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The Yale survey found that 65 percent of those surveyed discuss global warming “never” or “rarely.”

For some young people, the sadness is caused by inaction.

Cindy Chung, 17, of Bayonne, New Jersey, is an activist with iMatter, a network of high school students who advocate for environmental measures on a local level. She struggles to understand how people, especially adults, can continue with business as usual.

“It wasn’t our choice to be born into a doomed world,” she said. “All this terrible stuff can happen by 2030, and I won’t even be 30 years old. It’s so frightening.

As long as life continues as it has — with people choosing smaller family sizes, as is now common in most of the world — then in the 22nd or 23rd century, our decline could be just as steep as our rise.

there is no consensus on exactly how quickly populations will fall after that. Over the past 100 years, the global population quadrupled, from two billion to eight billion.

What would happen as a consequence? Over the past 200 years, humanity’s population growth has gone hand in hand with profound advances in living standards and health: longer lives, healthier children, better education, shorter workweeks and many more improvements

In this short period, humanity has been large and growing. Economists who study growth and progress don’t think this is a coincidence. Innovations and discoveries are made by people. In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives.

It would be tempting to welcome depopulation as a boon to the environment. But the pace of depopulation will be too slow for our most pressing problems. It will not replace the need for urgent action on climate, land use, biodiversity, pollution and other environmental challenges

If the population hits around 10 billion people in the 2080s and then begins to decline, it might still exceed today’s eight billion after 2100

Population decline would come quickly, measured in generations, and yet arrive far too slowly to be more than a sideshow in the effort to save the planet. Work to decarbonize our economies and reform our land use and food systems must accelerate in this decade and the next, not start in the next century.

This isn’t a call to immediately remake our societies and economies in the service of birthrates. It’s a call to start conversations now, so that our response to low birthrates is a decision that is made with the best ideas from all of u

If we wait, the less inclusive, less compassionate, less calm elements within our society and many societies worldwide may someday call depopulation a crisis and exploit it to suit their agendas — of inequality, nationalism, exclusion or control

Births won’t automatically rebound just because it would be convenient for advancing living standards or sharing the burden of care work

We know that fertility rates can stay below replacement because they have. They’ve been below that level in Brazil and Chile for about 20 years; in Thailand for about 30 years; and in Canada, Germany and Japan for about 50.

In fact, in none of the countries where lifelong fertility rates have fallen well below two have they ever returned above it. Depopulation could continue, generation after generation, as long as people look around and decide that small families work best for them, some having no children, some having three or four and many having one or two.

Nor can humanity count on any one region or subgroup to buoy us all over the long run. Birthrates are falling in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the current highest average rates, as education and economic opportunities continue to improve

The main reason that birthrates are low is simple: People today want smaller families than people did in the past. That’s true in different cultures and economies around the world. It’s what both women and men report in surveys.

Humanity is building a better, freer world with more opportunities for everyone, especially for women

That progress also means that, for many of us, the desire to build a family can clash with other important goals, including having a career, pursuing projects and maintaining relationships

In a world of sustained low birthrates and declining populations, there may be threats of backsliding on reproductive freedom — by limiting abortion rights, for example

Nobody yet knows what to do about global depopulation. But it wasn’t long ago that nobody knew what to do about climate change. These shared challenges have much in common,

As with climate change, our individual decisions on family size add up to an outcome that we all share.

Six decades from now is when the U.N. projects the size of the world population will peak. There won’t be any quick fixes: Even if it’s too early today to know exactly how to build an abundant future that offers good lives to a stable, large and flourishing future population, we should already be working toward that goal.

Saiz even took it a step further, showing that a lack of land can cause stricter regulation. If a place has less room to build — due to mountains, wetlands or oceans, for example — each square foot of dirt costs more. Homeowners also may push local officials to regulate the land more aggressively in an effort to protect their investment and safeguard a scarce resource.

From 2013 to 2018, zoning and related restrictions added about $410,000 to the cost of a quarter-acre lot in the San Francisco metro area, $199,000 in Los Angeles, $175,000 in Seattle and $152,000 in greater New York

The comparable figure for Phoenix sat at $22,000. Atlanta was $15,000. Dallas was a mere $2,000. Not coincidentally, perhaps, many such Sun Belt metros have produced floods of new housing.

But why do blue cities tend to have less land available for development? Perhaps it works the other way: Perhaps land-restricted places tend to evolve into Democratic strongholds.

We don’t have data for this, but logically higher home prices and regulation in land-light cities should make much of their housing accessible only to educated, well-compensated professionals, right? In this simple mental model, coastal cities have less room and thus, by definition, attract the elite. And in American politics right now, Democrats dominate the professional classes.

We’ve long heard Democrats derided as the “coastal elite,” but we never stopped to wonder why all those blue counties hugged the coasts in the first place. Exceptions are easy to find, but the subtle effects of coastal land shortages, over time, could help explain that most prominent feature of America’s political geography.

That effect could be compounded, Saiz told us, by the simple truth that coastlines, lakes and other natural obstacles to construction make cities more beautiful, and thus more desirable to those who can afford such amenities, as his research with Gerald Carlino of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia shows. And the presence of an educated workforce will cause the city’s economy to grow faster, further expanding economic divides.

“High-amenity areas are more desirable and tend to attract the highly skilled,” Saiz said. “These metros tend to have harder land constraints to start with, which begets more expensive housing prices which, in turn, activate more NIMBY activism to protect that wealth.”

But I was constantly confronted by the contradictions embedded in American leadership, the knowledge that our government arms autocrats while its rhetoric appeals to the dissidents trying to overthrow them or that our nation enforces rules — for the conduct of war, the resolution of disputes and the flow of commerce — while insisting that America be excused from following them when they become inconvenient.

He helped extend the war in Vietnam and expand it to Cambodia and Laos, where the United States rained down more bombs than it dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II. That bombing — often indiscriminately massacring civilians — did nothing to improve the terms on which the Vietnam War ended; if anything, it just indicated the lengths to which the United States would go to express its displeasure at losing.

From a strategic standpoint, Mr. Kissinger surely knew, being a superpower carried with it a cavernous margin of error that can be forgiven by history

Mr. Kissinger was fixated on credibility, the idea that America must impose a price on those who ignore our demands to shape the decisions of others in the future. It’s hard to see how the bombing of Laos, the coup in Chile or the killings in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) contributed to the outcome of the Cold War.

But Mr. Kissinger’s unsentimental view of global affairs allowed him to achieve consequential breakthroughs with autocratic countries closer to America’s weight class — a détente with the Soviet Union that reduced the escalatory momentum of the arms race and an opening to China that deepened the Sino-Soviet split, integrated the People’s Republic of China into the global order and prefaced Chinese reforms that lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

For decades, he was a coveted guest at gatherings of statesmen and tycoons, perhaps because he could always provide an intellectual framework for why some people are powerful and justified in wielding power

Now history has come full circle. Around the world, we see a resurgence of autocracy and ethnonationalism, most acutely in Russia’s war against Ukraine

Just a few decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the same countries we’d bombed were seeking expanded trade with the United States. Bangladesh and East Timor are now independent nations that receive American assistance. Chile is governed by a millennial socialist whose minister of defense is Mr. Allende’s granddaughter.

The generous defense is that Mr. Kissinger represented an ethos that saw the ends (the defeat of the Soviet Union and revolutionary Communism) as justifying the means. But for huge swaths of the world, this mind-set carried a brutal message that America has often conveyed to its own marginalized populations: We care about democracy for us, not for them.

But that worldview mistakes cynicism — or realism — for wisdom. The story, what it’s all about, matters. Ultimately, the Berlin Wall came down not because of chess moves made on the board of a great game but rather because people in the East wanted to live like the people in the West.

Economics, popular culture and social movements mattered. Despite all our flaws, we had a better system and story.

Credibility, after all, is not just about whether you punish an adversary to send a message to another; it’s also about whether you are what you say you are. No one can expect perfection in the affairs of state any more than in relations among human beings.

But the United States has paid a price for its hypocrisy, though it’s harder to measure than the outcome of a war or negotiation. Over the decades, our story about democracy has come to ring hollow to a growing number of people who can point to the places where our actions drained our words of meaning and “democracy” just sounded like an extension of American interests.

Similarly, our insistence on a rules-based international order has been ignored by strongmen who point to America’s sins to justify their own.

Superpowers do what they must. The wheel of history turns. When and where you live determines whether you get crushed or lifted by it

In Gaza the United States has supported an Israeli military operation that has killed civilians at a pace that has once again suggested to much of the world that we are selective in our embrace of international laws and norms.

Meanwhile, at home, we see how democracy has become subordinate to the pursuit of power within a chunk of the Republican Party.

This is where cynicism can lead. Because when there is no higher aspiration, no story to give meaning to our actions, politics and geopolitics become merely a zero-sum game. In that kind of world, might makes right.

his is also a cautionary tale. As imperfect as we are, the United States needs our story to survive. It’s what holds together a multiracial democracy at home and differentiates us from Russia and China abroad.

That story insists that a child in Laos is equal in dignity and worth to our children and that the people of Chile have the same right of self-determination as we do. For the United States, that must be a part of national security. We forget that at our peril.

One of the most fundamental problems with recycling is that we don’t really know how much of it actually happens because of an opaque global system that too often relies on measuring the material that arrives at the front door of the facility rather than what comes out

What we do know is that with plastics, at least, the amount being recycled is much less than most of us assumed.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, two of the most commonly used plastics in America — PET (used in soda bottles) and HDPE (used in milk jugs, among other things) — are “widely recycled,” but the rate is really only about 30 percent

Other plastics, like soft wraps and films, sometimes called No. 4 plastics, are not widely accepted in curbside collections.

The E.P.A. estimates that just 2.7 percent of polypropylene — the hard plastic known as No. 5, used to make furniture and cleaning bottles — was reprocessed in 2018

Crunch the sums, and only around 10 percent of plastics in the United States is recycle

the landfill-happy United States is far worse at recycling than other major economies. According to the E.P.A., America’s national recycling rate, just 32 percent, is lower than Britain’s 44 percent, Germany’s 48 percent and South Korea’s 58 percent.

the scientific research over decades has repeatedly found that in almost all cases, recycling our waste materials has significant environmental benefits

We need clearer labeling of what is and is not actually recyclable and transparency around true recycling rates

Recycling steel, for example, saves 72 percent of the energy of producing new steel; it also cuts water use by 40 percent

Recycling a ton of aluminum requires only about 5 percent of the energy and saves almost nine tons of bauxite from being hauled from mines

Even anti-plastics campaigners agree that recycling plastics, like PET, is better for the climate than burning them — a likely outcome if recycling efforts were to be abandoned.

The economic perks are significant, too. Recycling creates as many as 50 jobs for every one created by sending waste to landfills; the E.P.A. estimates that recycling and reuse accounted for 681,000 jobs in the United States alone.

That’s even more true in the developing world, where waste pickers rely on recycling for income.

before we abandon recycling, we should first try to fix it

Companies should be phasing out products that can’t be recycled and designing more products that are easier to recycle and reuse rather than leaving sustainability to their marketing departments.

Lawmakers can help by passing new laws, as cities like Seattle and San Francisco have done, to help increase recycling rates and drive investment into the sector.

Governments can also ban or restrict many problematic plastics to reduce the amount of needless plastics in our everyday lives, for instance in food packaging

According to a 2015 analysis by scientists at the University of Southampton in England, recycling a majority of commonly tossed-out waste materials resulted in a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions

Greater safety regulations are needed to reduce toxic chemical contents and microplastic pollution caused by the recycling process.

consumers can do their bit by buying recycled products (and buying less and reusing more).

Yes, recycling is broken, but abandon it too soon, and we risk going back to the system of decades past, in which we dumped and burned our garbage without care, in our relentless quest for more. Do that, and like the recycling symbol itself, we really will be going in circles.

The eerily humanlike chatbot, which went viral last year by generating its own answers to prompts, blindsided E.U. policymakers. The type of A.I. that powered ChatGPT was not mentioned in the draft law and was not a major focus of discussions about the policy. Lawmakers and their aides peppered one another with calls and texts to address the gap, as tech executives warned that overly aggressive regulations could put Europe at an economic disadvantage.

Even now, E.U. lawmakers are arguing over what to do, putting the law at risk. “We will always be lagging behind the speed of technology,” said Svenja Hahn, a member of the European Parliament who was involved in writing the A.I. law.

Lawmakers and regulators in Brussels, in Washington and elsewhere are losing a battle to regulate A.I. and are racing to catch up, as concerns grow that the powerful technology will automate away jobs, turbocharge the spread of disinformation and eventually develop its own kind of intelligence.

Nations have moved swiftly to tackle A.I.’s potential perils, but European officials have been caught off guard by the technology’s evolution, while U.S. lawmakers openly concede that they barely understand how it works.

The absence of rules has left a vacuum. Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, have been left to police themselves as they race to create and profit from advanced A.I. systems

At the root of the fragmented actions is a fundamental mismatch. A.I. systems are advancing so rapidly and unpredictably that lawmakers and regulators can’t keep pace

That gap has been compounded by an A.I. knowledge deficit in governments, labyrinthine bureaucracies and fears that too many rules may inadvertently limit the technology’s benefits.

Even in Europe, perhaps the world’s most aggressive tech regulator, A.I. has befuddled policymakers.

The European Union has plowed ahead with its new law, the A.I. Act, despite disputes over how to handle the makers of the latest A.I. systems.

The result has been a sprawl of responses. President Biden issued an executive order in October about A.I.’s national security effects as lawmakers debate what, if any, measures to pass. Japan is drafting nonbinding guidelines for the technology, while China has imposed restrictions on certain types of A.I. Britain has said existing laws are adequate for regulating the technology. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are pouring government money into A.I. research.

A final agreement, expected as soon as Wednesday, could restrict certain risky uses of the technology and create transparency requirements about how the underlying systems work. But even if it passes, it is not expected to take effect for at least 18 months — a lifetime in A.I. development — and how it will be enforced is unclear.

Many companies, preferring nonbinding codes of conduct that provide latitude to speed up development, are lobbying to soften proposed regulations and pitting governments against one another.

“No one, not even the creators of these systems, know what they will be able to do,” said Matt Clifford, an adviser to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain, who presided over an A.I. Safety Summit last month with 28 countries. “The urgency comes from there being a real question of whether governments are equipped to deal with and mitigate the risks.”

Europe takes the lead

In mid-2018, 52 academics, computer scientists and lawyers met at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Brussels to discuss artificial intelligence. E.U. officials had selected them to provide advice about the technology, which was drawing attention for powering driverless cars and facial recognition systems.

as they discussed A.I.’s possible effects — including the threat of facial recognition technology to people’s privacy — they recognized “there were all these legal gaps, and what happens if people don’t follow those guidelines?”

In 2019, the group published a 52-page report with 33 recommendations, including more oversight of A.I. tools that could harm individuals and society.

By October, the governments of France, Germany and Italy, the three largest E.U. economies, had come out against strict regulation of general purpose A.I. models for fear of hindering their domestic tech start-ups. Others in the European Parliament said the law would be toothless without addressing the technology. Divisions over the use of facial recognition technology also persisted.

So when the A.I. Act was unveiled in 2021, it concentrated on “high risk” uses of the technology, including in law enforcement, school admissions and hiring. It largely avoided regulating the A.I. models that powered them unless listed as dangerous

“They sent me a draft, and I sent them back 20 pages of comments,” said Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who advised the European Commission. “Anything not on their list of high-risk applications would not count, and the list excluded ChatGPT and most A.I. systems.”

E.U. leaders were undeterred.“Europe may not have been the leader in the last wave of digitalization, but it has it all to lead the next one,” Ms. Vestager said when she introduced the policy at a news conference in Brussels.

In 2020, European policymakers decided that the best approach was to focus on how A.I. was used and not the underlying technology. A.I. was not inherently good or bad, they said — it depended on how it was applied.

Nineteen months later, ChatGPT arrived.

The Washington game

Lacking tech expertise, lawmakers are increasingly relying on Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and other A.I. makers to explain how it works and to help create rules.

“We’re not experts,” said Representative Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, who hosted Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, and more than 50 lawmakers at a dinner in Washington in May. “It’s important to be humble.”

Tech companies have seized their advantage. In the first half of the year, many of Microsoft’s and Google’s combined 169 lobbyists met with lawmakers and the White House to discuss A.I. legislation, according to lobbying disclosures. OpenAI registered its first three lobbyists and a tech lobbying group unveiled a $25 million campaign to promote A.I.’s benefits this year.

In that same period, Mr. Altman met with more than 100 members of Congress, including former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, and the Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York. After testifying in Congress in May, Mr. Altman embarked on a 17-city global tour, meeting world leaders including President Emmanuel Macron of France, Mr. Sunak and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India.

, the White House announced that the four companies had agreed to voluntary commitments on A.I. safety, including testing their systems through third-party overseers — which most of the companies were already doing.

“It was brilliant,” Mr. Smith said. “Instead of people in government coming up with ideas that might have been impractical, they said, ‘Show us what you think you can do and we’ll push you to do more.’”

In a statement, Ms. Raimondo said the federal government would keep working with companies so “America continues to lead the world in responsible A.I. innovation.”

Over the summer, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into OpenAI and how it handles user data. Lawmakers continued welcoming tech executives.

In September, Mr. Schumer was the host of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Mr. Altman at a closed-door meeting with lawmakers in Washington to discuss A.I. rules. Mr. Musk warned of A.I.’s “civilizational” risks, while Mr. Altman proclaimed that A.I. could solve global problems such as poverty.

A.I. companies are playing governments off one another. In Europe, industry groups have warned that regulations could put the European Union behind the United States. In Washington, tech companies have cautioned that China might pull ahead.

In May, Ms. Vestager, Ms. Raimondo and Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, met in Lulea, Sweden, to discuss cooperating on digital policy.

“China is way better at this stuff than you imagine,” Mr. Clark of Anthropic told members of Congress in January.

After two days of talks, Ms. Vestager announced that Europe and the United States would release a shared code of conduct for safeguarding A.I. “within weeks.” She messaged colleagues in Brussels asking them to share her social media post about the pact, which she called a “huge step in a race we can’t afford to lose.”

Months later, no shared code of conduct had appeared. The United States instead announced A.I. guidelines of its own.

Little progress has been made internationally on A.I. With countries mired in economic competition and geopolitical distrust, many are setting their own rules for the borderless technology.

Yet “weak regulation in another country will affect you,” said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s technology minister, noting that a lack of rules around American social media companies led to a wave of global disinformation.

“Most of the countries impacted by those technologies were never at the table when policies were set,” he said. “A.I will be several factors more difficult to manage.”

Even among allies, the issue has been divisive. At the meeting in Sweden between E.U. and U.S. officials, Mr. Blinken criticized Europe for moving forward with A.I. regulations that could harm American companies, one attendee said. Thierry Breton, a European commissioner, shot back that the United States could not dictate European policy, the person said.

Some policymakers said they hoped for progress at an A.I. safety summit that Britain held last month at Bletchley Park, where the mathematician Alan Turing helped crack the Enigma code used by the Nazis. The gathering featured Vice President Kamala Harris; Wu Zhaohui, China’s vice minister of science and technology; Mr. Musk; and others.

The upshot was a 12-paragraph statement describing A.I.’s “transformative” potential and “catastrophic” risk of misuse. Attendees agreed to meet again next year.

The talks, in the end, produced a deal to keep talking.

Migrants are in politicians’ cross hairs, threatened with deportation and reduced support.

And the country’s commitment to fighting antisemitism seems not only to be failing but also to have given rise to an outpouring of anti-Muslim sentiment.

The truth is that Germany never fully deserved its vaunted reputation. The export-led economy depended on a large low-wage sector and the country’s position in the European Union.

The far right — ensconced in parts of the state — never went away, and the celebrated Willkommenskultur, short lived in any case, couldn’t conceal enduring xenophobia and suspicion about foreigners.

The culture of remembrance and historical reckoning, too, was far from perfect

Even so, the sudden coarsening of public life in the service of a warped sense of national identity is striking. Germany, supposed model of fair-minded moderation, has become mean.

the government’s habit of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism has had some disturbing effects. Most notably, it has created an atmosphere where advocacy for Palestinian rights or a cease-fire in Gaza is seen as suspect, running afoul of the state-mandated position

The police, for example, have cracked down on pro-Palestinian protests in several cities and outright banned numerous demonstrations.

politicians, seizing on some evidence of antisemitic displays at pro-Palestinian protests to link Muslims and migrants with antisemitism, have taken the opportunity to advance an anti-migrant agenda

When Mr. Scholz was asked about antisemitism among people “with Arab roots” in an October interview, he said Germany needed to sort out more precisely who is allowed to come into the country and who is not. “We are limiting irregular migration,” Mr. Scholz pronounced, before adding a little later, “We must finally deport on a large scale.”

More spending cuts are expected. In an economy on the cusp of recession — Germany is the only country among Group of 7 nations not expected to register growth in 2023 — this is bad news for Germans, who, according to a recent study, are predominantly worried about living expenses, increasing rents, tax hikes and cuts to benefits.

everal other high-ranking politicians have also pushed the need for stricter border controls in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Friedrich Merz, leader of the opposition Christian Democrats, spoke out against taking in refugees from Gaza, claiming that Germany already has “enough antisemitic young men in the country.”

In early November, after months of intense discussions, the federal government and the 16 state governors agreed on stricter measures to curb the number of migrants entering the country. Asylum seekers now receive less cash and have to wait twice as long to get on welfare, taking even more autonomy away from their lives. According to the new plan, Germany will also extend its border checks, speed up asylum procedures and look into the idea of offshoring asylum centers.

Worryingly, antisemitic incidents have been on the rise in recent weeks

it is troubling that Germany, of all places, should frame antisemitism as an imported problem. Crime statistics show that a vast majority of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing extremists and not by Islamists, let alone migrants or Muslims.

Germany’s leaders, aided by major media figures, are using the fight against antisemitism as a pretext to encourage racist resentment and anti-migrant sentiment.

Alternative for Germany, which has pulled the political center of gravity to the right since its formation in 2013, has never been stronger. Polling at over 20 percent, the party and its concerns, once fringe, are firmly mainstream. Questions of national identity and immigration dominate political discussion, in keeping with a broader rise of nativism across Europe.

The country’s anti-migrant turn is often justified in terms of economic concerns.

Opponents of immigration point to the underfunding of schools and hospitals, the lack of affordable housing, the miserable public transport and the general decline of the domestic economy.

German infrastructure is indeed in crisis. But this has little to do with immigration and everything to do with austerity policies that have been in place for the past two decades.

Central to those policies is the so-called debt brake. Enshrined in the German Constitution in 2009, it restricts the annual public deficit to 0.35 percent of gross domestic product, ensuring strict limits on spending.

The effects have been immediate: Mr. Lindner announced an early end to a price cap on energy bills, making it likely that German citizens will have to pay more for their heating in the coming year.

Christian Lindner, the finance minister and head of the center-right Free Democratic Party, called for a fundamental change in immigration policy to “reduce the appeal of the German welfare state.”

It’s bad news for the government, too. The coalition, composed of the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats, came to office in 2021 with a mandate to modernize the country and lead it in a progressive direction

Instead, with programs of fiscal restriction and stances of social reaction, Germany’s leaders are only serving the far-right party they claim to want to keep at bay.

Mr. Mitsotakis said, “Geography and history have ensured that we live together, and I feel a historic duty to bring the two states side by side, like our borders. We owe it to the next generations to build a tomorrow with calm waters where a tailwind blows.”

The countries signed a total of 15 agreements in areas including education, exports and agriculture, according to the Greek prime minister’s office. They vowed to hold continuing talks on political and economic issues like energy and tourism, and they agreed on confidence-building measures to eliminate unwarranted sources of tension.

They pledged to keep communication channels open and to refrain from any act or statement that might undermine the friendly spirit of the pact. If any dispute emerges, they vowed, both countries will try to solve it by peaceful means.

Mr. Mitsotakis said that resolutions to longstanding disputes over the so-called continental shelf and mineral rights in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean would be explored as a “next step” once high-level talks had progressed.

The only moment of slight unease was when Mr. Mitsotakis responded to Mr. Erdogan’s reference to a “Turkish minority” in Greece, noting that the international treaty that set the countries’ modern borders refers to a “Muslim” minority in Greece rather than a Turkish one, as the latter is perceived in Greece as implying territorial aspirations.

For Turkey, improving ties with Greece is also a way to fix relations with the West, according to Ahmet Kasim Han, a professor of international relations at Beykoz University in Istanbul. “Turkey basically cannot afford to have a further point of tension with the West” because of its domestic economic difficulties, he said. “And Greece is presenting a great window of opportunity in that sense.”

Turkey also wants to protect its interests in the eastern Mediterranean, an important route for natural gas to Europe that borders other important regional players like Israel and Egypt. That is particularly critical given Turkey’s strained relations with Israel over the war in Gaza.

A higher proportion of young people also believe that urgent action is required to deal with climate change.

nearly 90 per cent of the over-65s say they recycle as much as possible compared with only half of young people.

Retired Britons are also three times more likely than younger people to have installed energy-saving measure

The over-65s are also more likely to have reduced the number of flights they take, to take steps to save water, to repair items, to wash clothes at low temperatures and to choose a renewable energy tariff.

They are also more likely to turn the heating down and switch off lights in rooms they are not using.

young people have a long way to go to live up to their reputation as being concerned for the planet.

There are some areas where 18 to 24-year-olds are doing more than older people, however. Young people are more likely to walk or cycle than older people

and they are more likely to be vegetarian or vegan.

17 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds do not eat any meat compared with only 8 per cent of the over-65s

cross the population as a whole, 12 per cent of people say they are vegan or vegetarian.

Half of people questioned said that dealing with the cost of living is a greater priority than making changes to lower their environmental impact.

versky died in 1996. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for the work the two men did together, which he summarized in his 2011 best seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Another best seller, last year’s The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis, tells the story of the sometimes contentious collaboration between Tversky and Kahneman

Another key figure in the field is the University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler. One of the biases he’s most linked with is the endowment effect, which leads us to place an irrationally high value on our possessions.

In an experiment conducted by Thaler, Kahneman, and Jack L. Knetsch, half the participants were given a mug and then asked how much they would sell it for. The average answer was $5.78. The rest of the group said they would spend, on average, $2.21 for the same mug. This flew in the face of classic economic theory, which says that at a given time and among a certain population, an item has a market value that does not depend on whether one owns it or not. Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics.

“The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. The message … is not encouraging.”

Kahneman and others draw an analogy based on an understanding of the Müller-Lyer illusion, two parallel lines with arrows at each end. One line’s arrows point in; the other line’s arrows point out. Because of the direction of the arrows, the latter line appears shorter than the former, but in fact the two lines are the same length.

In this context, his pessimism relates, first, to the impossibility of effecting any changes to System 1—the quick-thinking part of our brain and the one that makes mistaken judgments tantamount to the Müller-Lyer line illusion

that’s not so easy in the real world, when we’re dealing with people and situations rather than lines. “Unfortunately, this sensible procedure is least likely to be applied when it is needed most,” Kahneman writes. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available.”

Because biases appear to be so hardwired and inalterable, most of the attention paid to countering them hasn’t dealt with the problematic thoughts, judgments, or predictions themselves

Is it really impossible, however, to shed or significantly mitigate one’s biases? Some studies have tentatively answered that question in the affirmative.

what if the person undergoing the de-biasing strategies was highly motivated and self-selected? In other words, what if it was me?

I met with Kahneman

Over an apple pastry and tea with milk, he told me, “Temperament has a lot to do with my position. You won’t find anyone more pessimistic than I am.”

Confirmation bias shows up most blatantly in our current political divide, where each side seems unable to allow that the other side is right about anything.

“I see the picture as unequal lines,” he said. “The goal is not to trust what I think I see. To understand that I shouldn’t believe my lying eyes.” That’s doable with the optical illusion, he said, but extremely difficult with real-world cognitive biases.

he most effective check against them, as Kahneman says, is from the outside: Others can perceive our errors more readily than we can.

“slow-thinking organizations,” as he puts it, can institute policies that include the monitoring of individual decisions and predictions. They can also require procedures such as checklists and “premortems,”

A premortem attempts to counter optimism bias by requiring team members to imagine that a project has gone very, very badly and write a sentence or two describing how that happened. Conducting this exercise, it turns out, helps people think ahead.

“My position is that none of these things have any effect on System 1,” Kahneman said. “You can’t improve intuition.

Perhaps, with very long-term training, lots of talk, and exposure to behavioral economics, what you can do is cue reasoning, so you can engage System 2 to follow rules. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t provide cues. And for most people, in the heat of argument the rules go out the window.

Kahneman describes an even earlier Nisbett article that showed subjects’ disinclination to believe statistical and other general evidence, basing their judgments instead on individual examples and vivid anecdotes. (This bias is known as base-rate neglect.)

over the years, Nisbett had come to emphasize in his research and thinking the possibility of training people to overcome or avoid a number of pitfalls, including base-rate neglect, fundamental attribution error, and the sunk-cost fallacy.

When Nisbett has to give an example of his approach, he usually brings up the baseball-phenom survey. This involved telephoning University of Michigan students on the pretense of conducting a poll about sports, and asking them why there are always several Major League batters with .450 batting averages early in a season, yet no player has ever finished a season with an average that high.

about half give the right answer: the law of large numbers, which holds that outlier results are much more frequent when the sample size (at bats, in this case) is small. Over the course of the season, as the number of at bats increases, regression to the mean is inevitabl

When Nisbett asks the same question of students who have completed the statistics course, about 70 percent give the right answer. He believes this result shows, pace Kahneman, that the law of large numbers can be absorbed into System 2—and maybe into System 1 as well, even when there are minimal cues.

Nisbett’s second-favorite example is that economists, who have absorbed the lessons of the sunk-cost fallacy, routinely walk out of bad movies and leave bad restaurant meals uneaten.

we’ve tested Michigan students over four years, and they show a huge increase in ability to solve problems. Graduate students in psychology also show a huge gain.”

, “I know from my own research on teaching people how to reason statistically that just a few examples in two or three domains are sufficient to improve people’s reasoning for an indefinitely large number of events.”

isbett suggested another factor: “You and Amos specialized in hard problems for which you were drawn to the wrong answer. I began to study easy problems, which you guys would never get wrong but untutored people routinely do … Then you can look at the effects of instruction on such easy problems, which turn out to be huge.”

Nisbett suggested that I take “Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age,” an online Coursera course in which he goes over what he considers the most effective de-biasing skills and concepts. Then, to see how much I had learned, I would take a survey he gives to Michigan undergraduates. So I did.

he course consists of eight lessons by Nisbett—who comes across on-screen as the authoritative but approachable psych professor we all would like to have had—interspersed with some graphics and quizzes. I recommend it. He explains the availability heuristic this way: “People are surprised that suicides outnumber homicides, and drownings outnumber deaths by fire. People always think crime is increasing” even if it’s not.

When I finished the course, Nisbett sent me the survey he and colleagues administer to Michigan undergrads

It contains a few dozen problems meant to measure the subjects’ resistance to cognitive biases

I got it right. Indeed, when I emailed my completed test, Nisbett replied, “My guess is that very few if any UM seniors did as well as you. I’m sure at least some psych students, at least after 2 years in school, did as well. But note that you came fairly close to a perfect score.”

In 2006, seeking to prevent another mistake of that magnitude, the U.S. government created the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (iarpa), an agency designed to use cutting-edge research and technology to improve intelligence-gathering and analysis. In 2011, iarpa initiated a program, Sirius, to fund the development of “serious” video games that could combat or mitigate what were deemed to be the six most damaging biases: confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, the bias blind spot (the feeling that one is less biased than the average person), the anchoring effect, the representativeness heuristic, and projection bias (the assumption that everybody else’s thinking is the same as one’s own).

For his part, Nisbett insisted that the results were meaningful. “If you’re doing better in a testing context,” he told me, “you’ll jolly well be doing better in the real world.”

The New York–based NeuroLeadership Institute offers organizations and individuals a variety of training sessions, webinars, and conferences that promise, among other things, to use brain science to teach participants to counter bias. This year’s two-day summit will be held in New York next month; for $2,845, you could learn, for example, “why are our brains so bad at thinking about the future, and how do we do it better?”

Nevertheless, I did not feel that reading Mindware and taking the Coursera course had necessarily rid me of my biases

One of the most important ingredients is what Tetlock calls “the outside view.” The inside view is a product of fundamental attribution error, base-rate neglect, and other biases that are constantly cajoling us into resting our judgments and predictions on good or vivid stories instead of on data and statistics

most promising are a handful of video games. Their genesis was in the Iraq War

Philip E. Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and his wife and research partner, Barbara Mellers, have for years been studying what they call “superforecasters”: people who manage to sidestep cognitive biases and predict future events with far more accuracy than the pundits

Together with collaborators who included staff from Creative Technologies, a company specializing in games and other simulations, and Leidos, a defense, intelligence, and health research company that does a lot of government work, Morewedge devised Missing. Some subjects played the game, which takes about three hours to complete, while others watched a video about cognitive bias. All were tested on bias-mitigation skills before the training, immediately afterward, and then finally after eight to 12 weeks had passed.

he said he saw the results as supporting the research and insights of Richard Nisbett. “Nisbett’s work was largely written off by the field, the assumption being that training can’t reduce bias,

“The literature on training suggests books and classes are fine entertainment but largely ineffectual. But the game has very large effects. It surprised everyone.”

even the positive results reminded me of something Daniel Kahneman had told me. “Pencil-and-paper doesn’t convince me,” he said. “A test can be given even a couple of years later. But the test cues the test-taker. It reminds him what it’s all about.”

Morewedge told me that some tentative real-world scenarios along the lines of Missing have shown “promising results,” but that it’s too soon to talk about them.

In the future, I will monitor my thoughts and reactions as best I can

It tweaked its algorithm to boost authoritative sources in the news feed and turned off recommendations to join groups based around political or social issues. Facebook is reversing some of these steps now, but it cannot make people forget this toolbox exists in the future

Nothing symbolizes this shift as neatly as Facebook’s decision in October (and Twitter’s shortly after) to start banning Holocaust denial. Almost exactly a year earlier, Zuckerberg had proudly tied himself to the First Amendment in a widely publicized “stand for free expression” at Georgetown University.

The evolution continues. Facebook announced earlier this month that it will join platforms such as YouTube and TikTok in removing, not merely labeling or down-ranking, false claims about COVID-19 vaccines.

the pandemic also showed that complete neutrality is impossible. Even though it’s not clear that removing content outright is the best way to correct misperceptions, Facebook and other platforms plainly want to signal that, at least in the current crisis, they don’t want to be seen as feeding people information that might kill them.

As platforms grow more comfortable with their power, they are recognizing that they have options beyond taking posts down or leaving them up. In addition to warning labels, Facebook implemented other “break glass” measures to stem misinformation as the election approached.

Down-ranking, labeling, or deleting content on an internet platform does not address the social or political circumstances that caused it to be posted in the first place

Content moderation comes to every content platform eventually, and platforms are starting to realize this faster than ever.

Platforms don’t deserve praise for belatedly noticing dumpster fires that they helped create and affixing unobtrusive labels to them

Warning labels for misinformation might make some commentators feel a little better, but whether labels actually do much to contain the spread of false information is still unknown.

News reporting suggests that insiders at Facebook knew they could and should do more about misinformation, but higher-ups vetoed their ideas. YouTube barely acted to stem the flood of misinformation about election results on its platform.

When internet platforms announce new policies, assessing whether they can and will enforce them consistently has always been difficult. In essence, the companies are grading their own work. But too often what can be gleaned from the outside suggests that they’re failing.

And if 2020 finally made clear to platforms the need for greater content moderation, it also exposed the inevitable limits of content moderation.

Even before the pandemic, YouTube had begun adjusting its recommendation algorithm to reduce the spread of borderline and harmful content, and is introducing pop-up nudges to encourage user

even the most powerful platform will never be able to fully compensate for the failures of other governing institutions or be able to stop the leader of the free world from constructing an alternative reality when a whole media ecosystem is ready and willing to enable him. As Renée DiResta wrote in The Atlantic last month, “reducing the supply of misinformation doesn’t eliminate the demand.”

Even so, this year’s events showed that nothing is innate, inevitable, or immutable about platforms as they currently exist. The possibilities for what they might become—and what role they will play in society—are limited more by imagination than any fixed technological constraint, and the companies appear more willing to experiment than ever.

If OnlyFans’s creator earnings were taken as a whole, the company would rank around No. 90 on Forbes’s list of the biggest private companies in America by revenue, ahead of Twitter (now called X), Neiman Marcus Group, New Balance, Hard Rock International and Hallmark Cards.

Many creators now operate like independent media companies, with support staffs, growth strategies and promotional budgets, and work to apply the cold quantification and data analytics of online marketing to the creation of a fantasy life.

The subscription site has often been laughed off as a tabloid punchline, a bawdy corner of the internet where young, underpaid women (teachers, nurses, cops) sell nude photos, get found out and lose their jobs.

pressures to perform for a global audience; an internet that never forgets. “There is simply no room for naivety,” one said in a guide posted to Reddit’s r/CreatorsAdvice.

America’s social media giants for years have held up online virality as the ultimate goal, doling out measurements of followers, reactions and hearts with an unspoken promise: that internet love can translate into sponsorships and endorsement deals

But OnlyFans represents the creator economy at its most blatantly transactional — a place where viewers pay upfront for creators’ labor, and intimacy is just another unit of content to monetize.

The fast ascent of OnlyFans further spotlights how the internet has helped foster a new style of modern gig work that creators see as safe, remote and self-directed,

Creators’ nonchalance about the digital sex trade has fueled a broader debate about whether the site’s promotion of feminist autonomy is a facade: just a new class of techno-capitalism, selling the same patriarchal dream.

But OnlyFans increasingly has become the model for how a new generation of online creators gets paid. Influencers popular on mainstream sites use it to capitalize on the audiences they’ve spent years building. And OnlyFans creators have turned going viral on the big social networks into a marketing strategy, using Facebook, Twitter and TikTok as sales funnels for getting new viewers to subscribe.

many creators, she added, still find it uniquely alluring — a rational choice in an often-irrational environment for gender, work and power. “Why would I spend my day doing dirty, degrading, minimum-wage labor when I can do something that brings more money in and that I have a lot more control over?”

it is targeting major “growth regions” in Latin America, Europe and Australia. (The Mexican diver Diego Balleza said he is using his $15-a-month account to save up for next year’s Paris Olympics.)

“Does an accountant always enjoy their work? No. All work has pleasure and pain, and a lot of it is boring and annoying. Does that mean they’re being exploited?”

Adams’s operation is registered in state business records as a limited liability company and offers quarterly employee performance reviews and catered lunch. It also runs with factory-like efficiency, thanks largely to a system designed in-house to track millions of data points on customers and content and ensure every video is rigorously planned and optimized.

Since sending her first photo in 2021, Adams’s OnlyFans accounts have earned $16.5 million in sales, more than 1.4 million fans and more than 11 million “likes.” She now makes about $30,000 a day — more than most American small businesses — from subscriptions, video sales, messages and tips, half of which is pure profit

Adams’s team sees its business as one of harmless, destigmatized gratification, in which both sides get what they want. The buyers are swiped over in dating apps, widowed, divorced or bored, eager to pay for the illusion of intimacy with an otherwise unattainable match. And the sellers see themselves as not all that different from the influencers they watched growing up on YouTube, charging for parts of their lives they’d otherwise share for free.

“This is normal for my generation, you know?

“I can go on TikTok right now and see ten girls wearing the bare minimum of clothing just to get people to join their page. Why not go the extra step to make money off it?”

the job can be financially precarious and mentally taxing, demanding not just the technical labor of recording, editing, managing and marketing but also the physical and emotional labor of adopting a persona to keep clients feeling special and eager to spend.

enix International Limited, is based, the company said its sales grew from $238 million in 2019 to more than $5.5 billion last year.

Its international army of creators has also grown from 348,000 in 2019 to more than 3 million today — a tenfold increase.

The company paid its owner, the Ukrainian American venture capitalist Leonid Radvinsky, $338 million in dividends last year.)

portion of its creator base and 70 percent of its annual revenue

When Tim Stokely, a London-based operator of live-cam sex sites, founded OnlyFans with his brother in 2016, he framed it as a simple way to monetize the creators who were becoming the world’s new celebrities — the same online influencers, just with a payment button. In 2019, Stokely told Wired magazine that his site was like “a bolt-on to your existing social media,” in the same way “Uber is a bolt-on to your car.”

Before OnlyFans, pornography on the internet had been largely a top-down enterprise, with agents, producers, studios and other middlemen hoarding the profits of performers’ work. OnlyFans democratized that business model, letting the workers run the show: recording their own content, deciding their prices, selling it however they’d like and reaping the full reward.

The platform bans real-world prostitution, as well as extreme or illegal content, and requires everyone who shows up on camera to verify they’re 18 or older by sending in a video selfie showing them holding a government-issued ID.

OnlyFans operates as a neutral marketplace, with no ads, trending topics or recommendation algorithms, placing few limitations on what creators can sell but also making it necessary for them to market themselves or fade away.

After sending other creators’ agents their money over PayPal, Adams’s ad workers send suggestions over the messaging app Telegram on how Bryce should be marketed, depending on the clientele. OnlyFans models whose fans tend to prefer the “girlfriend experience,” for instance, are told to talk up her authenticity: “Bryce is a real, fit girl who wants to get to know you

Like most platforms, OnlyFans suffers from a problem of incredible pay inequality, with the bulk of the profits concentrated in the bank accounts of the lucky few.

the top 1 percent of accounts made 33 percent of the money, and that most accounts took home less than $145 a month

Watching their partner have sex with someone else sometimes sparked what they called “classic little jealousy issues,” which Adams said they resolved with “more communication, more growing up.” The money was just too good. And over time, they adopted a self-affirming ideology that framed everything as just business. Things that were tough to do but got easier with practice, like shooting a sex scene, they called, in gym terms, “reps.” Things one may not want to do at first, but require some mental work to approach, became “self-limiting beliefs.”

They started hiring workers through friends and family, and what was once just Adams became a team effort, in which everyone was expected to workshop caption and video ideas. The group evaluated content under what Brian, who is 31, called a “triangulation method” that factored their comfort level with a piece of content alongside its engagement potential and “brand match.” Bryce the person gave way to Bryce the brand, a commercialized persona drafted by committee and refined for maximum marketability.

One of the operation’s most subtly critical components is a piece of software known as “the Tool,” which they developed and maintain in-house. The Tool scrapes and compiles every “like” and view on all of Adams’s social network accounts, every OnlyFans “fan action” and transaction, and every text, sext and chat message — more than 20 million lines of text so far.

It houses reams of customer data and a library of preset messages that Adams and her chatters can send to fans, helping to automate their reactions and flirtations — “an 80 percent template for a personalized response,” she said.

And it’s linked to a searchable database, in which hundreds of sex scenes are described in detail — by price, total sales, participants and general theme — and given a unique “stock keeping unit,” or SKU, much like the scannable codes on a grocery store shelf. If a fan says they like a certain sexual scenario, a team member can instantly surface any relevant scenes for an easy upsell. “Classic inventory chain,” Adams said.

The systemized database is especially handy for the young women of Adams’s chat team, known as the “girlfriends,” who work at a bench of laptops in the gym’s upper loft. The Tool helped “supercharge her messaging, which ended up, like, 3X-ing her output,” Brian said, meaning it tripled.

Keeping men talking is especially important because the chat window is where Adams’s team sends out their mass-message sales promotions, and the girlfriends never really know what to expect. One girlfriend said she’s had as many as four different sexting sessions going at once.

Adams employs a small team that helps her pay other OnlyFans creators to give away codes fans can use for free short-term trials. The team tracks redemption rates and promotional effectiveness in a voluminous spreadsheet, looking for guys who double up on discount codes, known as “stackers,” as well as bad bets and outright fraud.

Many OnlyFans creators don’t offer anything explicit, and the site has pushed to spotlight its stable of chefs, comedians and mountain bikers on a streaming channel, OFTV. But erotic content on the platform is inescapable; even some outwardly conventional creators shed their clothes behind the paywall

Creators with a more hardcore fan base, meanwhile, are told to cut to the chase: “300+ sex tapes & counting”; “Bryce doesn’t say no, she’s the most wild, authentic girl you will ever find.”

The $18 an hour she makes on the ad team, however, is increasingly dwarfed by the money Leigh makes from her personal OnlyFans account, where she sells sex scenes with her boyfriend for $10 a month. Leigh made $92,000 in gross sales in July, thanks largely to revenue from new fans who found her through Adams or the bikini videos Leigh posts to her 170,000-follower TikTok account

“This is a real job. You dedicate your time to it every single day. You’re always learning, you’re always doing new things,” she said. “I’d never thought I’d be good at business, but learning all these business tactics really empowers you. I have my own LLC; I don’t know any other 20-year-old right now that has their own LLC.”

The team is meeting all traffic goals, per their internal dashboard, which showed that through the day on a recent Thursday they’d gained 2,221,835 video plays, 19,707 landing-page clicks, 6,372 new OnlyFans subscribers and 9,024 new social-network followers. And to keep in shape, Adams and her boyfriend are abiding by a rigorous daily diet and workout plan

They eat the same Chick-fil-A salad at every lunch, track every calorie and pay a gym assistant to record data on every rep and weight of their exercise.

But the OnlyFans business is competitive, and it does not always feel to the couple like they’ve done enough. Their new personal challenge, they said, is to go viral on the other platforms as often as possible, largely through jokey TikTok clips and bikini videos that don’t give away too much.

the host told creators this sales-funnel technique was key to helping build the “cult of you”: “Someone’s fascination will become infatuation, which will make you a lot of money.”

Adams’s company has worked to reverse engineer the often-inscrutable art of virality, and Brian now estimates Adams makes about $5,000 in revenue for every million short-form video views she gets on TikTok.

Her team has begun ranking each platform by the amount of money they expect they can get from each viewer there, a metric they call “fan lifetime value.” (Subscribers who click through to her from Facebook tend to spend the most, the data show. Facebook declined to comment.)

The younger workers said they see the couple as mentors, and the two are constantly reminding them that the job of a creator is not a “lottery ticket” and requires a persistent grind. Whenever one complains about their lack of engagement, Brian said he responds, “When’s the last time you posted 60 different videos, 60 days in a row, on your Instagram Reels?”

But some have taken to it quite naturally. Rayna Rose, 19, was working last year at a hair salon, sweeping floors for $12 an hour, when an old high school classmate who worked with Adams asked whether she wanted to try OnlyFans and make $500 a video.

Rose started making videos and working as a chatter for $18 an hour but recently renegotiated her contract with Adams to focus more on her personal OnlyFans account, where she has nearly 30,000 fans, many of whom pay $10 a month.

One recent evening this summer, Adams was in the farm’s gym when her boyfriend told her he was headed to their guest room to record a collab with Rose, who was wearing a blue bikini top and braided pigtails.

“Go have fun,” Adams told them as they walked away. “Make good content.” The 15-minute video has so far sold more than 1,400 copies and accounted for more than $30,000 in sales.

Rose said she has lost friends due to her “lifestyle,” with one messaging her recently, “Can you imagine how successful you would be if you studied regularly and spent your time wisely?”

The message stung but, in Rose’s eyes, they didn’t understand her at all. She feels, for the first time, like she has a sense of purpose: She wants to be a full-time influencer. She expects to clear $200,000 in earnings this year and is now planning to move out of her parents’ house.

“I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And now I know,” she said. “I want to be big. I want to be, like, mainstream.”

“People have faced higher prices and that is difficult, but that doesn’t explain why people have not cut back,” she said of a phenomenon known as revealed preference. “They have spent as if they see nothing but good times in front of them. So why are their actions so out of whack with their words?”

Many said their own finances were good enough — they had jobs, owned houses, made ends meet. But they felt as if they were “just getting by,” with “nothing left over.” Many felt angry and anxious over prices and the pandemic and politics.

Also, economists said, wages have increased alongside prices. Real median earnings for full-time workers are slightly higher than at the end of 2019, and for many low earners, their raises have outpaced inflation. But it’s common for people to think about prices at face value, rather than relative to their income, a habit economists call money illusion.

“The pandemic shattered a lot of illusions of control,” Professor Stevenson said. “I wonder how much that has made us more aware of all the places we don’t have control, over prices, over the housing market.”

Inflation weighed heavily on voters — nearly all of them mentioned frustration at the price of something they buy regularly.

Consumer prices were up 3.2 percent in October from the year before, a decline in the year-over-year inflation rate from more than 8 percent in mid-2022. But inflation “casts a long shadow on how people evaluate things,” said Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard. Some people may expect prices to return to what they were before — something that rarely happens

Those feelings may be driving attitudes about the economy, economists speculated, sounding more like their colleagues from another branch of social science, psychology.

Younger people — who were a key to President Biden’s win in 2020 but showed less support for him in the new poll — had concerns specific to their phase of life. In the poll, 93 percent of them rated the economy unfavorably, more than any other age group.

“Everyone thinks a wage increase is something they deserve, and a price increase is imposed by the economy on them,” Professor Katz said.

There’s a sense that it’s become harder to achieve the things their parents did, like buying a home. Houses are less affordable than at the height of the 2006 bubble, and less than half of Americans can afford one.

“More than likely, half my income will go toward rent,” he said. “I was really hoping on that student loan forgiveness.”

Yet overall, economists said, data shows that more people are quitting jobs to start better ones, moving to more desirable places because they can work remotely, and starting new businesses.

He said he makes almost $80,000, serving in the military and working as a DoorDash deliverer, yet feels he had more spending money a decade ago, when he was two pay grades lower.

he uncertainty Mr. Blanck and Ms. Linn share about the future ran through many voters’ stories, darkening their economic outlook.

“The degree of volatility that we’ve experienced from different events — from the pandemic, from inflation — leaves them not confident that even if objectively good things are going on, it’s going to persist,”

In response to the pandemic, the United States built an extensive welfare state, and it has since been dismantled. While wealth has increased for families across the income spectrum, data shows, and there are indications that inequality could be shrinking, the changes have been small relative to decades of growing inequality, leading to a sense for some that the system is rigged.

“When things are going well, that means rich people are getting richer and all of us are pretty much second,” said Manuel Zimberoff, 26, a manufacturing engineer in Philadelphia. “And if things are going poorly, rich people are still getting richer, and all of us are screwed.”

For roughly two decades, partisanship has increasingly been correlated with views about the economy: Research has shown that people rate the economy more poorly when their party is not in power. Nearly every Republican in the poll rated the economy unfavorably, and 59 percent of Democrats did.

He brought up U.S. funding in Ukraine and the Middle East. He wanted to know: Is that the reason our economy is “slowing down?” He wasn’t sure, but he thought it might be. He plans to vote for “the Republican, any Republican,” he said. “Democrats have disappointed me.”

Google’s generative-AI-powered search is the true nightmare for publishers. Across the media world, Google generates nearly 40% of publishers’ traffic, accounting for the largest share of their “referrals,” according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from measurement firm SimilarWeb. 

“AI and large language models have the potential to destroy journalism and media brands as we know them,” said Mathias Döpfner, chairman and CEO of Axel Springer,

His company, one of Europe’s largest publishers and the owner of U.S. publications Politico and Business Insider, this week announced a deal to license its content to generative-AI specialist OpenAI.

publishers have seen enough to estimate that they will lose between 20% and 40% of their Google-generated traffic if anything resembling recent iterations rolls out widely. Google has said it is giving priority to sending traffic to publishers.

The rise of AI is the latest and most anxiety-inducing chapter in the long, uneasy marriage between Google and publishers, which have been bound to each other through a basic transaction: Google helps publishers be found by readers, and publishers give Google information—millions of pages of web content—to make its search engine useful.

Already, publishers are reeling from a major decline in traffic sourced from social-media sites, as both Meta and X, the former Twitter, have pulled away from distributing news.

, Google’s AI search was trained, in part, on their content and other material from across the web—without payment. 

Google’s view is that anything available on the open internet is fair game for training AI models. The company cites a legal doctrine that allows portions of a copyrighted work to be used without permission for cases such as criticism, news reporting or research.

The changes risk damaging website owners that produce the written material vital to both Google’s search engine and its powerful AI models.

“If Google kills too many publishers, it can’t build the LLM,”

Barry Diller, chairman of IAC and Expedia, said all major AI companies, including Google and rivals like OpenAI, have promised that they would continue to send traffic to publishers’ sites. “How they do it, they’ve been very clear to us and others, they don’t really know,” he said.

All of this has led Google and publishers to carry out an increasingly complex dialogue. In some meetings, Google is pitching the potential benefits of the other AI tools it is building, including one that would help with the writing and publishing of news articles

At the same time, publishers are seeking reassurances from Google that it will protect their businesses from an AI-powered search tool that will likely shrink their traffic, and they are making clear they expect to be paid for content used in AI training.

“Any attempts to estimate the traffic impact of our SGE experiment are entirely speculative at this stage as we continue to rapidly evolve the user experience and design, including how links are displayed, and we closely monitor internal data from our tests,” Reid said.

Many of IAC’s properties, like Brides, Investopedia and the Spruce, get more than 80% of their traffic from Google

Google began rolling out the AI search tool in May by letting users opt into testing. Using a chat interface that can understand longer queries in natural language, it aims to deliver what it calls “snapshots”—or summaries—of the answer, instead of the more link-heavy responses it has traditionally served up in search results. 

Google at first didn’t include links within the responses, instead placing them in boxes to the right of the passage. It later added in-line links following feedback from early users. Some more recent versions require users to click a button to expand the summary before getting links. Google doesn’t describe the links as source material but rather as corroboration of its summaries.

During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to San Francisco, the Google AI search bot responded to the question “What did President Xi say?” with two quotes from his opening remarks. Users had to click on a little red arrow to expand the response and see a link to the CNBC story that the remarks were taken from. The CNBC story also sat over on the far right-hand side of the screen in an image box.

The same query in Google’s regular search engine turned up a different quote from Xi’s remarks, but a link to the NBC News article it came from was beneath the paragraph, atop a long list of news stories from other sources like CNN and PBS.

Google’s Reid said AI is the future of search and expects its new tool to result in more queries.

“The number of information needs in the world is not a fixed number,” she said. “It actually grows as information becomes more accessible, becomes easier, becomes more powerful in understanding it.”

Testing has suggested that AI isn’t the right tool for answering every query, she said.

Many publishers are opting to insert code in their websites to block AI tools from “crawling” them for content. But blocking Google is thorny, because publishers must allow their sites to be crawled in order to be indexed by its search engine—and therefore visible to users searching for their content.To some in the publishing world there was an implicit threat in Google’s policy: Let us train on your content or you’ll be hard to find on the internet.

Countries’ commitments should reflect “equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities in the light of different national circumstances and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.”

It’s indisputable that poor nations should be allowed to develop and to eradicate poverty. Countries, obviously, can contribute to the global effort only to the extent of their capabilities

equity brings up a different, more slippery matter. What’s the just allocation of responsibility? What’s fair?

Countries, it turns out, have rather different takes on this question, potentially complicating efforts to make progress against climate change.

Consider the intended “nationally determined contributions” to battle climate change that various countries announced after the climate summit in Paris in 2015

One interesting study examined the notions of justice underpinning each national proposal. They were all over the map.

Critically, none of those experts considered the consequences of applying their logic to all countries across the board.

The aggregate notions of fairness did not add up to a solution. The countries that claimed responsibility for a small share of global emissions actually accounted for about a quarter of the total. Countries with per capita emissions ranging from 0.5 tons of carbon dioxide to 25 tons of CO2, roughly five times the global average, used this variable to justify modest plans.

The idea of an equitable and just distribution of responsibility might seem essential to achieve the shared goal of preventing a climate catastrophe

I can’t put precise odds on members of Congress accepting that the United States must bear one-fourth of the worldwide burden to cut greenhouse gas emissions because of the actions of long-dead Americans who had no idea they were causing damage. But the probability is quite low.

It seems only fair that countries such as the United States, which accounts for about a quarter of the greenhouse gases emitted by humanity since before the Industrial Revolution, should bear a much bigger share of the burden than, say, Brazil, which accounts for only 1 percent of historical emissions.

The United States, moreover, is quite rich and was made that way largely thanks to abundant and cheap fossil fuel.

Yet parsing how equity is to be achieved can get complicated

Should the goal be to equalize emissions per person, which today tilt heavily toward rich countries? (The United States emits some 18 tons per person; for India, the number is less than 3.

Or should we first cut emissions associated with the production of luxury goods and services that are mostly consumed in rich countries? Shouldn’t the emissions from producing the made-in-China toy you bought on Amazon accrue to the United States, where it is being played with?

They are in tension with the strategies championed by most rich countries, which are more sympathetic to the idea that historical emissions should be grandfathered in — not counted against them — and that they should be reduced in the future wherever reducing them is cheapest, which happens to be mostly in the developing world.

Many countries cannot afford the necessary mitigation pathways, either because they don’t have the resources to finance the new technologies needed to abandon fossil fuels, or because the resources they have are best deployed toward, say, buying air conditioning units or otherwise raising the standard of living.

There are essential truths that the world must acknowledge:

These countries are likely to face the gravest risks from climate change — whether measured in devastated crops, destroyed communities or people’s lives. Rich nations owe it to the world to ensure that resources and technologies are available for sufficient mitigation, adaptation and disaster relief

— not because they emitted a lot of greenhouse gases in the past, but because the task of preventing climate change and limiting its damage cannot be avoided, and they can afford it.

Many defended the fairness of their offer by pointing out that they accounted for a “small share” of global greenhouse gas emissions; others referred to their low per capita emissions. Many based their arguments on their vulnerability to climate change.

Consider the political ramifications of some climate justice arguments.

And that’s even without pointing out that China, today, emits more than double the amount of greenhouse gases the United States does.

Or consider how one research paper apportioned the remaining emissions budget — the greenhouse gases that can still be emitted in the future without breaching the warming ceiling (which in this estimate was set at 2 degrees Celsius)

It calculated nations’ responsibility for emissions starting only in 1992, when the world became aware of climate change, and assumed that each citizen of the world is entitled to the same budget since then. On this basis, it concluded that the United States would be entitled to 4.4 percent of the remainder, less than a fifth of its historic share.

That is fair. But it is also only 50 billion tons, or roughly nine years’ worth of emissions, at the nation’s current rate. I can’t imagine an administration that agreed to this surviving for long

The argument from guilt — built on the assumption that rich nations’ past development and emissions have incurred a moral debt to the rest of the world — will likely short-circuit the best case for action.

Better to draw on a different moral principle: to expect results from nations according to their capabilities and to assist them according to their needs. That frame could allow the job to get done.

Indians make up the largest group by far, accounting for 40 percent of all international students across the country, according to the Canada Bureau for International Education. China ranks second, at 12 percent.

At Northern College, there were 40 international students in 2014 — now it has 6,140. Enrollment got a further boost after Northern, like other remote public colleges, opened a campus by partnering with a private college in a Toronto suburb in 2015. Today, about one-third of Northern’s foreign students are in Timmins and at three other smaller northern campuses, while the rest are on the Toronto campus.

Maninderjit Kaur said she would probably not have gone to Timmins if the education consultant in India — who arranged her enrollment at Northern — had told her the school’s exact location.

She recalled landing at the airport in Toronto in 2018, and then hopping into an Uber, believing that Northern College was nearby. The eight-hour ride cost 800 Canadian dollars.

Now, Ms. Kaur works in marketing at the college and owns a gas station in town with her fiancé, Karanveer Singh, 28, who also came from India to study at Northern.

Dr. Penner, the college’s president, believed she held an ace: Graduates of Northern and other public colleges may apply for a post-graduation work permit that could lead to permanent residence and citizenship.

Early childhood education is a popular major among international students because of the high demand for related jobs in the region, said Erin Holmes, who oversees the program at Northern. Dozens of international students are immediately hired after graduating, allowing them to apply for permanent residence, Ms. Holmes said.

Across Canada, the influx of foreign students has been so great that it is blamed for worsening housing shortages. The Canadian government has recently taken measures to stem the increase, including by doubling the level of savings international students must prove they have