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Mr. Jobs didn’t trust third-party developers to offer the same level of aesthetically pleasing and stable experiences that Apple programmers could produce. He was convinced that the phone’s carefully designed native features were enough. It was “an iPod that made phone calls,” Mr. Grignon said to me.

Practically speaking, to be a minimalist smartphone user means that you deploy this device for a small number of features that do things you value (and that the phone does particularly well), and then outside of these activities, put it away

Mr. Jobs probably got it right the first time: Many of us would be better off returning to his original minimalist vision for our phones.

Under what I call the “constant companion model,” we now see our smartphones as always-on portals to information. Instead of improving activities that we found important before this technology existed, this model changes what we pay attention to in the first place — often in ways designed to benefit the stock price of attention-economy conglomerates, not our satisfaction and well-being.

This approach dethrones this gadget from a position of constant companion down to a luxury object, like a fancy bike or a high-end blender, that gives you great pleasure when you use it but doesn’t dominate your entire day

To succeed with this approach, a useful first step is to remove from your smartphone any apps that make money from your attention. This includes social media, addictive games and newsfeeds that clutter your screen with “breaking” notifications.

Turning our attention to professional activities, if your work doesn’t absolutely demand that you be accessible by email when away from your desk, delete the Gmail app or disconnect the built-in email client from your office servers.

Once you’ve stripped away the digital chatter clamoring for your attention, your smartphone will return to something closer to the role originally conceived by Mr. Jobs. It will become a well-designed object that comes out occasionally throughout your day to support — not subvert — your efforts to live well:

The iPhone is a fantastic phone, but it was never meant to be the foundation for a new form of existence in which the digital increasingly encroaches on the analog

Change could come in many guises: for example, some form of Medicare expansion, government negotiations on drug prices or enhancing the power of the Affordable Care Act. The more fundamental the reform, the more severe the economic effect.

The first casualties of a Medicare for all plan, said Kevin Schulman, a physician-economist at Stanford, would be the “intermediaries that add to cost, not quality.” For example, the armies of administrators, coders, billers and claims negotiators who make good middle-class salaries and have often spent years in school learning these skills.

Stanford researchers estimate that 5,000 community hospitals would lose more than $151 billion under a Medicare for all plan; that would translate into the loss of 860,000 to 1.5 million jobs. A Navigant study found that a typical midsize, nonprofit hospital system would have a net revenue loss of 22 percent.

Medicare for all would result in job losses (mostly among administrators) “somewhere in the range of two million” — about half on the insurers’ side and half employed in hospitals and doctors’ offices to argue with the former.

“What we can’t quantify is the effect that high health care costs have had on non-health care industries.”

The expense of paying for employees’ health care has depressed wages and entrepreneurship, he said. He described a textile manufacturer that moved more than 1,000 jobs out of the country because it couldn’t afford to pay for insurance for its workers. Such decisions have become common in recent years.

The S&P 500-stock index has risen more than 23 percent since Election Day last year. Along with a rising real estate market, that's helped to push the nation's total household wealth to $96.9 trillion. However, as NPR noted last spring, only about half the people in the country own stocks either directly or through retirement accounts.

Workers may be more reluctant to switch jobs

Government work has the lowest turnover, with a rate of 1.6% in November.

may not find high enough wages elsewhere to change jobs

Workers are also less mobile, in part due to a spouse’s job or other family concerns.

long overhang from the deep recession may weigh on some workers’ psyches

Changes to the tax law could cause turnover rates to pick up modestly this year

Research has shown that some of the disproportionate impact on women was driven by the need to care for children during the pandemic, a circumstance that is often not captured in the official unemployment rate, which accounts only for people actively seeking work.

Even among women, however, white women have not experienced the same changes in employment levels as women of color.

Comparing the percentage change in employment totals from a year ago is a useful benchmark for how hard the pandemic hit the American work force. But to see how the recovery is worsening inequality in the economy, it’s important to look at where different groups started from.

Workers on the older and younger ends of the spectrum also experienced outsize losses. Younger people, who also tend to be overrepresented in some of the most affected industries like food service, were much more likely to lose work early in the outbreak and are still among the farthest from their prepandemic employment levels. However, they have regained jobs more rapidly than older people, who may be more wary of returning to work and increasing their exposure to the coronavirus.

According to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group, workers in the lowest quartile of earners lost almost eight million jobs from 2019 to 2020, while the highest wage earners gained jobs.

How hard is it for any group, whether it is racial, political or ethnic, to come to terms with losing power and status? What encourages desperate behavior and a willingness to believe a pack of lies?

I posed these questions to a wide range of experts. This column explores their replies.

The population of U.S. Citizens who’ve lost the most power in the past 40 years, who aren’t competing well to get into college or get high paying jobs, whose marital prospects have dimmed, and who are outraged, are those I believe were most likely to be in on the attack.

White supremacy and frank racism are prime motivators, and they combined with other elements to fuel the insurrection: a groundswell of anger directed specifically at elites and an addictive lust for revenge against those they see as the agents of their disempowerment.

It is this admixture of factors that makes the insurgency that wrested control of the House and Senate so dangerous — and is likely to spark new forms of violence in the future.

While most acute among those possessing high status and power, Anderson said,People in general are sensitive to status threats and to any potential losses of social standing, and they respond to those threats with stress, anxiety, anger, and sometimes even violence

The terrorist attacks on 9/11, the Weatherman bombings in protest of the Vietnam War, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, or the assassination of abortion providers, may be motivated by different ideological beliefs but nonetheless share a common theme: The people who did these things appear to be motivated by strong moral conviction. Although some argue that engaging in behaviors like these requires moral disengagement, we find instead that they require maximum moral engagement and justification.

“lower class individuals experience greater vigilance to threat, relative to high status individuals, leading them to perceive greater hostility in their environment.”

This increased vigilance, Brinke and Keltner continue, createsa bias such that relatively low socio-economic status individuals perceive the powerful as dominant and threatening — endorsing a coercive theory of power

There is evidence that many non-college white Americans who have been undergoing what psychiatrists call “involuntary subordination” or “involuntary defeat” both resent and mourn their loss of centrality and what they perceive as their growing invisibility.

Before Trump, many of those who became his supporters suffered from what Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, describes as pervasive “unhappiness, stress and lack of hope” without a narrative to legitimate their condition:

When the jobs went away, families fell apart. There was no narrative other than the classic American dream that everyone who works hard can get ahead, and the implicit correlate was that those who fall behind and are on welfare are losers, lazy, and often minorities.

What, however, could prompt a mob — including not only members of the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Bois but also many seemingly ordinary Americans drawn to Trump — to break into the Capitol?

One possible answer: a mutated form of moral certitude based on the belief that one’s decline in social and economic status is the result of unfair, if not corrupt, decisions by others, especially by so-called elites.

there is evidence that individuals of lower social class are more cynical than those occupying higher classes, and that this cynicism is directed toward out-group members — that is, those that occupy higher classes.

violence is:considered to be the essence of evil. It is the prototype of immorality. But an examination of violent acts and practices across cultures and throughout history shows just the opposite. When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do it because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.

“Most violence,” Fiske and Rai contend, “is morally motivated.”

A key factor working in concert to aggravate the anomie and disgruntlement in many members of Trump’s white working-class base is their inability to obtain a college education, a limitation that blocks access to higher paying jobs and lowers their supposed “value” in marriage markets.

A major development since the end of the “Great Compression” of the 30 years or so after World War II, when there was less inequality and relatively greater job security, at least for white male workers, is that the differential rate of return on education and training is now much higher.

there isvery consistent and compelling evidence to suggest the some of what we have witnessed this past week is a reflection of the angst, anger, and refusal to accept an “America”’ in which White (Christian) Americans are losing dominance, be it political, material, and/or cultural. And, I use the term dominance here, because it is not simply a loss of status. It is a loss of power. A more racially, ethnically, religiously diverse US that is also a democracy requires White Americans to acquiesce to the interests and concerns of racial/ethnic and religious minorities.

In this new world, Federico argues, “promises of broad-based economic security” were replaced by a job market whereyou can have dignity, but it must be earned through market or entrepreneurial success (as the Reagan/Thatcher center-right would have it) or the meritocratic attainment of professional status (as the center-left would have it). But obviously, these are not avenues available to all, simply because society has only so many positions for captains of industry and educated professionals.

The result, Federico notes, is that “group consciousness is likely to emerge on the basis of education and training” and when “those with less education see themselves as being culturally very different from an educated stratum of the population that is more socially liberal and cosmopolitan, then the sense of group conflict is deepened.”

In their paper “Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage From 1940 to 2003,” Christine R. Schwartz and Robert D. Mare, professors of sociology at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California-Los Angeles, wrote that the “most striking” data in their research, “is the decline in odds that those with very low levels of education marry up.”

Trump, Richeson continued,leaned into the underlying White nationalist sentiments that had been on the fringe in his campaign for the presidency and made his campaign about re-centering Whiteness as what it actually means to be American and, by implication, delegitimizing claims for greater racial equity, be it in policing or any other important domain of American life.

Whites in the last 60 years have seen minoritized folks gain more political power, economic and educational opportunity. Even though these gains are grossly exaggerated, Whites experience them as a loss in group status.

all the rights revolutions — civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights — have been key to the emergence of the contemporary right wing:As the voices of women, people of color, and other traditionally marginalized communities grow louder the frame of reference from which we tell the story of American is expanding

The white male story is not irrelevant but it’s insufficient, and when you have a group of people that are accustomed to the spotlight see the camera lens pan away, it’s a threat to their sense of self. It’s not surprising that QAnon support started to soar in the weeks after B.L.M. QAnon offers a way for white evangelicals to place blame on (fictional) bad people instead of a broken system. It’s an organization that validates the source of Q-Anoners insecurity — irrelevance — and in its place offers a steady source of self-righteousness and acceptance.

“compared to other advanced countries caught up in the transition to knowledge society, the United States appears to be in a much more vulnerable position to a strong right-wing populist challenge.”

First, Kitschelt noted,The difference between economic winners and losers, captured by income inequality, poverty, and illiteracy rates within the dominant white ethnicity, is much greater than in most other Western countries, and there is no dense welfare state safety net to buffer the fall of people into unemployment and poverty.

Another key factor, Kitschelt pointed out, is thatThe decline of male status in the family is more sharply articulated than in Europe, hastened in the U.S. by economic inequality (men fall further under changing economic circumstances) and religiosity (leading to pockets of greater male resistance to the redefinition of gender roles).

More religious and less well-educated whites see Donald Trump as one of their own despite his being so obviously a child of privilege. He defends America as a Christian nation. He defends English as our national language. He is unashamed in stating that the loyalty of any government should be to its own citizens — both in terms of how we should deal with noncitizens here and how our foreign policy should be based on the doctrine of “America First.”

nlike most European countries, Kitschelt wrote,The United States had a civil war over slavery in the 19th century and a continuous history of structural racism and white oligarchical rule until the 1960s, and in many aspects until the present. Europe lacks this legacy.

for the moment the nation faces, for all intents and purposes, the makings of a civil insurgency. What makes this insurgency unusual in American history is that it is based on Trump’s false claim that he, not Joe Biden, won the presidency, that the election was stolen by malefactors in both parties, and that majorities in both branches of Congress no longer represent the true will of the people.

We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president; the same is, I believe, true of loss of manufacturing jobs as plants moved overseas.

President Obama, Grofman wrote,responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama. And the various Covid aid packages, while they include payments to the unemployed, are also helping big businesses more than the small businesses that have been and will be permanently going out of business due to the lockdowns (and they include various forms of pork.

“white less well-educated voters didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party deserted them.”

On top of that, in the United States.Many lines of conflict mutually reinforce each other rather than crosscut: Less educated whites tend to be more Evangelical and more racist, and they live in geographical spaces with less economic momentum.

He speaks in a language that ordinary people can understand. He makes fun of the elites who look down on his supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and who think it is a good idea to defund the police who protect them and to prioritize snail darters over jobs. He appoints judges and justices who are true conservatives. He believes more in gun rights than in gay rights. He rejects political correctness and the language-police and woke ideology as un-American. And he promises to reclaim the jobs that previous presidents (of both parties) allowed to be shipped abroad. In sum, he offers a relatively coherent set of beliefs and policies that are attractive to many voters and which he has been better at seeing implemented than any previous Republican president.

What Trump supporters who rioted in D.C. share are the beliefs that Trump is their hero, regardless of his flaws, and that defeating Democrats is a holy war to be waged by any means necessary.

In the end, Grofman said,Trying to explain the violence on the Hill by only talking about what the demonstrators believe is to miss the point. They are guilty, but they wouldn’t be there were it not for the Republican politicians and the Republican attorneys general, and most of all the president, who cynically exaggerate and lie and create fake conspiracy theories and demonize the opposition. It is the enablers of the mob who truly deserve the blame and the shame.

“With the pandemic raging, people are losing work and losing hope,” he said.

At the same time, economists said the concentrated nature of the December job losses suggested that the damage from the latest wave of coronavirus cases had not spread to the rest of the economy.

Most forecasters expect the economy to remain weak and perhaps shed more jobs in early 2021. But they are becoming increasingly optimistic about the rest of the year.

Nearly four million Americans have been unemployed for more than six months, the standard threshold for long-term unemployment.

Retailers, which laid off millions of workers last spring, added more than 120,000 jobs last month, a sign that they have learned to adapt to the pandemic.

Robert Branca, who owns two dozen Dunkin’ locations in Massachusetts, said that business picked up steadily over the summer but that it had tailed off since then.

Federal aid may also be crucial in another hard-hit category: the public sector.

“There are a lot of rich people who’ve saved a lot of money and really want to spend it,” said Tara Sinclair, an economist at George Washington University.

If that pattern repeats, it could have long-term consequences, particularly for people with disabilities, criminal records or other characteristics that make it hard to find jobs even in the best of times.

One explanation for why so many come to that conclusion in the first place has to do with the widening of the gulf between America’s coasts and the region in between them

Cities that can entice well-educated professionals are booming, even as “flyover” communities have largely seen good-paying factory work automated or shipped overseas, replaced to a large extent with insecure jobs: Walmart greeters, independent-contractor truck drivers, and the like.

a college degree has become the true mark of individual success in America—the sort of white-picket-fence fantasy that drives people well into their elder years to head back to school

the white working class that emerged in the 19th century—stitched together from long-combative European ethnic groups—strived to set themselves apart from African Americans, Chinese, and other vilified “indispensable enemies,” and build, by contrast (at least in their view), a sense of workingman pride.

this last election was a reminder that white male resentment of “nasty” women and “uppity” racial and other minorities remains strong.

That said, many Americans with more stable, better-paid jobs have blind spots of their own. For all of their professed open-mindedness in other areas, millions of the well-educated and well-off who live in or near big cities tend to endorse the notion, explicitly or implicitly, that education determines a person’s value

white voters from hard-hit rural areas and hollowed-out industrial towns have turned away from a Democratic Party that has offered them little in the way of hope and inspiration and much in the way of disdain and blame.

Well into the 21st century, two-thirds of Americans age 25 and over do not have a bachelor’s degree. The labor market has become more polarized, as highly paid jobs for workers with middling levels of education and skill dwindle away.

As much as both liberals and conservatives have touted education as a means of attaining social mobility, economic trends suggest that this strategy has limits, especially in its ability to do anything about the country’s rapidly growing inequalities

such a fervent belief in the transformative power of education also implies that a lack of it amounts to personal failure—being a “stupid” person

even some workers I spoke to—all former union members—said they felt that people without a good education did not deserve to make a good living.

The rules of meritocracy that these blue-collar workers say they admire barely apply to the very top levels of the economy. Groups of elite workers—professionals, managers, financial workers, tenured professors—continue to wall themselves off from competition. They still organize collectively, through lobbying, credentialing, licensing, and other strategies. But fewer ordinary workers have the same ability to do so

What has emerged in the new economy, then, is a stunted meritocracy: meritocracy for you, but not for me

From gripes about the backwardness and boredom of small-town America to jokes about “rednecks” and “white trash” that are still acceptable to say in polite company, it’s no wonder that the white working class believes that others look down on them. That’s not to say their situation is worse than that of the black and Latino working classes—it’s to say that where exactly they fit in the hierarchy of oppression is a question that leads nowhere, given how much all these groups have struggled in recent decades.

However exaggerated by stereotypes, the urbane, urban values of the well-educated professional class, with its postmodern cultural relativism and its rejection of old dogmas, are not attractive alternatives to what the working class has long relied on as a source of solace.

In the absence of other sources of meaning, Americans are left with meritocracy, a game of status and success, along with the often ruthless competition it engenders. And the consequence of a perspective of self-reliance—Americans, compared to people in other countries, hold a particularly strong belief that people succeed through their own hard work—is a sense that those who fail are somehow inferior

The concept of grace comes from the Christian teaching that everyone, not just the deserving, is saved by God’s grace. Grace in the broader sense that I (an agnostic) am using, however, can be both secular and religious. In the simplest terms, it is about refusing to divide the world into camps of deserving and undeserving, as those on both the right and left are wont to do

It rejects an obsession with excusing nothing, with measuring and judging the worth of people based on everything from a spotty résumé to an offensive comment.

Unlike an egalitarian viewpoint focused on measuring and leveling inequalities, grace rejects categories of right and wrong, just and unjust, and offers neither retribution nor restitution, but forgiveness.

With a perspective of grace, it becomes clearer that America, the wealthiest of nations, possesses enough prosperity to provide adequately for all. It becomes easier to part with one’s hard-won treasure in order to pull others up, even if those being helped seem “undeserving”—a label that today serves as a justification for opposing the sharing of wealth on the grounds that it is a greedy plea from the resentful, idle, and envious.

ignorance shouldn’t be considered an irremediable sin. Yet many of the liberal, affluent, and college-educated too often reduce the beliefs of a significant segment of the population to a mash of evil and delusion

One of the few things he could really depend on was his church. He volunteered on their Sunday-school bus, leading the kids in singing songs. “It helps to be around young people,” he said. For many of the jobless workers I interviewed, religion and tradition provided a sense of community and a feeling that their lives had purpose.

While there are no simple explanations for the desperation and anger visible in many predominantly white working-class communities, perhaps the most astute and original diagnosis came from the rabbi and activist Michael Lerner, who, in assessing Donald Trump’s victory, looked from a broader vantage point than most. Underneath the populist ire, he wrote, was a suffering “rooted in the hidden injuries of class and in the spiritual crisis that the global competitive marketplace generates.”

That cuts right to it. The modern economy privileges the well-educated and highly-skilled, while giving them an excuse to denigrate the people at the bottom (both white and nonwhite) as lazy, untalented, uneducated, and unsophisticated.

many well-off Americans from across the political spectrum scorn the white working class in particular for holding onto religious superstitions and politically incorrect views, and pity them for working lousy jobs at dollar stores and fast-food restaurants that the better-off rarely set foot in

This system of categorizing Americans—the logical extension of life in what can be called an extreme meritocracy—can be pernicious: The culture holds up those who succeed as examples, however anecdotal, that everyone can make it in America. Meanwhile, those who fail attract disdain and indifference from the better-off, their low status all the more painful because it is regarded as deserved.

the shame of low status afflicts not just the unemployed, but also the underemployed. Their days are no longer filled with the dignified, if exhausting, work of making real things.

For less educated workers (of all races) who have struggled for months or years to get another job, failure is a source of deep shame and a reason for self-blame. Without the right markers of merit—a diploma, marketable skills, a good job—they are “scrubs” who don’t deserve romantic partners, “takers” living parasitically off the government, “losers” who won’t amount to anything

Even those who consider themselves lucky to have jobs can feel a sense of despair, seeing how poorly they stand relative to others, or how much their communities have unraveled, or how dim their children’s future seems to be: Research shows that people judge how well they’re doing through constant comparisons, and by these personal metrics they are hurting, whatever the national unemployment rate may be.

tech supporters of U.B.I. consider machine intelligence to be something like a natural bounty for society: The country has struck oil, and now it can hand out checks to each of its citizens.

These supporters argue machine intelligence will produce so much economic surplus that we could collectively afford to liberate much of humanity from both labor and suffering.

As computers perform more of our work, we’d all be free to become artists, scholars, entrepreneurs or otherwise engage our passions in a society no longer centered on the drudgery of daily labor.

“For a couple hundred years, we’ve constructed our entire world around the need to work. Now we’re talking about more than just a tweak to the economy — it’s as foundational a departure as when we went from an agrarian society to an industrial one.”

“I think it’s a bad use of a human to spend 20 years of their life driving a truck back and forth across the United States,” Mr. Wenger said. “That’s not what we aspire to do as humans — it’s a bad use of a human brain — and automation and basic income is a development that will free us to do lots of incredible things that are more aligned with what it means to be human.”

There is an urgency to the techies’ interest in U.B.I. They argue that machine intelligence reached an inflection point in the last couple of years, and that technological progress now looks destined to change how most of the world works.

Wage growth is sluggish, job security is nonexistent, inequality looks inexorable, and the ideas that once seemed like a sure path to a better future (like taking on debt for college) are in doubt. Even where technology has created more jobs, like the so-called gig economy work created by services like Uber, it has only added to our collective uncertainty about the future of work.

people are looking at these trends and realizing these questions about the future of work are more real and immediate than they guessed,”

A cynic might see the interest of venture capitalists in U.B.I. as a way for them to atone for their complicity in the tech that might lead to permanent changes in the global economy.

they don’t see U.B.I. merely as a defense of the current social order. Instead they see automation and U.B.I. as the most optimistic path toward wider social progress.

When you give everyone free money, what do people do with their time? Do they goof off, or do they try to pursue more meaningful pursuits? Do they become more entrepreneurial? How would U.B.I. affect economic inequality? How would it alter people’s psychology and mood? Do we, as a species, need to be employed to feel fulfilled, or is that merely a legacy of postindustrial capitalism?

Proponents say these questions will be answered by research, which in turn will prompt political change. For now, they argue the proposal is affordable if we alter tax and welfare policies to pay for it, and if we account for the ways technological progress in health care and energy will reduce the amount necessary to provide a basic cost of living.

They also note that increasing economic urgency will push widespread political acceptance of the idea. “There’s a sense that growing inequality is intractable, and that we need to do something about it,

Andrew L. Stern, a former president of the Service Employees International Union, who is working on a book about U.B.I., compared the feeling of the current anxiety around jobs to a time of war. “I grew up during the Vietnam War, and my parents were antiwar for one reason: I could be drafted,” he said.

Today, as people across all income levels become increasingly worried about how they and their children will survive in tech-infatuated America, “we are back to the Vietnam War when it comes to jobs,

The impacts of technological change take their time appearing. They also vary hugely from industry to industry. Although in many simple economic models technology pairs neatly with capital and labour to produce output, in practice technological changes do not affect all workers the same way. Some find that their skills are complementary to new technologies. Others find themselves out of work.

The case for a highly disruptive period of economic growth is made by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at MIT, in “The Second Machine Age”, a book to be published later this month. Like the first great era of industrialisation, they argue, it should deliver enormous benefits—but not without a period of disorienting and uncomfortable change

Their argument rests on an underappreciated aspect of the exponential growth in chip processing speed, memory capacity and other computer metrics: that the amount of progress computers will make in the next few years is always equal to the progress they have made since the very beginning. Mr Brynjolfsson and Mr McAfee reckon that the main bottleneck on innovation is the time it takes society to sort through the many combinations and permutations of new technologies and business models.

A startling progression of inventions seems to bear their thesis out. Ten years ago technologically minded economists pointed to driving cars in traffic as the sort of human accomplishment that computers were highly unlikely to master. Now Google cars are rolling round California driver-free

Even after computers beat grandmasters at chess (once thought highly unlikely), nobody thought they could take on people at free-form games played in natural language. Then Watson, a pattern-recognising supercomputer developed by IBM, bested the best human competitors in America’s popular and syntactically tricksy general-knowledge quiz show “Jeopardy!” Versions of Watson are being marketed to firms

Text-mining programs will displace professional jobs in legal services. Biopsies will be analysed more efficiently by image-processing software than lab technicians. Accountants may follow travel agents and tellers into the unemployment line as tax software improves. Machines are already turning basic sports results and financial data into good-enough news stories.

A taxi driver will be a rarity in many places by the 2030s or 2040s. That sounds like bad news for journalists who rely on that most reliable source of local knowledge and prejudice—but will there be many journalists left to care? Will there be airline pilots? Or traffic cops? Or soldiers?

Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and a much-read blogger, writes in his most recent book, “Average is Over”, that rich economies seem to be bifurcating into a small group of workers with skills highly complementary with machine intelligence, for whom he has high hopes, and the rest, for whom not so much.

the second machine age will make such trial and error easier. It will be shockingly easy to launch a startup, bring a new product to market and sell to billions of global consumers (see article). Those who create or invest in blockbuster ideas may earn unprecedented returns as a result.

Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, argues along similar lines that America may be pioneering a hyper-unequal economic model in which a top 1% of capital-owners and “supermanagers” grab a growing share of national income and accumulate an increasing concentration of national wealth

The rise of the middle-class—a 20th-century innovation—was a hugely important political and social development across the world. The squeezing out of that class could generate a more antagonistic, unstable and potentially dangerous politics.

The current doldrum in wages may, like that of the early industrial era, be a temporary matter, with the good times about to roll (see chart 3). These jobs may look distinctly different from those they replace. Just as past mechanisation freed, or forced, workers into jobs requiring more cognitive dexterity, leaps in machine intelligence could create space for people to specialise in more emotive occupations, as yet unsuited to machines: a world of artists and therapists, love counsellors and yoga instructors.

though growth in areas of the economy that are not easily automated provides jobs, it does not necessarily help real wages. Mr Summers points out that prices of things-made-of-widgets have fallen remarkably in past decades; America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons that today you could get the equivalent of an early 1980s television for a twentieth of its then price,

owever, prices of things not made of widgets, most notably college education and health care, have shot up

As innovation continues, automation may bring down costs in some of those stubborn areas as well, though those dominated by scarcity—such as houses in desirable places—are likely to resist the trend, as may those where the state keeps market forces at bay. But if innovation does make health care or higher education cheaper, it will probably be at the cost of more jobs, and give rise to yet more concentration of income.

Adaptation to past waves of progress rested on political and policy responses. The most obvious are the massive improvements in educational attainment brought on first by the institution of universal secondary education and then by the rise of university attendance. Policies aimed at similar gains would now seem to be in order. But as Mr Cowen has pointed out, the gains of the 19th and 20th centuries will be hard to duplicate.

Boosting the skills and earning power of the children of 19th-century farmers and labourers took little more than offering schools where they could learn to read, write and do algebra. Pushing a large proportion of college graduates to complete graduate work successfully will be harder and more expensive. Perhaps cheap and innovative online education will indeed make new attainment possible. But as Mr Cowen notes, such programmes may tend to deliver big gains only for the most conscientious students.

Everyone should be able to benefit from productivity gains—in that, Keynes was united with his successors. His worry about technological unemployment was mainly a worry about a “temporary phase of maladjustment” as society and the economy adjusted to ever greater levels of productivity

However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages.

Even if trade flows begin to balance and there is less job loss in the future, the integration of the U.S. economy with those of its low-wage trading partners will pull down wages for many American workers, and will contribute to the ever rising inequality of incomes in the U.S. economy.

The mounting pressure applied by organized labor can be seen if you compare the votes of California House Democrats in 1993 on the North American Free Trade Agreement with votes on granting approval this year to fast track the TPP.

Nafta was approved in 1993, 234 to 200 by the full House, with Republicans in favor 132-43 and Democrats opposed 156-102. On June 18 of this year, the House passed fast-track legislation, but the partisan differences were much sharper: Republicans voted in favor, 190 to 50; Democrats opposed the legislation 158-28.

In between the votes on Nafta in 1993 and this year’s TPP, there was one major development pushing the union movement to the wall: the decline in manufacturing employment as trade with China accelerated in the 2000s.

The upstairs-downstairs character of the Democratic coalition proved to be the party’s strength in Obama’s two elections, and its continued viability is crucial to Clinton’s prospects next year. Trade, taxes and social spending are subjects that have not yet achieved progressive consensus and retain the potential to fracture the party

Trade always implies job destruction — this is the whole point of trade, namely to destroy jobs in import competing sectors to create them in exporting sectors, thus allowing for reallocation to sectors with comparative advantage, leading to an increased efficiency, the basis for the gains from trade.

Trade was linked to job losses in manufacturing that happened in the 1980s and then again in 2001-2004; it’s not happening now, because those jobs that could be shifted have been.” The bigger problem, Shapiro wrote, “is incomes – a majority of households saw their incomes decline from 2002-2013, even as they aged – i.e., people earned less at 40 than they had at 29.

In addition, one of “the ripple effects of globalization” is an intensification of competition, which, in turn, forces businesses to cut jobs and wages. “When people are feeling squeezed or worse economically, they retreat and see trade as a threat.”

The Democratic opposition to free trade has intensified in large part because of the current prominence of liberal-populist strength and the liberal tilt of individual – as opposed to special interest — donors.

The conflict between a pro-free-trade presidential wing of the Democratic Party and an anti-free-trade congressional wing has the potential to become a permanent fixture of the center-left. The conflict gives expression to both the downscale forces in the party that lean against trade and the pro-trade upscale forces.

from 2000 (the year that Congress granted China permanent normal trade relations status) to 2010, the number of manufacturing jobs fell by 34 percent, from just over 17 million to 11.5 million.

The real question, then, is how long will left and right within the Democratic coalition tolerate an inherently unstable posture on such a core issue as how this country does business abroad, and how it provides a livelihood for its citizens.

At 2.2 percent, average hourly wage growth is beating (very low) inflation, meaning paychecks have more buying power.

The underemployment rate, at 9.7 percent, remains elevated by 6 million part-time workers who would rather be full-timers but still can’t find the work.

the underemployment rate needs to fall another point before you can call the job market really tight

The underlying trend of job gains is over 200,000 per month, a strong enough clip to nudge the jobless rate even lower than its current eight-year low of 4.9 percent.

As you can see in the recent data, the better job market is giving people a reason to come back in and see what they can find.

It matters a great deal who they appoint in positions that directly affect fiscal policy. They appoint governors to the Federal Reserve. They set trade policy and deal with international competitors.

Unless the next president is smart and persuasive enough to get Congress to apply countercyclical policy to the next downturn, whatever gains folks have seen may be short-lived.

Many in the electorate are mad about the inequality embedded in the economy in a way that means they’ve only recently seen some gains (and that’s an average result — there are places that are still facing depressed conditions).

People are justifiably angry about an economy in which reckless finance brought us the recession, got bailed out and recovered way before the rest of us.

Times were once very good out here on the high desert of east-central Oregon, and a place like Burns — remote and obscure until a group of armed protesters took over a nearby federal wildlife sanctuary early this month

These days, cities like Portland, Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho, are gobbling up more of the jobs than ever, especially the good ones.

Half the jobs in Oregon, for example, are now clustered in just three counties in and around Portland, according to a study by Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research group in Bozeman, Mont

So the population grows ever older, poorer and less educated, and opportunities continue to dry up: The county has 10 percent fewer jobs than it did in 1979, according to state figures.

The pattern of poverty has shifted nationally as we

poverty rates fell or remained stable across the Northeast, South and Midwest — but rose significantly across the West, a Pew Research Center study said in 2014

What happened was a steep downturn, especially in the timber industry, which has all but disappeared

Changes in the wood industry were clearly also having an effect over those years, with more wood buyers shopping in Canada and more mills becoming automated, but many people here also said they thought the United States Forest Service

. Comparatively speaking, there are now much higher numbers of people in their prime working-age years whose incomes are below the federal poverty measure for a family.

But the role of government in what happened here is also more nuanced and complex than the black-hat-white-hat imagery presented by Mr. Bundy and his companions.

Government paychecks, like the one Mr. Ward earns at his job at the prison, have helped keep Harney County afloat as private jobs have declined

People like the Wards said that when environmental groups filed lawsuits and applied pressure at the State Capitol in Salem or in Washington, D.C.,

Some residents and local officials say they believe the history and relationship between the people and the government is being distorted by the protesters,

“People feel powerless,” said State Representative Cliff Bentz, a Republican whose district covers much of eastern Oregon, includ Harney County. “As the rural areas grow more and more poor and urban areas grow more and more wealthy, there’s a shift in power.”

So-called continuing claims rose to nearly 5.3 million for the week ended Jan. 2, from 5.1 million a week earlier, according to the Labor Department. That marked the first weekly increase since November.

Hunter Keegan, 27 years old, of Fairfax County, Va., said he lost his job as a corporate recruiter for a health-care company last April. He said he immediately began applying for work in the greater Washington, D.C., area as well as in other parts of the country where the labor market seems to be faring better.

Seasonal quirks and the passage last month of a $900 billion Covid-19 relief bill could have muddied the claims picture somewhat.

At the same time, the bill added the $300-a-week supplement for those receiving unemployment benefits through March 14 and extended two federal pandemic programs that otherwise would have paid out their final benefits in December. News of the relief package could also have contributed to an uptick in initial claims by encouraging additional workers to apply or previously eligible workers who exhausted their benefits to reapply.

The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths.

Furthermore, local economies are struggling in places where more people can work from home.

In other words, redder places had milder job losses, and the relationship is strong.

Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic.

So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living.

The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories). All other recent recessions have hit goods-related industries worse, which tend to be more concentrated in Republican-leaning places.

Some people are trying to figure out the impact from the bottom up, looking at various kinds of work and guesstimating how much of that work can be replaced or augmented by A.I. The most widely circulated numbers come from Goldman Sachs, whose base case has A.I. increasing the growth rate of productivity — output per person-hour — by almost 1.5 percentage points a year over a decade, for a total over that decade of about 15 percent:

By the time the productivity surge tapered off, productivity was about 12 percent higher than the previous trend would have led you to expect it would be. Since A.I. is arguably an even more profound innovation than the technologies that drove the 1995-2005 boom, 15 percent isn’t at all unreasonable.

economists often identify total factor productivity growth with technological progress. That’s sometimes a bit dubious, since T.F.P. is really a “measure of our ignorance,” simply the part of economic growth we can’t explain otherwise. But from 1995 to 2005 it seems fairly clear that the boom was driven by information technology.

Here’s another view of that boom, in which I show the natural log of productivity — so that a straight line corresponds to steady growth — and plot a continuation of the growth rate from 1973 to 1995 (the red line), so that you can see how actual growth compared:

Is this plausible? Actually, yes. One parallel, if you’ve studied the historical relationship between technology and productivity, is the productivity boom from 1995 to 2005, which followed decades of weak productivity growth.

But will higher productivity make us richer or simply reduce the number of jobs? Fears of technological unemployment — a term invented by none other than John Maynard Keynes in 1930 — go back at least to the early 19th century.

While technology has often eliminated some jobs, however, historically this has always been, as Keynes wrote, “a temporary phase of maladjustment,” with other forms of employment rising to replace the jobs lost

while there’s no reason to believe that what we’re calling A.I. will lead to mass unemployment, it may well hurt the people who are displaced from their jobs and either have trouble finding new employment or are obliged to accept lower wages. Who are the potential losers?

The likely answer is that big impacts will fall on relatively high-end administrative jobs, many of them currently highly paid, while blue-collar jobs will be largely unscathed

there are other applications of big data that may affect blue-collar work. For example, with all the buzz around ChatGPT there has been relatively little attention paid to the fact that after years of failed hype, self-driving cars are actually beginning to go into service.

Still, at this point it seems more likely than not that A.I. will, unlike technological progress over the past 40 years, be a force for lower rather than higher income inequality.

rapidly rising interest rates have made debt considerably more worrisome. Conventional estimates of the economy’s long-run sustainable growth rate, like those of the Federal Reserve, tend to put it around 1.8 percent. And real interest rates on federal debt are now above that number:

if optimistic estimates of the boost from the technology are at all right, growth will be much higher than 1.8 percent over the next decade, and debt won’t be a big concern after all — especially because faster growth will boost revenue and reduce the budget deficit.

All of this is, of course, highly speculative. Nobody really knows how big an impact A.I. will have. But again, it doesn’t have to be “true” artificial intelligence to be a big deal for the economy, and the best guess is that it will probably matter a lot.

All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.

Sulzberger seems to underestimate the struggle he is in, that all journalism and indeed America itself is in

In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias

on their own, these qualities have no chance against the Times’s new, more dangerous problem, which is in crucial respects the opposite of the old one.

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether

the internet knocked the industry off its foundations. Local newspapers were the proving ground between college campuses and national newsrooms. As they disintegrated, the national news media lost a source of seasoned reporters and many Americans lost a journalism whose truth they could verify with their own eyes.

far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage:

the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.

One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down.

leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around

This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles.

Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered

. I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.

As the country became more polarised, the national media followed the money by serving partisan audiences the versions of reality they preferred

This relationship proved self-reinforcing. As Americans became freer to choose among alternative versions of reality, their polarisation intensified.

as the top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle and business, that made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters.

here have been signs the Times is trying to recover the courage of its convictions

The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.

As Sulzberger told me in the past, returning to the old standards will require agonising change. He saw that as the gradual work of many years, but I think he is mistaken. To overcome the cultural and commercial pressures the Times faces, particularly given the severe test posed by another Trump candidacy and possible presidency, its publisher and senior editors will have to be bolder than that.

As a Democrat from a family of Democrats, a graduate of Yale and a blossom of the imagined meritocracy, I had my first real chance, at Buchanan’s rallies, to see the world through the eyes of stalwart opponents of abortion, immigration and the relentlessly rising tide of modernity.

the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too.

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole.

It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe.

The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact.

It is equally hard to imagine how America’s diversity can continue to be a source of strength, rather than become a fatal flaw, if Americans are afraid or unwilling to listen to each other.

I suppose it is also pretty grandiose to think you might help fix all that. But that hope, to me, is what makes journalism worth doing.

Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favour”. That is not true of the institution today – it cannot be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream conservative argument such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise.

Most important, the Times, probably more than any other American institution, could influence the way society approached debate and engagement with opposing views. If Times Opinion demonstrated the same kind of intellectual courage and curiosity that my colleagues at the Atlantic had shown, I hoped, the rest of the media would follow.

You did not have to go along with everything that any tribe said. You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.

This fundamental honesty was vital for readers, because it equipped them to make better, more informed judgments about the world. Sometimes it might shock or upset them by failing to conform to their picture of reality. But it also granted them the respect of acknowledging that they were able to work things out for themselves.

The Atlantic did not aspire to the same role as the Times. It did not promise to serve up the news of the day without any bias. But it was to opinion journalism what the Times’s reporting was supposed to be to news: honest and open to the world.

Those were the glory days of the blog, and we hit on the idea of creating a living op-ed page, a collective of bloggers with different points of view but a shared intellectual honesty who would argue out the meaning of the news of the day

They were brilliant, gutsy writers, and their disagreements were deep enough that I used to joke that my main work as editor was to prevent fistfights.

Under its owner, David Bradley, my colleagues and I distilled our purpose as publishing big arguments about big ideas

we also began producing some of the most important work in American journalism: Nicholas Carr on whether Google was “making us stupid”; Hanna Rosin on “the end of men”; Taylor Branch on “the shame of college sports”; Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the case for reparations”; Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt on “the coddling of the American mind”.

I was starting to see some effects of the new campus politics within the Atlantic. A promising new editor had created a digital form for aspiring freelancers to fill out, and she wanted to ask them to disclose their racial and sexual identity. Why? Because, she said, if we were to write about the trans community, for example, we would ask a trans person to write the story

There was a good argument for that, I acknowledged, and it sometimes might be the right answer. But as I thought about the old people, auto workers and abortion opponents I had learned from, I told her there was also an argument for correspondents who brought an outsider’s ignorance, along with curiosity and empathy, to the story.

A journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers, it seemed to me then, and seems even more so to me now, can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing.

In the age of the internet it is hard even for a child to sustain an “innocent eye”, but the alternative for journalists remains as dangerous as ever, to become propagandists. America has more than enough of those already.

When I looked around the Opinion department, change was not what I perceived. Excellent writers and editors were doing excellent work. But the department’s journalism was consumed with politics and foreign affairs in an era when readers were also fascinated by changes in technology, business, science and culture.

Fairly quickly, though, I realised two things: first, that if I did my job as I thought it should be done, and as the Sulzbergers said they wanted me to do it, I would be too polarising internally ever to lead the newsroom; second, that I did not want that job, though no one but my wife believed me when I said that.

there was a compensating moral and psychological privilege that came with aspiring to journalistic neutrality and open-mindedness, despised as they might understandably be by partisans. Unlike the duelling politicians and advocates of all kinds, unlike the corporate chieftains and their critics, unlike even the sainted non-profit workers, you did not have to pretend things were simpler than they actually were

On the right and left, America’s elites now talk within their tribes, and get angry or contemptuous on those occasions when they happen to overhear the other conclave. If they could be coaxed to agree what they were arguing about, and the rules by which they would argue about it, opinion journalism could serve a foundational need of the democracy by fostering diverse and inclusive debate. Who could be against that?

The large staff of op-ed editors contained only a couple of women. Although the 11 columnists were individually admirable, only two of them were women and only one was a person of colour

Not only did they all focus on politics and foreign affairs, but during the 2016 campaign, no columnist shared, in broad terms, the worldview of the ascendant progressives of the Democratic Party, incarnated by Bernie Sanders. And only two were conservative.

This last fact was of particular concern to the elder Sulzberger. He told me the Times needed more conservative voices, and that its own editorial line had become predictably left-wing. “Too many liberals,” read my notes about the Opinion line-up from a meeting I had with him and Mark Thompson, then the chief executive, as I was preparing to rejoin the paper. “Even conservatives are liberals’ idea of a conservative.” The last note I took from that meeting was: “Can’t ignore 150m conservative Americans.”

As I knew from my time at the Atlantic, this kind of structural transformation can be frightening and even infuriating for those understandably proud of things as they are. It is hard on everyone

experience at the Atlantic also taught me that pursuing new ways of doing journalism in pursuit of venerable institutional principles created enthusiasm for change. I expected that same dynamic to allay concerns at the Times.

If Opinion published a wider range of views, it would help frame a set of shared arguments that corresponded to, and drew upon, the set of shared facts coming from the newsroom.

New progressive voices were celebrated within the Times. But in contrast to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, conservative voices – even eloquent anti-Trump conservative voices – were despised, regardless of how many leftists might surround them.

The Opinion department mocked the paper’s claim to value diversity. It did not have a single black editor

Eventually, it sank in that my snotty joke was actually on me: I was the one ignorantly fighting a battle that was already lost. The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters.

Out of naivety or arrogance, I was slow to recognise that at the Times, unlike at the Atlantic, these values were no longer universally accepted, let alone esteemed

After the 9/11 attacks, as the bureau chief in Jerusalem, I spent a lot of time in the Gaza Strip interviewing Hamas leaders, recruiters and foot soldiers, trying to understand and describe their murderous ideology. Some readers complained that I was providing a platform for terrorists, but there was never any objection from within the Times.

Our role, we knew, was to help readers understand such threats, and this required empathetic – not sympathetic – reporting. This is not an easy distinction but good reporters make it: they learn to understand and communicate the sources and nature of a toxic ideology without justifying it, much less advocating it.

Today’s newsroom turns that moral logic on its head, at least when it comes to fellow Americans. Unlike the views of Hamas, the views of many Americans have come to seem dangerous to engage in the absence of explicit condemnation

Focusing on potential perpetrators – “platforming” them by explaining rather than judging their views – is believed to empower them to do more harm.

After the profile of the Ohio man was published, media Twitter lit up with attacks on the article as “normalising” Nazism and white nationalism, and the Times convulsed internally. The Times wound up publishing a cringing editor’s note that hung the writer out to dry and approvingly quoted some of the criticism, including a tweet from a Washington Post opinion editor asking, “Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies”?

the Times lacked the confidence to defend its own work

The editor’s note paraded the principle of publishing such pieces, saying it was important to “shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life”. But less light is what the readers got. As a reporter in the newsroom, you’d have to have been an idiot after that explosion to attempt such a profile

Empathetic reporting about Trump supporters became even more rare. It became a cliché among influential left-wing columnists and editors that blinkered political reporters interviewed a few Trump supporters in diners and came away suckered into thinking there was something besides racism that could explain anyone’s support for the man.

After a year spent publishing editorials attacking Trump and his policies, I thought it would be a demonstration of Timesian open-mindedness to give his supporters their say. Also, I thought the letters were interesting, so I turned over the entire editorial page to the Trump letters.

I wasn’t surprised that we got some criticism on Twitter. But I was astonished by the fury of my Times colleagues. I found myself facing an angry internal town hall, trying to justify what to me was an obvious journalistic decision

Didn’t he think other Times readers should understand the sources of Trump’s support? Didn’t he also see it was a wonderful thing that some Trump supporters did not just dismiss the Times as fake news, but still believed in it enough to respond thoughtfully to an invitation to share their views?

And if the Times could not bear to publish the views of Americans who supported Trump, why should it be surprised that those voters would not trust it?

Two years later, in 2020, Baquet acknowledged that in 2016 the Times had failed to take seriously the idea that Trump could become president partly because it failed to send its reporters out into America to listen to voters and understand “the turmoil in the country”. And, he continued, the Times still did not understand the views of many Americans

Speaking four months before we published the Cotton op-ed, he said that to argue that the views of such voters should not appear in the Times was “not journalistic”.

Conservative arguments in the Opinion pages reliably started uproars within the Times. Sometimes I would hear directly from colleagues who had the grace to confront me with their concerns; more often they would take to the company’s Slack channels or Twitter to advertise their distress in front of each other

This environment of enforced group-think, inside and outside the paper, was hard even on liberal opinion writers. One left-of-centre columnist told me that he was reluctant to appear in the New York office for fear of being accosted by colleagues.

An internal survey shortly after I left the paper found that barely half the staff, within an enterprise ostensibly devoted to telling the truth, agreed “there is a free exchange of views in this company” and “people are not afraid to say what they really think”.)

Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy.

The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious

Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias

By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”

sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.

The Times’s failure to honour its own stated principles of openness to a range of views was particularly hard on the handful of conservative writers, some of whom would complain about being flyspecked and abused by colleagues. One day when I relayed a conservative’s concern about double standards to Sulzberger, he lost his patience. He told me to inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard and he should get used to it.

A publication that promises its readers to stand apart from politics should not have different standards for different writers based on their politics. But I delivered the message. There are many things I regret about my tenure as editorial-page editor. That is the only act of which I am ashamed.

I began to think of myself not as a benighted veteran on a remote island, but as Rip Van Winkle. I had left one newspaper, had a pleasant dream for ten years, and returned to a place I barely recognised.

The new New York Times was the product of two shocks – sudden collapse, and then sudden success. The paper almost went bankrupt during the financial crisis, and the ensuing panic provoked a crisis of confidence among its leaders. Digital competitors like the HuffPost were gaining readers and winning plaudits within the media industry as innovative. They were the cool kids; Times folk were ink-stained wrinklies.

In its panic, the Times bought out experienced reporters and editors and began hiring journalists from publications like the HuffPost who were considered “digital natives” because they had never worked in print. This hiring quickly became easier, since most digital publications financed by venture capital turned out to be bad businesses

Though they might have lacked deep or varied reporting backgrounds, some of the Times’s new hires brought skills in video and audio; others were practised at marketing themselves – building their brands, as journalists now put it – in social media. Some were brilliant and fiercely honest, in keeping with the old aspirations of the paper.

critically, the Times abandoned its practice of acculturation, including those months-long assignments on Metro covering cops and crime or housing. Many new hires who never spent time in the streets went straight into senior writing and editing roles.

All these recruits arrived with their own notions of the purpose of the Times. To me, publishing conservatives helped fulfil the paper’s mission; to them, I think, it betrayed that mission.

then, to the shock and horror of the newsroom, Trump won the presidency. In his article for Columbia Journalism Review, Sulzberger cites the Times’s failure to take Trump’s chances seriously as an example of how “prematurely shutting down inquiry and debate” can allow “conventional wisdom to ossify in a way that blinds society.

Many Times staff members – scared, angry – assumed the Times was supposed to help lead the resistance. Anxious for growth, the Times’s marketing team implicitly endorsed that idea, too.

As the number of subscribers ballooned, the marketing department tracked their expectations, and came to a nuanced conclusion. More than 95% of Times subscribers described themselves as Democrats or independents, and a vast majority of them believed the Times was also liberal

A similar majority applauded that bias; it had become “a selling point”, reported one internal marketing memo. Yet at the same time, the marketers concluded, subscribers wanted to believe that the Times was independent.

As that memo argued, even if the Times was seen as politically to the left, it was critical to its brand also to be seen as broadening its readers’ horizons, and that required “a perception of independence”.

Readers could cancel their subscriptions if the Times challenged their worldview by reporting the truth without regard to politics. As a result, the Times’s long-term civic value was coming into conflict with the paper’s short-term shareholder value

The Times has every right to pursue the commercial strategy that makes it the most money. But leaning into a partisan audience creates a powerful dynamic. Nobody warned the new subscribers to the Times that it might disappoint them by reporting truths that conflicted with their expectations

When your product is “independent journalism”, that commercial strategy is tricky, because too much independence might alienate your audience, while too little can lead to charges of hypocrisy that strike at the heart of the brand.

It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism

The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.

there has been a sea change over the past ten years in how journalists think about pursuing justice. The reporters’ creed used to have its foundation in liberalism, in the classic philosophical sense. The exercise of a reporter’s curiosity and empathy, given scope by the constitutional protections of free speech, would equip readers with the best information to form their own judgments. The best ideas and arguments would win out

The journalist’s role was to be a sworn witness; the readers’ role was to be judge and jury. In its idealised form, journalism was lonely, prickly, unpopular work, because it was only through unrelenting scepticism and questioning that society could advance. If everyone the reporter knew thought X, the reporter’s role was to ask: why X?

Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy, and they have their reasons for it. They are more concerned with group rights than individual rights, which they regard as a bulwark for the privileges of white men. They have seen the principle of  free speech used to protect right-wing outfits like Project Veritas and Breitbart News and are uneasy with it.

They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens’ judgment confirmed by Trump’s election, and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts. They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on

The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power, as journalists often have done.

And they do not just want to be part of the cool crowd. They need to be

To be more valued by their peers and their contacts – and hold sway over their bosses – they need a lot of followers in social media. That means they must be seen to applaud the right sentiments of the right people in social media

The journalist from central casting used to be a loner, contrarian or a misfit. Now journalism is becoming another job for joiners, or, to borrow Twitter’s own parlance, “followers”, a term that mocks the essence of a journalist’s role.

The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand

What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind.

By contrast, the old newsroom ideology seems cynical on its surface. It used to bug me that my editors at the Times assumed every word out of the mouth of any person in power was a lie.

And the pursuit of objectivity can seem reptilian, even nihilistic, in its abjuration of a fixed position in moral contests. But the basis of that old newsroom approach was idealistic: the notion that power ultimately lies in truth and ideas, and that the citizens of a pluralistic democracy, not leaders of any sort, must be trusted to judge both.

Our role in Times Opinion, I used to urge my colleagues, was not to tell people what to think, but to help them fulfil their desire to think for themselves.

It seems to me that putting the pursuit of truth, rather than of justice, at the top of a publication’s hierarchy of values also better serves not just truth but justice, too

over the long term journalism that is not also sceptical of the advocates of any form of justice and the programmes they put forward, and that does not struggle honestly to understand and explain the sources of resistance,

will not assure that those programmes will work, and it also has no legitimate claim to the trust of reasonable people who see the world very differently. Rather than advance understanding and durable change, it provokes backlash.

The impatience within the newsroom with such old ways was intensified by the generational failure of the Times to hire and promote women and non-white people

Pay attention if you are white at the Times and you will hear black editors speak of hiring consultants at their own expense to figure out how to get white staff to respect them

As wave after wave of pain and outrage swept through the Times, over a headline that was not damning enough of Trump or someone’s obnoxious tweets, I came to think of the people who were fragile, the ones who were caught up in Slack or Twitter storms, as people who had only recently discovered that they were white and were still getting over the shock.

Having concluded they had got ahead by working hard, it has been a revelation to them that their skin colour was not just part of the wallpaper of American life, but a source of power, protection and advancement.

I share the bewilderment that so many people could back Trump, given the things he says and does, and that makes me want to understand why they do: the breadth and diversity of his support suggests not just racism is at work. Yet these elite, well-meaning Times staff cannot seem to stretch the empathy they are learning to extend to people with a different skin colour to include those, of whatever race, who have different politics.

The digital natives were nevertheless valuable, not only for their skills but also because they were excited for the Times to embrace its future. That made them important allies of the editorial and business leaders as they sought to shift the Times to digital journalism and to replace staff steeped in the ways of print. Partly for that reason, and partly out of fear, the leadership indulged internal attacks on Times journalism, despite pleas from me and others, to them and the company as a whole, that Times folk should treat each other with more respect

My colleagues and I in Opinion came in for a lot of the scorn, but we were not alone. Correspondents in the Washington bureau and political reporters would take a beating, too, when they were seen as committing sins like “false balance” because of the nuance in their stories.

My fellow editorial and commercial leaders were well aware of how the culture of the institution had changed. As delighted as they were by the Times’s digital transformation they were not blind to the ideological change that came with it. They were unhappy with the bullying and group-think; we often discussed such cultural problems in the weekly meetings of the executive committee, composed of the top editorial and business leaders, including the publisher. Inevitably, these bitch sessions would end with someone saying a version of: “Well, at some point we have to tell them this is what we believe in as a newspaper, and if they don’t like it they should work somewhere else.” It took me a couple of years to realise that this moment was never going to come.

There is a lot not to miss about the days when editors like Boyd could strike terror in young reporters like me and Purdum. But the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that editors now tremble before their reporters and even their interns. “I miss the old climate of fear,” Baquet used to say with a smile, in another of his barbed jokes.

I wish I’d pursued my point and talked myself out of the job. This contest over control of opinion journalism within the Times was not just a bureaucratic turf battle (though it was that, too)

The newsroom’s embrace of opinion journalism has compromised the Times’s independence, misled its readers and fostered a culture of intolerance and conformity.

The Opinion department is a relic of the era when the Times enforced a line between news and opinion journalism.

Editors in the newsroom did not touch opinionated copy, lest they be contaminated by it, and opinion journalists and editors kept largely to their own, distant floor within the Times building. Such fastidiousness could seem excessive, but it enforced an ethos that Times reporters owed their readers an unceasing struggle against bias in the news

But by the time I returned as editorial-page editor, more opinion columnists and critics were writing for the newsroom than for Opinion. As at the cable news networks, the boundaries between commentary and news were disappearing, and readers had little reason to trust that Times journalists were resisting rather than indulging their biases

The Times newsroom had added more cultural critics, and, as Baquet noted, they were free to opine about politics.

Departments across the Times newsroom had also begun appointing their own “columnists”, without stipulating any rules that might distinguish them from columnists in Opinion

I checked to see if, since I left the Times, it had developed guidelines explaining the difference, if any, between a news columnist and opinion columnist. The paper’s spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, did not respond to the question.)

The internet rewards opinionated work and, as news editors felt increasing pressure to generate page views, they began not just hiring more opinion writers but also running their own versions of opinionated essays by outside voices – historically, the province of Opinion’s op-ed department.

Yet because the paper continued to honour the letter of its old principles, none of this work could be labelled “opinion” (it still isn’t). After all, it did not come from the Opinion department.

And so a newsroom technology columnist might call for, say, unionisation of the Silicon Valley workforce, as one did, or an outside writer might argue in the business section for reparations for slavery, as one did, and to the average reader their work would appear indistinguishable from Times news articles.

By similarly circular logic, the newsroom’s opinion journalism breaks another of the Times’s commitments to its readers. Because the newsroom officially does not do opinion – even though it openly hires and publishes opinion journalists – it feels free to ignore Opinion’s mandate to provide a diversity of views

When I was editorial-page editor, there were a couple of newsroom columnists whose politics were not obvious. But the other newsroom columnists, and the critics, read as passionate progressives.

I urged Baquet several times to add a conservative to the newsroom roster of cultural critics. That would serve the readers by diversifying the Times’s analysis of culture, where the paper’s left-wing bias had become most blatant, and it would show that the newsroom also believed in restoring the Times’s commitment to taking conservatives seriously. He said this was a good idea, but he never acted on it

I couldn’t help trying the idea out on one of the paper’s top cultural editors, too: he told me he did not think Times readers would be interested in that point of view.

opinion was spreading through the newsroom in other ways. News desks were urging reporters to write in the first person and to use more “voice”, but few newsroom editors had experience in handling that kind of journalism, and no one seemed certain where “voice” stopped and “opinion” began

The Times magazine, meanwhile, became a crusading progressive publication

Baquet liked to say the magazine was Switzerland, by which he meant that it sat between the newsroom and Opinion. But it reported only to the news side. Its work was not labelled as opinion and it was free to omit conservative viewpoints.

his creep of politics into the newsroom’s journalism helped the Times beat back some of its new challengers, at least those on the left