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His voice was a powerful force for nonviolence in the anti-apartheid movement, earning him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

“You are overwhelmed by the extent of evil,” he said. But, he added, it was necessary to open the wound to cleanse it. In return for an honest accounting of past crimes, the committee offered amnesty, establishing what Archbishop Tutu called the principle of restorative — rather than retributive — justice.

Archbishop Tutu preached that the policy of apartheid was as dehumanizing to the oppressors as it was to the oppressed. At home, he stood against looming violence and sought to bridge the chasm between Black and white; abroad, he urged economic sanctions against the South African government to force a change of policy.

But as much as he had inveighed against the apartheid-era leadership, he displayed equal disapproval of leading figures in the dominant African National Congress, which came to power under Nelson Mandela in the first fully democratic elections in 1994.

“many, too many, of our people live in grueling, demeaning, dehumanizing poverty.”

“We are sitting on a powder keg,” he said.

The cause of death was cancer, the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation said, adding that Archbishop Tutu had died in a care facility.

“I think we are at a bad place in South Africa,” Archbishop Tutu told The New York Times Magazine in 2010, “and especially when you contrast it with the Mandela era. Many of the things that we dreamed were possible seem to be getting more and more out of reach. We have the most unequal society in the world.”

This government, our government, is worse than the apartheid government,” he said, “because at least you were expecting it with the apartheid government.”

In elections in 2016, while still under the leadership of Mr. Zuma, the party’s share of the vote slipped to its lowest level since the end of apartheid. Mr. Ramaphosa struggled to reverse that trend, but earned some praise later for his robust handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Politics were inherent in his religious teachings. “We had the land, and they had the Bible,” he said in one of his parables. “Then they said, ‘Let us pray,’ and we closed our eyes. When we opened them again, they had the land and we had the Bible. Maybe we got the better end of the deal.”

Although Archbishop Tutu, like other Black South Africans of his era, had suffered through the horrors and indignities of apartheid, he did not allow himself to hate his enemies.

He coined the phrase “rainbow nation” to describe the new South Africa emerging into democracy, and called for vigorous debate among all races.

Archbishop Tutu had always said that he was a priest, not a politician, and that when the real leaders of the movement against apartheid returned from jail or exile he would serve as its chaplain.

While he never forgot his father’s shame when a white policeman called him “boy” in front of his son, he was even more deeply affected when a white man in a priest’s robe tipped his hat to his mother, he said.

But Archbishop Tutu did not stay entirely out of the nation’s business.

When Desmond was hospitalized with tuberculosis, Father Huddleston visited him almost every day. “This little boy very well could have died,” Father Huddleston told an interviewer many years later, “but he didn’t give up, and he never lost his glorious sense of humor.”

After his recovery, Desmond wanted to become a doctor, but his family could not afford the school fees. Instead he became a teacher, studying at the Pretoria Bantu Normal College and earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Africa. He taught high school for three years but resigned to protest the Bantu Education Act, which lowered education standards for Black students.

By then he was married to Nomalizo Leah Shenxane, a major influence in his life

He was named Anglican dean of Johannesburg in 1975 and consecrated bishop of Lesotho the next year. In 1978 he became the first Black general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, and began to establish the organization as a major force in the movement against apartheid.

Under Bishop Tutu’s leadership, the council established scholarships for Black youths and organized self-help programs in Black townships. There were also more controversial programs: Lawyers were hired to represent Black defendants on trial under the security laws, and support was provided for the families of those detained without trial.

A month after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, Desmond Tutu became the first Anglican bishop of Johannesburg when the national church hierarchy intervened to break a deadlock between Black and white electors. He was named archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, becoming spiritual head of the country’s 1.5 million Anglicans, 80 percent of whom were Black.

“I am a man of peace, but not a pacifist.”

In 2021, as he approached his 90th birthday, he pitched into a fraught debate as disinformation about coronavirus vaccines swirled.

He remained equally outspoken even in later years. In 2003 he criticized his own government for backing Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, who had a long record of human rights abuses.

On his frequent trips abroad during the apartheid era, Archbishop Tutu never stopped pressing the case for sanctions against South Africa. The government struck back and twice revoked his passport, forcing him to travel with a document that described his citizenship as “undetermined.”

Still, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its final findings in 2003, Archbishop Tutu’s imprint was plain. It warned the government against issuing a blanket amnesty to perpetrators of the crimes of apartheid and urged businesses to join with the government in delivering reparations to the millions of Black people victimized by the former white minority government.

Archbishop Tutu officially retired from public duties in 2010. One of his last major appearances came that year, when South Africa hosted the World Cup

But he did not retreat from the public eye entirely. In June 2011, he joined Michelle Obama at the new Cape Town Stadium, built for the tournament, where she was promoting physical fitness during a tour of southern Africa.

In an interview in the early 1980s, he said: “Blacks don’t believe that they are introducing violence into the situation. They believe that the situation is already violent.”

“There is nothing to fear,” he said. “Don’t let Covid-19 continue to ravage our country, or our world. Vaccinate.”

“As people’s living standards start to fall, they will be increased protests on the streets of Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities. And I think that will play in to probably an elite attempt to remove Putin in due course.”

Chinese premier Li Keqiang said the Ukraine situation was “disconcerting”, adding that the country would support “all efforts that are conducive to a peaceful settlement of the crisis”.

The United States’ allies in the Pacific, including Japan and Australia, “will also adopt a stronger military posture. So it all seems unfriendly to China.”

At the heart of China’s strategy lies a conviction that the United States is weakened from reckless foreign adventures, including, from Beijing’s perspective, goading Mr. Putin into the Ukraine conflict.

China’s path ahead is by no means certain. Drawing too close to Russia would risk entrenching animosity toward China in Europe and beyond, a possibility that worries Mr. Xi’s government, for all its bluster.

“This means that as long as we don’t commit terminal strategic blunders, China’s modernization will not be cut short, and on the contrary, China will have even greater ability and will to play a more important role in building a new international order,” Zheng Yongnian, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, who has advised senior officials, wrote after the invasion in a widely circulated article.

It’s not just China’s reputation in the West; I think it also affects China’s reputation in the non-West, because it’s essentially associating itself with an imperial power.”

In any case, China’s economy is large enough to absorb blows that would cripple others. Chinese companies may even end up well positioned to take advantage of Russia’s desperate need for trade, as happened when Moscow faced sanctions over the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

“Biden has repeatedly avowed that the United States is not in a ‘new Cold War’ with China, but China often feels the chill creeping in everywhere.”

Just as Mr. Putin depicts the United States as menacing Russia on its western frontier, Mr. Xi sees American support for Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy that Beijing claims as its own, as a similar threat off China’s coast.

“The West should not have become a hegemon in defining universal standards because the West or Europe, or the West in general is only part of humanity,” Mr. Dugin told a Chinese state television interviewer in 2019. “And the other part, a majority of human beings, live outside the West, in Asia.”

As it turns to Beijing for support against Western sanctions, Russia will become increasingly beholden to China as its diplomatic and economic lifeline, while serving as its strategic geopolitical ballast, analysts say.

That, for me, will always be the core of conservatism. Not support for limited government or tax cuts. Not favoring open markets. Not fighting for higher defense budgets

A reactionary, by contrast, is someone who thinks the world has already broken and diverged so radically from the traditions, habits, ideals, norms, and laws that prevailed in the past that the present is a wasteland with nothing worth conserving and handing down.

what’s needed is not greater respect and reverence for the past but rather a radical break from it that amounts to active destruction of the corrupted present before something new and worthwhile can be built in its place

regeneration demands we “go forward—step by step further into decadence.” (Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” Aphorism 43)

a conservative is someone who emphasizes continuity between the present and the past, and therefore sees moral and political commonality across time and underlying the very real changes that take place throughout history

A reactionary, meanwhile, has his eyes focused on perceived moral discontinuities in history. He lives on the lookout for ruptures, fissures, and revolutions that have torn time itself asunder, separated into a Before and an After. There can be no going back, at least not directly, from the present. What we need first is a counter-revolution to turn back the tide and tear down the world that has emerged from the revolutionary exertions of morality’s mortal enemies.

they view conservatives as saps, suckers, and chumps who end up serving as handmaidens to the revolutionaries, following along behind them, urging conciliation and resignation to change. Conservatives are therefore a major part of the problem, not the solution. The point is to win, to wield ruthless, brute power like their revolutionary enemies do, though for contrary moral ends.   

Is this fair?

That’s not a rhetorical question—it’s an unanswerable question. Because nothing is fair.It’s not fair that one kid is born in a mansion in Bel-Air, another kid is born in row house in Northeast Philly, and another kid is born in a slum in Mumbai.

Because in some ways we all are. Life is not fair.

It’s not fair that Bill Lumberg is an idiot, but he makes so much money that he drives a Porsche. It’s also not fair when people in Porsches get hit by drunk drivers.

There’s only one measure by which fairness exists in our world: That we’re all God’s children, with dignity and worth simply because we were loved into being.

And that is, ultimately, what I wanted to say about this college admissions story. Are you, personally, getting the short end of the stick? Look, I don’t know you. But yes. In some way you are. Even if you’re in that top 0.1 percent.

It’s not fair that some kids can get 1510 on their SATs and some kids struggle to break 900. It’s not fair that some kids are born with genetic disorders that cut their lives short long before they even know what the SATs are.

It’s okay to notice unfairness and it’s wise to try to remedy it where possible. But we shouldn’t dwell on it or let it define our worldview.

Maybe your kid got 1510 on her SATs but didn’t get into Brown. Or maybe your kid struggled to graduate high school. Or maybe you were never able to have kids, even though you desperately wanted them.

I don’t know if they teach gratitude and compassion at the Ivy Plus schools, but those are the two most important lessons for all of us.

This is the same question as “Should we notice and object to Jason Aldean’s not-really-veiled incitement—or should we let it slide so that we don’t give him a bigger audience?”

I can see both sides of the coin. But my tentative answer is that it’s better to push back against agitators (and law breakers), even if doing so elevates them.

The logic of the provocateur is the logic of the bully. They act because they believe they will get away with it. Some of them (like Aldean) will. But also, some of them won’t be able to ride the wave to greater prominence. Deterrence is real.

There may be obvious short-term benefits to not elevating bad actors, but there may also be non-obvious long-term costs. For instance: When the rule of law is set aside in one instance, it weakens the rule of law in all instances. Maybe this weakness has no practical consequences. But also, maybe it does.

Most bad actors can be safely ignored, because they will never become dangerous at scale. Only a handful of them have the potential to metastasize and build subterranean movements. But it’s hard to reliably tell these two groups apart.

Having your actions governed by fixed mores is not infallible. But relying exclusively on judgment calls is more fallible. In the long run, we’re probably better off just calling things as we see them, using objective standards, rather than trying to play bank-shots in order to jump to better outcomes. If someone in a prominent position is making noises about shooting people from groups he doesn’t like, for instance, we should say that this is irresponsible and dangerous. If someone is breaking the law, we should want the legal system to operate with due process rather than turning a blind eye to criminality.

When I asked about Australia’s rather impressive health outcomes, he said that while “Australia’s mortality that is amenable to, or influenced by, the health care system specifically is good, it’s not fundamentally better than that seen in peer O.E.C.D. countries, the U.S. excepted. Rather, Australia’s public health, social policy and living standards are more responsible for outcomes.”

Addressing these issues in the United States would require significant investment, to the tune of hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars a year. That seems impossible until you remember that we spent more than $4.4 trillion on health care in 2022. We just don’t think of social policies like housing, food and education as health care.

Other countries, on the other hand, recognize that these issues are just as important, if not more so, than hospitals, drugs and doctors. Our narrow view too often defines health care as what you get when you’re sick, not what you might need to remain well.

When other countries choose to spend less on their health care systems (and it is a choice), they take the money they save and invest it in programs that benefit their citizens by improving social determinants of health

In the United States, conversely, we argue that the much less resourced programs we already have need to be cut further. The recent debt limit compromise reduces discretionary spending and makes it harder for people to access government programs like food stamps.

When I asked experts in each of these countries what might improve the areas where they are deficient (for instance, the N.H.S. has been struggling quite a bit as of late), they all replied the same way: more money. Some of them lack the political will to allocate those funds. Others can’t make major investments without drawing from other priorities.

Singapore will need to spend more, it’s very unlikely to go above the 8 percent to 10 percent of G.D.P. that pretty much all developed countries have historically spent.

That is, all of them except the United States. We currently spend about 18 percent of G.D.P. on health care. That’s almost $12,000 per American. It’s about twice what other countries currently spend.

We cannot seem to do what other countries think is easy, while we’ve happily decided to do what other countries think is impossible.But this is also what gives me hope. We’ve already decided to spend the money; we just need to spend it better.

Hitchens argued that unfettered free speech and inquiry would always make civil society stronger. When he wrote the introduction to his collection of essays For the Sake of Argument in 1993, he had a specific left-wing tradition in mind: the left of Orwell and Victor Serge and C.L.R. James, which simultaneously opposed Stalinism, fascism, and imperialism in the twentieth century, and which stood for “individual and collective emancipation, self-determination and internationalism.”

As many on the Western left built their politics around incessant condemnations of their own societies as racist, exploitative, oligarchic, and imperialistic, Hitchens recognized the difference between self-criticism and self-flagellation.

He didn’t just despise religion because he regarded it as a form of totalitarianism—he also recognized that it’s an infinitely replenishable wellspring of tribal hatred.

He also opposed identity politics, because he didn’t think our social and civic lives should be reduced to rigid categories based on melanin, X chromosomes, and sexuality.

He recognized that the Enlightenment values of individual rights, freedom of expression and conscience, humanism, pluralism, and democracy are universal—they provide the most stable, just, and rational foundation for any civil society, whether they’re observed in America or Europe or Iraq.

he argued that these values are for export. Hitchens believed in universal human rights. This is why, at a time when his comrades were still manning the barricades against the “imperial” West after the Cold War, he argued that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should intervene to stop a genocidal assault on Bosnia. It’s why he argued that American power could be used to defend human rights and promote democracy.

He believed in the concept of global citizenship, which is why he firmly supported international institutions like the European Union

One of the reasons Orwell accumulated many left-wing enemies in his time was the fact that his criticisms of his own “side” were grounded in authentic left-wing principles

he criticized the left-wing intellectuals who enjoy “seeing their own country humiliated” and “follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong.” Among some of these intellectuals, Orwell wrote: “One finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of the Western countries.”

This is a predictable manifestation of what the American political theorist Michael Walzer calls the “default position” of the left: a purportedly “anti-imperialist and anti-militarist” position inclined toward the view that “everything that goes wrong in the world is America’s fault.”

the tendency to ignore and rationalize even the most egregious violence and authoritarianism abroad in favor of an obsessive emphasis on the crimes and blunders of Western governments has become a reflex.

Much of the left has been captured by a strange mix of sectarian and authoritarian impulses: a myopic emphasis on identitarianism and group rights over the individual; an orientation toward subjectivity and tribalism over objectivity and universalism; and demands for political orthodoxy enforced by repressive tactics like the suppression of speech.

These left-wing pathologies are particularly corrosive today because they give right-wing nationalists and populists on both sides of the Atlantic—whose rise over the past several years has been characterized by hostility to democratic norms and institutions, rampant xenophobia, and other forms of illiberalism—an opportunity to claim that those who oppose them are the true authoritarians.

He understood that the left could only defeat these noxious political forces by rediscovering its best traditions: support for free expression, pluralism, and universalism—the values of the Enlightenment.

Hitchens closes his book Why Orwell Matters with the following observation: “What he [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that ‘views’ do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.”

Despite the pervasive idea that Hitchens exchanged one set of convictions for another by the end of his life, his commitment to his core principles never wavered.

Some called the world system of the 2000s and early 2010s “Chimerica”. During these years, the hope that global trade would lead to a cessation of great-power conflict, even without ideological alignment, seemed justified. And although China’s politics didn’t liberalize, under Jiang and Hu the country became more open to foreign travelers, foreign workers, and foreign ideas. This might not have been the End of History, but it was a compromise most people could live with for a while.

In the mid-2010s, this compromise began to break down. On the U.S. side, there was increasing anger over the long-term decline of good manufacturing jobs, and an increasing feeling of the U.S. in second place. China, and the Chimerica system, became the target of some of this anger — not without good reason

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, apparently felt that these events validated his pre-existing plan for “great changes unseen in a century” — i.e. China’s displacement of the U.S. as the global hegemon. Though this was Xi’s ambition from the start, it was the Chimerica system that had made his dream feasible, by making China the biggest manufacturing and trading nation on Earth.

Now, Xi seemed to feel that China had extracted all it could from the Chimerica system, and that the benefits no longer outweighed the costs. His industrial crackdowns in 2021 included measures to limit Western, Japanese, and South Korean cultural influences. Under his Zero Covid system, China became much more closed to the world, with inflows of people from abroad basically halted.

But these were only the first of a number of ways in which Xi, who just cemented his absolute power over his country at the 20th Party Congress, has made it clear that China’s era of “reform and opening up” is over

Markets, for their part, seem to realize that this time is different. China’s stocks cratered after the party congress — so much so that they’re now trading below the value of their assets on paper.

The key thing to understand about this decoupling, I think, and the reason it’s for real, is that this is something the leaders of both the U.S. and China want.

The U.S. is acting not out of concern for its industries — indeed, its chip industry will take a huge hit from export controls — but because of how it perceives its own national security. And China’s leaders want to shift to indigenous industry, regulated industry, and even nationalized industry, even if that shift makes China grow more slowly.

The decoupling between China and the developed democracies, so long a topic of conversation and speculation, now appears to be a reality. A critical point has been reached. The old world-economic system of Chimerica is being swept away, and something new will take its place.

It will take a while for the new world-economic system to be born (and as Gramsci says, this will be a “time of monsters”)

A lot will be contingent on events, such as whether there is another world war.

already I think we can make some educated guesses and ask some key questions.

I expect the Biden administration and/or its successor to get tripped up for a while by the mirage of a self-sufficient U.S., and to implement “Buy American” policies that hurt our allies and trading partners and slow the formation of a bloc that can match China. But if Americans can finally pull their heads out of their rear ends and recognize that their country doesn’t dominate the world the way it used to, there’s a chance to create a non-China economic bloc that preserves lots of the efficiencies of the old Chimerica system while also serving U.S. national security needs.

In fact, whether the non-China blog coordinates on policy is really the big question regarding the new world-economic order. Together, the U.S., Europe, and the rich democracies of East Asia comprise a manufacturing bloc that can match China’s output and a technological bloc that can exceed China’s capabilities. With the vast populations of India and other friendly developing countries on their side, they can create a trading and production bloc that will be almost as efficient as the old Chimerica system. But this will take coordination and trust on economic policy that has been notably absent so far. The U.S. will have to put aside its worries about competition with Japan, Korea, Germany or Taiwan — and vice versa.

this vision — a largely but not completely bifurcated global system of production and trade, with two technologically advanced high-output blocs competing head to head — seems like the most likely replacement for the Chimerica system that dominated the global economy over the past two decades

But it’s only a loose guess. What’s not really in doubt here is that we’ve reached a watershed moment in the history of the global economy; the system we came to know and rely on over the past two decades is crumbling, and our leaders and thinkers need to be scrambling to plan what comes next.

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.

the U.K. manufacturing industry has less technological automation than just about any other similarly rich country. With barely 100 installed robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers in 2020, its average robot density was below that of Slovenia and Slovaki

One analysis of the U.K.’s infamous “productivity puzzle” concluded that outside of London and finance, almost every British sector has lower productivity than its Western European peers.

What was once the world’s most powerful globalized empire has now voted to explicitly reduce global access to trade and talent. Since Brexit, immigration, exports, and foreign investment have all declined, likely reducing the size of the U.K.’s economy by several percentage points in the long run.

“Take out Greater London—the prosperity of which depends to an uncomfortable degree on a willingness to provide services to oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union—and the UK is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.”

Today, Britain seems trapped between a left-wing aversion to growth and a right-wing aversion to openness. On the academic left, the U.K. has lately been home to a surging movement called degrowtherism, which asserts that saving the planet requires rich countries to stop seeking growth.

On the right, the electorate is dominated by older voters who care more about culture wars than about competitiveness

The U.K. is now an object lesson for other countries dealing with a dark triad of deindustrialization, degrowth, and denigration of foreigners.

Enemies of progress can criticize the legacy of industrialization, productivity, and globalization. But the U.K. shows us what can happen when a rich country seems to reject all three. Rather than transforming into some post-economic Eden of good vibes, it becomes bitter, flailing, and nonsensical.

he continued to follow key elements of the game plan outlined in “Transformative Politics.” When Mr. Obama scolded pundits for slicing America into red states and blue states, it wasn’t a dopey celebration of national harmony. It was a strategic attempt to drain the venom out of the culture wars, allowing Democrats to win back working-class voters who had been polarized into the G.O.P. And it elected him president, twice.

he warned against retreating in the battle for civil rights. Moderates scrambling for the middle ground were just as misguided, he argued, as anti-racists implicitly pinning their hopes on a collective racial epiphany.

bringing the conversation back to economics was the best way to beat the right. Instead of trimming their ambitions to court affluent suburbanites, Democrats had to embrace “long-term, structural change, change that might break the zero-sum equation that pits powerless blacks [against] only slightly less powerless whites.”

All the pieces of Mr. Obama’s plan fit together: an electoral strategy designed to make Democrats the party of working people; a policy agenda oriented around comprehensive economic reform; and a faith that American democracy could deliver real change. By mixing political calculation with moral vision, Democrats could resurrect the March on Washington coalition and — finally — transform politics.

Economics were a safer bet. Blue-collar workers of all races, Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher wrote, “understood in concrete ways the fact that America’s individualist mythology covers up a game that is fixed against them.

Rebuilding the March on Washington coalition requires an all-out war against polarization. That larger project begins with a simple message: Democrats exist because the country belongs to all of us, not just the 1 percent. With this guiding principle in mind, everything else becomes easier — picking fights that focus the media spotlight on a game that’s rigged in favor of the rich; calling the bluff of right-wing populists who can’t stomach a capital-gains-tax hike; corralling activists in support of the needs of working people; and, ultimately, putting power back in the hands of ordinary Americans.

The party’s record in the midterms has been even shakier. Democrats held unified control of Congress for all of Mr. Roosevelt’s presidency. In the Obama era, divided government has been the norm. And no, that’s not just because of gerrymandering. House Republicans won the national popular vote three times in the past 12 years — 2010, 2014 and 2016 — and there’s a good chance they’ll do it again this November.

the party is facing the same basic problem that has bedeviled Democrats since the breakdown of the New Deal coalition in the 1960s. An electorate divided by culture isn’t going to deliver the votes that Democrats need to build a lasting majority.

The crisis of democracy, then, is really a problem of the Democratic coalition. So long as elections keep being decided by wafer-thin margins, the odds of a divergence between the popular vote and the Electoral College will stay high, voters in small rural states will continue to hold the balance of power in the Senate, and Republican election deniers will get new grist for conspiracy theorizing. Even if Democrats manage to take office, they won’t have the numbers to push through reforms that might break this electoral stalemate.

What’s missing from all this is a vision for transcending the divide between the party’s rival sects, a plan for both winning elections and securing lasting change — in short, a program for transforming politics.

Mr. Rustin’s vision — the same vision that once upon a time drew a young Barack Obama into politics — remains the best starting point for coming up with a truly democratic solution to the crisis of democracy. Only 27 percent of registered voters identify as liberal. But 62 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on millionaires. An even greater number — 71 percent — approve of labor unions. And 83 percent support raising the federal minimum wage.

Today we are living in the world the Obama coalition has made. Yes, Democrats have won the popular vote in each of the past four presidential elections. But thanks to continued losses among blue-collar voters — including Latinos and a smaller but significant number of African Americans — the Obama coalition has remained a pipsqueak by historical standards. Under Franklin Roosevelt, the average Democratic margin of victory was 14.9 percentage points. Since 2008, it’s been 4.4 percentage points.

the road to freedom that Bayard Rustin dreamed of still goes through a majority movement — a coalition rooted in the working class, bound together by shared economic interests and committed to drawing out the best in the American political tradition.

The economist Thomas Malthus, now dismissed by mainstream economics as an interesting crank, is resurrected by Galor as the man who correctly saw that for millennia humanity had been trapped by its own fertility into subsistence, starvation and famine. As soon as material matters improved, the birthrate went up, so did the population, and the pressure on food resources exploded – returning humanity to starvation

great sections of Galor’s book are to be applauded

What broke the Malthusian armlock on humanity’s destiny, argues Galor, is the gradual quickening in the introduction of technologies that required mass education for their successful implementation. This triggered a virtuous circle of more innovation, more investment in education, more need to invest in the quality of children rather than quantity, so that birthrates declined sufficiently to allow living standards and life expectancy to rise. Because it was now rational to invest in children’s education rather than get them working, child labour and exploitation fell away

Above all he shows how cultural attitudes persist long after whatever concatenation of events brought them into being, so that countries and cultures that get ahead tend to stay ahead

He is scathing about the shock programmes of market liberalisation that accompanied the “Washington consensus”, ignorant of these persistent traits. Effective market economies can’t be built spontaneously in cultures that are hostile to the very conception.

his optimism about humanity shines through – prize its diversity, commit to educate its children and they will find their way to innovate and create a culture of growth

It’s a great way to look at the world, but a healthy recognition that power, capitalism, finance, the existence and structure of states and public philosophies – some right, some wrong – are all part of the brew would have made his account more realistic

Part of the enthusiasm behind the sky-high valuation of Tesla, where he is chief executive, comes from his predictions for the auto company’s abilities to develop humanoid robots—dubbed Optimus—that can be deployed for everything from personal assistants to factory workers. He’s also founded an AI startup, dubbed xAI, that he said aims to develop its own superhuman intelligence, even as some are skeptical of that possibility. 

Musk likes to point to another work of Sci-Fi to describe how AI could change our world: a series of books by the late-, self-described-socialist author Iain Banks that revolve around a post-scarcity society that includes superintelligent AI. 

That is the question.

“We’re actually going to have—and already do have—a massive shortage of labor. So, I think we will have not people out of work but actually still a shortage of labor—even in the future.” 

Musk has cast his work to develop humanoid robots as an attempt to solve labor issues, saying there aren’t enough workers and cautioning that low birthrates will be even more problematic. 

Instead, Musk predicts robots will be taking jobs that are uncomfortable, dangerous or tedious. 

A few years ago, Musk declared himself a socialist of sorts. “Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm,” he tweeted. “True socialism seeks greatest good for all.”

“It’s fun to cook food but it’s not that fun to wash the dishes,” Musk said this month. “The computer is perfectly happy to wash the dishes.”

In the near term, Goldman Sachs in April estimated generative AI could boost the global gross domestic product by 7% during the next decade and that roughly two-thirds of U.S. occupations could be partially automated by AI. 

Vinod Khosla, a prominent venture capitalist whose firm has invested in the technology, predicted within a decade AI will be able to do “80% of 80%” of all jobs today.

“I believe the need to work in society will disappear in 25 years for those countries that adapt these technologies,” Khosla said. “I do think there’s room for universal basic income assuring a minimum standard and people will be able to work on the things they want to work on.” 

Forget universal basic income. In Musk’s world, he foresees something more lush, where most things will be abundant except unique pieces of art and real estate. 

“We won’t have universal basic income, we’ll have universal high income,” Musk said this month. “In some sense, it’ll be somewhat of a leveler or an equalizer because, really, I think everyone will have access to this magic genie.” 

All of which kind of sounds a lot like socialism—except it’s unclear who controls the resources in this Muskism society

“Digital super intelligence combined with robotics will essentially make goods and services close to free in the long term,” Musk said

“What is an economy? An economy is GDP per capita times capita.” Musk said at a tech conference in France this year. “Now what happens if you don’t actually have a limit on capita—if you have an unlimited number of…people or robots? It’s not clear what meaning an economy has at that point because you have an unlimited economy effectively.”

In theory, humanity would be freed up for other pursuits. But what? Baby making. Bespoke cooking. Competitive human-ing. 

“Obviously a machine can go faster than any human but we still have humans race against each other,” Musk said. “We still enjoy competing against other humans to, at least, see who was the best human.”

Still, even as Musk talks about this future, he seems to be grappling with what it might actually mean in practice and how it is at odds with his own life. 

“If I think about it too hard, it, frankly, can be dispiriting and demotivating, because…I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into building companies,” he said earlier this year. “If I’m sacrificing time with friends and family that I would prefer but then ultimately the AI can do all these things, does that make sense?”“To some extent,” Musk concluded, “I have to have a deliberate suspension of disbelief in order to remain motivated.”

Friedman’s thought, she argues, is more complex and subtle than has been understood: He raised pressing questions about the market, individualism, and the role of the state that will be with us for as long as capitalism endures.

Just as important, his time at Chicago taught Friedman about the intertwining of political, intellectual, and personal loyalties. He became a regular in an informal group of graduate students and junior faculty trying to consolidate the department as a center of free-market thought

by the 1930s, the leading figures at the University of Chicago were deeply committed to what had become known as price theory, which analyzed economic behavior in terms of the incentives and information reflected in prices. The economists who left their mark on Friedman sought to create predictive models of economic decision making, and they were politically invested in the ideal of an unencumbered marketplace.

Friedman was also shaped by older traditions of economic thought, in particular the vision of political economy advanced by thinkers such as Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. For them, as for him, economics was not a narrow social science, concerned with increasing productivity and efficiency. It was closely linked to a broader set of political ideas and values, and it necessarily dealt with basic questions of justice, freedom, and the best way to organize society.

His libertarian ethos helped seed the far more openly hierarchical social and political conservatism that fuels much of our present-day political dysfunction.

But his fundamental commitments were consistent. In his early work on consumption habits, Friedman sought to puncture the arrogance of the postwar Keynesian economists, who claimed to be able to manipulate the economy from above, using taxes and spending to turn investment, consumption, and demand on and off like so many spigots

Instead, he believed that consumption patterns were dependent on local conditions and on lifetime expectations of income. The federal government, he argued, could do much less to affect economic demand—­and hence to fight recessions—­than the Keynesian consensus suggested.

In 1946, Friedman was hired by the University of Chicago, where he shut down efforts to recruit economists who didn’t subscribe to free-market views.

He was also legendary for his brutal classroom culture. One departmental memo, trying to rectify the situation, went so far as to remind faculty to please not treat a university student “like a dog.” What had started as a freewheeling, rebellious culture among the economists in Room Seven wound up as doctrinal rigidity.

Evidence leads her to argue more pointedly that Rose (credited only with providing “assistance”) essentially co-wrote Capitalism and Freedom (1962).

Burns implicitly exposes some of the limitations of Friedman’s focus on the economic benefits of innate individual talent. He had more than nature to thank for producing associates of such high caliber, ready to benefit him in his career. Culture and institutions clearly played a large role, and sexual discrimination during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s ensured that professional paths were anything but fair.

The state, he acknowledged, would have to take some responsibility for managing economic life—­and thus economists would be thrust into a public role. The question was what they would do with this new prominence.

Almost as soon as the Second World War ended, Friedman began to stake out a distinctive rhetorical position, arguing that the policy goals of the welfare state could be better accomplished by the free market

in Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman made the case that the real problem lay in the methods liberals employed, which involved interfering with the competitive price mechanism of the free market. Liberals weren’t morally wrong, just foolish, despite the vaunted expertise of their economic advisers.

In a rhetorical move that seemed designed to portray liberal political leaders as incompetent, he emphasized efficiency and the importance of the price system as a tool for social policy

For Friedman, the competitive market was the realm of innovation, creativity, and freedom. In constructing his arguments, he envisioned workers and consumers as individuals in a position to exert decisive economic power, always able to seek a higher wage, a better price, an improved product

The limits of this notion emerged starkly in his contorted attempts to apply economic reasoning to the problem of racism, which he described as merely a matter of taste that should be free from the “coercive power” of the law:

Although he personally rejected racial prejudice, he considered the question of whether Black children could attend good schools—and whether, given the “taste” for prejudice in the South, Black adults could find remunerative jobs—less important than the “right” of white southerners to make economic decisions that reflected their individual preferences. In fact, Friedman compared fair-employment laws to the Nuremberg Race Laws of Nazi Germany. Not only was this tone-deaf in the context of the surging 1960s civil-rights movement; it was a sign of how restricted his idea of freedom really was.

s the conservative movement started to make electoral gains in the ’70s, Friedman emerged as a full-throated challenger of liberal goals, not just methods

He campaigned for “tax limitation” amendments that would have restricted the ability of state governments to tax or spend

n a famous New York Times Magazine essay, he suggested that corporations had no “social responsibility” at all; they were accountable only for increasing their own profit

Friedman’s free-market certainties went on to win over neoliberals. By the time he and Rose published their 1998 memoir, Two Lucky People, their ideas, once on the margin of society, had become the reigning consensus.

That consensus is now in surprising disarray in the Republican Party that was once its stronghold. The startling rise in economic inequality and the continued erosion of middle-class living standards have called into question the idea that downsizing the welfare state, ending regulations, and expanding the reach of the market really do lead to greater economic well-being—let alone freedom.

Friedman—despite being caricatured as a key intellectual architect of anti-government politics—had actually internalized an underlying assumption of the New Deal era: that government policy should be the key focus of political action. Using market theory to reshape state and federal policy was a constant theme of his career.

Still, Friedman—­and the libertarian economic tradition he advanced—­bears more responsibility for the rise of a far right in the United States than Burns’s biography would suggest. His strategy of goading the left, fully on display in the various provocations of Free to Choose and even Capitalism and Freedom, has been a staple for conservatives ever since

He zealously promoted the kind of relentless individualism that undergirds parts of today’s right, most notably the gun lobby. The hostile spirit that he brought to civil-rights laws surfaces now in the idea that reliance on court decisions and legislation to address racial hierarchy itself hems in freedom

The opposition to centralized government that he championed informs a political culture that venerates local authority and private power, even when they are oppressive

his insistence (to quote Capitalism and Freedom) that “any … use of government is fraught with danger” has nurtured a deep pessimism that democratic politics can offer any route to redressing social and economic inequalities.

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.

Since then, it has struggled to assert itself as a credible vehicle for truly mass mobilisation.

Many significant organisations and movements have emerged in its wake. The most attention-grabbing have been from the recent, even more radical flank of the UK’s climate movement – first Insulate Britain and then Just Stop Oil – who have blocked the M25, stopped test matches and much more.

many in the broader climate movement now feel that action that disrupts the general public has become counterproductive – as XR came to learn

Citizens already feel the alarm has been raised. Right now, they don’t need further reminders: they need a journey into positive, effective action that they feel includes them.

I moved on from XR in 2020, judging it likely that it had achieved most of what it was capable of achieving (a huge raising of climate consciousness – not to mention a parliamentary declaration of climate and environment emergency, a net zero law, and a parliament-backed citizens’ assembly on climate).

what is now plainly obvious is that the most important achievement of XR may turn out to be the space it opened up for a new, moderate flank in the climate movement to emerge.

XR successfully dragged the whole eco-agenda into the light of day

this has made it both necessary and possible for a wave of novel organisations and initiatives to fill the vacuum; groups such as Wild Card, Community Climate Action, Lawyers for Net Zero, Purpose Disruptors and Zero Hour.

many of the successes of historical movements that inspired XR (the Suffragettes, for instance) followed a similar pattern: an agenda-shift prompted by radical-flank initiatives paving the way for actual political success by more moderate agents of change.

in order to make any real impact on the desperate situation we are slipping into, movements must now unite people in campaigns that they can actually get on board with. That means acting with others where they live, or work or pray – and within the law.

XR itself knows this is the way forward, and seems to have learned from past mistakes. As of 2023, it will no longer disrupt the public

XR’s new strategy, optimistically titled “Here comes everyone”, plans to build on the clearest success of the movement so far. In April, it mobilised about 60,000 people – considerably more than at any previous moment in its history – in a peaceful march on the climate crisis

If there is to be any chance of achieving a transformative adaptation to the self-imposed threat of ecological collapse, it’s going to require not just a minority, but most of us, to step up.

In decades to come, the only question our children will have any real interest in is: now that it’s becoming clearer what can effectively achieve change, how will you act? And once you knew, what did you do?

“Write a five-paragraph essay on Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse.’” Too generic? Well, how about “Write a five-paragraph essay on the theme of loss in ‘To the Lighthouse’”? Too high-schoolish? “Add some bigger words, please.” The product might not be ready to turn in the moment it is born, fully formed, from ChatGPT’s head. But with enough tweaking — either by the student or by the machine at the student’s demand — chances are the output can muster at least a passing grade.

Which of these uses are okay? Which aren’t? The harnessing of an AI tool to create an annotated bibliography likely doesn’t rankle even librarians the way relying on that same tool to draft a reflection on Virginia Woolf offends the professor of the modern novel. Why? Because that kind of contemplation goes closer to the heart of what education is really about.

the core of the question colleges now face. They can’t really stop students from using AI in class. They might not be able to notice students have done so at all, and when they do think they’ve noticed they’ll be acting only on suspicion. But maybe teachers can control the ways in which students use AI in class.

Figuring out exactly what ways those ought to be requires educators to determine what they care about in essays — what they are desperate to hear. The purpose of these papers is for students to demonstrate what they’ve learned, from hard facts to compositional know-how, and for teachers to assess how their pupils are progressing. The answer to what teachers want to get from students in their written work depends on what they want to give to students.

ChatGPT is sort of in a class of its own, because it can be almost anything its users want it to be so long as they possess one essential skill: prompt engineering. This means, basically, manipulating the machine not only into giving you an answer but also into giving you the kind of answer you’re looking for.

The next concern is that students should use AI in a manner that improves not only their writing but also their thinking — in short, in a manner that enhances learning rather than bypasses the need to learn at all.

This simple principle makes for complicated practice. Certainly, no one is going to learn anything by letting AI write an essay in its entirety. What about letting AI brainstorm an idea, on the other hand, or write an outline, or gin up a counter-argument? Lyndsey Cook, a senior at Ole Miss planning a career in nursing, finds the brainstorming especially helpful: She’ll ask ChatGPT or another tool to identify the themes in a piece of literature, and then she’ll go back and look for them herself.

These shortcuts, on the one hand, might interfere with students’ learning to brainstorm, outline or see the other side of things on their own

But — here comes a human-generated counterargument — they may also aid students in surmounting obstacles in their composition that otherwise would have stopped them short. That’s particularly true of kids whose high schools didn’t send them to college already equipped with these capabilities.

Allow AI to boost you over these early hurdles, and suddenly the opportunity for deeper learning — the opportunity to really write — will open up. That’s how Caleb Jackson, the part-time student for whom Perplexity has been such a boon, sees it: His professor, he says , wanted them to “get away from the high-school paper and go further, to write something larger like a thesis.”

maybe, as one young Ole Miss faculty member put it to me, this risks “losing the value of the struggle.” That, she says, is what she is scared will go away.

All this invites the most important question there is: What is learning for?

Learning, in college, can be instrumental. According to this view, the aim of teaching is to prepare students to live in the real world, so all that really matters is whether they have the chops to field jobs that feed themselves and their families. Perhaps knowing how to use AI to do any given task for you, then, is one of the most valuable skills out there — the same way it pays to be quick with a calculator.

If you accept this line of argument, however, there are still drawbacks to robotic crutches. Some level of critical thinking is necessary to function as an adult, and if AI stymies its development even the instrumental aim of education is thwarted. The same goes for that “value of the struggle.” The real world is full of adversity, much of which the largest language model can’t tell you how to overcome.

more compelling is the idea, probably shared by most college professors, that learning isn’t only instrumental after all — that it has intrinsic value and that it is the end rather than merely a means to one.

Every step along the way that is skipped, the shorter the journey becomes, the less we will take in as we travel.

This glummest of outlooks suggests that AI will stunt personal growth even if it doesn’t harm professional prospects.

While that doesn’t mean it’s wise to prohibit every little application of the technology in class, it probably does mean discouraging those most closely related to critical thinking.

One approach is to alter standards for grading, so that the things the machines are worst at are also the things that earn the best marks: originality, say, or depth of feeling, or so-called metacognition — the process of thinking about one’s own thinking or one’s own learning.

Hopefully, these things are also the most valuable because they are what make us human.

Caleb Jackson only wants AI to help him write his papers — not to write them for him. “If ChatGPT will get you an A, and you yourself might get a C, it’s like, ‘Well, I earned that C.’” He pauses. “That might sound crazy.”

Dominic Tovar agrees. Let AI take charge of everything, and, “They’re not so much tools at that point. They’re just replacing you.”

Lyndsey Cook, too, believes that even if these systems could reliably find the answers to the most vexing research problems, “it would take away from research itself” — because scientific inquiry is valuable for its own sake. “To have AI say, ‘Hey, this is the answer …’” she trails off, sounding dispirited.

Claire Mischker, lecturer of composition and director of the Ole Miss graduate writing center, asked her students at the end of last semester to turn in short reflections on their experience in her class. She received submissions that she was near certain were produced by ChatGPT — “that,” she says as sarcastically as she does mournfully, “felt really good.

The central theme of the course was empathy.

First, few people are more eager to take advantage of free speech rights than people who possess deep moral convictions. When you watch a furious campus debate, the last thing you think is, “Watch the relativists fight.” The combatants possess burning convictions

Second, humility isn’t relativism, and even people who believe that absolute truth exists should possess enough humility to recognize they don’t know all that truth.

Third, prudent people know that they will not always rule. This is the most pragmatic case for free speech.

One of my favorite expressions of American pluralism comes from my friend Barry Corey, president of Biola University, an evangelical college in California. He advocates a life lived with a “firm center and soft edges.” The firm center is the “commitment to that which is true,” and for a Christian that means God’s truth. Soft edges, on the other hand, “means hospitality and kindness, especially toward those we don’t think like, or vote like, or believe like.”

American free speech doctrine represents a legal version of that marvelous moral rule. The First Amendment protects our firm center. It’s what ensures our ability to walk into the public square, express our convictions and challenge our nation’s moral and political norms. Does anyone for a moment think that Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, was a moral relativist? Yet he’s also the author of one of the most powerful arguments in support of free speech in American history.

At the same time, we protect the free speech of others and thereby manifest “hospitality and kindness.” We declare to our opponents that they are equal citizens of our Republic, possessing the same dignity and liberty that we possess ourselves.

That’s the key to making pluralism work. Enforced conformity is a recipe for violent conflict, regardless of whether the demand is made from the right, left or middle

The defense of liberty, meanwhile, makes diversity sustainable. It allows individuals and communities of differing convictions to flourish across those differences

Treating them all equally under the law isn’t relativism. It’s justice, and justice is a fundamental moral obligation of the state.

The clarification comes after Russia opened a criminal inquiry into Meta on Friday because of the change in its hate speech policy

“I want to be crystal clear: Our policies are focused on protecting people’s rights to speech as an expression of self-defense in reaction to a military invasion of their country,” he wrote.

“The fact is, if we applied our standard content policies without any adjustments we would now be removing content from ordinary Ukrainians expressing their resistance and fury at the invading military forces, which would rightly be viewed as unacceptable. 

We will not tolerate Russophobia or any kind of discrimination, harassment or violence towards Russians on our platform.”

What Friedman believed in was capitalism, or what he called “economic freedom.” Political freedom might come — but capitalism, he said, could do just fine without it.

the corporate funders of “Free to Choose” set out to make their case.

it was still a time when capitalism’s most enthusiastic supporters evidently felt the need to win the public over to a vision of free markets and minimal government

The documentary series “Free to Choose,” which aired on public television in 1980

He and other observers are trying to make sense of what might happen next — and, befitting our current bewilderment, they offer a range of perspectives. Some, like Wolf, hope the relationship can be repaired; others argue that the pairing has always been fraught, if not impossible.

he has also read his Marx and Engels, looking askance at their solutions while commending them for how “brilliantly” they described capitalism’s relentlessness and omnivorousness. Left to its own devices, capitalism expands wherever it can, plowing its way through national boundaries and local traditions — making it marvelously dynamic or utterly ruinous, and not infrequently both.

In Wolf’s case, his anguished tone reflects the scale of his own disillusionment. Born in 1946 in postwar England, he recalls in his preface how “the world seemed solid as I grew up.” He describes the feelings of “confidence” in democracy and capitalism that flourished with the collapse of the Soviet Union

Yet the “democratic capitalism” that Wolf wants to preserve was, even by his own lights, short-lived. Democracy itself — or “liberal democracy” with universal suffrage, which Wolf says is the kind of democracy he means — is a “political mayfly.” Democratic capitalism ended, in his account, with the financial crisis of 2008

Robert Reich has offered another measure, arguing that democratic capitalism, at least in the United States, began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and ended with Reagan, when “corporate capitalism” took over.

The left-wing German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck stakes out a decidedly different position, suggesting that the tendency to equate “democratic capitalism” with a few decades of postwar plenty is to misinterpret a “historical compromise between a then uniquely powerful working class and an equally uniquely weakened capitalist class

In “How Will Capitalism End?” (2016), Streeck argues that it’s not compromise but the cascade of crises following the postwar boom — inflation, unemployment, market crashes — “that represents the normal condition of democratic capitalism.” Where Wolf wistfully invokes a “delicate flower,” Streeck writes contemptuously of a “shotgun marriage.”

the historian Gary Gerstle explores in his fascinating and incisive “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order” (2022). Before the New Deal order started to falter in the late 1960s and ’70s, Gerstle writes, a majority of Americans believed that capitalism should be managed by a strong state; in the neoliberal order that followed, a majority of Americans believed that the state should be constrained by free markets. Each order began to break down when its traditional ways of solving problems didn’t seem to work

capitalism, according to Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, has obtained the status of civic religion. In “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market,” the authors argue that industry groups and wealthy donors have engaged in a concerted campaign to promote “market fundamentalism” — “a vision of growth and innovation by unfettered markets where government just gets out of the way.”

The main implication of “The Big Myth” seems to be that “market fundamentalism” is so horrifically egregious — enriching the few and despoiling the planet — that Americans had to be plied with propaganda to believe in it.

as Gerstle’s book shows, neoliberal ideas proved so seductive because they also happened to dovetail with the stories that Americans wanted to tell about themselves, emphasizing individuality and freedom.

A new generation of swashbuckling billionaires entertain the prospect of secession, using their money to realize fantasies of escape, whether through seasteading or spaceships. The book quotes one seasteading enthusiast declaring, “Democracy is not the answer,” but merely “the current industry standard.”

Slobodian’s excellent if discomfiting new book, “Crack-Up Capitalism” (forthcoming in April), explores other neoliberal evasions of the nation-state: tax havens, special economic zones, gated communities — enclaves that are “freed from ordinary forms of regulation.

in “Globalists” (2018) the historian Quinn Slobodian argues that neoliberals have found ways not just to liberate markets but to “encase” them in international institutions, thereby shielding capitalist activities from democratic accountability. He observes that neoliberals were especially alarmed after World War II by decolonization, adopting a condescending “racialized language” that pitted “the rational West,” with its trade rules and property laws, against a postcolonial South, “with its ‘emotional’ commitment to sovereignty.”