstacles, such as action or sports movies (even when the protagonist is a woman). And why most stories made by women or for women (even when the lead is a man) have their conflicts resolved by people opening up and expressing their feelings (Heated Rivalry, Pride and Prejudice), self-acceptance and acceptance from others (K-Pop Demon Hunters), reconciling with and apologizing for wrongdoing (Frozen, Wicked).

When Moana addressed an environmental disaster like Project Hail Mary, the heroine apologized to the environment and made restitution. When Arrival addressed interstellar relationships, communication is solved through imaginative empathy rather than Project Hail Mary’s analytical problem-solving. This difference between “fixing” a situation and “empathizing” with it is often a source of mutual–often humorous–frustration between the sexes. (The “It’s not about the nail” sketch is one of my favorite examples from the guy’s point of view.)

The trend in Hollywood has been to treat the way men overwhelmingly operate in the world as a flaw. Reed Richards in Fantastic Four: First Steps describes his deeply analytical and scientific self as “broken” compared to his more empathetic wife. (A statement the film validates.) Films like Barbie, Iron Claw, Sketch, Ad Astra, and Deliver Me from Nowhere portray men’s relational style as a weakness to overcome. The main stories where men’s differences are welcome are stories about violence. Superhero movies or action heroes like John Wick, Reacher, or any Jason Statham film celebrate men, but primarily for their capacity to smash someone’s face in. These trends tell men the only acceptable way to be a man is to embrace stereotypical femininity or embrace violent masculinity. It doesn’t take an astrophage scientist to figure out where that leads.

Project Hail Mary portrays men’s orientation not as a barrier to thriving relationships, but as their source. Problem-solving is what brings Ryland Grace and Rocky together and how they solve the communication barrier. Problem-solving orientation is portrayed as a source of co-operation–where people work together to accomplish a goal–rather than something that requires a villain to destroy. (Unless you count the bacteria.)

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Friendship and Purpose

When people talk about the crisis of men, whether it’s male loneliness or men falling behind economically, there is a tendency to blame men and male culture. Movies about male friendship, (like Friendship), male arrested development, like Palm Springs and The King of Staten Island, blame men for maladjusted relational skills and lack of ambition.

But the data shows the opposite. Men still deeply desire to have a life of purpose and responsibility, and “define manhood in traditional terms: responsibility, sacrifice, and the capacity to provide for others.” But they simply don’t see the path available to them to achieve them. As Samuel James writes for the American Enterprise Institute: “For much of the 20th century, the transition to adulthood was guided by clear institutional pathways. Stable employment, often accessible without a degree, provided the foundation for marriage and family formation. Community institutions—religious congregations, civic associations, fraternal organizations—offered mentorship and a sense of belonging.”

The problem is these pathways are increasingly closed to men. Schools largely teach according to girls’ learning styles and grade girls higher than boys for the same work. During the height of the “Woke” era, multiple organizations made it a stated goal to diversify their workplace (without firing any of the guys at the top) by simply not hiring a generation of men. Churchgoing has also collapsed, and with it, a sense of purpose and a built-in community.

Church collapse and workplace instability have hurt both men’s and women’s relationships. But they’ve hit men harder because men tend to build relationships differently. Women build connection through emotional intimacy first. Men do so through shared work, purpose, and goals (as I detailed in my review of F1). Without a central goal–through faith, shared cultural identity, or work–it’s much harder for men to get to emotional intimacy.

We find Ryland Grace in the same place many men today are. He’s shut out of places of cultural respect and influence. He is then called upon to help save the world, and it is through that shared mission that he builds his deep bonds with others–Officer Carl, Eva Stratt, Rocky, and more. This “purpose-focused” relationship building is assumed and celebrated rather than deconstructed. But unlike more “man’s man” movies like F1, which portray relationships of mutual respect that never get to emotional intimacy, Project Hail Mary has its heroes cry and express their love for each other.

Then there’s the demoralization. Even when paths are not totally closed, it can be difficult to go where you know you’re not wanted. A common theme in Hollywood and culture over the past few decades is that a) humans are a cancer in the world that’s destroying it (Princess Mononoke, WALLl-E, Noah, Avatar), b) that things are better once men abandon their positions of power and give them over to women (Avengers: Endgame, Poor Things, The Last Jedi, One Battle After Another, The Bride) and c) institutions are evil/compromised and you can only be heroic and/or free by abandoning those institutions (almost every Marvel movie, Reacher, F1). It also permeates the culture that normalizes women bashing men in songs and on social media.

One of the reasons Dr. Jordan Peterson became so popular with men is he directly condemned that story and told them a different story. One where they were a hero, and investing in themselves and institutions made the world better–not worse. “You have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter catastrophe of life to face, in truth, devoted to love and without fear.”

Project Hail Mary follows Peterson in flipping the script on how men see themselves. Ryland Grace is likewise called up by the government agent Eva Stratt and told that he is important and that he has a purpose. He constantly insists that he’s just a teacher, but she points to the value that he brings to the world, and that by partnering with the government he can save it. As I wrote in my review for World Magazine: “The world is ending, but in this movie, it’s not because humans are a disease, destroying the planet with climate change. On the contrary, they’re the world’s only hope of survival. Grace is a flawed hero without being a deconstruction of a hero. Human institutions are imperfect, but they aren’t shadowy conspiracies run by corporations endangering the planet to make a profit.”

Men’s power means that justified fears of toxic masculinity will never go away. But the more we have pictures of positive masculinity like Project Hail Mary, the more likely we are to see it in real life too.

I won’t reproduce everything, but here are some highlights.

There’s been an interesting change in the milestones young men perceive as important to becoming an adult.

The study hones in on the drop in formal education, but what I find more interesting is the shift from “working full time” to “being financially independent.” My impression is that Gen Z people, both male and female, do not like the idea of a traditional 9-5 job. There’s an entire genre of Tik Tok videos of 20-something women crying about how they hate their 9-5 job. I hear plenty of stories about businesses struggling to recruit younger workers, who’d rather drive for Uber or Door Dash so that they can control their own schedule (and work on their aspirations to be a social media star). You can also see the popularity of hustle culture as feeding into this.

At the same time, most young men actually do have full time jobs.

There’s also an interesting look at education by various demographic characteristics. Keep in mind, many of the men surveyed are pretty young, and can’t be expected to have completed college yet.

You’ve seen me write and tweet before about how there’s been a big leftward shift in the educated classes in America. Today’s GOP is alienating to educated, high functioning people in many respects, so I expect this trend to continue.

What we see here is that among Gen Z men, liberals are twice as likely to have a college degree than conservative ones. So the idea of young people being more conservative isn’t going to bail Republicans out there.

No surprise, we also see that religious people are more likely to have a degree (religious practice is positively correlated with education), and people from intact families are three time more likely to have a degree.

The survey has questions about dating and marriage. We see here that the majority of young men are afraid to ask women out.

Most men have long been hesitant to ask women on dates. One of the biggest planks in the manosphere was about men forcing themselves to approach women in order to overcome “approach anxiety.” Their mantra was “always be approaching.” Helping men overcome nervousness here - and frame rejection as nothing shameful but something that happens to basically all men the majority of the time if they are actually asking people out - was one of the successful self-improvement items on their list. Today’s manosphere is more about validating men in not asking women out.

Lastly, I’ll highlight this interesting poll question about masculinity. The study emphasizes men agreeing with the idea that manhood is about sacrifice.

I find it more interesting that an even higher percentage of men said it included “strength” and “leadership.”

Almost everyone agrees that manhood involves sacrifice and service. But our society too often reduced it to that. I think this survey shows men are hungry for a definition in manhood that has more positive elements in it, like strength and leadership.

I could go on since there are so many interesting charts and findings in here. But I’ll let you click over and read the report for yourself.

While immigration levels have waxed and waned, I think it’s fair to say that immigration has been a common dynamic in our society for much of its history.

You don’t have to believe that America is a nation of immigrants or that America is just an idea to recognize that immigration has long been a part of our society.

America has done a far better job of absorbing immigrants than any other country. Even today, apart from perhaps some other Anglosphere nations, no one else has really cracked the code on it. It’s basically one of our superpowers as a nation.

While immigrants do in fact receive copious public benefits and are often the recipients of major financial transfers, immigrants who come to the US have to work. They just can’t sit around collecting welfare indefinitely like in Europe. And overwhelmingly they do want to work and are working.

Immigrants are disproportionately entrepreneurial risk takers. Long distance migration itself is an inherently entrepreneurial act. Ross Perot once talked about a “giant sucking sound” of Mexico luring factories south of the border. But as I previously wrote, the real giant sucking sound has been the United States hoovering up the most high agency, entrepreneurial, risk taking people from Mexico and elsewhere. (This essay is in my collection on cities, The Urban State of Mind).

Places do in fact need new blood. Places with low percentages of newcomers - domestic and foreign - tend to be extremely stagnant places with insular, calcified cultures that make change difficult if not impossible. Many Rust Belt cities are demographic cul-de-sacs. Very few people move in or out.

Whether or not ambitious people from other places want to come to your community, or country, and stake their claim on building a better life is a major indicator of civic health.

Most immigrants are also mostly great people. There are officially about 50 million foreign born people in the United States. Whenever you have a group that big, there are going to be more than a few bad apples. Illegal migrants are less desirable because they’ve already showed contempt for our laws. And the there are some more problem-plagued groups like Somalis.

But on the whole, immigrant individuals and families are great. Some of them have really inspiring stories. I honestly don’t understand the excessive negativity about them. People love to trash Indians these days, for example. But I’ve worked and engaged with a lot of Indians over the years - in India, as work visa holders like H-1Bs, immigrants, and second generation - and my experiences have by and large been positive, both personally and professionally. There are 700,000 Indian illegals in the US - the third highest source of illegal migrants and about 13% of the overall US Indian population. You don’t have engage in the hagiography that some do about Indians or immigrants in general to recognize that most of them are basically good people. There are a number of immigrants in my neighborhood, and they are great.

The extreme low openness exemplified by many people on the right about immigrants and diversity today seems very at odds with the historic right as exemplified by, say, the British imperialist. They were very comfortable embedded in other cultures, often admired them and studied them more deeply than the natives themselves had, but without forgetting who they were.

This idea of wanting to live in a shire-like community of people just like you, who’ve lived there for generations, and where things are still basically the same as they were back in the day is the mentality of a European peasant or villager. You’ve mostly only found this in America in places that have stagnated or which failed to achieve the dreams their boosters set for them.

As a general disposition, I’m a more the more the merrier kind of person on immigration, consistent with our country continuing to be intact and as great or greater as it has been.

Unfortunately, we are well past that point. Mass immigration has become a significant negative for the United States, and immigration needs to be significantly reduced until such time as these problems are resolved.

There are a long list of reasons why immigration has become a negative for our country, but I will highlight four.

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My early forays into trying out AI chatbots were disappointing to say the least. Their training data stopped more than a year into the past and they couldn’t access the web, so they were useless on current events. They regularly made stuff up. They couldn’t supply links to sources that substantiated their claims (at least not real links at any rate).

About a year ago I decided to adopt a policy of “AI first.” Meaning, I wanted to try to use AI as a solution before using more traditional approaches. In practice, this meant using AI (usually Grok) rather than Google for information searches. It’s amazing how instinctive firing up a Google window is. It took me months to just break the almost autonomous habit of just searching Google. And it wasn’t necessarily any easier either. With Google, I’d just use keywords to try to find things, whereas with AI I was typing in questions. Especially on a phone this was more painful.

But in recent months, AI has become much, much better than it used to be. Though while not without errors - it continues to make things up, aka “hallucinating” - it’s already super-useful and is only going to become more so. I have subscriptions to both Claude and Grok, and regularly use both.

I typically use Grok to spell and grammar check my posts before publishing them. It also gives me headline suggestions. For podcasts, Substack’s built in AI transcribes the audio of my podcasts. I can then feed the transcript into Grok, which will create Youtube descriptions with suggested chapterization and timestamps in the correct format. I use an AI product called Eleven Labs to generate the audio versions of my posts. I had Grok generate the cover image for this post.

I also use Claude a lot to help with research or developing ideas. It’s very helpful in finding examples to illustrate points I’m trying to make. I also use it to help refine ideas and frameworks. It will give me feedback and suggestions about things I might be missing. It can also fact check things for me and flag potential problems.

In short, I don’t use AI for any actual writing, but employing it extensively in the tasks that surround writing.

These chat bots are also very good search type engines these days. They can provide links to real time articles. I only really use Google these days when there’s a very specific web page I’m looking for. For example, I still use Google to quickly get links to my own articles I’ve written. I can search by title on this site to get them.

Claude and Grok are also fantastic for getting backgrounders on topics. Think of them as an interactive encyclopedia. I recently read my first book by René Girard, and thought his interpretation of the death of Christ was pretty heterodox, and probably more aligned with Eastern Orthodoxy than Western Christianity, despite Girard being Catholic. Grok gave me all kinds of information about how various people had responded to Girard, as well as a comparison between his views and Eastern Orthodoxy.

AI is great for getting a summary of how various commentators have interpreted passages of scripture. One of my favorites things to do with it is, when I hear something from a pastor that sounds like it might be a modern innovation, to ask whether or not any major figure in Christian history taught this prior to 1900. Out comes an entire history of the idea - if there is one.

If I want to use any of this material in print, I have it spit out links to credible sources.

Musk has integrated Grok right into Twitter/X. You can click the Grok icon on any tweet and get an explanation of it, and the context of the post. (I think it’s actually regressed a bit here, but if it doesn’t explain everything, you can prompt it for exactly what you are looking for). If someone simply posts a screen shot of a paragraph out of an article or book, Grok will often tell you the source and even provide a link to it for you.

AI has also proven useful for tons of personal tasks like home repairs. I can post a picture of something and have it diagnose what’s wrong and provide instructions for how to fix. In some cases this can be way better than the old search methods, because it’s interactive. You can tell it what you’ve tried and what you are doing, and it will guide you along or make suggestions. It will also tell you if an option you plan to try is a bad idea or not. Even if it misses some, it will at least catch a few.

I’ve also been using Claude Code, which is a command line “vibe coding” tool. Claude Code is like having superpowers. I read in Neiman Lab that the New York Times had built a tool they called the “Manosphere Report,” that produces transcripts of manosphere podcasts. I had Claude Code whip one up for me. It downloads any podcasts I tell it to (from Youtube, Rumble, or Apple Podcasts), transcribes them, then produces a summary report with guests, topics discussed, and any controversies. The whole thing is automated. It took me two hours to create with Claude Code, 75% of which was me trying to figure out how to install all the dependencies.

I’m using it for other things as well. This is so powerful that I haven’t even figured out all the things I can do with it. I think I’m suffering from a lack of imagination of all the ways that AI will allow me to do things that aren’t even in my mental toolbox right now.

My next goal is to get to the point where I’m using AI so much that I’m fully using a Claude Max subscription. I figure if I’m not using it well beyond the basic account limits, I’m not using it nearly enough.

In short, AI is real, useful, and ready for primetime in some applications right now. You do need to validate the output and other things. It’s not fire and forget. But there’s a ton it’s already doing.

Just the improvements that AI has experienced in the last year are incredible. There’s every reason to believe it’s only going to keep getting better. That’s not saying there won’t be a big AI financial crash, lots of failed companies, etc. But this technology is very much for real.

If you aren’t using AI yet, I really suggest leaning in hard to trying it and figuring out what it can do. It’s a technology you don’t want to find yourself behind the curve on.

You might also be interested in this perspective on AI from Ken Corless. He’s a former Accenture colleague of mine, now at Deloitte, who has been leading complex technology implementations for a long time. I believe he just oversaw the technology implementation at the Milan-Cortina Olympics. He wrote an interesting piece “Ten Things I Think I Think About... AI, Agents, Humans and Software Development,” which is an interesting perspective from inside the IT consulting industry.

“Why don’t men approach us anymore?”

I see this question from women all the time now, whether it’s on TikTok or think pieces like the New York Times’ Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back. As a guy who lived through the #MeToo movement, it causes me a certain amount of whiplash. There was a time when all it seemed I heard from women–in person or online–was about how guys approaching girls in public was unwelcome and made life a hardship for women. Now–seemingly overnight–women online are constantly not only bemoaning the fact that men have backed off, but seem bewildered as to why it happened.

And this is not simply anecdotal. According to the Institute for Family Studies, less than half of men have been on a date in the past year. (Even less for women.) And according to a widely-cited report from DatePsych, less than half of men 18-25 had ever approached a woman in person.

Guys have been more than eager to explain why they’re not approaching. Whether that’s not wanting to be seen as creepy or the normalization of tearing down men (even while you’re dating them). Men will also sometimes note that close to half of young women are depressed. And because they’re feminists, they will largely blame their male partner for their unhappiness. So men feel like they have a choice between being rejected and being in a relationship where they’ll be constantly mistreated.

But most men and women don’t seem that impressed with those excuses. After all, isn’t part of being a man doing hard, risky things? And how risky is it, anyway? Most women under 40 want men to approach them. There are plenty of tools out there to help men learn how to not come off as creepy. And most of the “male-bashing” by women is just talk. When women get married to men, they consistently shift toward men’s values and political views.

That’s why culture critics like Rob Henderson often argue that men’s real reasons for not approaching women are simply cowardice. “What’s really happening is that many men are anxious about approaching women and are relieved to find a socially acceptable justification for that anxiety. It’s not that I’m afraid, they tell themselves; it’s that I might get humiliated or posted online.” The same IFS report agrees that self-confidence is one of the main drivers of young people not dating.

But if men are cowards today about dating, I think we overlook one major reason why: Hollywood. As a male culture critic, I can attest to the fact that Hollywood has consistently lied to men about romance. And when those lies fall apart, it leads to disillusionment and confusion. Part of fixing dating is understanding how men got lied to and telling a better story to those men.

Some voices today think it’s the absence of Hollywood romantic comedies that is causing the dearth of romance. Reese Witherspoon argued that we used to learn dating social dynamics and skills by watching rom-coms with the likes of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

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But the truth is, we learned false dating dynamics. One of the best analyses of men’s changing romantic fantasies came from Charlie Houpert of Charisma on Command. He notes that romances in the 2000s were dominated by “average guy gets hot girl” romances. These movies featured awkward, nerdy, klutzy, boring, and guys — typically unsuccessful with girls — who get to win the most desired girl over the traditional hot jock. Comedies like Girl Next Door, She’s Out of Your League, Knocked Up, There’s Something About Mary, adventure movies like Spider-Man, The Lord of the Rings (Samwise Gamgee), Harry Potter (Ron and Hermione) Kim Possible, Scott Pilgrim vs the World. The list goes on and on. But what those guys did have was initiative. Whether Matthew Kidman or Samwise Gamgee, or Ron Stoppable, they took the risk and made the first move and were rewarded for it.

But modern movies are different. The male leads are ridiculously attractive and cool. They are Jack Reacher, Tony Stark, Captain America, Thor, Henry Cavill’s Superman or Witcher, Paul Atreides, or The Mandalorian. Chris Pratt traded out the lovable goofy and paunchy Andy Dwyer–who still pulled the enviable April Ludgate–for the ripped and cocky Star Lord. Even the rom coms–which used to have leads that included Kevin Hart and Jack Black–are now populated entirely by “Chads” like Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton), Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal (Materialists) or Glen Powell (Anyone But You). They are the cocky jocks that the previous films made the bad guys. It’s no wonder in this environment that we see the trend of “looksmaxxing”, made more famous by figures like Clavicular.

Moreover, these new leads rarely take the initiative. Reacher and Geralt both have love interests, but almost always, the women take the initiative. Jane Foster kisses Thor first. Chani kisses Paul first. But more often than not, even when men do initiate, romance is largely absent –particularly in Marvel films–until the third act when they abruptly kiss.

Why did the male fantasy change? I think it’s pretty obvious: we tried the old one, and it didn’t work. When I started really asking girls out, I mostly got turned down. The guys I knew who I saw as like me–“average guys” like the protagonists in the movies–also got turned down. The guys who had the most success with girls–particularly the girls everyone wanted–were the “cool guys” who were the “bad guys” in the movies we grew up watching.

What we learned from that was that what Hollywood–and often the well-meaning women in our lives–had told us wasn’t true. We don’t get the girl by “being ourselves”. You get the girl by being the kind of attractive guy she wants.

Different guys responded in different ways. Some gave up on girls entirely. Others–like me–decided to work on ourselves to become more attractive. But given that all this was happening during the rise of the internet, it’s no surprise that a lot of this took place online. For the men who gave up, this led to the incel and MGTOW (men going their own way) movements. For those who dedicated themselves to self-improvement, this led to following self-help figures like Jordan Peterson, Chris Williamson and–yes–Charlie Houpert.

I found a lot of good living through this era of men’s “self-improvement” culture online. The old male fantasy that you could be a conventionally unattractive guy and still get a conventionally attractive woman was honestly not fair to women. Why should she have to settle? Men leaning into self-improvement gave men the responsibility to grow and empowered them to do so. But it did so while also teaching them not to blame themselves for everything or despise their masculinity. Finally, it glorified the process of growth, rather than simply the results. And we know that most growth happens when you fall in love with the journey and not just the destination.

But there were also problems I didn’t always see until my guy friends challenged me. When you decide you won’t pursue girls until you become the ideal guy, it’s too easy to just… never seriously pursue girls. There’s always more you can do to improve. This is especially true the more time you spend online. You base your idea of who can get girls–and what girls are worth pursuing–on people the algorithm pushes at you. So you just stay on a hamster wheel that never ends. The consequence of making marriage a “capstone” rather than a “cornerstone” and always moving the goalposts on the “cap” is not usually a better relationship, but no relationship. And ultimately, it’s one reason we’re headed for increased loneliness and population collapse.

The truth is, it’s so easy for self-improvement just to be another way to avoid pain. The fantasy of “becoming the chad” is the fantasy that it’s possible to become the kind of guy that girls won’t reject, who won’t call us the “mediocre men” in every Sabrina Carpenter song. It’s avoiding the pain of feeling worthless because you’re always the person desiring, not the one being desired.

But nobody avoids pain. You just get better at handling pain the more you experience it. You don’t grow by avoiding real-life scary stuff, but by doing the scary stuff. You learn to fall in love with really amazing women by getting to know real women. You learn in what ways you need to grow by having real-life friends and mentors who tell you what you need to hear–not what the algorithm knows you want to hear–and testing it out in the real world.

When dads left home for work during the Industrial Revolution, dad-style parenting fell off and became stigmatized. Dad’s rougher, tougher style of parenting that focused on training boys to be men, and going on joyful supervised adventures, was considered harsh and–at worst–abusive. But rejecting dad-style parenting created a generation of men who never gained the competence and confidence they needed, and retreated into video games, porn, and movies where they could have fantasies of what they wanted rather than the real thing. Setting up expectations that were easy to dash and leave them disillusioned.

Hollywood is great at capturing our hearts with fantasies. And some of those fantasies are good. Social media is good for strategies. And some of those strategies are good. But the future belongs to those who dream and do things in real life. Even those who do it mediocre.

As one example, the New York Times’ real estate section highlighted a Boomer couple who decided to “upsize” in their retirement.

“We spent the last 10 years in an apartment — eight years in Chicago and now two years here,” said Mrs. Harlow, 67. “And that whole time, we’ve had what I call a ‘one-butt kitchen,’ where you can’t walk past each other.”

They thought about buying a lot and building their dream home, but doing it from Chicago would have been too difficult. So in 2022, the Harlows returned to Biloxi, found an apartment, and plotted their next steps to a bigger space.

…

Biloxi is regularly hit by tropical storms and hurricanes; Mrs. Harlow’s childhood home in East Biloxi was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. So they looked exclusively in North Biloxi, which is farther inland, nestled in the woods along the Tchoutacabouffa River. But it came with other challenges.

“The homes in North Biloxi don’t come up on the market very often, because it’s a level-five school district and so they go fast,” said Sallie Lawson of Fidelis Realty, who worked with the Harlows. “Most houses do 10 days at max on the market and they’re gone.” [emphasis added]

They ended up buying a four bedroom house, a decision they described as a “no-brainer.”

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To put some more statistical meat on this trend, St. Louis University Demographer Ness Sándoval posted about St. Charles County in his region. St. Charles County is another example of prime suburbia.

The most important county to watch right now is Saint Charles. What looks like growth on the surface is, in reality, a demographic paradox unfolding in slow motion. It is the fastest-growing county in the St. Louis region, yet much of that growth is driven by senior citizens relocating there for retirement.

Population growth alone does not guarantee demographic vitality. When the red line in the month-to-month mortality trend continues to edge upward, it signals something deeper than expansion—it signals aging that is accelerating.

The official 2024 death numbers are now in, and Saint Charles has moved another step closer to crossing the demographic Rubicon. In 2018, the gap between births and deaths stood at 1,159 (4,306 births to 3,147 deaths). By last year, that gap had narrowed to 518. In 2024, it fell again—to just 431 (4,107 births to 3,676 deaths). The margin that once provided demographic momentum is shrinking each year.

At this pace, Saint Charles may even surpass Saint Louis City in entering the first phase of demographic winter, when births approach or fall below deaths.

Four years ago, the county might have bought time by urgently expanding housing options tailored for families with children. Instead, the current trajectory suggests a slow demographic transition that will be increasingly difficult to reverse. Growth without generational renewal is not long-term growth. It is a shift in age structure and age structure ultimately determines destiny. [emphasis added']

He attached this chart of births vs. deaths in St. Charles County.

Births, though falling, are not down that much as of yet, but keep in mind this county is booming in total population. Some of the rise in death rates is also surely from generational cohort factors. We are an aging society in general, and the large Boomer generation is starting to die at higher rates. St. Charles is a growth area, but also long established. So a number of the older people dying are those who raised families there and aged in place.

Still, Sándoval notes the influx of retirees.

What’s going on here?

I don’t have good data on this as of yet, but my impression is that many of these prime suburbia retirees are relocating to be closer to children and grandchildren. We personally know quite a number of people like this where we live in suburban Indianapolis.

When I lived in Chicago in the 1990s, a common story went something like this: kids went to college at Iowa or some other Big Ten school, moved to Chicago, lived there a few years, got married, had a kid, then moved back to the wife’s hometown (or sometimes the husband’s).

In the 2000s, I started noticing a change. Rather than the children relocating to be closer to their parents and extended family, the parents started relocating to be closer to their adult children and grandchildren.

The wife of one couple I knew in Chicago was originally from Pittsburgh. Her siblings had moved south to the Charlotte area, and after retirement, her parents moved there.

As has been well-documented, upper-middle-class people are now more concentrated in upscale communities, not spread throughout the country or its urban regions. There’s also been great divergence between metropolitan areas in terms of growth and economic opportunities.

In this environment, a place like Charlotte is just going to look more attractive than moving back to a place like Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is a great city with opportunity in select high end industries like AI and robotics, but in general the clear trend has been towards boomtown Sunbelt destinations.

In this kind of environment, it often makes more sense for parents to move rather than the children.

I’m sure that there are also cases in which people simply choose to retire to these prime suburban areas. These cities have become much more amenity rich and are now fantastic places to live based on the product they offer. It isn’t just the old “good schools and low taxes” model of eras past.

But while I don’t want to discount straight up retirement moves, I did want to highlight these family ones. Again, while I haven’t been able to find data on this, I did reach out to Sándoval. He confirmed that he’s heard from sources in St. Charles County that a lot of people are retiring there for proximity to children. (I hope he does some quantitative research on this).

I would say in general that proximity to extended family is generally a good thing. So there are lots of reasons it’s a positive development that parents are moving closer to children and grandchildren.

But this also has big implications for these suburbs.

A lot of people have a vision of multigenerational living in a single household. One of the big urbanist ideas right now is legalizing so-called “accessory dwelling units,” sometimes called “granny flats.” Part of the idea is that aging parents can live there, allowing easy caregiving, etc.

I’m sure there’s some of this, but I don’t personally know anyone doing it. But we do know many people where the retired couple owns a house.

These Boomer retirees are often still healthy and active, have plenty of money, and don’t need to economize on space. They want the big space, to live in for themselves, and to host family gatherings.

Rather than the multigenerational household, what we see is the multi-household extended family.

While the couple in North Biloxi moved to their hometown to be near their parents, not their children, they did want to host their children and other family gatherings, hence their desire for a large house.

After seven years up north, the couple felt ready to get back to their roots. They wanted to be closer to Mrs. Harlow’s parents in Biloxi, and they wanted their two adult daughters — one lives in Omaha, the other in Italy — to be able to come and see family….“The whole idea was to have enough room so that if on the off chance everyone came at the same time, they could all have their own bedrooms and baths,” said Mr. Harlow, 65.

If you’ve got the money - and the Boomers do - why not?

Boomer retirees are putting upward pressure on prime suburban home prices - and making it difficult for families to be able to buy into these communities with top schools. In effect, families are starting to get squeezed out of these communities.

A few people posted reactions to this topic when I discussed it on Twitter. Ashley Weber said, “The last two large ranch style homes for sale on my street have been purchased by Boomer retirees. They are ideal family homes with large yards, safe neighborhood in a good school district. Would love to have had playmates for my children.”

Sullivan Nolan wrote, “I’ve been in the market for awhile and see this all the time. At open houses I’m usually one of the youngest people there. It feels incredibly strange to be competing with retirees for 4 bed / 3 bath homes in top tier school districts.”

What this trend means in practice is that in a growing number of cases, in order to provide housing for families, you actually need to provide two houses - one for the actual family and another for at least one set of their parents.

Boomer retirees buying up homes in prime suburban areas has to be a factor in why prices are going up there. When the towns with good school districts become unaffordable to many families, this can’t be a positive for our fertility rates.

Again, while there are good things about parents moving to be closer to children, it does have this downside. Combine the price increases with increasingly militant demands by Boomers that they shouldn’t have to pay property taxes because they are retired, and the general NIMBYism and willingness to show up to public meetings to complain that Boomers/seniors also have. This is a recipe for public policy negatives that undermine schools and the community in the long term as they get fiscally squeezed and become less dynamic.

Public policy in these suburbs has tended towards actually exacerbating these problems. This is because they enormously privilege development for seniors.

My own city of Carmel, Indiana has recently adopted a de facto policy of becoming a retirement community. Any development that’s age restricted to seniors gets waived through the city council almost automatically, while developments for anyone else get subjected to an ordeal. In one particularly egregious case, the city council expressed skepticism of a development because it included apartments. The developer simply converted them to age-restricted apartments and the council approved without further objection.

As one person on Twitter observed about her community, some towns are actually putting age-restricted retirement communities directly next to their public schools, “The top performing school district in our area has an amazing public middle school for kids gifted in the arts and a top rated elementary school. They just built a 55+ gated community the on the property adjacent to the schools. This should be illegal.”

These kinds of decisions, if compounded over the years into the future, pose a long-term risk to these towns’ futures.

It’s good to have people of all ages in your community - including Boomer retirees. We should welcome all. But you don’t want to become a retirement community.

Whether or not that happens, the trend of Boomers retirees buying up big houses in prime suburbs with great school districts seemed primed to continue.

So what leads normally careful and level-headed writers to swing so wildly in criticizing my book? I believe that their reaction is a reflection of a newish intellectual fault line running through today’s embattled liberal center — by which I mean those people on the center-left and center-right who share more common ground with each other than they do with either the populist right or the “woke” left. That fault line consists of disagreement over the severity of the problems confronting contemporary liberal societies and the connection between those problems and the undeniable political crisis that alarms both sides.

Call it the division between the “brokenists” and the “anti-brokenists,” after the Alana Newhouse essay from a few years back, “Everything Is Broken,” that helped to bring the fault line into view. Brokenists, like myself, regard the political upheavals of the past decade as an understandable but misguided reaction to serious underlying maladies. The furious energy on the political extremes is due to legitimate frustration with a deeply flawed status quo; the problem is that the remedies proposed by those on the extremes are considerably worse than the disease. Anti-brokenists, meanwhile, concede that there are plenty of problems these days, but they insist that there are always plenty of problems; what has changed is the emergence of conflicting “derangement syndromes” that render people unable to handle living in a fallen, messy world and itching as a result to burn everything down and start over.

Each branch of liberal centrists sees the other as deeply mistaken in its response to the rise of extremism. Anti-brokenists — and I’m putting the authors of the two book reviews in question in that camp — worry that people like me are lending aid and comfort to the enemy by substantiating their exaggerated complaints about the status quo. Brokenists, meanwhile, believe that extremists have risen to power by filling a vacuum created by centrist complacency and neglect. In this view, which I share, dismissing widespread disaffection from established institutions and governing elites as so much hysteria and entitled whining is doomed to failure. It will only add fuel to the extremist fire. [emphasis added]

I’d like to reframe this within the context of what I call the American Transition. In this framework, America is in a liminal period between an older order that’s in decline, and a newer one that has yet to fully emerge. This makes the future up for grabs in a way it hasn’t been in much of our lives, causing political and social upheaval, and creating a lot of uncertainty and unease.

Old Orderist vs. New Orderists

To me, the fundamental divide is between those who are still committed to the old order, and those who are trying to build a new one. Think of it as the “old orderists” and the “new orderists.”

Those committed to the old order believe it is still the best answer for the realities of today’s world. What’s wrong is primarily that we have strayed from it, and thus we need to course correct to go back. We need to restore our political norms, our commitment to trade, our postwar institutions, our traditional alliances, bourgeois values, etc.

This does not mean a rote adherence to the specific formulas of yesterday. The old orderists agree that there are new challenges, and that continuous updates are needed. But they believe the previous basic institutional, ideological, political, social, and cultural frameworks remain sound guides to the future.

The new orderists think that the old order, particularly in how it evolved in the post-Cold War world, is no longer fit for purpose. New technological, institutional, political, etc. paradigms are required. This doesn’t necessary mean the old order is “broken,” only that new approaches are needed for new times.

They too don’t believe that the entire old order needs to be jettisoned. In many domains it may be sound, or require simply evolutionary change. But their focus is on building the new rather than trying to restore the old.

Few people fall completely into one camp or another. And probably few people conceptualize themselves within this framework. But I think these two groups capture something of the divide.

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Legacy vs. New Institutions

The old orderists tend to be clustered in legacy institutions, while the new orderists are in newer ones. This makes sense in that the legacy institutions are a product of the old order. Those institutions and the people in them thrived in the old order, and thus tend to think more positively of it. (It’s similar in a sense to how successful, high-functioning regions like Utah or upscale suburbia have been less friendly to Trump-style politics or disruption).

New orderists, those focused on key aspects of an American Transition, tend to be clustered in newer or outsider institutions and movements (though not exclusively). Some examples: Foundation for American Innovation, Institute for Progress, Economic Innovation Group, American Affairs Journal, the Abundance Liberals/The Argument, AI Industry, the AI Safety Movement, Effective Altruism/Rationalism, American Compass, Palladium, Works in Progress/Stripe Press, the Democratic Socialists of America, the “Tech Right.” Perhaps Lindsey would add the Niskanen Center to this list. Some older organizations are part of this as well, notably the Claremont Institute and to some extent the Heritage Foundation.

This spans groups ranging from right to left, from the center to the political edges, but they share some commonalities in that they are looking to address today’s challenges through new models.

Not all of these groups would probably think of themselves as new orderist. My impression is that the people at the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) would not, for example. But they are very much working on a core problem of geographic inequality that requires new models to address. And they are doing it via a new, standalone organization, which says something.

It’s interesting that to date the old orderist institutions have by and large not seemed interested in taking on the kinds of initiatives that these newer organizations are working on, or co-opting the people involved in them.

The Abundance Liberal movement is particularly instructive to look at. As the movement germinated, many of its key figures exited major institutions. Matthew Yglesias went independent a bit earlier. Derek Thompson and Jerusalem Demsas left the Atlantic. Ezra Klein is the main figure still at an establishment institution, the New York Times. It will be interesting to watch his future. Perhaps these are all coincidences, but it shows even fairly mainstream figures have tended to end up outside of legacy institutions when taking on topics that are new orderist in nature.

The Problem with Populism

This framework also helps us understand the problems of various populist political movements. Trumpism is very critical of the old order, but is largely not looking to create a new one. There are cases where the administration is doing that, such as with its work on creating policy frameworks for AI, or onshoring critical manufacturing. The great legacy of the first Trump administration was a reset in our view of China, in which the Trump position was adopted by mainstream elites.

However, a lot of the Trump vision is more reactionary than future oriented. We see it in energy policy especially, in which Trump wants to see an America burning lots and lots of coal to generate electricity, and where coal mining is still an aspirational industry. He’s both attacked green energy - not just by ending future subsidies, but by trying to cancel already approved and under construction projects - and rolled back fuel efficiency rules.

Not all of his moves here are necessarily bad. The key is that they are retro oriented. Rather than looking forward to a new model, it’s about going back to an old 1970s style America of coal plants and gas guzzlers. It is deconstructing rather than constructing.

In some respects this is the worst of both worlds. It’s disruptive of the current order but without building a better or more viable future one. This is a problem that has bedeviled that part of the American right. It hasn’t yet been able to articulate a positive view of the future. (One exception is various forms of localism, but these are predicated on either exiting from mainstream society, or the continued future decay of mainstream society).

Many of the groups on the left, particularly in the DSA, neo-socialist space, do have a vision for a future order. It’s just a bad one, built around some combination of degrowth, wealth taxes, identity politics as the foundational ordering principle of society, and more in that line.

A Time to Build

Regardless of your feelings about old vs. new orders, the right disposition is to be constructively working on building positive future models to address the major challenges and opportunities we face. That’s why I think some of the most interesting work today is coming out of places like IFP, EIG, American Affairs, and the Abundance Liberals.

America is the protean nation. Its genius has been inventing and reinventing itself for the future over and over again. It’s been America that’s often created the future, as Tanner Greer so brilliantly described in his essay. We are a dynamic nation. And it would be strange indeed we were to be technologically and economically dynamic, while remaining institutionally, politically, and culturally stagnant.

This is why we need to have the courage and spirit of adventure necessary to embrace change and dynamism, and go out and build a positive future once again.

But there’s a different kind of cringe out there, one that is a contributing factor in why cultural engagement evangelicals, the group best positioned to produce elites, have underperformed in creating those high-level people.

The term “cultural cringe” was coined to describe the view of Australians about their own culture. In cultural cringe, people at the imperial periphery see their own culture as inferior to that of the cultural center. So Australian culture is viewed, by Australians themselves, as inferior to English or London culture.

The term cultural cringe was coined in a 1950 essay by A. A. Phillips, who wrote:

Above our writers—and other artists—looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon cul­ture. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the charac­teristic Australian Cultural Cringe…The Cringe mainly appears in an inability to escape needless comparisons. The Australian reader, more or less consciously, hedges and hesitates, asking himself ‘Yes, but what would a cul­tivated Englishman think of this?’ No writer can communicate confidently to a reader with the ‘Yes, but’ habit; and this parti­cular demand is curiously crippling to critical judgment.

…

A second effect of the Cringe has been the estrangement of the Australian Intellectual. Australian life, let us agree, has an at­mosphere of often dismaying crudity. I do not know if our cul­tural crust is proportionately any thinner than that of other Anglo-Saxon communities; but to the intellectual it seems thinner because, in a small community, there is not enough of it to pro­vide for the individual a protective insulation. Hence, even more than most intellectuals, he feels a sense of exposure. This is made much worse by the intrusion of that deadly habit of Eng­lish comparisons. There is a certain type of Australian intel­lectual who is forever sidling up to the cultivated Englishman, insinuating: ‘I, of course, am not like these other crude Austra­lians; I understand how you must feel about them; I should be spiritually more at home in Oxford or Bloomsbury.’

It is not the critical attitude of the intellectual that is harm­ful; that could be a healthy, even creative, influence, if the criti­cism were felt to come from within, if the critic had a sense of identification with his subject, if his irritation came from a sense of shared shame rather than a disdainful separation. It is his refusal to participate, the arch of his indifferent eye-brows, which exerts the chilling and stultifying influence.

Cultural cringe theory became a key influence on post-colonial studies.

The general idea is applicable in a lot of domains. Domestically in the US, people in tertiary locations feel culturally inferior to coastal cities like New York. So these places tend to not produce cultural innovations or a lot of original thinking, but rather look to the metropole for their cues.

When I was primarily focused on writing about cities, I was always frustrated that Midwest cities had so few original ideas for urban development, but instead preferred to simply copy what other, cooler places were doing. I saw so much opportunity in this region, but little willingness to seize it. When the occasional place did find a leader who was able to chart its own path - such as Carmel, Indiana, the city where I live - the results could be extraordinary and influential at the national level.

Cultural engagement Christianity also suffers from a kind of cultural cringe. They tend to view evangelical culture as inferior to mainstream elite culture, particularly in its urban variety, and see that as the standard.

Evangelicals are a socially subaltern group with a culture that is often viewed as cringe in the ordinary sense of the word. It’s not surprising that the intellectual and artistic people who emerge from this culture often develop a sense of alienation from it, and want to distance themselves from it socially in favor of fitting in with their new milieu - or the milieu they aspire to join - which they view as superior.

I can directly relate to this. I grew up in rural Southern Indiana. I was raised in a hardcore, apocalyptic (end times focused) pentecostal church. After graduating from college I moved to Chicago to work as a consultant, and have spent much of my adult life living in big cities. I fell in love with cities and urban life and urban culture. As someone once told me, “Aaron, you love cities like only someone from a town of 29 people can.” I share the intellectual, cultural, and lifestyle preferences of urban America.

Combine that with the fact that I didn’t attend church during the first part of my adulthood, and I am someone who feels very alienated from evangelicalism. For the first time in my life, I’ve been attending a non-denominational baptistic megachurch here - probably the median/modal experience for evangelicals in America - and every single week it feels like visiting a foreign country. I doubt that will ever change. After we moved back to the Middle American city of Indianapolis, I have yet to encounter a church in the entire region that’s culturally resonant with me. Similarly, beyond the foreignness of seeker sensitive evangelicalism, I find a lot of culture war evangelicalism off-putting, and some of the behaviors and rhetoric I see mortifying.

I try to take as much of an academic view of this as possible. While I’m not going to argue that all cultures are equally valid or that we can’t say some things are superior to others, there’s a sense in which we should accept that something like megachurch evangelicalism is an authentic and valid cultural expression of the people who attend them. Just because it’s not designed for me doesn’t make it bad or inherently inferior.

Similarly, I try to see the good in all of these different groups. I see the different religious traditions as akin to spiritual gifts - each has things they are good at. The pentecostals, for example, are fantastic at helping people suffering from severe life challenges like criminal behaviors, addiction, homelessness, etc. Just because I’m not a pentecostal doesn’t mean I can’t recognize the great work pentecostals do.

Another thing I’ve tried to do is avoid ceasing to identify as an evangelical, something that seems to be a popular move among some in urban areas. What I’ve observed is that, like the ex-vangelical, people who do this almost always remain captive to evangelicalism in some ways (i.e., in that they are still self-defined by how they are not like evangelicals). Also, it’s important to retain a sense of affiliation with people with whom we have ties, but are nevertheless very different from. It’s like those folk libertarian, get-off-my-lawn conservatives in Indiana. They drive me crazy. But they are fellow-citizens and their preferences and well-being have to be taken into account.

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Where a kind of cultural cringe really comes into play, however, is when people fail to maintain critical detachment from the milieu in which they do feel a sense of aspirational affinity.

A good example is JD Vance. His book Hillbilly Elegy was written only about three years after he graduated from Yale Law. At that point, he’d developed pretty keen insights into the hillbilly world he came from. He saw their good sides, but also the negative aspects that hobbled their ability to build functional, prosperous lives and communities.

However, he still had stars in his eyes about the new world that he’d entered thanks to Yale. He had not yet acquired the critical detachment necessary to see their flaws and foibles, the things they were getting wrong. Some of you might not like the direction he’s taken his more recently developed insights about that class, but he’s certainly developed some.

Similarly, the evangelical cultural engagement world seems not to have developed the ability to look at mainstream elite culture in a critically detached way. This feeds into an inability to create insightful analysis or compelling critiques of that culture, which in my view is related to the persistent inability of evangelicals to form people who end up in the seniormost positions in the key domains of society.

It’s rare in my experience to come across an evangelical saying something that helps me better understand or make sense of our world, much less compelling ideas for change.

I don’t think I’m alone. Which evangelical figures are followed by people who aren’t evangelical or otherwise Christian because they are providing this kind of insight? How many secular people read evangelicals to gain insight about the world? Which articles written by evangelicals have gone viral in wider society because they were so compelling? How many evangelical novels are read or songs are listened to because they are just so good, apart from the religious content?

It strikes me as uncommon (though not non-existent). Outsiders tend to read evangelicals mostly in order to find out what evangelicals are up to. Or because there’s some evangelical who will confirm all of their anti-evangelical biases by agreeing with them about how horrible evangelicals are.

Contrast that with the Catholic columnist Ross Douthat. Religious people read him because he explains the wider world to them. Secular people read him because he explains the religious world to them. But many people of all stripes also read him because he has interesting and compelling political and cultural insight and critique, such as in his book Decadence.

I’ll highlight again the Catholic political scientist Patrick Deneen, who wrote a trenchant critique of liberalism that made waves in the wider discourse. Even Barack Obama recommended the book.

It takes a degree of critical detachment from the culture, and cultural confidence, to be able to do things like this. It’s easy to prophetically criticize racism or even “capitalism.” Start criticizing something like liberalism, though, and you might get in trouble with the kinds of people you don’t want to get in trouble with.

The cultural engagement model has tended to downplay areas where Christianity is in conflict with culture while being very loud where it can be positioned as aligned with the culture (e.g., refugees and racism). There’s been less of an attempt to be genuinely prophetic, or to provide a truly unique perspective on the issues of the day. (I actually think there’s been regression here, as something like the original CCDA vision was such an original contribution, if not a perfect one).

Again, there are exceptions. For example, I’ve learned things about race from Anthony Bradley and Albert Thompson, two black evangelicals who’ve deeply studied the topic (and in fact have PhDs in subjects related to it). I’m not saying we’re at a zero here. But we are underperforming. Almost all compelling insight about the world, compelling cultural commentary, high impact research, new technologies, powerful art, etc. is coming from secular sources.

The solution is not the kind of cocky arrogance sometimes displayed in the culture war world. This is simply the flip side of cultural cringe. Rather, it’s the quiet confidence that you have something to offer the world in the domains of the Creation Mandate, not just the Great Commission. Phillips describes it well:

If I have thought this article worth writing, it is because I believe that progress will quicken when we articulately recognise two facts: that the Cringe is a worse enemy to our cultural develop­ment than our isolation, and that the opposite of the Cringe is not the Strut, but a relaxed erectness of carriage.

That’s what cultural engagement evangelicals should seek to develop. This is preconditional for high-impact participation in the key domains of society.

Today I want to dive into what it takes to successfully navigate a social transition and construct a successful new configuration, by looking back at a previous such transformation. This was the transition from the society of antebellum America, to that of post-Civil War America and the society built by the Second Industrial Revolution.

This transition occurred over the period of roughly 1860 to 1930. The advent of the Great Depression signaled the problems of the new order, inaugurating a new period of transition that created American society as we have personally known it, but I’ll have to cover that transition in a future post.

I’ll again commend Tanner Greer’s excellent essay on the making of a techno-nationalist elite that describes antebellum America as having people who saw themselves primarily as citizens of their state, each of which had its own insular elite. The economy was built around extractive industries like the southern slave economy (in which northern industries like New England textile mills were integrated) and elites who were suspicious of industrialization. Greer writes that their favored politicians, “dismantled America’s system of centralized finance, slashed its tariffs, vetoed internal improvements, shoved industrial policy down to the states, and maligned the rising class of industrialists.”

In my own essay on the managerial revolution, I describe the nature of the economy as basically a collection of small sole proprietorships and partnerships:

Prior to circa 1830, America was a capitalist country, but the economy consisted of a vast number of small-scale businesses or household enterprises. Only a handful of businesses – a couple of armories and textile mills – had as many as 100 employees. Essentially no businesses operated in a multi-site, multi-unit, or vertically integrated manner apart from the short-lived Second Bank of the United States. Production, distribution, and sales happened through market transactions, facilitated by an array of trading companies, jobbers, agents, etc.

In the Civil War and its aftermath, America saw a vast transformation to a new, integrated national identity and economy. This was increasingly shaped by technological advances, large scale corporations of the type we are familiar with, linked together by sophisticated new forms of infrastructure like railroads and telegraph lines.

This didn’t just happen. It had to be created. It required significant policy changes and government actions to facilitate it, the development of new financial institutions, etc. There was innovation across a whole range of domains, from technology to corporate forms.

But this “techno-nationalist” transformation had another side to it, which is figuring out how to help Americans adapt to this new world, and how to make sure that this new world actually benefitted the average citizen. Along with the Second Industrial Revolution, we also had the Progressive Movement, which, broadly understood, undertook the social side of this national transition.

In effect, the American transition proceeded along two tracks, one creating what we can call the Techno-Industrial Stack, the other the Human-Social Stack.

Here’s an example of what went into creating the Techno-Industrial Stack.

The orientation of those involved in this effort was towards technological and industrial acceleration, and about building - companies, infrastructure, etc. Numerous industrial innovations were created, and many new industries formed. The modern corporation with its layers of management and internal processes and controls began to emerge. The legal environment was transformed to be friendly to these types of institutions, which would have been largely illegal or difficult to establish in antebellum America. The finance world also developed in parallel to finance this. And the vast quantities of geographically concentrated labor needed for steel mills, auto factories, etc. were supplied by the stupendous growth of huge urban centers and mass immigration. Chicago, for example, went from 300,000 people in 1870 to 1.7 million people in 1900.

It’s important to note that not everything was positive about this. Perhaps the creation of the cigarette industry wasn’t one of our high points. There was also tremendous pollution, etc. And of course these firms created a lot of misery as well, and were known to abuse customers and employees. Hence the need for the Human-Social Stack.

The creation of that Human-Social Stack was even more involved. Here’s some of what went into it.

The orientation of this stack was towards formation - of our people and institutions - and tending to their wellbeing. It created a new, national identity, a new elite (the WASPs/Eastern Establishment), and a stable governing coalition. There were reforms across a host of dimensions including politics, labor, civil society - even religion. There was a focus on formation of our people through upgraded education (e.g., the high school movement), integration of immigrants, etc. The negative effects of large-scale industrialization and urbanization were ameliorated through labor laws, unionization, sanitation, pure food and drug laws, antitrust etc.

Again, not all of these were positive. The encounter of Christianity with modern science was not resolved well in the form of liberal Christianity in my view. The temperance movement ultimately brought Prohibition, which proved unpopular. Similarly, I could have included something like eugenics on this list, which was fortunately ultimately rejected.

But while we could look back at this and criticize a lot of what happened, undoubtedly our leaders turned America into a great nation, a global powerhouse across multiple dimensions. And by and large they managed to overcome many of the problems and make this new America work for its people, not just for elites.

Today, we face a similar task of future building in America. We need to keep building the 21st century Techo-Industrial Stack - AI, autonomy, robotics, space, energy, biotechnology and surely much more. We also need to be building in parallel a Human-Social Stack that makes that technology work for our people, and helps our people get positioned for success in that world. We need acceleration, but also formation. It’s a time to build technology, but also to build up our people.

This transition takes place against the backdrop of competition with China, which is trying to beat us in this race, with a model that’s proven extremely effective in the techno-industrial sphere but dystopian in the human-social one.

Better American versions of these are not just going to appear. They have to be built. We will need solutions that span all of the different domains I highlighted in the two charts above, and probably more than that. Unfortunately, all too many of our debates today are either irrelevant to the task of actually building that future America, or are actively about trying to keep us from building it. We need to make sure we are focused on the right challenges and tasks.