2025-08-15 18:30:12
Americans who go to Tokyo or Paris or Seoul or London are often wowed by the efficient train systems, dense housing, and walkable city streets lined with shops and restaurants. And yet in these countries, many secondary cities also have these attractive features. Go to Nagoya or Fukuoka, and the trains will be almost as convenient, the houses almost as dense, and the streets almost as attractive as in Tokyo.
The U.S. is very different. We have New York City, and that’s about it. People from Chicago or Boston may protest that their own cities are also walkable, but transit use statistics show just how big the gap is between NYC and everybody else:
Chicago, Boston, and the rest have their old urban cores with a few train lines and some shopping streets. But for the most part, even these cities are car-centric sprawl. You can also see this in the population density numbers; New York simply towers over all the rest:1
There’s simply no other town in America that looks and feels like NYC.
Some of the reasons for this are historical. NYC became a big city before the rise of the mass-market passenger car, so it had to use transit to move people around; many cities, like L.A., Houston, and Phoenix, saw their growth happen later. America’s car-friendly policies, abundant land, and desire for suburban living created the car-centric development pattern that we see in many cities in the West and South today.
But many older cities don’t have this excuse. For example, take Philadelphia. In 1910, NYC was only three times bigger than Philly; by 1960 it was almost four times as big, and by 2010 it was five times as big. In other words, Philadelphia had its big growth spurt earlier than NYC did, but its outcome in terms of walkability and transit is just much weaker, with fewer than 20% of Philadelphians using transit for their commute. Very little of downtown Philly looks like Manhattan.
The reason NYC is so much bigger than every other city in America is partly mathematical — every country tends to have one city that towers over the rest in terms of total population. And it’s partly economic — Ed Glaeser has a great essay on the industrial history of NYC. But those reasons can’t explain why NYC is so much denser than other cities. In fact, because NYC includes such an unusually large percent of its metropolitan area (44%, compared to less than 33% for other major cities), you might naively expect it to be less dense — San Francisco is just the tiny metropolitan core of the Bay Area, while NYC includes Staten Island and other outlying areas. Yet NYC is still far denser than SF or any other large American city.
The reason NYC is America’s only truly dense large city is due to policy. Other cities have restrictive zoning codes that limit floor-area ratios, impose citywide height limits, impose parking minimums, and restrict certain areas to single-family homes.2 For example, here’s a map showing just how much of San Francisco’s land (in pink) is zoned to allow only single-family homes:
Keep in mind that this is America’s second-densest big city. New York City really stands alone, in terms of allowing tall buildings.
New York City is also unique in having an extensive subway system. In terms of miles of rail, NYC has more than other cities, but just as important is the shape of the network. NYC’s subway is a dense grid that covers all of Manhattan and much of Brooklyn; other cities tend to have commuter rail systems that connect the city center directly to outlying areas but which aren’t as useful for getting around within the central city. For example, here are train maps for NYC, San Francisco, and Boston:
American cities are no longer able to build subways. This is partly because we’ve outlawed the cheap methods used to build them:
But a lot of it is because of the same problems of low state capacity and excessive citizen input that block every other construction project in America.
In other words, America has only one New York because no other American city wants to become like New York. Throughout the country, “Manhattanization” is a scary term that gets thrown at any developer who wants to increase density.
And yet the number of Americans who want to live in NYC is not small; it’s huge. NYC 1-bedroom rents have been soaring, even as they stagnate nationwide:
Someone wants to live in NYC, obviously. Partly that’s because of the enormous consumption benefits for the young wealthy childless people who love living in cities. And partly that’s because dense cities allow industrial clustering effects — everyone knows that if you want to hire good employees in banking, publishing, corporate law, and so on, it helps to be in NYC.
Is one city enough to hold all of the Americans who want to live in big, dense cities, as well as all of the Americans who need to live there for work? It is not. The middle class is being pushed out of NYC at a rapid clip. Americans are trying to pile into other cities, but NIMBYism isn’t letting those cities build many new houses to accommodate them; as a result, rents in other cities go up faster than wages.
America needs more than one NYC. It needs Chicago, Philadelphia, and other big old cities with existing walkable urban cores to step up and Manhattanize themselves, so that the country won’t just have one Manhattan.
How can this be done? The first step is simply to adopt NYC-style big floor-area ratios, as well as all the city’s other permissive building policies. Allow more density, and some density will get built.
The second thing these cities can do is to build more trains. Because the “cut and cover” policies that build subways cheaply are always very unpopular, this probably also means building elevated trains and surface rail. NIMBYism will have to be overcome, but that’s true of just about anything that anyone wants to get done. Cities should also focus on building trains that allow their residents to get around the city, rather than just get into and out of the city; this means constructing trains in a grid or web pattern.
Another idea is that if other big cities can reduce crime, their citizens will be less apprehensive about allowing more density and transit. NYC is one of America’s safest big cities, with a homicide of less than 4 per 100,000 population as of 2024. Chicago, in contrast, was at 17.5, and Philadelphia at 16.9. San Francisco has a fairly low homicide rate of 6.4, but it still has a big problem of public disorder, including fentanyl use, homeless encampments, store raids, and general lawlessness. Reducing this public disorder — as well as crime in general — would make it far more appealing to live in a dense area, to walk down shop-lined streets, to take the train, and so on.
Some Americans instinctively recoil from calls to make more cities like NYC. They prefer their single-family homes, their cars, their strip-malls and lawns. Fine. But those people should consider that if America had one or two more New York-style cities, the people who want to live in that sort of city would move there, freeing up more space for everyone else.
The U.S. needs both dense cities and suburbs, in order to satisfy all the different Americans who want different lifestyles. We are overweight on Los Angeles type cities, and underweight on NYC type cities. We need to restore balance, by converting more of our big old cities into gleaming new Manhattans.
This is not true of, say, Japanese cities. Osaka is actually about twice as dense as Tokyo. That’s partly an artifact of how density is measured; Tokyo is more of an office town, where people commute in from residential areas outside the city proper.
NYC has a few other innovative policies that allow it to achieve greater density. These include density bonuses, special-purpose districts, as-of-right development, and the ability to sell unused floor-area ratio so that nearby buildings can use it.
2025-08-13 16:29:06
Donald Trump is choking off U.S. manufacturing with tariffs, replacing statistical agency personnel with apparatchiks who will manipulate data to make the President look good, and so on. Yet some progressives remain convinced that the key to winning back the country is to harness a wave of populist anger by attacking big corporations. I’m not sure I see the political logic there, but I guess I’m not much of an expert on politics.
Anyway, I’m sympathetic to the notion that monopoly power has increased in the U.S. economy since the turn of the century, and that this is making life harder for some Americans. But corporate power is simply not the cause of many of the problems regular Americans face — there are a lot of other things going on too. And because antitrust progressives insist on fitting every problem into the paradigm of corporate power, they end up believing a number of false things about the world. One example I’ve written about before is that of health insurers, whom antitrust progressives view as the chief architect of everything that’s wrong with the U.S. health system; in fact, these companies make almost no profits and are fairly efficient.
Another important example is the housing market. Overall, housing has not actually gotten more expensive throughout America; if you compare median personal income to the CPI measure for rent of primary residence, you’ll see that income has actually gone up slightly faster than rent since 1980:
But in the attractive cities where most people would like to live if they had the choice, rent has gone up much faster than in the decayed Rust Belt cities and small towns where most Americans would prefer not to live. The rental crisis is a local one, but it’s real.
Abundance liberals blame this problem on lack of housing supply, and support YIMBY policies to build more housing in cities. But although some progressives are coming around on this, many are strongly opposed to the abundance agenda. Instead, they want to blame high rents on powerful companies who buy up all the houses and then jack up prices.
A few years ago, this manifested as a panic about BlackRock buying up large amounts of the housing stock in America. This was a silly mistake; BlackRock doesn’t buy homes, except indirectly by investing in stocks called REITs. People were probably thinking of Blackstone, a much smaller asset manager with a similar name, which does buy up homes.
In addition to this silly mistake, the broader panic just wasn’t based on facts. In 2021, Derek Thompson did a great job of debunking the myth:
The U.S. has roughly 140 million housing units, a broad category that includes mansions, tiny townhouses, and apartments of all sizes. Of those 140 million units, about 80 million are stand-alone single-family homes. Of those 80 million, about 15 million are rental properties. Of those 15 million single-family rentals, institutional investors own about 300,000; most of the rest are owned by individual landlords. Of that 300,000, the real-estate rental company Invitation Homes—in which BlackRock is an investor—owns about 80,000. (To clear up a common confusion: The investment firm Blackstone, not BlackRock, established Invitation Homes. Don’t yell at me; I didn’t name them.)
Megacorps such as BlackRock, then, are not removing a large share of the market from individual ownership. Rental-home companies own less than half of one percent of all housing, even in states such as Texas, where they were actively buying up foreclosed properties after the Great Recession. Their recent buying has been small compared with the overall market.
The actual number of homes Blackstone (or BlackRock) was buying was tiny — far too tiny to affect rental prices in any significant way, except perhaps in a few very localized areas.
But somehow, despite its lack of connection to reality, the meme stuck around, and the size of the problem grew as the story was repeated around the internet. There are still people who think BlackRock is buying up much of the housing in America. In fact, even some right-wingers are convinced of this:
The exact form of the claim varies. Sometimes it’s 44% of the housing that the evil corporations are buying up, sometimes it’s just 20%. Sometimes it’s BlackRock alone that’s responsible, sometimes it’s the private equity industry:
But the meme remains false. Many news outlets have debunked it over the years. For example, Logan Mohtashami posted the following charts in Yahoo Finance in 2024:
The first of the two charts shows that institutional buyers — which includes private equity, BlackRock, etc. — own only a tiny sliver of the homes in America. The second chart shows that there was a corporate home-buying spree in 2022, but it never even hit 5% of home purchases at its peak — far lower than the rumors claim.
Kriston Capps also wrote a great debunking of the “corporate landlords” myth in 2024. Here was his chart:
Almost zero of the U.S. housing stock gets bought by owners who own more than 9 units. Corporate landlords just aren’t significant enough to be driving the rental crisis in America’s most desirable cities. (Of course, this doesn’t stop anticorporate types from mocking the very idea that high rents are caused by something other than market power.)
In fact, it gets even worse for the antitrust story here. It turns out that corporate landlords probably don’t even do what antitrust people think they do! The common story is that corporations buy up all the houses in an area, thus creating a local monopoly, and using that local monopoly to jack up rents — which in turn causes gentrification and pushes poor people and minorities out of the neighborhood.
Except Konhee Chang, an economics job market candidate, found evidence that corporate landlords actually make housing cheaper for lower-income folks, and lead to diversification instead of gentrification!
Using property-level data on tenants, home prices, rents, and acquisition timing, I show that increasing rental supply in American suburbs, where rentals are scarce and expensive relative to owner-occupied housing, reduces segregation by enabling lower-income, disproportionately non-White renters to move into neighborhoods where they otherwise could not afford to own. In response, nearby incumbent households are more likely to move out, perceiving renters as a disamenity. Large-scale landlords expand rental supply by converting owner-occupied homes into rentals, exploiting cost efficiencies from geographic concentration.
Chang found that corporate landlords drive down rents and slightly raise the price of buying a house:
This is only to be expected, since what the corporate landlords are doing is buying up housing (which raises purchase prices because it increases demand) and converting it to rental units (which lowers rents because it increases supply).1
So as far as we can tell, corporate landlords — at least, right now — aren’t causing the harms that the antitrust progressives (and some right-wing pundits) claim. The cause of the housing crisis in desirable metro areas must lie elsewhere. The obvious culprit here is just supply limitations — i.e., land-use regulations and NIMBYism. And the obvious way to address that is the abundance agenda.2
For antitrust progressives, the problem with that conclusion is that it doesn’t place the blame on their class enemies. If corporate power isn’t the problem when it comes to high rents, then it means fewer opportunities for progressives to harness populist rage against the business class. In addition, antitrust progressives probably still believe that they can harness a wave of anticorporate populist sentiment to buoy Democrats back to victory. I would be very surprised if that strategy worked.
But in any case, the story that corporate landlords are making American housing unaffordable is simply false. It’s just another free-floating memetic myth that keeps getting in the way of our ability to solve our very real problems. And the zeal with which antitrust progressives have embraced and propagated that myth should make us a little more pessimistic about their ability to accomplish positive change in the current political economy.
This ought to be an open-and-shut case, but a progressive economist popped up to try to argue:
As I explained, the reason welfare goes down in the paper is that corporate landlords push down prices enough that poor Black and Hispanic people are able to move in to previously richer, whiter neighborhoods. Chang, the author of the paper, assumes — probably correctly — that rich white homeowners do not like to live next to poor Black and Hispanic renters. And so the rich white homeowners lose utility from corporate landlords, because they no longer get to exclude people from their neighborhoods along racial and class lines!
Somehow, this point was lost on the progressive economist, who ended up defending white flight as a socially desirable thing.
Of course, even the abundance agenda won’t totally be able to negate the local impacts of big increases in demand for housing in coastal cities. Demand for life in those cities is just extremely high. But supply increases will blunt those impacts, and create affordability further from the center of New York City, San Francisco, etc.
2025-08-12 17:32:17
I’ve got quite a few great podcasts for you today. One is this excellent live show that Erik Torenberg and I did with Dwarkesh Patel, in which we interview Dwarkesh about his thoughts on AI and the economy. The picture of me here is quite silly-looking, but the conversation was excellent:
I also went on Pascal-emmanuel Gobry’s podcast to debate him about illegal immigration:
And some Japanese media folks at a company called Glasp interviewed me about AI and jobs, and about foreign direct investment in Japan!
Finally, here’s an episode of Econ 102, where Erik and I discuss Javier Milei and various other topics:
Anyway, on to the roundup!
It’s practically conventional wisdom that AI is going to take jobs away from large numbers of humans, leaving them without anything useful to do in the economy. People are so convinced of this that they’ll jump at practically any hint in the data that allows them to believe that it’s happening. A little while ago I wrote a post about why both economists and popular commentators are getting way over their skis on this:
Anyway, Sarah Eckhardt and Nathan Goldschlag of the Economic Innovation Group have a good new report on this, which shows that as far as we can tell, AI isn’t taking jobs yet — at least, not on any measurable scale.
Eckhardt and Goldschlag start with a measure of predicted AI exposure for various jobs. These measures don’t tell you which jobs are going to be replaced by AI; instead, they just tell you which jobs currently involve more tasks that can probably be done by AI. These measures actually have a pretty good track record at predicting which workers will end up using AI.
Basically, Eckhardt and Goldschlag find no correlation — or even a negative correlation — between that measure of AI exposure and any measure of labor market distress. For example, here’s the unemployment rate of workers with varying degrees of predicted AI exposure (1 is the least exposed, 5 is the most exposed):
There has been a recent rise in unemployment, but it’s concentrated among the people who are least exposed to AI, while those who are the most exposed almost all still have jobs. The same is true when we look only at recent college graduates, who have been the focus of the most concern in the media:
And the same is true when we look at which workers are exiting the labor force completely:
And one more interesting finding is that the most-exposed workers are actually less likely to switch to less-exposed occupations than they were before generative AI hit the market! In other words, coders and paper-pushers are not becoming plumbers to protect themselves from AI:
The researchers also try using alternative measures of AI exposure, and they find pretty much the same thing.
In other words, AI job displacement just hasn’t happened yet. It may happen in the future, but so far, every time people have jumped at a particular data point to claim it’s finally happening, it has turned out to be a mirage.
Bernie Sanders and his followers deeply believe that America’s economy is in a prolonged state of crisis — that capitalist economic policies have steadily immiserated the American public, creating a country where regular people are economically drowning even as corporate fat cats enrich themselves. Their absolute faith in this narrative often leads them to interpret economic statistics in dubious or even ridiculous ways. The latest example of this is when Bernie Sanders posted a chart of housing versus wages:
This is a pretty ridiculous chart. Why would you plot home prices on the same y-axis as weekly income? Does anyone think these two things should be even remotely close to the same size? Do we think people should be able to afford a house on a single week of income? That’s ridiculous.
A non-ridiculous way to present this data would be to divide home prices by weekly earnings. That would show us how many weeks a typical worker would need to work in order to afford a home. But actually, the “median weekly earnings” number is for full-time workers only, so instead we should use median personal income, which counts everybody. Here’s what that looks like:
In the 80s and 90s, it took about 8 years of work to afford a home. Since then, the number has climbed to about 10 years — a significant and concerning drop in affordability, but not a catastrophic drop. A breakdown by the Economic Innovation Group shows that mortgages are about as affordable as they ever were, but down payments have gotten less affordable:
While the drop in housing affordability over the past half century is certainly a problem, it’s not the kind of crisis that Bernie paints it as. Using silly charts in service of alarmist narratives ultimately just weakens trust in your movement — or at least, it should.
The three most powerful countries in the world are now all ruled by strongmen. In China, Xi Jinping has subdued all rivals, and concentrated what used to be a dispersed bureaucratic oligarchy under his own personal rule. In Russia, Putin is effectively an emperor. The U.S. is still officially a democracy, but democratic norms and institutions are eroding rapidly, and in April a majority of Americans called Trump a “dictator”.
The question is what effect these personalistic regimes will have on the economy. China’s growth over the past four decades pretty much proves that democracy isn’t necessary for a strong or even dominant economy. But there’s a difference between countries ruled by a single strongman, and countries ruled by a system of elite institutions that distribute power among a number of oligarchs.
A new paper by Blattman, Gehlbach, and Yu shows that personalist regimes tend to experience lower economic growth than either democracies or autocracies with more distributed power. The difference isn’t huge, but you can see it on a graph:
It’s not clear which direction the causation runs here; it could be that countries with bad economies tend to turn to strongmen to save them. But Blattman et al. test for this using variables that tend to predict regime transitions, and they don’t find any change. That implies that personalist regimes actually make mistakes that slow down economic growth.
Xi, Putin, and Trump certainly don’t exactly seem to be violating that rule of thumb. China’s growth has slowed relentlessly under Xi, and his industrial policy seems to be simply driving Chinese companies into unprofitability rather than extricating the country from its economic slump. Putin’s war in Ukraine is slowly crushing the life out of the Russian economy, while Trump’s tariffs continue to wear down the resilient U.S. economy.
The trend toward strongmen is a bad one.
Does it ever seem like modern political discourse is dominated by crazy idiots? Well, that’s because it is. In a new paper entitled “Dark personalities in the digital arena: how psychopathy and narcissism shape online political participation”, Ahmed and Masood find that your intuition isn’t wrong:
This cross-national study investigates how psychopathy, narcissism, and fear of missing out (FoMO) influence online political participation, and how cognitive ability moderates these associations. Drawing on data from the United States and seven Asian countries, the findings reveal that individuals high in psychopathy and FoMO are consistently more likely to engage in online political activity….Conversely, higher cognitive ability is uniformly associated with lower levels of online political participation. Notably, the relationship between psychopathy and participation is stronger among individuals with lower cognitive ability in five countries, suggesting that those with both high psychopathy and low cognitive ability are the most actively involved in online political engagement.
Almost everyone blames recent political trends on their chosen enemy group, but the real culprit is social media, which has elevated the worst people in our society to positions of influence from which they were previously shut out.
What force can defeat the terrible power of social media and its armies of crazy idiots? In my Fourth of July post, I expressed hope that AI algorithms could be harnessed to defeat the hordes of humanity’s worst:
LLMs give platforms the ability to cheaply and quickly filter content according to sentiment. Simply having an LLM downrank angry content and uprank positive content would lean against the natural tendencies of social media technology. Call it Digital Walter Cronkite.
Of course, that solution would depend on the willingness of platform owners like Elon Musk to unleash algorithms in service of moderation and reasonability. That seems a bit like wishful thinking, I admit.
But there’s another possibility, which is that AI itself will simply naturally drive humans off of social media, by generating infinite amounts of slop. A new paper by Campante et al. finds evidence that AI-generated images nudge news consumers toward more trustworthy human-gatekept media:
We study how AI-generated misinformation affects demand for trustworthy news…Readers were randomly assigned to a treatment highlighting the challenge of distinguishing real from AI-generated images. The treatment raised concern with misinformation…and reduced trust in news…Importantly, it affected post-survey browsing behavior: daily visits to [the mainstream newspaper’s] digital content rose by 2.5%…[S]ubscriber retention increased by 1.1% after five months…Results are consistent with a model where the relative value of trustworthy news sources increases with the prevalence of misinformation, which may thus boost engagement with those sources even while lowering trust in news content.
A similar effect might happen with AI agents, which are already flooding social media with trash commentary. As X and other social media companies lose the battle against the bot swarms, human users may stop relying on those feeds for their window on the world. The psychopaths and attention-seekers might simply get drowned out in the automated cacophony.
That would be a weird end to the age of mass social media, but honestly it’s not the worst ending I could think of.
The American and Chinese economies continue to decouple. Even though Trump keeps “pausing” his tariffs on China, China is selling less and less to America:
But you’ll notice that China’s exports to Europe and Southeast Asia are still growing strongly. This has led some commentators to claim that China is simply shipping its good through third-party countries, avoiding tariffs (or the threat of tariffs) by essentially just slapping a different “made in” label on stuff that was actually made in China.
Those claims are wrong. You can see that they’re wrong by looking at the actual products that China is selling to countries in Southeast Asia (the region usually accused of transshipping Chinese goods to the U.S.), versus the products it used to sell to the U.S. The two sets of products don’t match up very well, meaning that only a modest portion of Chinese trade with Southeast Asia could reflect diversion of trade from the U.S. Gerard DiPippo did this exercise:
Facing U.S. tariffs, China’s exports to the U.S. are down—while exports to Southeast Asia are up. Is that trade diversion and potential transshipment? My estimate: at most 34% of the increased PRC exports to SE Asia in Q2 could reflect trade diverted from the United States.
In fact, this is an upper bound. Many of the countries being accused of transshipping Chinese goods — Mexico, Vietnam, etc. — have their own industries as well, which export a lot to the U.S. Increased U.S. imports from those countries are likely to at least partially — or perhaps mostly — be locally made goods.
All this goes to show that you can’t draw conclusions about decoupling just from macro data.
There are a number of popular ideas out there about who marries whom. One is that rich men primarily want physically attractive wives and don’t care about social status, education, and so on. Another is that power couples tend to be dual earners.
In fact, both of these stereotypes are wrong. As Lyman Stone shows in a post for the Institute for Family Studies, rich men tend to marry highly educated, high-earning women women who become housewives after marriage. Here are some charts:
I don’t like the use of the word “overwhelmingly” in any of these charts, but the point is clear — rich men, who presumably have greater choice in who they marry, often tend to prefer women who are educated and high-income before marriage, but many of these women become homemakers after marriage. Call it the “power trad” couple.
2025-08-10 17:23:38
In a post a week ago, I shared some pretty startling numbers about the size of the AI-related capex boom:
In fact, this boom is so big that in 2025 so far, AI-related investment has contributed more to economic growth than all the growth in consumer spending combined. Since consumption is more than three times as big as investment overall, this is a really startling fact — it means that consumption is sluggish, while AI capex is sustaining economic growth all by itself. Paul Kedrosky calls this a “private sector stimulus program”, and he’s not wrong.
My last post asked whether a crash in the AI sector would hurt the U.S. economy. But there’s another important question here, which is who is actually going to make a profit from all this spending. Will it be the AI model companies themselves, like OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic? Will it be the companies that provide the compute to train and run the AI models — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google? Will it just be the GPU companies like Nvidia that provide the physical infrastructure?
The profit question is an important one if you’re an investor, of course, since corporate valuations are (usually) based on how much profit companies make — not on how much they invest or how much total revenue they generate. But it’s also important if we want to understand the social impact of the AI boom — in particular, the question of whether AI will lead to extreme economic inequality.
There’s a narrative out there that after AI takes everyone’s jobs, the only people in society who will have money are the people who own the AI companies — the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world, and perhaps the Satya Nadellas and Jensen Huangs. It’s possible to spin sci-fi scenarios where the mass of humanity is impoverished and starving, while a few Robot Lords order their pet AI gods to use all of Earth’s resources to colonize the Solar System.
In reality, those scenarios would run into political problems (i.e., war) long before they came to pass. But it’s important to ask whether that’s the direction in which our economic system is naturally heading. Thomas Piketty, for instance, wrote that inequality in society tends to increase until some sort of major political event — war, revolution, etc. — forces it back down. Some people worry whether the AI boom will represent the fulfillment of that dark vision.
It’s worth it to note that so far, stock markets don’t actually expect anything that extreme to happen. When you look at the price-to-earnings ratios of the major public AI-related companies, they’re somewhat high but not particularly astronomical:
If markets expected these companies to reap untold bonanzas of profit thanks to AI, they’d be valued at far greater ratios to their current earnings, because people would expect their earnings to grow very rapidly. As for OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic, their combined valuation is still less than $1 trillion; for comparison, Nvidia’s current valuation is around $4.5 trillion. So markets also don’t currently expect the big AI labs to make untold profits, either. As for the broader market, the PE ratio of the S&P 500 is around 30 — historically somewhat high, but not astronomically high.
So we seem to have a disconnect between a popular narrative and market expectations. If AI is going to make all the money in the economy, why are markets not expecting companies to see truly wondrous profit growth? The answer, I think, is that markets are remembering something that popular commentary and folklore has forgotten — the importance of corporate competition in limiting capital income. Investors know that AI companies are going to compete with each other, and that this is going to limit how much they can profit from their creations.
2025-08-08 17:25:20
It starts with a little bump on your neck. You notice it when your hand brushes against it while you’re washing your hair, but at first you don’t pay it much attention. Then your spouse looks at your neck and asks you “What’s that?” It’s a little brown bump, maybe a mole. You think that maybe you should get it checked out by a dermatologist, but you forget to make an appointment, because work has just been so busy lately.
Then a few weeks later you look at the bump again, and it looks noticeably bigger. This time you call the dermatologist, but the soonest they can get you in is three weeks from now. By the time you’re in the doctor’s office, the bump is at least double the size it was when you noticed it. The doctor is tense and concerned, and he does a biopsy. Five days later you get the result over the phone: Melanoma.
“That’s cancer, right?” you ask, just to confirm, feeling something fall away in the pit of your stomach. “Yes,” the doctor’s assistant confirms. “That’s cancer.”
Cancer. The word is like the fall of an axe, cutting off the future you had imagined for yourself. Now instead, the days ahead are filled with surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation, CT scans, MRIs. You will never again entirely be free of the eternal gnawing fear of discovering that the cancer has spread. Your hair is going to fall out, you’re going to go under the knife, you’re going to be weak and sick. You’re going to to read everything there is to read about cancer, and it still won’t help. It may go into remission, or you may die, but your life will never read the same.
This story reflects the sad reality of life for millions of Americans. Cancer is the second most common cause of death, just barely behind heart disease, killing over 600,000 every year. And every year, almost 2 million Americans are diagnosed with new cases of cancer. Some kinds, like prostate cancer, are usually manageable; others, like pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma, are practically death sentences.
Now, there’s a common myth that cancer is an intractable disease that will never succumb to modern medicine. In 1971, President Richard Nixon launched the so-called “War on Cancer”; for many years, it was fashionable to say that cancer had won the war. But in fact, since around 1990, humanity has been making steady gains. Thanks to advances in early detection, screening, and various treatments, as well as the drop in smoking and a vaccine against a virus that causes cervical cancer, death rates have fallen at every age for almost every type of cancer. For a while this was masked by an increase in lung cancer from the smoking boom, but now that’s over too:
The problem is that since the population is growing steadily older, overall death rates are still higher than they were in Nixon’s day:
We’re delaying death from cancer, but not eliminating it.
In recent years, however, an explosion of new therapies has promised to accelerate our progress in treating the disease, changing the very nature of what it means to have cancer. The most promising of these are immunotherapies — medical techniques that use the body’s own immune system to attack cancer cells. And of those therapies, one of the most promising is mRNA vaccines.
Yes, mRNA vaccines — the same kind of technology that we used to vaccinate Americans against Covid during the pandemic. But it works a little differently. These mRNA cancer vaccines aren’t something that everyone takes in advance, to prevent themselves from getting cancer — instead, they’re a type of therapy that you take after you get diagnosed with the disease. Often, the vaccines are personalized, meaning that they develop a specific vaccine for your particular cancer.
mRNA vaccines, in combination with other therapies, promise to contain many cancers, turning them from a death sentence into a manageable, non-fatal disease. These vaccines are currently in development to fight all of the biggest killers: lung cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, and melanoma. They’re even being used against glioblastoma, the most aggressive and common type of brain cancer. There are even some tantalizing results suggesting that mRNA could soon be used to create a universal cancer therapy.
Imagine how the story I told at the top of this post would go in an age of highly effective mRNA therapies. Instead of being sentenced to years of gut-wrenching fear, possibly followed by an agonizing death, someone diagnosed with cancer would simply sigh and realize that they would have to spend a bunch of money on treatments for the foreseeable future. That is the world toward which science is taking us.
And yet now all of this is in danger. The MAGA movement, which now holds near-absolute political power in America, has gone to war against mRNA technology. RFK Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services and a prominent vaccine skeptics, just canceled a large amount of federal funding:
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced this week it is beginning a "coordinated wind-down" of federally funded mRNA vaccine development.
This includes terminating awards and contracts with pharmaceutical companies and universities and canceling 22 investment projects worth nearly $500 million. While some final-stage contracts will be allowed to be completed, no new mRNA-based projects will be initiated, the HHS said.
Officially, all of the cancelled funding is supposedly for mRNA vaccines for upper respiratory illness — basically, Covid and anything that looks remotely like Covid. So officially, cancer research isn’t being cancelled — yet. But cancer researchers are terrified that this move will derail their whole field, and with good reason. The chilling effect of this funding cancellation will cause a general loss of enthusiasm for the technology.
If you’re a researcher developing an mRNA treatment for lung cancer, how would you rate your chances of RFK Jr. approving your therapy for mass use when it has “mRNA” in the name? If you’re a private funding organization, do you really want to fund a technology that the government — and a large chunk of the American electorate — has an irrational vendetta against? What lab is going to want to allocate resources toward a field that’s marked for destruction? And what aspiring researcher is going to want to dedicate their career to it?
This is from the ABC News report I cited above:
mRNA technology has…been hailed as a potential vector for providing personalized cancer treatments and protection against HIV transmission…It's unclear if any of the BARDA contracts are specifically for cancer vaccines or HIV vaccine development, but [Peter] Hotez [of Baylor College of Medicine] said the real damage is denigrating mRNA technology.
"What he's done is he's caused uncertainty among the American people about the safety and effectiveness of mRNA for any condition, including cancer," he said. "And in fact, mRNA technology is probably the most exciting technology we have now for cancer and also other non-communicable illnesses. … Even though he may not be canceling any cancer vaccine contracts through BARDA, it may have collateral deleterious in terms of squashing enthusiasm for the technology."
And The Guardian writes:
Researchers fear that therapeutic cancer vaccines will get “swept up in that tidal wave” against mRNA vaccines, Aaron Sasson, chief of surgical oncology at Stony Brook University, said in April.
When it comes to mRNA breakthroughs, “the next couple of years are the most critical”, Elias Sayour, a professor for pediatric oncology research at the University of Florida, said…The uncertainty around mRNA specifically, and research broadly, could also discourage researchers and institutions from beginning new projects, he said.
So it’s very possible that thanks to RFK Jr., the Trump administration, and the MAGA movement writ large, cancer vaccines will not be available nearly as soon as it looked like they would just a few months ago. Eventually, the technology will be developed, with some combination of funding from Europe, China, private companies, and so on. But in the meantime, many people — including many Americans — will experience the nightmare of a traditional cancer diagnosis, like what I described at the top of this post.
Why is this happening? Why is the U.S. government attacking the technology that offers us the greatest chance to defeat one of humanity’s oldest and most terrible scourges?
It’s pretty easy to trace the reasons historically. During the pandemic, the antivax movement took over the American right — possibly because of fear of needles, possibly as a macho way to express bravery against the virus itself, possibly because of instinctive dread of modern technology or expert consensus or government recommendations. But whatever the reason, Trump — despite having authorized the project that created mRNA vaccines, and despite wanting to take some deserved credit for defeating Covid — was forced to accede to the wave of antivax sentiment, and to ally with it in order to win reelection in 2024. Part of that meant hiring RFK Jr. and putting him in charge of HHS — a political marriage of convenience.
But fundamentally, it’s hard to fathom just how America arrived at this juncture. We’ve certainly seen both sides of the U.S. political divide embrace blatant lies in order to express solidarity. For the right, the biggest lie was always that climate change isn’t happening, or isn’t caused by humans.1 Climate denial might seem like a lie without consequences — after all, the worst harms from climate change are going to arrive decades in the future. But because green energy technologies also happened to become cheap, the right-wing dogma that anything “green” is bad is causing the MAGA movement to oppose the cheapest and most reliable energy sources available:
Not having cheap energy is certainly bad. But dying of cancer? You’d think that would be a bridge too far, even for Trump’s followers. But recall how during the Covid pandemic, right-wing types died in droves because they refused to take the life-saving vaccine:
The case of the Covid vaccines proved proved that plenty of MAGA people are willing to actually risk death in order to make a political statement — and to avoid the loss of face that would come with admitting they were wrong.
So it will be with cancer. When RFK inevitably declares — in the face of all the evidence — that mRNA vaccines aren’t effective against cancer, and cancels funding and approvals for that whole line of research, it will condemn a great many Americans to terror, pain, and death. And because most Americans never experienced mRNA cancer treatments for themselves, they won’t realize the world they’re missing out on. When the doctor tells them “It’s cancer”, they won’t even think about the wondrous treatments that might have saved their lives — or lay the blame on the bizarre right-wing political movement that, unbeknownst to them, has handed them a death sentence.
Progressives have embraced many lies too, of course — the idea that police don’t reduce crime, or that most American live paycheck to paycheck, or that American workers have become poorer since the early 1970s, or that houses have become unaffordable for the American middle class, and so on.
2025-08-06 17:26:36
Today, instead of writing about economics as usual, I thought I’d do a culture post. I’ve given my lists of favorite sci-fi novels and anime series, so I thought I’d do another list — my favorite immigrant memoir comics.
Immigrant memoir comics are my guilty pleasure. I just can’t get enough of reading about the immigrant experience, and I find that graphic novelists often talk about their lives more plainly and truthfully than standard novelists. Interestingly, these comics will give you a broad range of immigrant perspectives — people who love America and do well here, people who reject America or suffer life setbacks, and people who simply tolerate it because they have to. Reading comics like this is a great (and pretty quick) way to understand the truth about the people who come to America.
In the current political climate, I think it’s especially important that we understand this.
So anyway, here are the thirteen best immigrant memoir comics I’ve read.
For me, this is the ultimate graphic novel about the immigrant experience, even though the protagonist (the author himself) is not an immigrant himself, and the story mostly takes place in Mexico. The author was born in the U.S., but his parents and some of his (many) siblings were born in Mexico, so the family basically straddles the two countries — culturally, and sometimes physically. Mexikid is the story of how Pedro and his family drive to Mexico to fetch Pedro’s grandfather, who has become something of a legendary figure within the family due his exploits during the Mexican Civil War.
There are several reasons why this comic is so amazing. There are some authors who just have this natural talent for telling stories that depict the world through the eyes of a child — Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes is one of them, and Pedro Martín is another. The story deals with a lot of dark things — war, poverty, child labor and so on. Pedro’s father even admits to having been an illegal immigrant, before receiving amnesty in 1986. But because the protagonist is a happy kid who can’t quite tell reality from fantasy, even the darker elements are dealt with in a cheerful, cartoonish way. Somehow there’s an overwhelming sense of positivity and optimism.
And the source of that optimism is America itself. Even though the story takes place in Mexico, the author never wastes a chance to show how American culture — from superheroes to musicals to TV shows — pervades everything that these Mexican-American kids love. Behind this, there’s the knowledge that America welcomed this family in, saved them from violence, and gave them security in exchange for hard work. And in return, they give America their love.
Mexikid’s art reinforces this sunny optimism. It’s probably the best visual depiction of the southwestern desert that I’ve ever seen in a comic. Everything is brightly colored, drenched in sun, with wide-open skies — a metaphor for the wide-open possibilities of generations of life in America. If you want a graphic novel to make you feel good about immigration, this is it.
I Was Their American Dream follows an archetype that has basically become the staple of the immigrant memoir genre — the story of a kid who come to America at a young age, and struggles to fit in at school while also dealing with their parents’ old-world quirks and problems. Malaka Gharib executes this in fine form, telling the story of her mixed Egyptian-Filipino family with humor and warmth, and adding plenty of informative cultural context.
Of all the immigrant memoir comics I read, this one was the most unambiguously positive. America never wrongs or excludes the protagonist in any way — she finds a way to fit in at school just as easily as any white kid in the 80s or 90s, and then she goes to college and has fun there too. Her parents get divorced, and her dad moves back to Egypt for a better job, but America remains the land of promise, wealth, and safety. The art is pretty cartoonish, but it adds to the generally silly fun tone.
Racial exclusion barely comes up. The protagonist/author grows up in an immigrant “ethnoburb” in Southern California where there are almost no white people, so white people are simply exotic and interesting to her, rather than dominant and threatening. When she first encounters white people en masse, it’s as a college student, and while they can sometimes be obtuse, she generally views them as fun and even exotic.1
Overall, if you want a story of successful middle-class immigration, this is a good pick. There’s also a sequel called It Won’t Always Be Like This, about the author’s time visiting her father in Egypt.
This one has a similar title to I Was Their American Dream, and it also has a very similar storyline. But it’s a significantly darker story — the author/protagonist grows up with a poor single mother from Korea, and struggles to fit in due to her limited English skills and general shyness. These challenges are exacerbated when the family is forced to move to Huntsville, Alabama — not the most welcoming place for nonwhite foreigners, at least at the time.
Still, it’s a triumphant story in the end. The family moves to Virginia, where a more diverse student body at Robin’s high school puts her more at ease and makes it easier to find friends. Interestingly, Japanese comics emerge as a social glue that binds together American kids of various ethnicities (something that, as an observer of weeb culture, I’ve often remarked on). Ultimately, these things help Robin ease into American identity; at the end, after a trip to Korea, she realizes that she’s fundamentally American, and goes back home more optimistic and satisfied with her identity.
There are definitely important lessons here about how to speed assimilation and the adoption of American identity, if people are willing to pay attention. The art is also very beautiful, in an understated way.
If the previous three comics were the most happy and triumphant stories about immigration, this is the most horrifying. It’s a first-hand account of how Japanese Americans were forced out of their homes and thrown into racial concentration camps during World War 2. There are plenty of memoirs about concentration camps, but this one takes place in America, the Land of the Free, and so to an American reader it hits very hard.
Still, the story manages to end on a hopeful, positive note. The author/protagonist, George Takei, ends up becoming a famous actor (he plays Sulu on the original Star Trek), winning a kind of representation that would never have been possible before or during the war. And the U.S. government eventually pays reparations to the Japanese Americans it wronged. Takei intentionally presents the vision of a America as a self-improving nation — a place that always had promise, and that progressively fulfills more and more of that promise over time.
This is the best comic I’ve read about illegal immigration. It’s about a Salvadoran boy (the author’s cousin) whose mother decides to take him to America to escape desperate poverty and the constant threat of violence in El Salvador. The story is gripping, tense, and harrowing — it feels like Lord of the Rings, with hobbits sneaking across Mordor. The main danger is not the U.S. Border Patrol, but the various criminals who try to exploit, rob, kidnap, or murder would-be illegal immigrants headed north. In the end, they make it, but only barely, and they’re emotionally scarred for life by the journey.
If you want to understand what’s really at stake when people immigrate illegally, and what they have to face in order to do so, this is a good lesson.
This is certainly one of the most beautifully written graphic novels in this list, and certainly the most beautifully illustrated. It’s in black and white, but every page feels like a work of art.
Unfortunately, this is also a story about depression and child abuse. American life, institutions, and culture present zero obstacle to the author/protagonist — in fact, Americans are generally presented as helpful, caring, and well-intentioned. Instead, the entire challenge comes from the protagonist’s troubled family, and from her own spiraling mental illness. (She’s also gay and bad at school, which don’t exactly help the situation at home.)
It’s still quintessentially an immigrant story, because it’s about how second-generation Americans tend to have very little support system outside their families; when those families are dysfunctional, they’re often trapped, with no one they can easily turn to. That’s a thing people without immigrant families tend to forget.
This is the most famous of another subgenre of immigrant memoir comics: the Vietnam War refugee memoir. Other examples of this include Thien Pham’s Family Style (which I liked, and which is similar to The Best We Could Do but more upbeat), and GB Tran’s Vietnamerica (which was such a faithfully factual account that it didn’t end up telling much of a coherent story).
The Best We Could Do tells the harrowing story of a family of refugees from South Vietnam — what life was like in Vietnam before and during the war, how the family escaped on a boat and made it to the U.S., and their struggles with life in the U.S. as impoverished refugees. It doesn’t depict America as a land of promise or aspiration, but as a desperate compromise. The family doesn’t idolize America, but simply has nowhere else to go. Nor does America shower them with opportunity when they arrive; it’s only through constant hard work, perseverance, and family unity that they manage to make it in their forbidding new home.
This is another story about a refugee from a communist dictatorship — this time, Castro’s Cuba. American leftists tend to have romantic fantasies about revolutionary Cuba, but Worm depicts an impoverished, slowly decaying country filled with fear, where neighbors rat on their neighbors and daily life is ruthlessly repressed. (The art style really compounds the feeling of anxiety.) The title refers both to a parasite that almost kills the author/protagonist, and to the protagonist’s father, who is labeled a “worm” for daring to secretly oppose Castro.
In the end, Rodriguez and his family escape Cuba on the famous 1980 Mariel Boatlift, and make it to America, where they succeed economically (after facing the usual challenges). The Rodriguez family idolizes America for saving them from a brutal dictatorship and giving them the opportunity to become middle-class.
But then Trump gets elected, and the nation suddenly seems far less friendly to immigrants. A now-grown-up Rodriguez decides that Trump is similar to Castro, and decides to use his art to oppose Trump. Rodriguez creates what’s probably still the most iconic political cartoon about Trump — an image of a melting, screaming, eyeless orange head that appeared on the cover of Time. It’s not the happiest ending, but at least America is a place where dissidents can still go against the President in public — at least for now.
This comic follows the same basic template as I Was Their American Dream and Almost American Girl — an immigrant kid struggling to fit in in school. But unlike those others, this isn’t a triumphant story of assimilation; the author/protagonist suffers constant punishing, brutal social exclusion, which only gets worse after Covid (since her family is from Wuhan). Eventually she rejects the idea of America and travels back to China, but finds that she doesn’t quite fit in there either. She ends on a hopeful note, declaring that she doesn’t really belong anywhere, but it doesn’t feel like a victory.
If rightists want to read a story about immigration that confirms all their worst fears, Huda F. Cares? will probably do nicely. It’s a story about a deeply conservative, completely insular Muslim family who lives in America but is not fundamentally of America. They stick primarily to themselves, living out their traditionalist religious lifestyle in seclusion. Their family trip to Disneyland — the one time they let themselves venture outside their enclave — is the subject of the story, and yet almost none of the book is spent describing Disneyland at all. Instead, it’s all about internal family dynamics.
They do occasionally encounter Americans outside their family, but these are pretty much always presented as threats or opponents to be overcome. Regular Americans insult Huda’s family and try to sexually harass the (conservatively dressed) women. When one of the girls is detained at the park for hitting a sexual harasser, the mother takes a video and threatens to summon the online mob against the park security, ultimately forcing them to let her daughter off the hook. At the end, the family decides that the world is always going to be against them, and that they have to stick together as a family to resist.
This is presented as a hopeful conclusion, since the family ultimately puts aside their constant squabbling to unite against the outside world. But it’s not the kind of story a lot of Americans would probably like to hear about immigration.
This is the only story on this list about European immigrants. It takes place in the postwar period, and follows a girl from a Jewish family who becomes a devout Catholic. The backdrop of the story is the Holocaust, and how it basically caused the entire family to have PTSD. It’s interesting how similar this memoir is to the more modern-day ones on the list — the immigrant experience in America is more timeless than people realize. This reads much like a combination of the fish-out-of-water story of Almost American Girl with the refugee story of The Best We Could Do.
I also really liked the art in this comic. It’s richly textured and skillfully expressive.
This one is interesting because it’s a story of remigration — a Canadian girl whose parents move back to Hong Kong when she’s a teenager, taking her with them. Part of the story is about how Ruth’s ancestors escaped World War 2 to Hong Kong, and part of it is about how she struggles to fit in in her parents’ country. Overall this is a very sweet and well-told story, and it demonstrates some of the commonalities of the immigrant experience across countries.
It’s notable, by the way, that the author later immigrated to America, and now lives in NYC, though she describes herself as a “proud Canadian”. In this case, remigration didn’t take; the pull of the New World is strong.
Including Parachute Kids is kind of cheating, because it’s technically fictionalized and not a memoir. It’s the story of a strange and slightly terrifying phenomenon called, well, “parachute kids” — kids from other countries whose parents drop them off in America with friends or relatives, who then pretend to be those kids’ parents, so that the kids can grow up as U.S. citizens and act as anchor babies.
This is kind of a crazy thing to do, and shows the desperate lengths to which people will go to give their kids the chance to be American. The reason I included it in the list is that it definitely feels like a lightly fictionalized memoir — the kind of thing you’d write as fiction if you didn’t want to get anyone in trouble.
Interestingly, despite the fraud and child abandonment, the story of the parachute kids is told as a hopeful, positive tale of resilience. Americans are almost always presented as friendly, helpful people, and the parachute kids themselves are resourceful and strong. In the end, they make it in America. Stories like this are a reminder that our immigration system is just too restrictive; people like the protagonists of Parachute Kids should have just been allowed to move in, without having to separate their family.
At one point the protagonist declares that “I KISSED A LOOOOTTTTT OF WHITE GUYS.” This is not necessarily the kind of thing you’d want to write in a graphic novel in the “woke” age, but I found its innocent confident positivity to be extremely charming.
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