I had an odd dispute with an energy policy wonk a few months ago in which I was saying that electricity is expensive in California — meaning that the price of electricity is high — and he was saying that it’s cheap, by which he meant the average household’s monthly electricity bill is not particularly high.

His point is true because the average California household uses a below-average amount of electricity compared to residents of other states. That’s in part because of energy efficiency standards, but it’s in part a function of weather and infrastructure.

They don’t use a lot of electricity for air conditioning in California because in large swaths of the state it’s generally not that hot in the summer. In the South, where you might think the mild winters would balance out the incredibly hot summers in terms of relative energy use, people tend to have inefficient, “good enough” electric resistance heaters for the occasional cold snaps (compared to places where it’s really cold, where people tend to burn gas or oil for home heat). So even though electricity is much cheaper in Alabama than in California, the average monthly electricity bill in Alabama is a lot higher.

Why does this matter?

Well, it’s a reminder that influential elements of the environmental movement are driven by their roots as a conservation movement. The core desire expressed here is to shrink the human footprint: to use less energy, build less stuff, and live more humbly and in harmony with a somewhat superstitious conception of “nature.”

You also see this in the Sierra Club’s strange journey on immigration, which they used to be very hostile to because of their degrowth values. They eventually dropped their anti-immigration stance and later became good progressive allies to the immigration advocates because of the awkward coalition politics.

But the Sierra Club and many other environmental groups didn’t drop the degrowth ideology.

They often say that they’ve dropped it, and I think they sometimes genuinely believe they’ve dropped it. But whenever the rubber hits the road, they are fundamentally more interested in learning to get by with less than in developing abundant clean energy.

And this is popping up in a serious way as the movement wrestles with rising electricity demand. Building a clean energy economy is going to require huge amounts of new electricity. That means tons of new generation and tons of new transmission infrastructure — gargantuan projects that will allow us to use electricity to power our cars, to cook our food, to heat our homes, and maybe eventually to ship our freight or provide heat for industrial purposes.

But instead of focusing on how to get all that electricity built as quickly and cleanly as possible, the greens want to impose tighter price controls on utilities, minimize infrastructure investment, and meet household energy needs with rationing.

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The long war on utilities

Almost1 no one thinks that market competition works for electrical utilities. There are too many complexities involving public rights of way, and it’s too expensive to maintain multiple overlapping sets of transmission and distribution infrastructure that compete with each other.

There are a few ways to handle this non-competitive situation. One is public power, like you see with the Tennessee Valley Authority.2 Another is electric co-ops, of which there are many in the United States, but they’re generally small. A third is a regulated utility, where a private company acts as a monopoly provider but its rates are regulated by the government.

The utility model itself comes in two forms: “vertically integrated,” where the utility also owns power plants (this is most common in the Southeast), and “deregulated,” where, despite the name, the utility is highly regulated but purchases its actual electricity at market prices from competing generators. In both the vertically integrated and deregulated models, though, the utility’s profit margins and rate of return are capped.

What’s not capped is that if you build more infrastructure and sell people more electricity, you make more money. The point, traditionally, of utility regulation was to make electricity abundantly available. You prevent the utility from gouging its customers, but you encourage it to sell them more electricity.

Environmentalists have always hated this model, because they don’t think we should sell people more electricity. Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute, for instance, spread the idea that the cheapest and greenest kilowatt-hour is the one you never use. Environmentalists want to promote conservation. They acknowledge that people need electricity, but they think that’s bad. If everyone can switch to different kinds of light bulbs so they don’t need as much electricity, that’s the win. They think the point of utility regulation should be to provide people with an adequate amount of energy to get by. That means there should be a positive financial incentive to get people to use less, rather than a positive financial incentive for the utility to build more and supply more.

Lovins — regarded as an authority by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra, and other major green groups — illustrates this well in his “soft energy path” charts. He envisioned replacing America’s level of 1975 energy consumption with a 100 percent renewable system that does not replace 100 percent of the 1975 energy. His view is that we should be substantially reducing per capita energy consumption as an integral element of the energy transition.

You can’t really make sense of anything these groups do without understanding that as the goal.

And of course it’s great to be less wasteful. But I think this is a fundamentally unappealing vision, which is why the groups that are promoting it tend not to state it as clearly as Lovins does. But with public anxiety about electricity prices rising, the opportunity has presented itself to kill two birds with one stone: if you can force utilities to accept a lower rate of return, you’ll address consumer demand for relief and achieve the long-term goal of handicapping energy infrastructure growth.

As you see greens try to address the political demand for affordability, keep your eyes peeled. There’s a big difference between an agenda to make energy more affordable through abundance and more affordable through rationing.

The soft path to rationing

Leah Stokes’s recent Atlantic article outlining ideas to make electricity cheaper is an example of both the agenda, and the tendency to rhetorically soft-pedal what the agenda actually is.

She writes that you could make electricity prices lower by cutting utilities’ rates of return, and that one benefit of this policy is that it would cause them to invest less.

Legislators could trim these profits directly by more closely aligning utilities’ guaranteed rates of return with their actual costs. Such adjustments could also limit utilities’ endless quest for more infrastructure.

I’m glad she said it so clearly here. Recently, Neale Mahoney and Bharat Ramamurti wrote an op-ed trying to convince people like me to worry less about price controls and see that those controls could be part of a one-two package of immediate consumer relief plus long-term supply-side measures.

And they definitely could be! But to understand the landscape, you have to understand that Stokes (a favorite at Sierra, League of Conservation Voters, Evergreen, and other mainstream green groups) doesn’t see the anti-supply impact of price controls as an undesirable downside — she sees it as a benefit. In their view, utilities are problematically overbuilding infrastructure, and we need to cut their rates of return, not just to save consumers money in the short term but to slow down utilities’ pace of investment.

Stokes offers two other ideas to make electricity cheaper. One is to take the portion of infrastructure costs that can be plausibly related to climate change off the ratepayers’ books, and instead allocate the blame for them to fossil fuel companies who will then be charged a fee. This seems like an awfully roundabout way of saying “do a carbon tax,” which is a fine idea, but it isn’t going to make electricity cheaper.

Then last but not least, she wants utilities to vary their pricing by the time of day.

In places with a lot of solar, including California, some installations are producing more energy than is being consumed, so some power is being wasted. If people shifted more of their electricity use toward the middle of the day, the grid’s overall costs would go down, because demand would decrease in later hours, when prices are the highest. And the easiest way to nudge people toward using that midday power is to make it cheaper — or even free.

Variable pricing seems like a reasonable idea to me (my uncle co-authored a paper advocating this a few years ago if you want a much more detailed version of the case), but it’s disingenuous to act like this is just going to be a case of cheap electricity in the early afternoon. To make this work, you need to have symmetrically higher prices at other times. More to the point, the green wing of the energy wonk community is suddenly buzzing in a frenzied way about responsive demand, as if this is some kind of magic alternative to major new capital investment, in a way that doesn’t make any sense to me.

Imagine if you electrified everything

A tell here, in my opinion, is that these takes often emphasize the question of data centers as drivers of new electricity demand. But imagine everyone decides tomorrow that AI is fake and nobody ever wants to build a data center again.

The climate movement itself has spent years prepping people to replace fossil fuels in cars, stoves, and furnaces with electricity. They want to ban gas leaf blowers and have people use electric ones instead. Electric boats aren’t quite ready for the mass market, but people are working on it. Electrifying heavy construction equipment, trucking, or freight rail seems further off, but one can imagine it happening and, again, it is specifically the climate movement that wants to do this.

Well, that means we’re gonna need a lot of electricity!

A small price nudge to encourage people to charge their electric vehicles at midday rather than in the evening is not going to replace the need for new infrastructure if you imagine a world where 100 percent of the cars are electric. And it’s definitely not going to work if you’re also electrifying home heating and larger and larger swaths of industry.

You of course do want to use infrastructure efficiently rather than inefficiently, but if you want to electrify large parts of the economy in the context of population growth and per capita G.D.P. growth, then you clearly want a lot more electricity infrastructure, not just better demand-management. That’s the appealing, optimistic vision of a modern dynamic approach to climate change.

But people who favor such an approach to climate change need to understand that the Stokes/Lovins vision that the green groups embrace is fundamentally different — they want decarbonization by rationing to avoid new infrastructure.

It’s important to be clear about the goal here because I think the progressive community raises reasonable questions about the whole regulated investor-owned utility model. There’s a lot to be said for the public power alternative!

But how we organize the utility sector is fundamentally less important than to what end we’re organizing it. If we replaced the investor-owned utilities of the Northeast with a T.V.A.-style agency, I think the goal should be to promote emissions reduction by making electricity cheaper and more abundant via a mix of natural gas, renewables, and transmission while hoping to participate in breakthroughs in nuclear and geothermal. And if we stuck with regulated utilities, I think the goal should also be to promote emissions reduction by making electricity cheaper and more abundant. We can debate the best policy mix to promote that goal, but we also need to debate the goal, and it’s one the green groups fundamentally reject.

They’d like you to see their posture as being more hardcore about climate change, but if you have a halfway realistic view of the politics, it’s not even that. People aren’t going to switch to electric cars and electric home heating if doing so raises their fuel costs, and you’re not going to have enough electricity to keep prices low in the context of electrification unless you build the infrastructure.

The case for ambition

Beyond the weeds of utility regulation, I’d like to motivate people to get off the soft path by reminding the world of the potential upsides of truly abundant energy.

One of the really big ones is the ability to do vertical farming.

This is a thing that people get excited about every few years because the benefits would be massive. Not only do vertical farms have a dramatically smaller geographical footprint than conventional farms, they are also wildly more resource efficient in terms of things like water and pesticides. The agriculture sector is responsible for dramatically more consumption of these resources than the overhyped data centers, but obviously people can’t just not eat food. The problem is that, offsetting all these benefits, a vertical farm would require lots of electricity to run, so it’s not within light-years from being cost-effective right now.

Similarly, if we could grow animal protein in a factory rather than raise livestock, we would achieve incredible ecological benefits and a massive reduction in cruelty. Powering such a factory with electricity is also in some sense more energy-efficient than growing crops to manufacture animal feed to give to chickens we then slaughter. But in a more literal sense, it would mean you’d need a ton of electricity.

It would also be nice to be able to actually do carbon removal to mitigate the harms of the global emissions overshoot that the world is all-but-certain to engage in. Perhaps this is doable, but it requires energy.

These somewhat utopian dreams are not policies for 2029 or even necessarily for 2050, but we ought to set high aspirations for a dynamic, cleaner, high-energy future. Sure, we should use our infrastructure as efficiently as we reasonably can. But the future ought to involve dramatically more electricity, which is going to mean dramatically more supportive infrastructure. A vision for utilities that doesn’t support that isn’t going to work.

I have become, in some areas, more appreciative of free markets over the years, but in others I have bigger doubts than ever.

For example, there’s a new paper from some British economists looking at the economic geography of gambling establishments in the United Kingdom. They show that “living closer to and in high densities of gambling shops increases the likelihood of gambling and being a problematic gambler” and use this to call for targeted interventions to address the spatial distribution of gambling venues.

This strikes me as an unusual case of scholars understating the significance of their research.

The current spatial distribution of gambling venues, after all, is that the gambling venue is your phone, which is in your pocket at all times. I was recently seated at a dinner with a bunch of guys who were mostly a bit older than I am and who had kids in high school or college. The ones with sons reported feeling intense anxiety about the amount of time and money their boys were spending on sports gambling, and the ones with daughters reported their girls’ annoyance at how much time the young men they were acquainted with spent on sports gambling.

This fall, I’ve been watching Knicks games (and the Washington Spirit playoff run) with my 10-year-old, and it’s appalling what a large share of the broadcasting content is gambling-related. It seems like America fell ass-backwards into the idea that we should have ubiquitous, super-convenient gambling opportunities in a way that is totally contrary to how Western society has traditionally been organized.

I don’t feel particularly morally scandalized by gambling, but just imagine if a person said to you, “My plan for next year is to spend a lot more time focused on my sports gambling.” I guess if Nate Silver told me that, I’d feel fine. But generally speaking, it’s a bad idea! Don’t do that! So we shouldn’t be organizing our society around getting more people to spend more time gambling.

And now some questions.

Logan: There’s been debate online about the price of hotels in NYC and the reason they are so expensive. Is there a solution to this besides building more hotels? And what are your thoughts on the Airbnb ban?

The way this debate got going was that someone tweeted an offhand observation about high New York City hotel prices, other people chimed in with observations about the Airbnb ban and regulatory restrictions on new hotel construction, and then the antitrust brigade marched in with various conspiracy theories and lots of nitpicking about what exactly the supply side restrictions are.

And it’s certainly worth rolling back and looking at what the policy framework in New York City actually is.

In January of 2020, the New York Times reported that, having obtained regulatory restrictions on Airbnb, the new policy goal of the hotel workers’ union was to make it harder to open new hotels. In April of 2021, as Bill de Blasio was getting close to enacting the policy that the workers wanted, he told the N.Y.T. that it’s a good idea to make it harder to open new hotels:

The mayor wants to require City Council approval for any new hotel, anywhere in the city — a layer of scrutiny otherwise reserved for neighborhood-altering projects such as airports, helipads, racetracks, large stadiums, and drive-in movie theaters. He has said hotels create more traffic and activity than ordinary buildings, and he has defended the policy as good for both organized labor and community residents.

The de Blasio policy built on a more limited policy adopted under Michael Bloomberg that applied similar rules to specific neighborhoods in the city. Under the Bloomberg rules, literally no hotels were constructed in any of the areas where the more difficult process applied. This led some people to characterize de Blasio’s more expansive approach as banning new hotels citywide. In practice, construction has not dropped to zero. It’s also true that supply restrictions are not the only reason that hotel rooms in New York are expensive. On some level, they are expensive because there is a lot of demand for hotel rooms in New York City. Land prices there are very high, as are construction costs. Even if you completely repealed this de Blasio policy, hotels would still be expensive.

The question to ask, though, is why, given how expensive hotel rooms are, you don’t see more people making money by building new hotels.

And one reason you don’t see that is that the city has deliberately made building new hotels hard to do.

Is that a good idea? It seems to me that it is not. Making it easier to build new hotels would generate new construction jobs, would generate new long-term employment opportunities working at the hotels, and would generate tax revenue through New York’s 5.875 percent hotel-room-occupancy tax plus the general retail sales tax that is also applied to hotels plus a few special fees. More hotel rooms would also mean more visitors to the city with ancillary benefits for the city’s restaurants (more tax revenue) and other businesses. More tourists in particular might help pull New York’s Broadway theaters out of their current economic funk, which I believe would have downstream benefits for Off Broadway and the larger theatrical ecosystem.

And, of course, many of the same benefits could be obtained by making it easier to operate an Airbnb.

That said, legalizing Airbnb would in fact put upward pressure on housing demand and exacerbate the housing affordability crisis in the city.

On some level, though, there isn’t some “one weird trick” for fixing New York or any other complicated urban area. Wherever you look, there are stationary bandits at work, and most of the bad actors are not billionaires or even necessarily villainous people. Lots of ordinary, sympathetic New Yorkers are getting somewhat sweetheart deals on the rent thanks to rent stabilization — sweetheart deals that make housing less affordable for everyone else.

What the city needs to do is roll everything back. It needs to be easier to build new market-rate apartments. A larger share of units needs to be charged market rents. It should be easier to build hotels and easier to compete with hotels via short-term rentals. All this will lead to more traffic congestion, so the congestion fee needs to be higher in the core zone and probably applied at a lower-but-nonzero rate across a wider range of the city. All those market reforms would generate a ton of new tax revenue, which would allow for lower taxes. There shouldn’t be dumb sidewalk shed rules. There shouldn’t be featherbedding for subway conductors. The M.T.A. should do sweeping reforms to reduce construction costs and build hundreds of kilometers of new subway and commuter rail lines, which would facilitate even more housing.

That’s all just to say that looking at the situation and asking “What’s really going on with hotels?” and then getting obsessed with the minutiae of hotel pricing is the wrong way to think about things.

The city deliberately chose to restrain the growth of its tourist industry, in part to reduce traffic and in part thanks to rent-seeking by hotel owners and hotel unions. The way to have a growing and dynamic city is to stop deliberately stifling growth. That means in part saying “no” to rent-seekers, but also actually solving issues related to congestion using better transportation policy. But if you succeed in transforming New York into a high-growth city with broad opportunities, you’re also going to find yourself needing to build more schools and parks and all kinds of other things and you’ll probably find more nests of waste and rent-seeking there. I don’t happen to know anything about the details of those policy areas but I’m sure someone does.

My broad point here is just that you don’t want to obsess over any particular corner of the problem.

Some American cities are in really dire straits, dealing with decades of population loss, low demand for housing or private sector investment, and really dire public safety problems. Other cities — New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, D.C. — are in low-growth equilibria despite high demand. They have lots of specific dysfunctions and weird problems, but the core solution isn’t to get really hung up on hotel prices; it’s to reject the underlying economic model of extraction and shift into a growth paradigm.

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Radical Centrism Advocate: Imagine a tech billionaire who privately shares your moderate worldview but believes his own industry has contributed to polarization. He gives you $1B per year through 2028 to run an independent, nonpartisan effort to strengthen the political information ecosystem and make U.S. politics more functional. Your plan needs clear goals and measurable results by 2028. How would you structure the strategy? Where would you allocate resources — including supporting media or research organizations, strengthening civic or community institutions, improving political campaign infrastructure or candidate pipelines, supporting electoral reforms, and hiring staff or talent for any platforms or initiatives you’d launch? And what specific outcomes would you aim to achieve by 2028?

If you really have a budget that large and a timeline that short, then I think the boring answer is that a very large share of your money should go into a super PAC that has the goal to get a moderate Democrat elected president in 2028. Who is that? I’m not sure. The most obvious options, though, are probably Andy Beshear, Ruben Gallego, and Josh Shapiro, so you’d want to meet with them and a few others and see who you like best and who is most aligned with you and then back them hard. Of course, there are various down-ballot Slow Boring candidates who are good too. I would also cut unrestricted checks to a few think tanks and nonprofits that I like. Any actual billionaires who want my frank takes on this landscape should feel free to reach out.

A more long-term issue is that I think media content is a really underrated opportunity. A person with money to spend could build a reasonably large, overwhelmingly non-political media enterprise, and then just seed it gently with smart centrist takes. Imagine if The Argument had not just more money to do more of what it’s doing, but was also embedded in a much larger ecosystem that’s mostly about fashion, pop culture, sports, health, exercise, and other non-political topics that all exist as a mechanism to gently funnel audience to smart political takes.

Last but not least, though, I would really encourage any politically moderate billionaires out there to talk to their billionaire friends and encourage them to be more thoughtful with the money they are already spending. Mark Zuckerberg put a lot of money into pretty far-left stuff around crime, immigration, and racial justice before taking a rightward pivot in his politics. People like Eric Schmidt and Michael Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos fund some surprisingly left-wing entities whose politics I am pretty sure they do not share. Nicole Shanahan is a bit of a nut job, but what she describes here captures some important truths.

Beyond truly wacky organizations, there are a lot of wealthy center-left business people who care about climate change but, being center-left business people, are not degrowth anti-capitalists. And yet when it comes time to write checks, a lot of them are writing checks to name-brand green groups, all of which have somewhere between three and nine toes in the waters of degrowth anti-capitalism.

If you cut those groups off and invest in better groups, you’ll lose the brand halo but you’ll actually accomplish what you want to accomplish.

Joseph: What if, for whatever reason, Trump had not run in 2024? Does Kamala Harris beat Ron DeSantis? And if Ron DeSantis beats Kamala Harris, what does the present day look like? I don’t know that DeSantis’s heart is in it for the anti-immigration stuff, seeing as he has always needed Hispanic votes to win in Florida. Is his administration then a more stereotypically Republican economic orthodoxy but with the crank stuff (antivax, death to woke, war on higher education) dialed up to 800 percent?

I think if Trump just stands aside after losing in 2020, the whole situation ends up looking really different. He’s probably not heavily intervening in the 2022 primaries and as a result Republicans probably do better in the Senate races. Without John Fetterman’s very fluky win against Dr. Oz, you don’t get this myth that Democrats are actually in solid political shape. Early matchup polling shows DeSantis, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, and other contenders all beating Biden. You get more panic in Dem-land and the incumbent draws some kind of real primary challenge. I think this ends up forcing him out earlier, and Kamala Harris still ends up as the nominee except she needs to tack left to win the nomination.

Ultimately whoever the G.O.P. nominee is ends up doing better than Trump did — and doing so without moderating as much as Trump did on abortion. This then sets up a rather different 2025 with fewer insane trade-policy moves and less aggression on interior enforcement. But whoever the new president is would still have the same basic problem of having promised to bring prices down without any real plan to achieve that.

Lost Future: Retro question- if you could unilaterally set state marijuana policy, what would it be? Medical marijuana only? I think the whole ‘medical’ angle has been proven to be pretty fake, no? Actual fullscale legalization with retail stores, as many states do today? Or, would you just do decriminalization (i.e. you can possess it but can’t buy it in a legal storefront)? Or, nothing at all- preserve the old status quo of making it an arrestable offense? Or just a fine?

I think people should be allowed to buy and use marijuana, but that legalization has ended up going awry because it was promoted as part of a push against mass incarceration. This was doubly misguided because on the one hand it’s simply never been the case that large numbers of people were in prison for non-violent marijuana charges and on the other hand any reasonable system of recreational marijuana still needs lots of regulations and the rules need to be enforced.

But marijuana should be handled more or less like beer or wine or liquor — it should be freely sold in licensed stores, it should be taxed, and people who are selling it illegally should be punished. We don’t let people stroll down the street with an open container of beer and we shouldn’t let them smoke a joint there either. But also alcohol taxes should be higher and there should be more restrictions on booze advertising. Last but not least, we tend to be reluctant to severely punish low-level drunk-driving offenses because losing your ability to drive a car is so socially and economically crippling in most places. What ought to happen if you’re caught driving under the influence (whether of beer or pot) is that your license to drink or smoke gets suspended.

Alexa: Who should run for DC mayor? Any takes on the upcoming race?

I would love to see Randy Clarke, Brooke Pinto, or Christina Henderson get in the race, but as far as I can tell none of them want to. Kenyan McDuffie is likely who I will end up supporting. But I think there’s a real opportunity here for an outsider-type who wouldn’t necessarily be on my radar to get in the race and make some noise.

My broad take is that Muriel Bowser has been generally correct in most of her policy disputes with the Council, but at the same time, the performance of her administration has been flawed on a technocratic and implementation level. The city could use a technocrat, an administrator, a “make it work better” kind of person, and it definitely does not need a left-wing ideologue, which is who I am afraid we are going to get.

City of Trees: You are given a handsome commission to consult on designing a TV show similar to a reboot of All In The Family, with the goal of developing a series that can both accurately describe the current political atmosphere of this decade, and hope to build a wide audience that can help bridge the divides that we currently face. What would your advice be? This can include the types of characters you would recommend, and with what kind of traits and backgrounds, or any other details you’d like.

I would aim for a multigenerational portrait of an extended Mexican-American family living in San Antonio. You have a middle-aged, U.S.-born bilingual dad who’s achieved a modicum of economic success in a blue-collar field.

He’s an Obama / Clinton / Biden / Trump voter. His wife, also Hispanic, works in a medical office and is more liberal and angry about that Trump vote. They’ve got school-aged kids. He’s got a younger sister who went to college, works a professional job, and is super progressive — always lecturing her parents about intersectionality. They also have a younger brother who’s become evangelical, married a white woman he met in church, and they’re full-on MAGA. The four grandparents all live in town but have different family stories: one immigrated illegally as a young kid and benefited from the Reagan amnesty, one is from a longstanding Tejano family, one immigrated as an adult, and one was U.S.-born to immigrant parents. The grandparents all tend strongly toward being Democrats on a partisan level, but have all kinds of retrograde old-person views.

The broad theme here would be the contrasting dissonances between the more ideological siblings.

On one level, this whole family is very much a portrait of the kind of thing that conservatives like to hold up, except they’re Mexican-Americans and the current conservative movement is full of people ranting against the supposed evils of “third world migration to the West” and doing racial profiling. On another level, you have the educated progressive who likes to present herself in her circles as an avatar of the “Latinx community,” but who knows perfectly well that her parents and in-laws and siblings are constantly saying and doing things that would get them kicked out of the progressive N.G.O. complex in an instant.

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Adam: What’s your take on Your Party, the new left wing party that just imploded in the UK? They broke down because the Gaza wing did not fully support the left view on trans rights. I can see parallels with the Democrats having an opening with Hispanics and Muslims but struggling with those demographics more socially conservative views.

There are certain parallels to the American situation but fundamentally our partisan institutions are very different. Where you really see this playing out, though, is the Netherlands, where for a long time the Muslim community voted for the traditional social-democratic party but more recently has been gravitating to a niche party called Denk, which has conservative views on L.G.B.T. topics.

DWD: Alternate history question: What if Charles Evans Hughes got a few thousand more votes in California and got elected president in 1916?

Hughes didn’t disagree much with Wilson on the foreign policy that would dominate the next 4 years but would he be more effective? and what would the knock-off effects be?

This is an interesting one. Hughes was a fairly progressive Republican, and there was not a strong policy contrast in the campaign. Wilson ran hard on the slogan “he kept us out of war,” while Hughes accused Wilson of doing too little to prepare for an eventual war. Wilson won in November of 1916 and of course entered the war in April of 1917. Hughes would presumably have done the same and there’s no reason to think his domestic policies would have been all that different either. He presumably would not have been incapacitated by stroke at the end of his term the way Wilson was and also wouldn’t have made the big (and ultimately unpopular) push around the League of Nations.

But what happens in 1920?

One possibility is that the Hughes administration stumbles into a recession similar to the one that happened in real world 1920, is just about as unpopular as Wilson was by the end, and that Democrats sweep back into office. This leaves Democrats to govern through the Roaring Twenties and then lead the country into the Great Depression. That could have left some very different history for the United States.

Another possibility is that Hughes navigates the demobilization more effectively than Wilson did, emerges popular from wartime triumph, and coasts to re-election in 1924. In that case, you don’t necessarily see the progressive wing of the Republican Party die off with Theodore Roosevelt. Hughes was also a bit of a civil-rights champion. In the real world, after losing the election, he delivered the keynote address at the 1919 National Conference on Lynching. Later in life, as a Supreme Court justice, he also wrote the majority opinion in State of Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, which was a very important early civil-rights case. Put that together with wartime business-labor collaboration and successful macroeconomic management, and you possibly have a scenario in which the racial realignment doesn’t happen and Republicans end up being the center-left party while Democrats become a southern-dominated center-right one.

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It should be fairly obvious to anyone who's been paying attention to the tech news that many companies are pushing the adoption of "AI" (large language models) among their own employees--from software developers to management--and the push is coming from the top down, as C-suite executives order their staff to use AI, Or Else. But we know that LLMs reduce programmer productivity-- one major study showed that "developers believed that using AI tools helped them perform 20% faster -- but they actually worked 19% slower." (Source.)

Another recent study found that 87% of executives are using AI on the job, compared with just 27% of employees: "AI adoption varies by seniority, with 87% of executives using it on the job, compared with 57% of managers and 27% of employees. It also finds that executives are 45% more likely to use the technology on the job than Gen Zers, the youngest members of today's workforce and the first generation to have grown up with the internet.

"The findings are based on a survey of roughly 7,000 professionals age 18 and older who work in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, and New Zealand. It was commissioned by HR software company Dayforce and conducted online from July 22 to August 6."

Why are executives pushing the use of new and highly questionable tools on their subordinates, even when they reduce productivity?

I speculate that to understand this disconnect, you need to look at what executives do.

Gordon Moore, long-time co-founder and CEO of Intel, explained how he saw the CEO's job in his book on management: a CEO is a tie-breaker. Effective enterprises delegate decision making to the lowest level possible, because obviously decisions should be made by the people most closely involved in the work. But if a dispute arises, for example between two business units disagreeing on which of two projects to assign scarce resources to, the two units need to consult a higher level management team about where their projects fit into the enterprise's priorities. Then the argument can be settled ... or not, in which case it propagates up through the layers of the management tree until it lands in the CEO's in-tray. At which point, the buck can no longer be passed on and someone (the CEO) has to make a ruling.

So a lot of a CEO's job, aside from leading on strategic policy, is to arbitrate between conflicting sides in an argument. They're a referee, or maybe a judge.

Now, today's LLMs are not intelligent. But they're very good at generating plausible-sounding arguments, because they're language models. If you ask an LLM a question it does not answer the question, but it uses its probabilistic model of language to generate something that closely resembles the semantic structure of an answer.

LLMs are effectively optimized for bamboozling CEOs into mistaking them for intelligent activity, rather than autocomplete on steroids. And so the corporate leaders extrapolate from their own experience to that of their employees, and assume that anyone not sprinkling magic AI pixie dust on their work is obviously a dirty slacker or a luddite.

(And this false optimization serves the purposes of the AI companies very well indeed because CEOs make the big ticket buying decisions, and internally all corporations ultimately turn out to be Stalinist command economies.)

Anyway, this is my hypothesis: we're seeing an insane push for LLM adoption in all lines of work, however inappropriate, because they directly exploit a cognitive bias to which senior management is vulnerable.