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Every law embodies a particular hypothesis about how the world works, a hope that if you pull on levers A and B, then outcomes C and D will result

Democrats hope to create an economy where the government doesn’t just help Americans buy green technologies; it also helps nurture the industries that produce that technology.

The idea is this: The era of passive, hands-off government is over. The laws embrace an approach to governing the economy that scholars call “industrial policy,” a catch-all name for a wide array of tools and tactics that all assume the government can help new domestic industries get started, grow, and reach massive scale.

If “this country used to make things,” as the saying goes, and if it wants to make things again, then the government needs to help it. And if the country believes that certain industries bestow a strategic advantage, then it needs to protect them against foreign interference.

From its founding to the 1970s, the country had an economic doctrine that was defined by its pragmatism and the willingness of its government to find new areas of growth.

It’s more like a toolbox of different approaches that act in concert to help push technologies to grow and reach commercial scale. The IRA and the two other new laws prefer four tools in particular.

“Yes, there was an ‘invisible hand,’” Stephen Cohen and Brad DeLong write in their history of the topic, Concrete Economics. “But the invisible hand was repeatedly lifted at the elbow by the government, and placed in a new position from where it could go on to perform its magic.”

That pragmatism faded in the 1980s, when industrial policy became scorned as one more instance of Big Government coming in to pick so-called winners and losers.

The two other large bills passed by this Congress—the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law and the CHIPS and Science Act—make down payments on the future as well; both laws, notably, were passed by bipartisan majorities.

it is in the IRA that these general commitments become specific, and therefore transformative.

Since the 1980s, when Congress has wanted to spur technological progress, it has usually thrown money exclusively at R&D. We have had a science policy, not an industrial policy

inextricable from that turn is Washington’s consuming anxiety over China’s rise—and China has embraced industrial policy.

although not a single Republican voted for the IRA, its wager is not especially partisan or even ideological.

the demonstration project. A demonstration project helps a technology that has previously existed only in the lab get out in the real world for the first time

supply-push policies. As the name suggests, these tools “push” on the supply side of an industry by underwriting new factories or assuring that those factories have access to cheap inputs to make things.

demand-pull policies, which create a market for whatever is coming out of those new factories. The government can “pull” on demand by buying those products itself or by subsidizing them for consumers.

protective policies, meant to insulate industries—especially new ones that are still growing—from foreign interference

Although both parties have moved to embrace industrial policy, Democrats are clearly ahead of their Republican colleagues. You can see it in their policy: While the bipartisan infrastructure law sets up lots of demonstration projects, and the CHIPS Act adopts some supply-push and protectionist theory, only the IRA uses all four tools.

In order to stop climate change, experts believe, the United States must do three things: clean up its power grid, replacing coal and gas power plants with zero-carbon sources; electrify everything it can, swapping fossil-fueled vehicles and boilers with electric vehicles and heat pumps; and mop up the rest, mitigating carbon pollution from impossible-to-electrify industrial activities. The IRA aims to nurture every industry needed to realize that vision.

Hydrogen and carbon removal are going to benefit from nearly every tool the government has. The bipartisan infrastructure law will spend more than $11 billion on hydrogen and carbon-removal “hubs,” huge demonstration projects

These hubs will also foster geographic concentration, the economic idea that when you put lots of people working on the same problem near one another, they solve it faster. You can see such clustering at work in San Francisco’s tech industry, and also in China, which now creates hubs for virtually every activity that it wants to dominate globally—even soccer.

Then the IRA will take over and deploy some good ol’ supply push and demand pull. It includes new programs to underwrite new hydrogen factories; on the demand side, a powerful new tax credit will pay companies for every kilogram of low-carbon hydrogen that they produce

Another tax credit will boost the demand of carbon removal by paying firms a $180 bounty for trapping a ton of carbon dioxide and pumping it undergroun

Today, not only does China make most batteries worldwide; it alone makes the tools that make the batteries, Nathan Iyer, an analyst at RMI, a nonpartisan energy think tank, told me. This extreme geographic concentration—which afflicts not only the battery industry but also the solar-panel industry—could slow down the energy transition and make it more expensive

the new tax credit is also supply-minded, arguably even protectionist. Under the new scheme, very few electric cars and trucks will immediately qualify for that full $7,500 subsidy; it will go only toward vehicles whose batteries are primarily made in North America and where a certain percentage of minerals are mined and processed in the U.S. or one of its allies. Will these policies accelerate the shift to EVs? Well, no, not immediately. But the idea is that by boosting domestic production of EVs, batteries will become cheaper and more abundant—and the U.S. will avoid subsidizing one of China’s growth industries.

Right now, next to no solar panels are made in the U.S., even though the technology was invented here. The IRA endeavors to change that by—you guessed it—a mix of supply-push, demand-pull, and protectionist policies. Under the law, the government will underwrite new factories to make every subcomponent of the solar supply chain; then it will pay those factories for every item that they produce

“It’s realistic that within four to five years, [U.S. solar manufacturers] could completely meet domestic demand for solar,” Scott Moskowitz, the head of public affairs for the solar manufacturer Q CELLS, told me.

In each of these industries, you’ll notice that the government isn’t only subsidizing factories; it is actually paying them to operate. That choice, which is central to the IRA’s approach, is “really defending against the mistakes of the 2009 bill,” Iyer told me. In its stimulus bill passed during the Great Recession, the Obama administration tried to do green industrial policy, underwriting new solar-panel factories across the country. But then Chinese firms began exporting cheap solar panels by the millions, saturating domestic demand and leaving those sparkly new factories idle

So many other industries will also be touched by these laws. There’s a new program to nurture a low-carbon aviation-fuel industry in the U.S. (Long-distance jet travel is one of those climate problems that nobody knows how to solve yet.)

the revelation of the IRA is that decarbonizing the United States may require re-industrializing it. A net-zero America may have more refineries, more factories, and more goods production than a fossil-fueled America—while also having cheaper cars, healthier air, and fewer natural disasters. And once the U.S. gets there, then it can keep going: It can set an example for the world that a populous, affluent country can reduce its emissions while enjoying all the trappings of modernity,

There are a slew of policies meant to grow and decarbonize the U.S. industrial sector; every tax credit pays out a bonus if you use U.S.-made steel, cement, or concrete. “You would need thousands and thousands of words to capture the industries that will be transformed by this,” Josh Freed, the climate and energy leader at Third Way, a center-left think tank, told me.

Five EVs were sold in China last year for every one EV sold in the United States; that larger domestic market will provide a significant economy of scale when Chinese EV makers begin exporting their cars abroad. For that reason and others, many people in China are “deeply skeptical” that the U.S. can catch up with its lead,

We are about to have a huge new set of vested interests who want the economy to be clean and benefit from that. We’ve literally never had that before,” Freed told me.

“This is going to change everything,” he said

that is the IRA’s biggest idea, its biggest hypothesis: that America can improve its standard of living and preserve its global preeminence while ruthlessly eliminating carbon pollution; that climate change, actually, doesn’t change everything, and that in fact it can be addressed by changing as little as possible.

This hypothesis has already proved itself out in one important way, which is that the IRA passed, and the previous 30 years of climate proposals did not. Now comes the real test.

And yet, when people act as if Mr. Altman has nearly realized his long-held vision, he pushes back.

This past week, more than a thousand A.I. experts and tech leaders called on OpenAI and other companies to pause their work on systems like ChatGPT, saying they present “profound risks to society and humanity.”

As people realize that this technology is also a way of spreading falsehoods or even persuading people to do things they should not do, some critics are accusing Mr. Altman of reckless behavior.

To spend time with Mr. Altman is to understand that Silicon Valley will push this technology forward even though it is not quite sure what the implications will be

Many industry leaders, A.I. researchers and pundits see ChatGPT as a fundamental technological shift, as significant as the creation of the web browser or the iPhone. But few can agree on the future of this technology.

Some believe it will deliver a utopia where everyone has all the time and money ever needed. Others believe it could destroy humanity. Still others spend much of their time arguing that the technology is never as powerful as everyone says it is, insisting that neither nirvana nor doomsday is as close as it might seem.

he is often criticized from all directions. But those closest to him believe this is as it should be. “If you’re equally upsetting both extreme sides, then you’re doing something right,” said OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman.

“The hype over these systems — even if everything we hope for is right long term — is totally out of control for the short term,” he told me on a recent afternoon. There is time, he said, to better understand how these systems will ultimately change the world.

in 2019, he paraphrased Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project, who believed the atomic bomb was an inevitability of scientific progress. “Technology happens because it is possible,” he said

His life has been a fairly steady climb toward greater prosperity and wealth, driven by an effective set of personal skills — not to mention some luck. It makes sense that he believes that the good thing will happen rather than the bad.

He said his company was building technology that would “solve some of our most pressing problems, really increase the standard of life and also figure out much better uses for human will and creativity.”

He was not exactly sure what problems it will solve, but he argued that ChatGPT showed the first signs of what is possible. Then, with his next breath, he worried that the same technology could cause serious harm if it wound up in the hands of some authoritarian government.

Kelly Sims, a partner with the venture capital firm Thrive Capital who worked with Mr. Altman as a board adviser to OpenAI, said it was like he was constantly arguing with himself.

“In a single conversation,” she said, “he is both sides of the debate club.”

“Why is he working on something that won’t make him richer? One answer is that lots of people do that once they have enough money, which Sam probably does. The other is that he likes power.”

he is also the product of a strange, sprawling online community that began to worry, around the same time Mr. Altman came to the Valley, that artificial intelligence would one day destroy the world. Called rationalists or effective altruists, members of this movement were instrumental in the creation of OpenAI.

Does it make sense to ride that curve if it could end in diaster? Mr. Altman is certainly determined to see how it all plays out.

He takes pride in recognizing when a technology is about to reach exponential growth — and then riding that curve into the future.

“He has a natural ability to talk people into things,” Mr. Graham said. “If it isn’t inborn, it was at least fully developed before he was 20. I first met Sam when he was 19, and I remember thinking at the time: ‘So this is what Bill Gates must have been like.

poker taught Mr. Altman how to read people and evaluate risk.

In March, Mr. Altman tweeted out a selfie, bathed by a pale orange flash, that showed him smiling between a blond woman giving a peace sign and a bearded guy wearing a fedora.

He believed, according to his younger brother Max, that he was one of the few people who could meaningfully change the world through A.I. research, as opposed to the many people who could do so through politics.

In 2019, just as OpenAI’s research was taking off, Mr. Altman grabbed the reins, stepping down as president of Y Combinator to concentrate on a company with fewer than 100 employees that was unsure how it would pay its bills.

Within a year, he had transformed OpenAI into a nonprofit with a for-profit arm. That way he could pursue the money it would need to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.

Mr. Brockman, OpenAI’s president, said Mr. Altman’s talent lies in understanding what people want. “He really tries to find the thing that matters most to a person — and then figure out how to give it to them,” Mr. Brockman told me. “That is the algorithm he uses over and over.”

Mr. Yudkowsky and his writings played key roles in the creation of both OpenAI and DeepMind, another lab intent on building artificial general intelligence.

“These are people who have left an indelible mark on the fabric of the tech industry and maybe the fabric of the world,” he said. “I think Sam is going to be one of those people.”

The trouble is, unlike the days when Apple, Microsoft and Meta were getting started, people are well aware of how technology can transform the world — and how dangerous it can be.

Mr. Scott of Microsoft believes that Mr. Altman will ultimately be discussed in the same breath as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

The woman was the Canadian singer Grimes, Mr. Musk’s former partner, and the hat guy was Eliezer Yudkowsky, a self-described A.I. researcher who believes, perhaps more than anyone, that artificial intelligence could one day destroy humanity.

The selfie — snapped by Mr. Altman at a party his company was hosting — shows how close he is to this way of thinking. But he has his own views on the dangers of artificial intelligence.

It showed him “how to notice patterns in people over time, how to make decisions with very imperfect information, how to decide when it was worth pain, in a sense, to get more information,” he told me while strolling across his ranch in Napa. “It’s a great game.”

He also helped spawn the vast online community of rationalists and effective altruists who are convinced that A.I. is an existential risk. This surprisingly influential group is represented by researchers inside many of the top A.I. labs, including OpenAI.

They don’t see this as hypocrisy: Many of them believe that because they understand the dangers clearer than anyone else, they are in the best position to build this technology.

Mr. Altman believes that effective altruists have played an important role in the rise of artificial intelligence, alerting the industry to the dangers. He also believes they exaggerate these dangers.

As OpenAI developed ChatGPT, many others, including Google and Meta, were building similar technology. But it was Mr. Altman and OpenAI that chose to share the technology with the world.

Many in the field have criticized the decision, arguing that this set off a race to release technology that gets things wrong, makes things up and could soon be used to rapidly spread disinformation.

Mr. Altman argues that rather than developing and testing the technology entirely behind closed doors before releasing it in full, it is safer to gradually share it so everyone can better understand risks and how to handle them.

He told me that it would be a “very slow takeoff.”

When I asked Mr. Altman if a machine that could do anything the human brain could do would eventually drive the price of human labor to zero, he demurred. He said he could not imagine a world where human intelligence was useless.

If he’s wrong, he thinks he can make it up to humanity.

His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.

If A.G.I. does create all that wealth, he is not sure how the company will redistribute it. Money could mean something very different in this new world.

But as he once told me: “I feel like the A.G.I. can help with that.”

the alternative to that, which is admittedly less economically efficient, but much more likely to succeed in the real world, is to recognize that cleaner energy sources deliver some public good. They deliver a benefit of cleaner air, less air pollution and deaths and mortalities and asthma attacks and less climate damages. And to subsidize their production, so that we get more from the clean sources.

I do think that we are going to see basically the full range of all of those clean firm power generation technologies get trialed out over the next few years and have a chance to scale

what is going to be key to stopping, preventing the worst impacts of climate change is reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions globally as rapidly as possible.

where I see the future for nuclear in the West, and I think where the bulk of the industry and the investment now is focused is on smaller and more modular reactors that instead of trying to power a million people per reactor are trying to power 50,000 or 100,000 people, like a 1/10 or a 1/20 the size of a large scale reactor.

the challenge for electricity is really twofold, we have to cut emissions from the power sector, right? Which already is now the number two, used to be the number one, emitting sector of the economy. Since we have made some progress, electricity is now number two and transportation is edged into the number one position for biggest greenhouse gas polluting sector.

it is an important reality of complex energy systems that we need a complete team of resources, and we need a range of options because we’re a big, diverse country with different resource spaces, different geographic constraints and different values, frankly. So that some parts of the country really do want to build nuclear power or really do want to continue to use natural gas. Other parts don’t want to touch them.

I’m really struck by this International Energy Association estimate that almost half of global emissions reductions by 2050 will come from technologies that exist only as prototypes or demonstration projects today

And that means that the bets on each individual one are so much smaller that you can build one for a billion dollars instead of $15 billion or $20 billion. And I think that makes it much more likely that we can get our muscle memory back and get the economies of scale and learning by doing and trained work force developed around building them in series. That’s going to be key to building low-cost reactors.

I think we have to add that to the message. It’s not saying that one outweighs the other or these trade-offs are easy, but it is an important element that we can’t forget. That the more transmission we build, the more wind and solar we build, the lower the air pollution and public health impacts on vulnerable communities are as well, and we can save tens of thousands of lives in the process.

And so there’s sort of an opportunity cost right now where until we’ve shut down the last coal plants and the last natural gas plants, every single megawatt-hour of new clean electricity, new energy efficiency that we can add to the grid that goes to replace a nuclear power plant is a wasted opportunity to accelerate our emissions reductions and get rid of those dirty fossil fuels.

here is a segment of the climate movement that just hates this part of the bill, hates this part of the theory, does not want to see a substantial part of our decarbonization pathway built around things that allow us to continue producing fossil fuels in a putatively cleaner way. And I think there’s also some skepticism that it really will work technically in the long run. What is that critique? And why aren’t you persuaded by it?

And so they don’t cost a whole lot to demonstrate. We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars to demonstrate, rather than billions of dollars. And so I’m confident that we’re going to see a lot of success there.

But what we need are technologies that are not constrained by the weather and are not constrained by a duration limit, that can go as long as we need them, whenever we need them. And that’s what we call the third category, which are firm resources or clean firm resources, because we want to replace the dirty ones with the clean ones. And so today, we rely on natural gas and coal and our existing nuclear fleet for that firm role. But if we want to build a clean energy system and we need all that new clean electricity, we’re going to need to build about an equivalent amount as we have coal and gas plants today of clean firm options, whether that’s new nuclear power plants, advanced geothermal or similar options like that.

it is a massive transformation of our energy system, right? We’re going to have to rewire the country and change the way we make and use energy from the way we produce it, to the way we transport it, to the way we consume it at a very large scale. And so, yeah, that is the statistic.

l, let me get at that point about revitalization, about trying to spread a lot of this money geographically, widely. When I’ve talked to the Biden administration about this bill, something they’re always very keen to tell me is that it isn’t just money, it is standards. This bill is full of standards.

Well, there’s two — I think, two elements of that critique. One is that fossil energy companies are themselves primarily responsible for our lack of progress on climate change. That because of their vested economic interests, they have actively disrupted efforts to confront climate change over the long haul. And so climate campaigners, in this view, are trying to delegitimize fossil fuel companies and industries as social actors, the same way that tobacco companies were villainized and basically delegitimized as legitimate corporate citizens. And so that’s an effort, that’s a political strategy, that’s meant to try to weaken the ability of oil and gas companies to impede progress.

And that is real value because every time we burn natural gas or coal, we’re consuming something that costs money. And if we can avoid that, then the wind and solar farms are effectively delivering value in the value of the avoided fuel, and of course, the social value of the avoided emissions.

let’s also not forget that the money talks, right? That finances is a necessary condition, if not sufficient. But what this bill does is aligns all of the financial incentives, or at least most of them, behind making the right clean energy choices. And without that, there’s no way we’re going to make progress at the pace we need

And geothermal, unlike a big nuclear plant, they’re really modular. You only need to build them in 5 or 10 megawatt increments

The first rule of holes is stop digging, right? Then you can figure out how to climb out

We’re going to see the first nuclear power plants built at the end of the decade. There are a variety of technologies that are getting licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commissio

re you confident that we have or are near to having the carbon-capture technologies to reliably capture, and store, or use carbon for very, very long periods of geologic time?

You shouldn’t expect everyone to just be altruistic. We have to make it make good financial sense for everyone to make the clean choice. And so there’s two ways to do that. You can make fossil energy more expensive to price in the true cost of consuming fossil fuels for society, which includes all of the climate damages that are going to occur down the line because of accelerating climate change, but also air pollution

We still have to go all the way from there to net-zero in 2050. And that, of course, is assuming that we can build transmission in wind and solar at the pace that makes economic sense. So if we can’t do that, we’re going to fall even further short. So this is a big step down the road to net zero, but it is not the last step we need to take. And we need to sustain and accelerate this transition.

the policy environment is now finally aligned to do that with the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure law providing both demonstration funding for the first kind of n-of-a-kind, first handful of projects in all of those categories, as well as the first market-ready deployment subsidies, so that we can scale up, and drive down the cost, and improve the maturity and performance of all those technologies over the next 10 years as well, just as we did for wind and solar.

And so the role of wind and solar is effectively to displace the fuel consumption of other potentially more dependable resources in the grid, maybe not necessarily to shut down the power plant as a whole, but to use it less and less.

The last time Congress took up and failed to pass climate policy in 2009 and 2010, solar PV cost 10 times as much as it does today, and wind, onshore wind farms, cost three times as much as they do today. So we’ve seen a 90 percent decline in the cost of both solar PV and lithium ion batteries, which are the major cost component in electric vehicles and our main source of growing grid scale energy storage to help deal with the variability of wind and solar on the grid. And so those costs have come down by a factor of 10, and we’ve seen about a 70 percent decline in the cost of wind over the last decade. And that changes the whole game, right?

we tried them out, and we deployed them at scale, and we got better and better at it over time. And so we don’t need carbon capture at scale this decade. The things that are going to do all of the emissions reduction work, really, the bulk of it, are technologies that we bet on a decade ago and are ready to scale now. What we need to do over this next decade is to repeat that same kind of success that we had for wind and solar and batteries with the full portfolio of options that we think we might need at scale in the 2030s and 2040

Every year matters. Every tenth of a degree of warming matters in terms of the impacts and damages and suffering that can be avoided in the future. And so we need to get to net-zero emissions globally as rapidly as we can.

until we reach the point where the total emissions of climate-warming gases from human activities is exactly equaled out or more so by the removal of those same greenhouse gases from the atmosphere each year due to human activities, we’re basically contributing to the growing concentration of climate-warming gases in the atmosphere. And that’s what drives climate change, those cumulative emissions and the total atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases

let’s take the big picture of that. It gets called decarbonization, but as I understand it, basically every theory of how to hit net zero by 2050 looks like this — you make electricity clean, you make much more clean electricity, you make almost everything run on electricity, and then you mop up the kind of small industries or productive questions that we have not figured out how to make electric. Is that basically right?

nothing in this bill really changes our capacity to plan. There’s no central coordinator, or the federal government doesn’t have vast new powers to decide where things go. So I worry a little bit that we’re solving the money problem, but there’s a lot of other reasons we end up building things slowly and over budget than just money.

And so when I think about the challenge of decarbonization, I think about how you unlock feedback loops and how you change the political economy of decarbonization by disrupting current interests that might oppose clean energy transitions and building and strengthening interests that would support them

the other analogy I often use is that of a balanced diet. You can’t eat only bananas, and you don’t want to only eat burgers, you want to eat a diverse mix of different parts of your diet. And so whether it’s trying to have all the right star players playing the right position on the court or trying to balance out your diet, what we need to build is an effective energy system that consists of team of different roles. And we break it down in our research as basically three key roles.

There’s a second, and more substantial or tangible reason to oppose carbon capture, which is that if it perpetuates some amount of fossil fuel use — it’s going to be dramatically less than today — but some amount of fossil fuel use, then it also perpetuates some of the impacts of the extractive economy and the transport and processing of fossil fuels that have primarily been borne by low income and Black and Brown communities

I worry about those things too. Those were big emphasis points in the Net-Zero America Study. Once you start to really unpack the scale and pace of change that we’re talking about, you inevitably start to be concerned with some of those other kind of rate limiting factors that constrained how quickly we can make this transition.

you write and your colleagues write in the Net-Zero Report that, quote, “expanding the supply of clean electricity is a linchpin in all net-zero paths.”

achieving the required additions by 2030 of utility scale solar and wind capacity means installing 38 to 67 gigawatts a year on average. The U.S. single year record added capacity is 25 gigawatts, which we did in 2020. So we need to on average be somewhere between — be around doubling our best-ever year in solar and wind capacity installation year after year after year after year.

that’s a big role, but it’s not the only role that we have. And because their output is variable, as well as demand for electricity which goes up and down.

there’s basically two main reasons why electricity is such a key linchpin. The first is that it’s a carbon-free energy carrier. And by that I mean it’s a way to move energy around in our economy and convert it and make use of it that doesn’t emit any CO2 directly when we do use electricity.

And so, yeah, you do have to onboard new workers through apprenticeship programs and pay them prevailing wages if you want to build wind and solar projects.

The first is the one that wind and solar fill and other weather-dependent variable renewable resources. And we call those fuel-saving resources. If you think about what a wind farm is, it’s a bunch of steel, and copper, and capital that you invested upfront that then has no fuel costs.

so aligning the incentives isn’t sufficient, but it does mean we now have a lot more very clear reasons for a lot more constituents to try to get to work solving the next set of challenges. And so that’s a huge step forward.

We need a second key role, which we call fast-burst or balancing resources. And that’s where batteries, battery energy storage, as well as smart charging of electric vehicles or other ways to flexibly move around when we consume electricity

so if we can grow the share of carbon-free generation, we can decarbonize both the front end of the supply of our energy carriers. And then when we consume that carbon-free electricity on the other end, it doesn’t emit CO2 either. And there’s just a lot more ways to produce carbon-free electricity than there are to produce liquid fuels or gaseous fuels

we could avoid on the order of 35,000 premature deaths over the first decade of implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act due to the improvements in our clean energy economy, through the reduction of coal combustion and vehicle-related emissions.

I just don’t think we’re going to sustain the clean energy transition and diversify the set of communities that have a clear political stake in continuing that transition if we don’t drive some of these kinds of broad benefits that the bill is trying to do

And then when I talk to critics of the bill, one thing I hear is that a real problem is that this bill is full of standards. That if you just look at the decarbonization task — the land use we were talking about, the speed we need to do it. It is inhumanly hard already. But all over this bill is the tying of decarbonization money to other kinds of priorities,

If you think about what it would take to get 10 times as much political will to act, that’s a huge effort, right? There’s a lot of organizing. There’s a lot of transforming politics to get 10 times as much political will

then the challenge is we need to produce that electricity from a carbon-free source, and that’s the second reason why electricity is so key because we do actually have a lot of different ways to produce carbon-free electricity

one of the clear, tangible, near-term benefits of transitioning away from fossil fuel combustion, whether those are coal-fired power plants or buses or gasoline vehicles is that we’re going to substantially reduce fine particulate pollution and other ozone forming pollution that also creates smog and impacts urban air quality and air quality across the country

we need solutions that work in all of those contexts. And so keeping our options open, rather than trying to constrain them is definitely the lowest risk way to proceed these days. Because if you bet on a set of limited set of technologies, and you bet wrong, you’ve bet the planet, and you’ve failed. The stakes are that high.

we are going to need to enter a new era of nation building, right? A new era of investment in physical infrastructure that can build a better country. There are huge benefits associated with this, but are going to mean, we are going to see large-scale construction, and infrastructure, and impacts on lives

the Inflation Reduction Act is insufficient. It’s a huge step forward. But our estimation from the Repeat Project is that it cuts about two-thirds of the annual emissions gap that we need to close in 2030. It still leaves about a half a billion tons of emissions on the table that we need to tackle with additional policies. And that’s just 2030.

All of those decisions, we basically are putting the thumb on the scale heavily for the cleaner option over the dirtier option.

it took 140 years to build today’s power grid. Now, we have to build that much new clean electricity again and then build it again, so we have to build it twice over in just 30 years to hit our goals.

We, in the broad human sense, right? So Germany and Spain and China and the United States and a whole bunch of different countries decided to subsidize the deployment of those technologies when they were expensive, create early markets that drove innovation and cost declines and made them into tremendously affordable options for the future

“Making Climate Policy Work” by Danny Cullenward and David Victor, which explores the political economy and really real world history and experience of using market-based instruments, like carbon taxes or emissions cap and trade programs to try to tackle climate change. I think the book does a really good job of summarizing both a range of scholarship and the kind of real-world experience that we’ve gotten in the few places that have succeeded in implementing carbon pricing

what the Inflation Reduction Act does at its core is focus on making clean energy cheaper. And it does that in two main ways. The first way is with subsidies, right? So there’s a big package of tax credits that does the bulk of the work. But there’s also rebates for low-income households to do energy efficiency and electrification.

We built about 10 gigawatts of utility solar in 2020. The E.I.A. thinks we’ll build about 20 gigawatts this year. So things change, we can grow.

. Beyond wind and solar, what do you see as playing the central or most promising roles here?

if I sort of sum up the whole bill in one nutshell or one tweet, it’s that we’re going to tax billionaire corporations and tax cheats, and use that money to make energy cheaper and cleaner for all Americans, and also to build more of those technologies here in the United States, which we can talk about later

There’s loan programs that can help offer lower cost financing for projects. There’s grants that go out to states, and rural utilities, and others to help install things. And all of that is designed to make the cleaner option the good business decision, the good household financial decision.

the excellent article in “Nature Climate Change” from 2018, called “Sequencing to Ratchet Up Climate Policy Stringency,” which is the lea

So why electricity? Why has electrifying everything become almost synonymous with decarbonization in climate world?

So that it just makes good economic sense. And that clean energy is cheap energy for everybody. That’s with subsidies upfront, but it’s also going to kick off the same kind of innovation and incremental learning by doing in economies of scale that unlock those tremendous cost reductions for solar, and wind, and lithium ion batteries over the last decade

so we have to guide that process in a way that doesn’t recreate some of the harms of the last era of nation building, where we drove interstates right through the middle of Black and brown communities, and they had no say in the process. So that’s the challenge at a high level is like how do you build a national social license and sense of mission or purpose, and how do you guide the deployment of that infrastructure at scale, which doesn’t concentrate harms and spreads benefits amongst the people who really should be benefiting.

By no means is that impossible, but it is a profound construction challenge

author is —

And so we’re going to kick off the same kind of processes as well with this bill, building on the demonstration and hubs funding and things like that in the infrastructure law for the next generation of technologies that can take us even further down the path to net zero beyond 2030.

electricity is a way to power our lives — heat homes, power factories, move cars around — that at least when we use the electricity on that end, doesn’t lead to any CO2, or frankly, any other air pollutants and other combustion-related pollutants that cause public health impacts.

We made it 10 times easier to take action. So for a given amount of political will, we can do 10 times more decarbonization in the power sector and in transportation, which are two most heavily emitting sectors than we could do a decade ag

The reason that these aren’t expensive alternative energy technologies, as we called them in the 2009 era, and are now mainstream affordable options is because we used public policy.

he author is Michael Pahle and a variety of others who said — both economists, political scientists and policy analysts, who again, are trying to face down this reality that current policy ambition is inadequate. We’ve got to go further and faster. And so they’re trying to think about how do you order these policie

Their reasoning is straightforward: These companies have decided that the best way to make generative AI better is to build bigger AI models. And that is really, really expensive, requiring resources on the scale of moon missions and the interstate-highway system to fund the data centers and related infrastructure that generative AI depends on

“If we’re going to justify a trillion or more dollars of investment, [AI] needs to solve complex problems and enable us to do things we haven’t been able to do before.” Today’s flagship AI models, he said, largely cannot.

Now a number of voices in the finance world are beginning to ask whether all of this investment can pay off. OpenAI, for its part, may lose up to $5 billion this year, almost 10 times more than what the company lost in 2022,

Dario Amodei, the CEO of the rival start-up Anthropic, has predicted that a single AI model (such as, say, GPT-6) could cost $100 billion to train by 2027. The global data-center buildup over the next few years could require trillions of dollars from tech companies, utilities, and other industries, according to a July report from Moody’s Ratings.

Over the past few weeks, analysts and investors at some of the world’s most influential financial institutions—including Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital, Moody’s, and Barclays—have issued reports that raise doubts about whether the enormous investments in generative AI will be profitable.

generative AI has already done extraordinary things, of course—advancing drug development, solving challenging math problems, generating stunning video clips. But exactly what uses of the technology can actually make money remains unclear

At present, AI is generally good at doing existing tasks—writing blog posts, coding, translating—faster and cheaper than humans can. But efficiency gains can provide only so much value, boosting the current economy but not creating a new one.

Right now, Silicon Valley might just functionally be replacing some jobs, such as customer service and form-processing work, with historically expensive software, which is not a recipe for widespread economic transformation.

McKinsey has estimated that generative AI could eventually add almost $8 trillion to the global economy every year

Tony Kim, the head of technology investment at BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, told me he believes that AI will trigger one of the most significant technological upheavals ever. “Prior industrial revolutions were never about intelligence,”

“Here, we can manufacture intelligence.”

this future is not guaranteed. Many of the productivity gains expected from AI could be both greatly overestimated and very premature, Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, has found

AI products’ key flaws, such as a tendency to invent false information, could make them unusable, or deployable only under strict human oversight, in certain settings—courts, hospitals, government agencies, schools

AI as a truly epoch-shifting technology, it may well be more akin to blockchain, a very expensive tool destined to fall short of promises to fundamentally transform society and the economy.

Researchers at Barclays recently calculated that tech companies are collectively paying for enough AI-computing infrastructure to eventually power 12,000 different ChatGPTs. Silicon Valley could very well produce a whole host of hit generative-AI products like ChatGPT, “but probably not 12,000 of them,

even if it did, there would be nowhere enough demand to use all those apps and actually turn a profit.

Some of the largest tech companies’ current spending on AI data centers will require roughly $600 billion of annual revenue to break even, of which they are currently about $500 billion short.

Tech proponents have responded to the criticism that the industry is spending too much, too fast, with something like religious dogma. “I don’t care” how much we spend, Altman has said. “I genuinely don’t.

the industry is asking the world to engage in something like a trillion-dollar tautology: AI’s world-transformative potential justifies spending any amount of resources, because its evangelists will spend any amount to make AI transform the world.

in the AI era in particular, a lack of clear evidence for a healthy return on investment may not even matter. Unlike the companies that went bust in the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, Big Tech can spend exorbitant sums of money and be largely fine

perhaps even more important in Silicon Valley than a messianic belief in AI is a terrible fear of missing out. “In the tech industry, what drives part of this is nobody wants to be left behind. Nobody wants to be seen as lagging,

Go all in on AI, the thinking goes, or someone else will. Their actions evince “a sense of desperation,” Cahn writes. “If you do not move now, you will never get another chance.” Enormous sums of money are likely to continue flowing into AI for the foreseeable future, driven by a mix of unshakable confidence and all-consuming fear.

But the system works. In the dorms, classrooms, summer internships and early jobs they learn how to behave the way successful people do in the highly educated hubs. There’s no economic reason to return home, and maybe it’s not even socially possible anymore.

The highly educated cluster around a few small nodes. Decade after decade, smart and educated people flock away from Merced, Calif., Yuma, Ariz., Flint, Mich., and Vineland, N.J. In those places, less than 15 percent of the residents have college degrees. They flock to Washington, Boston, San Jose, Raleigh-Durham and San Francisco. In those places, nearly 50 percent of the residents have college degrees.

the magnet places have positive ecologies that multiply innovation, creativity and wealth. The abandoned places have negative ecologies and fall further behind.

This sorting is self-reinforcing, and it seems to grow more unforgiving every year.

half of the jobs in university political science programs went to graduates of the top 11 schools. That is to say, if you have a Ph.D. from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and so on, your odds of getting a job are very good. If you earned your degree from one of the other 100 degree-granting universities, your odds are not.

The first problem with the effort is that it’s like shooting a water gun into a waterfall

The second problem is the focus on income redistribution

The final problem is that, in an effort to reduce the economic concentration of power, the administration is concentrating political power in Washington

the liberal agenda is not very good at addressing the inequality problem it seeks to solve. The meritocracy is overwhelming the liberal project.

Who can accomplish something significant in three months?   But this is exactly the point — it takes a project out of the realm of business as usual.

Rapid Results was designed to help large corporations.   It was invented about 40 years ago by Robert Schaffer, a management consultant.  Five years ago, Schaffer’s company spun off a group as a nonprofit to train people all around the world to use the same method.   Rapid Results has spread, well, rapidly, because it has a champion in the World Bank, which is teaching people to use the method in various countries.

A trained facilitator sits down with people in a business, organization or village to decide on what to do.  They vote.  Now, if we had some money from the government or the World Bank — say, $5,000 or perhaps $30,000 — how could we spend it to accomplish that goal in just 100 days?  The village chooses its goal and how to get it done. The facilitator only talks about what other villages have accomplished in 100 days.

Rapid Results initiatives are a “bite-sized approach to complex problem-solving.  Communities will get confidence to tackle problems that may seem insurmountable.”  The tight deadline “forces a degree of prioritization and focus which leads to results,

The deadline creates an ethos of doing whatever it takes.  People aren’t sitting and waiting for the district official to come out.   They go buy the materials themselves.  Women sleep on the bulk cement bags to make sure no one steals them. A village in Sudan needed bricks for a school, and the contractor wasn’t producing enough.  So the Rapid Results team organized a competition in the community to make bricks, and the project stayed on schedule.

I spent a lot of time in the classrooms of gifted individuals who sometimes used very little actual technology but really thought about interaction in profound and inspiring ways.

PaulNJ10h ago

CLParisDec. 6

But a long history of climate policy failures might also cause climate activists and the politicians they support to be more humble about their convictions, more sensitive to the human effects of their policy, and more willing to listen to criticism.

JDec. 6Times PickSo Stephens' position is that nothing can be done, so we should do nothing? He may be right; but future generations would curse us for not even trying to address the problems that will imperil not only their way of life but possibly their lives. I am weary of the trope that "we can't instantly and painlessly solve climate change, so we should not even try." Let's begin with a carbon tax and by removing the myriad tax subsidies for fossil fuels. Let's commit to reaching meaningful international agreements, rather than backing out of the few that now exist. Let's try ANYthing other than denying the consensus of 97% of climate scientists and whistling past the proverbial graveyard.

CEABurnetDec. 6Times PickWhile getting old is not for wimps, there are some times that being old is just fine. This is one of those moments. Currently at 62, I will likely be dead by the time the worst climate change effects make life as we know it very difficult to sustain. That is small comfort when thinking about the fate of our children and grandchildren, who will have to survive in a world besieged by more frequent and severe storms, droughts, and wild fires. And if we think the swelling migrant masses are a problem for Europe and the US, just wait until water becomes more scarce and crops fail to appear in Africa and South and Central America. No wall or amount of “safe” tear gas will be able to contain them.

Climate change policy, by its nature, can't work on a national level. The taxes imposed by the government were meant to make up for a budget shortfall caused by repealing a wealth tax (ISF). Taxing the poor and working classes to pay for a reduction in taxes on the wealthy is probably not a good way to charm the vast majority of French people into supporting your neoliberal "reforms"

While solutions to the climate change problem are difficult and complex, the fact remains that inaction is not the answer. And it will take not only governments and politicians to do something, but the collaboration of all of us. Instead of saying we love our children and grandchildren let’s do something about it. But obviously, we do not have the will to do it. Want proof? Consumers in the US are shunning fuel efficient passenger cars and opting for gas guzzling trucks. We are just like the lemmings marching steadily, and apparently willingly, to the edge of the cliff

Tooze calls it a problem in “Western capitalism” intentionally. It was not just an American problem.

One of the great strengths of Tooze’s book is to demonstrate the deeply intertwined nature of the European and American financial systems.

In 2006, European banks generated a third of America’s riskiest privately issued mortgage-backed securities. By 2007, two-thirds of commercial paper issued was sponsored by a European financial entity.

“Between 2001 and 2006,” Tooze writes, “Greece, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, the U.K., France, Ireland and Spain all experienced real estate booms more severe than those that energized the United States.”

while the crisis may have been caused in both America and Europe, it was solved largely by Washington. Partly, this reflected the post-Cold War financial system, in which the dollar had become the hyperdominant global currency and, as a result, the Federal Reserve had truly become the world’s central bank.

therein lies the unique feature of the crash of 2008. Unlike that of 1929, it was not followed by a Great Depression. It was not so much the crisis as the rescue and its economic, political and social consequences that mattered most

The Fed acted aggressively and also in highly ingenious ways, becoming a guarantor of last resort to the battered balance sheets of American but also European banks. About half the liquidity support the Fed provided during the crisis went to European banks

Before the rescue and even in its early stages, the global economy was falling into a bottomless abyss. In the first months after the panic on Wall Street, world trade and industrial production fell at least as fast as they did during the first months of the Great Depression. Global capital flows declined by a staggering 90 percent

But Tooze also convincingly shows that the European Central Bank mismanaged things from the start

China, with its own gigantic stimulus, created an oasis of growth in an otherwise stagnant global economy.

The rescue worked better than almost anyone imagined

The governing elite did not anticipate the crisis — as few elites have over hundreds of years of capitalism. But once it happened, many of them — particularly in America — acted quickly and intelligently, and as a result another Great Depression was averted. The system worked

The Federal Reserve, with some assistance from other central banks, arrested this decline. The Obama fiscal stimulus also helped to break the fall.

On the left, the entire episode discredited the market-friendly policies of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schroeder, disheartening the center-left and emboldening those who want more government intervention in the economy

On the right, it became a rallying cry against bailouts and the Fed, buoying an imaginary free-market alternative to government intervention. Unlike in the 1930s, when the libertarian strategy was tried and only deepened the Depression, in the last 10 years it has been possible for the right to argue against the bailouts, secure in the knowledge that their proposed policies will never actually be implemented.

The crash brought together many forces that were around anyway — stagnant wages, widening inequality, anger about immigration and, above all, a deep distrust of elites and government — and supercharged them. The result has been a wave of nationalism, protectionism and populism in the West today.

confirmation of this can be found in the one major Western country that did not have a financial crisis and has little populism in its wake — Canada.

No government handled the crisis better than that of the United States, which acted in a surprisingly bipartisan fashion in late 2008 and almost seamlessly coordinated policy between the outgoing Bush and incoming Obama administrations. And yet, the backlash to the bailouts has produced the most consequential result in the United States.

experts are considering the new vulnerabilities of a global economy

we are confronting a quite different problem — an erratic, unpredictable United States led by a president who seems inclined to redo or even scrap the basic architecture of the system that America has painstakingly built since 1945. How will the world handle this unexpected development? What will be its outcome? This is the current crisis that we will live through and that historians will soon analyze.

The introduction of a universal basic income is, he believes, inevitable. This drastic reinvention of the welfare state would see the government pay every single citizen, irrespective of their wealth or employment status, a regular cash sum calculated to cover all their basic needs

Is he worried that the country’s economic woes are leading us towards the threat of civil unrest? “Yes – or certainly just to the rise of politicians who don’t believe in our democracy. I think that’s a genuine risk. I am genuinely fearful for the fabric of what we think of as this nation, if we don’t address these problems.” In his lifetime is this threat unprecedented? “Yes, of course it is. This is the most scary time since the second world war.”

“It is fucking mad for middle class people like us to want anything other than a decent life for our children,” he exclaims. “If you’re on shit wages, it’s completely reasonable to want your children to be better off than you are. Completely reasonable. But the notion that we,” and he gestures around his elegant townhouse kitchen, “should want more [for our children] is shocking and appalling. We shouldn’t think in those terms. We’ve actually got to think, maybe we should make some sacrifices and be a bit poorer. Because if we don’t make those sacrifices and become a bit poorer, so that those lower down the scale have better lives, we may end up facing utter chaos.”

“We will end up with it. We just have to reconcile ourselves to no growth. The natural tendency of the economy at the moment is to widen income and wealth disparities and in those circumstances, and particularly when you layer on top of that the rise of robots and artificial intelligence, it is very, very difficult to think of any alternative but guaranteeing some kind of universal basic income.” Does he assume this will become Labour party policy in the foreseeable future? “Yeah.”

“I think it’s becoming clearer that Labour will end up, as a minimum, signed up to a position where we are a bit like Norway.” In other words, a permanent member of the single market. “But it’s altogether conceivable that they end up being a party that says we have to have another vote on this. They will arrive undoubtedly at one or other of those positions.”

Peston is critical of Corbyn’s view that “the state can solve everything”, but isn’t at all surprised by his popularity. “Younger people think, ‘Fuck it, nobody’s running this place for me. And capitalism is shit, it’s doing nothing for me because when am I ever going to get any capital?’ So, it’s not surprising in those circumstances that they then say, ‘We want a public sector, state-based solution of the sort that Jeremy Corbyn is offering’.”

What is new is the role social media (and, to a lesser extent, digital news) plays in both focusing outrage and scaring employers. And this, too, is a problem of economics, not culture. Social platforms and media publishers want to attract people to their websites or shows and make sure they come back. They do this, in part, by tuning the platforms and home pages and story choices to surface content that outrages the audience.

This is not just a problem of social media platforms. Watch Fox News for a night, and you’ll see a festival of stories elevating some random local excess to national attention and inflicting terrible pain on the people who are targeted. Fox isn’t anti-cancel culture; it just wants to be the one controlling that culture.

Cancellations are sometimes intended, and deserved. Some speech should have consequences. But many of the people who participate in the digital pile-ons that lead to cancellation don’t want to cancel anybody. They’re just joining in that day’s online conversation. They’re criticizing an offensive or even dangerous idea, mocking someone they think deserves it, hunting for retweets, demanding accountability, making a joke. They aren’t trying to get anyone fired. But collectively, they do get someone fired.

The problem is when that one awful thing someone said comes to define their online identity, and then it defines their future economic and political and personal opportunities

This isn’t an easy problem to solve, but our lifelong digital identities are too important to be left to the terms and conditions of a single company, or even a few.

Finally, it would be better to focus on cancel behavior than cancel culture. There is no one ideology that gleefully mobs or targets employers online. Plenty of anti-cancel culture warriors get their retweets directing their followers to mob others.

Unless something that is said is truly dangerous and you actually want to see that person fired from their current job and potentially unable to find a new one — a high bar, but one that is sometimes met — you shouldn’t use social media to join an ongoing pile-on against a normal person.

There have always been things we cannot say in polite society, and those things are changing, in overdue ways. The balance of demographic power is shifting, and groups that had little voice in the language and ordering of the national agenda are gaining that voice and using it.

Slowly and painfully, we are creating a society in which more people can speak and have some say over how they’re spoken of.

This has transformed policy design: These are now negotiations among Democrats, done with the intention of finding policies popular enough that Republican voters will back them, even if Republican politicians will not

iden still talks like he believes bipartisanship is possible in Congress, but his administration has put the onus on Republicans to prove it, and to do so on the administration’s terms. That, more than any other single factor, has unleashed Democrats’ legislative ambitions.

in general, the younger generation has sharply different views on the role of government, the worth of markets and the risks worth taking seriously.

the new generation of staff members see the world very differently. “There has been a lot more work done to try to understand what the roots of economic inequality are over the course of the last decade, and openness to thinking about power and power dynamics,

“The next generation of the economics profession is rebelling against its predecessors by being all about inequality in the same way that my generation rebelled against its predecessors by being all about incentives, and this is a good thing,” said Larry Summers,

Multiple economists, both inside and outside the Biden administration, told me that this is an administration in which economists and financiers are simply far less influential than they were in past administrations.

economists are one of many voices at the table, not the dominant voices. This partly reflects Biden himself: he’s less academically minded, and more naturally skeptical of the way economists view the world and human behavior, than either Obama or Clinton. But it goes deeper than tha

The backdrop for this administration is the failures of the past generation of economic advice. Fifteen years of financial crises, yawning inequality and repeated debt panics that never showed up in interest rates have taken the shine off economic expertise

But the core of this story is climate. “Many mainstream economists, even in the 1980s, recognized that the market wouldn’t cover everyone’s needs so you’d need some modest amount of public support to correct for that moderate market failure,” Felicia Wong, the president of the Roosevelt Institute, said. “But they never envisioned the climate crisis. This is not a failure of the market at the margins. This is the market incentivizing destruction.”

the scale of the climate disaster, and the speed at which it must be addressed, simply demands a different role for the government. “If you think across the big systems in our country — the transportation system being one, the power and energy system being another — in order to actually solve climate change, we’re going to have to transform those systems,”

Biden and his team see this as fundamentally a political problem. They view the idea that a carbon tax is the essential answer to the problem of climate change as being so divorced from political reality as to be actively dangerous.

it’s not just a messaging and narrative imperative,” he told me. “It has to be that Americans see and experience that the investments in building out a more resilient power grid actually improve their lives and create job opportunities for them, or their neighbors.”

Even beyond climate, political risks weigh more heavily on the Biden administration than they did on past administrations. This is another lesson learned from the Obama years

Democrats lost the House in 2010, effectively ending Obama’s legislative agenda, and then they lost the Senate in 2014, and then Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, and then Democrats lost the Supreme Court for a generation.

Many who served under Obama, and who now serve under Biden, believe that they were so focused on economic risks that they missed the political risks — and you can’t make good economic policy if you lose political power

Biden is a politician, in the truest sense of the word. Biden sees his role, in part, as sensing what the country wants, intuiting what people will and won’t accept, and then working within those boundaries.

In America, that’s often treated as a dirty business. We like the aesthetics of conviction, we believe leaders should follow their own counsel, we use “politician” as an epithet.

But Biden’s more traditional understanding of the politician’s job has given him the flexibility to change alongside the country

Stagnating wages and a warming world and Hurricane Katrina and a pandemic virus proved that there were scarier words in the English language than “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” as Ronald Reagan famously put it

He’s emphasizing the irresponsibility of allowing social and economic problems to fester, as opposed to the irresponsibility of spending money on social and economic problems. His administration is defined by the fear that the government isn’t doing enough, not that it’s doing too much.

National Greatness Conservatism. We argued that the G.O.P. had become too anti-government. “How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?” we asked. Only a return to the robust American nationalism of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt would do: ambitious national projects, infrastructure, federal programs to increase social mobility.

George W. Bush, who made his own leap, to Compassionate Conservatism. (You know somebody has made a paradigm leap when he or she starts adding some modifying word or phrase before “Conservatism.”) This was an attempt to meld Catholic social teaching to conservatism.

am’s Club Republicans, led by Reihan Salam and my Times colleague Ross Douthat, pointed a way to link the G.O.P. to working-class concerns

Front Porch Republicans celebrated small towns and local communities.

The Reformicons tried to use government to build strong families and neighborhoods

The Niskanen Center is an entire think tank for people who have leapt from libertarianism.

Most actual Republican politicians rejected all of this. They stuck, mostly through dumb inertia, to an anti-government zombie Reaganism long after Reagan was dead and even though the nation’s problems were utterly different from what they were when he was alive

Donald Trump and Bannon took a low-rent strand of conservatism — class-based ethnic nationalism — that had always been locked away in the basement of the American right, and overturned the Reagan paradigm.

Bannon and Trump got the emotions right. They understood that Republican voters were no longer motivated by a sense of hope and opportunity; they were motivated by a sense of menace, resentment and fear. At base, many Republicans felt they were being purged from their own country — by the educated elite, by multiculturalism, by militant secularism.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump and Bannon discarded the Republican orthodoxy — entitlement reform, fiscal restraint, free trade, comprehensive immigration reform. They embraced a European-style blood-and-soil conservatism. Close off immigration. Close trade. We have nothing to offer the world and should protect ourselves from its dangers.

Over the last three years, it’s been interesting to watch a series of Republican officeholders break free from old orthodoxies and begin to think afresh.

future is embodied by a small group of Republican senators in their 40s, including Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse.

they start with certain common Trumpian premises:

Everything is not OK. The free market is not working well. Wages are stagnant. Too much power is in the hands of the corporate elites. Middle America is getting screwed. Finance capitalism is unbalanced. American society is in abject decline. If Reaganism was “Let’s be free,” the new mood is “Take control.

Economic libertarianism is not the answer. Free markets alone won’t solve our problems

We need policies to shore up the conservative units of society — family, neighborhood, faith, nation. We need policies that build solidarity, not just liberty.

The working class is the heart of the Republican Party. Once, businesspeople and entrepreneurs were at the center of the Republican imagination. Now it’s clear that the party needs to stop catering to the corporate class and start focusing on the shop owners, the plumbers, the salaried workers

China changes everything. The rise of a 1.4-billion-person authoritarian superpower means that free trade no longer works because the Chinese are not playing by the same rules

The managerial class betrays America. Many of the post-Reagan positions seem like steps to the left. But these Republicans combine a greater willingness to use government with a greater hostility to the managerial class.

From these common premises the four senators go off in different directions.

Hawley is the most populist of the group. His core belief is that middle-class Americans have been betrayed by elites on every level — political elites, cultural elites, financial elites

The modern leadership class has one set of values — globalization, cosmopolitanism — and the Middle Americans have another set — family, home, rootedness, nation

Cotton has a less developed political vision but a more developed attitude: hawkishness.

Sasse is the most sociological of the crew. He is a Tocquevillian localist, who notes that most normal Americans go days without thinking of national politics. His vision is centered on the small associations — neighborhood groups, high school football teams, churches and community centers — where people find their greatest joys, satisfactions and supports.

over the long term, some version of Working-Class Republicanism will redefine the G.O.P. In the first place, that’s where Republican voters are

Behind these public figures there is a posse of policy wonks and commentators supporting a new Working-Class Republicanism,

Levin thinks the prevailing post-Trump viewpoints define the problem too much in economic terms. The crucial problem, he argues, is not economic; it’s social: alienation. Millions of Americans don’t feel part of anything they can trust. They feel no one is looking out for them.

“What’s needed,” Levin says, “is not just to expand economic conservatism beyond growth to also prioritize family, community and nation, but also to expand social conservatism beyond sexual ethics and religious liberty to prioritize family, community and nation

The Republican Party looks completely brain-dead at every spot Trump directly reaches. Off in the corners, though, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment on the right.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page stands as a vigilant guardian of the corpse, eager to rebut all dissenters. The former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania are staunch defenders of Minimal-Government Conservatism

there’s also the possibility that Republicans will abandon any positive vision and revert to being a simple anti-government party — a party of opposition to whatever Biden is doing.

Government’s job, he says, is to “create a framework of ordered liberty” so that people can make their family and neighborhood the center of their lives.

Second, the working-class emphasis is the only way out of the demographic doom loop. If the party sticks with its old white high school-educated base, it will die. They just aren’t making enough old white men.

None of this works unless Republicans can deracialize their appeal — by which I mean they must stop pandering to the racists in the party and stop presenting themselves and seeing themselves as the party of white people

In the past two decades, the list of British calamities, policy misjudgments, and forecasting failures has been eye-watering: the disaster of Iraq, the botched Libyan intervention in 2011, the near miss of Scottish independence in 2014, the woeful handling of Britain’s divorce from the European Union from 2016 onward

What emerges is a picture of a country whose systemic weaknesses were exposed with appalling brutality, a country that believed it was stronger than it was, and that paid the price for failures that have built up for years

The most difficult question about all this is also the simplest: Why?

Like much of the Western world, Britain had prepared for an influenza pandemic, whereas places that were hit early—Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan—had readied themselves for the type of respiratory illness that COVID-19 proved to be.

Britain’s pandemic story is not all bad. The NHS is almost universally seen as having risen to the challenge; the University of Oxford is leading the race to develop the first coronavirus vaccine for international distribution, backed with timely and significant government cash; new hospitals were built and treatments discovered with extraordinary speed; the welfare system did not collapse, despite the enormous pressure it suddenly faced; and a national economic safety net was rolled out quickly.

One influential U.K. government official told me that although individual mistakes always happen in a fast-moving crisis, and had clearly taken place in Britain’s response to COVID-19, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that Britain was simply not ready. As Ian Boyd, a professor and member of SAGE, put it: “The reality is, there has been a major systemic failure.”

“It’s obvious that the British state was not prepared for” the pandemic, this official told me. “But, even worse, many parts of the state thought they were prepared, which is significantly more dangerous.”

When the crisis came, too much of Britain’s core infrastructure simply failed, according to senior officials and experts involved in the pandemic response

The human immune system actually has two parts. There is, as Cummings correctly identifies, the adaptive part. But there is also an innate part, preprogrammed as the first line of defense against infectious disease. Humans need both. The same is true of a state and its government, said those I spoke with—many of whom were sympathetic to Cummings’s diagnosis. Without a functioning structure, the responsive antibodies of the government and its agencies cannot learn on the job. When the pandemic hit, both parts of Britain’s immune system were found wanting.

The consequences may be serious and long term, but the most immediately tragic effect was that creating space in hospitals appears to have been prioritized over shielding Britain’s elderly, many of whom were moved to care homes, part of what Britain calls the social-care sector, where the disease then spread. Some 25,000 patients were discharged into these care homes between March 17 and April 16, many without a requirement that they secure a negative coronavirus test beforehand.

There was a bit too much exceptionalism about how brilliant British science was at the start of this outbreak, which ended up with a blind spot about what was happening in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, where we just weren’t looking closely enough, and they turned out to be the best in the world at tackling the coronavirus,” a former British cabinet minister told me.

The focus on influenza pandemics and the lack of a tracing system were compounded by a shortfall in testing capacity.

Johnson’s strategy throughout was one that his hero Winston Churchill raged against during the First World War, when he concluded that generals had been given too much power by politicians. In the Second World War, Churchill, by then prime minister and defense secretary, argued that “at the summit, true politics and strategy are one.” Johnson did not take this approach, succumbing—as his detractors would have it—to fatalistic management rather than bold leadership, empowering the generals rather than taking responsibility himself

“It was a mixture of poor advice and fatalism on behalf of the experts,” one former colleague of Johnson’s told me, “and complacency and boosterism on behalf of the PM.”

What it all adds up to, then, is a sobering reality: Institutional weaknesses of state capacity and advice were not corrected by political judgment, and political weaknesses were not corrected by institutional strength. The system was hardwired for a crisis that did not come, and could not adapt quickly enough to the one that did.

Britain’s NHS has come to represent the country itself, its sense of identity and what it stands for. Set up in 1948, it became known as the first universal health-care system of any major country in the world (although in reality New Zealand got there first). Its creation, three years after victory in the Second World War, was a high-water mark in the country’s power and prestige—a time when it was a global leader, an exception.

Every developed country in the world, apart from the United States, has a universal health-care system, many of which produce better results than the NHS.

When the pandemic hit, then, Britain was not the strong, successful, resilient country it imagined, but a poorly governed and fragile one. The truth is, Britain was sick before it caught the coronavirus.

In asking the country to rally to the NHS’s defense, Johnson was triggering its sense of self, its sense of pride and national unity—its sense of exceptionalism.

Before the coronavirus, the NHS was already under considerable financial pressure. Waiting times for appointments were rising, and the country had one of the lowest levels of spare intensive-care capacity in Europe. In 2017, Simon Stevens, the NHS’s chief executive, compared the situation to the time of the health sevice’s founding decades prior: an “economy in disarray, the end of empire, a nation negotiating its place in the world.”

Yet from its beginnings, the NHS has occupied a unique hold on British life. It is routinely among the most trusted institutions in the country. Its key tenet—that all Britons will have access to health care, free at the point of service—symbolizes an aspirational egalitarianism that, even as inequality has risen since the Margaret Thatcher era, remains at the core of British identity.

In effect, Britain was rigorously building capacity to help the NHS cope, but releasing potentially infected elderly, and vulnerable, patients in the process. By late June, more than 19,000 people had died in care homes from COVID-19. Separate excess-death data suggest that the figure may be considerably higher

Britain failed to foresee the dangers of such an extraordinary rush to create hospital capacity, a shift that was necessary only because of years of underfunding and decades of missed opportunities to bridge the divide between the NHS and retirement homes, which other countries, such as Germany, had found the political will to do.

Ultimately, the scandal is a consequence of a political culture that has proved unable to confront and address long-term problems, even when they are well known.

other health systems, such as Germany’s, which is better funded and decentralized, performed better than Britain’s. Those I spoke with who either are in Germany or know about Germany’s success told me there was an element of luck about the disparity with Britain. Germany had a greater industrial base to produce medical testing and personal protective equipment, and those who returned to Germany with the virus from abroad were often younger and healthier, meaning the initial strain on its health system was less.

However, this overlooks core structural issues—resulting from political choices in each country—that meant that Germany proved more resilient when the crisis came, whether because of the funding formula for its health system, which allows individuals more latitude to top up their coverage with private contributions, or its decentralized nature, which meant that separate regions and hospitals were better able to respond to local outbreaks and build their own testing network.

Also unlike Britain, which has ducked the problem of reforming elderly care, Germany created a system in 1995 that everyone pays into, avoids catastrophic costs, and has cross-party support.

A second, related revelation of the crisis—which also exposed the failure of the British state—is that underneath the apparent simplicity of the NHS’s single national model lies an engine of bewildering complexity, whose lines of responsibility, control, and accountability are unintelligible to voters and even to most politicians.

Britain, I was told, has found a way to be simultaneously overcentralized and weak at its center. The pandemic revealed the British state’s inability to manage the nation’s health:

Since at least the 1970s, growing inequality between comparatively rich southeast England (including London) and the rest of the country has spurred all parties to pledge to “rebalance the economy” and make it less reliant on the capital. Yet large parts remain poorer than the European average. According to official EU figures, Britain has five regions with a per capita gross domestic product of less than $25,000. France, Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden have none

If Britain were part of the United States, it would be anywhere from the third- to the eighth-poorest state, depending on the measure.

Britain’s performance in this crisis has been so bad, it is damaging the country’s reputation, both at home and abroad.

Inside Downing Street, officials believe that the lessons of the pandemic apply far beyond the immediate confines of elderly care and coronavirus testing, taking in Britain’s long-term economic failures and general governance, as well as what they regard as its ineffective foreign policy and diplomacy.

the scale of the task itself is enormous. “We need a complete revamp of our government structure because it’s not fit for purpose anymore,” Boyd told me. “I just don’t know if we really understand our weakness.”

In practice, does Johnson have the confidence to match his diagnosis of Britain’s ills, given the timidity of his approach during the pandemic? The nagging worry among even Johnson’s supporters in Parliament is that although he may campaign as a Ronald Reagan, he might govern as a Silvio Berlusconi, failing to solve the structural problems he has identified.

This is not a story of pessimistic fatalism, of inevitable decline. Britain was able to partially reverse a previous slump in the 1980s, and Germany, seen as a European laggard in the ‘90s, is now the West’s obvious success story. One of the strengths of the Westminster parliamentary system is that it occasionally produces governments—like Johnson’s—with real power to effect change, should they try to enact it.

It has been overtaken by many of its rivals, whether in terms of health provision or economic resilience, but does not seem to realize it. And once the pandemic passes, the problems Britain faces will remain: how to sustain institutions so that they bind the country together, not pull it apart; how to remain prosperous in the 21st century’s globalized economy; how to promote its interests and values; how to pay for the ever-increasing costs of an aging population.

“The really important question,” Boyd said, “is whether the state, in its current form, is structurally capable of delivering on the big-picture items that are coming, whether pandemics or climate change or anything else.”

In War and Peace and War (2006), his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon, the “maverick mathematician” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years’ worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies.

The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,”

The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem.

Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.” The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—­­is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.

Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill.

Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.

“You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.

Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country

Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels

Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard.

The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people.

Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

“I gave up because I solved the problem.” Turchin published one final monograph, Complex Population Dynamics: A Theoretical / Empirical Synthesis (2003), then broke the news to his UConn colleagues that he would be saying a permanent sayonara to the field

“Does population ecology have general laws?” Turchin asked. Most ecologists said no: Populations have their own dynamics, and each situation is different.

All sciences go through this transition to mathematization,” Turchin told me. “When I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.”

After its long adolescence of collecting and cataloging, ecology had enough data to describe these universal laws—and to stop pretending that every species had its own idiosyncrasies. “Ecologists know these laws and should call them laws,” he said.

The laws Turchin applied to ecology—and his insistence on calling them laws—­generated respectful controversy at the time. Now they are cited in textbooks.

Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings.

Turchin suggested that “there are several very general law-like propositions” that could be applied to ecology.

If the historians weren’t going to usher in a mathematical revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for them.

“There is a longstanding debate among scientists and philosophers as to whether history has general laws,” he and a co-author wrote in Secular Cycles (2009). “A basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems.”

he likened historians reluctant to build general principles to his colleagues in biology “who care most for the private life of warblers.” “Let history continue to focus on the particular,” he wrote. Cliodynamics would be a new science

To seed the journal’s research, Turchin masterminded a digital archive of historical and archaeological data.

The coding of its records requires finesse, he told me, because (for example) the method of determining the size of the elite-aspirant class of medieval France might differ from the measure of the same class in the present-day United States. (For medieval France, a proxy is the membership in its noble class, which became glutted with second and third sons who had no castles or manors to rule over. One American proxy, Turchin says, is the number of lawyers.)

Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in gods—especially “moralizing gods,” the kind who scold you for sinning. Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (“records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality”) to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before

One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale

the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones.

Certain aspects of this cyclical view require relearning portions of American history, with special attention paid to the numbers of elites. The industrialization of the North, starting in the mid-19th century, Turchin says, made huge numbers of people rich. The elite herd was culled during the Civil War, which killed off or impoverished the southern slaveholding class, and during Reconstruction, when America experienced a wave of assassinations of Republican politicians.

“There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.”